It’s a former British colony in almost exactly the same way Australia and Canada are. I don’t see what time has to do with it.
You may want to consider that Bengal was partitioned by the British in 1906 in an attempt to prevent the nationalist movement there growing any stronger.
What foundations are you referring to? The assembly system which the British in their great wisdom installed in 1919(and with which they further attempted to drive a wedge between India’s Hindus and Muslims) came years after and in an effort to appease the Indian nationalist movement which had already organised itself politically to oppose British rule and was demanding self rule. It enfranchised barely 10% of India’s population and reserved seats for those friendly to the British. The Indian independence movement strengthened as a result of this and their numerous other exploitative policies and led to another attempt by the British to install wider democracy in 1937. The major Indian party - the Congress - lasted only two years in government then because the Viceroy took India into the second world war without consulting it. Interestingly, the Muslim league, which would later go on to fail so miserably at maintaining democracy in Pakistan and Bangladesh, did not resign and continued to govern. By your thesis, they had a greater British foundation in democracy. Why would they go on to fail while the Indians succeeded?
If these 10 or 20 years of stop start democracy enforced by the Indian independence movement are for you the ‘foundation’ which the British laid for democracy in India, and they are thus to thank for India’s democracy, I am gobsmacked at your interpretation or rather, ignorance of history. It is the Indian independence movement and the remarkable spirit of its leaders which is to thank for India’s democracy, not the colonial masters from whom they had to win it.
Educate me: what democratic structures did a pre-independence India have that were developed independently of the British? Is it not the case that democracy was a foreign concept to India before the British?
Err, I wouldn’t group South Africa in with those others. I mean, we’re not doing too badly but we’re hardly what I’d call a developed nation overall. (first-world is so Cold War)
And to the OP - in addition to everything else mentioned about settler vs resource exploitation, don’t discount the idea that the successful colonies were mostly the temperate ones, and the unsuccesful ones, the tropical ones. Malaria, tsetse fly and no place to grow barley = unhappy Brits.
Ha. The railways were expanded so they could move troops around and quell resistance to their rule. Industrialisation? Stopped people burning widows in response to Rammohun roy’s petitions. Partial, massively flawed democracy which never worked in a hope to appease the Indian independence movement. Are you fucking kidding me?
There was barely any democracy in Britain before India was ruled by the British. There’s not much point to saying, oh so India was ruled by the British between 1757 and 1947(and they propped up many local monarchs in the years before that), but guess what, it didn’t independently evolve any democratic governance structures in this time! So Indian democracy is thanks to the Brits!
And in pre-Independence India, The Indian National Congress, which was a large, pan-India organisation, was a quasi-democratic body that fought for independence and after independence ruled the country for very many years. Still does actually.
“Industrialization” was the exact opposite of what India got.
Thing is, British management of the Indian economy was incredibly inefficient. The point was to crush native industry and turn India into a resource production area. The colonies were supposed to create raw materials that were shipped to factories in Britain where they were turned into finished goods, then sold by British merchants on the world market.
This was a deliberate policy of destroying India’s manufacturing capability to enrich a small group of British industrialists. It wasn’t all that effective at producing wealth for the British people, or the British empire as a whole, but that didn’t matter since the people who created the policy benefited enormously. They got a much larger slice of a much smaller pie.
So yes, India got railways. How else were those raw materials supposed to get to port to be shipped back to Britain? How else are you going to move troops from one province to put down rebellions in another province?
Yes, colonial taxes were low. That’s because the British didn’t conceive of India as a productive cash cow to be milked like the Mughals did, but rather it was to be turned into a vast plantation. The peasants working on the plantations couldn’t be expected to pay high taxes because they wouldn’t be paid anything above subsistence.
And “India’s per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it later increased to $618, by 1947” isn’t exactly a sterling record of development. A decline for a hundred years, followed by a tiny increase for the next hundred years. All while industrialization was creating huge increases in wealth in other parts of the world.
Reading George Orwell’s essays in the 1940s, he was convinced that Britain’s wealth was dependent on stealing a few pennies each from the Indian peasantry, and that when the Empire fell apart the British would have to accept a permanent decrease in their standard of living. But of course that wasn’t really what was happening. Britain was keeping India poor, but for almost no real net benefit to the British economy.
Er. The case of the Romans may or may not be analogous to British colonialism in India. What’s your point? That if the British ruthlessly exploited India and Indians over 200 years and installed extractive institutions that plague the country to this day but installed a rail network it somehow helps make India successful? Bollocks. Here btw, is what happened to the rail network before independence in 1947, and is typical of how the British treated India.
This however, is not accurate. Colonial taxes under the Zamindari or permanent settlement system, which had been installed in half the country, were cripplingly high. The British got to do it ‘one step removed’ by auctioning off large tracts of land for unsustainable amounts to local landlords who in turn attempted to extract that value from the peasants who lived on the land, leading to massive institutional problems that persist today.
India wasn’t a nation before the British came, it was a loose affiliation of ethnic identities. The India you live in, which is where I presume you are from, was shaped by British practices of law and economics, education and ideology, it was not disastrous.
I’m aware of the Kohinoor Diamond, and I’m aware that it was acquired from one empire in India (Sikh empire) and passed onto another empire. Thing is, what did the Persians leave in their wake other than destruction? I’ll assume you’ll say the same thing about the British, but that’s an inaccurate statement.
A British civil servant helped found the Indian National Congress.
I’ll agree and say it isn’t, however, you cannot ignore the situation India was in between 1700 and 1947, around the beginning of the 18th century the Mughal empire was collapsing into petty states, the enlargement of the East India Company, the Afghan invasion and sacking of Delhi, so after the consolidation of India under British rule, it’s no surprise the results of GDP increases look so unspectacular.
Again, the Raj wanted India to be able to compete in manufacturing.
I’m not contesting that India was affected by British rule. I’m contesting the idea that India and/or Indian people were somehow better off because of British rule, or that British rule was some sort of benign
The Persians also came, attacked and left. Sure they caused damage through that, but that damage was ephemeral. The British introduced policies and institutions that are affecting outcomes in India to this very day. Look up the zamindari system and Bannerjee and Iyer’s paper on it.
And read the fucking article, and you’ll see why he did it, and how he was treated by the British government! Bold mine.
Who do you think is representative of the ‘British’? The government that this man was criticising and that demoted and dismissed him from service, or the one conscientious objector who thought of himself as Indian?
So according to you the British impact on India can be separated from the East India Company and the actions it took?
Again, after two centuries spent systematically undermining the Indian economy by treating it as a plantation, that it helped promote one businessman to establish one industry in the fag end of the 19th century, in which it was losing ground against other countries does NOT somehow enable you to make the claim that the the British were “supportive of industry in India”. Here’s what the paragraph above has to say, btw
Here’s a passage from a paper “De-industrialisation of India reconsidered” published in 1975 by respected economist R. Chattopadhyay(he regularly co authors with MIT economist Esther Duflo), bold mine
I think this answer really is the response to the OP. The former British colonies which have done well are the ones which, for whatever local reasons, were led to independence by leaders and movements which were committed to some form of civil government and rule of law. Contrast Gandhi and Nehru, on the one hand, with someone like Mugabe.
Relatively peaceful evolutions to self-government are more likely to be enduring, because they are based on principles which are more likely to support a peaceful civil society. That’s how colonies like Canada, Australia and New Zealand did it.
Violent revolutions, especially ones where terror has been a component, have the problem of legitimising violence even after the colonial regime ends, making it more difficult to establish a civil society.
Which isn’t to say that armed revolution can’t lead to a civil society, as the US shows, but it takes a special kind of leadership committed to civil rule. There’s a reason George III said that George Washington was unique. Washington’s facing down the dissident officers in the Newburgh Conspiracy, and resigning his own commission after the war, were two of the crucial steps in establishing a civil republic after the armed revolution.
Gandhi’s emphasis on non-violence, which Mandela followed, were other ways to achieve a peaceful independence, that helped keep the genie of violence in the bottle.
Other colonies which fought revolutions to achieve independence were not so blessed in their leadership.
Fair points - I was referring more to his actions towards the end of his period of imprisonment and after his release. His emphasis then was on a peaceful transition and on a civil, democratic society. Given his immense personal popularity, he could easily have followed the well-trod path of becoming a president for life. Instead he followed the path of orderly transitions of power, and a commitment to a constitutional, democratic structure.
This is the answer, I think. Although other factors like temperate vs. tropical location might play some role.
The same seems to hold true of the former Spanish colonies, incidentally. Their human development index seems to track, pretty well, the fraction of their population that derives from European settlers (i.e. the extent to which the country was a ‘settler’ colony vs. an ‘exploitation’ one). You have Argentina/Chile/Costa Rica at the top (almost entirely settler states), Mexico/Cuba/Dominican Republic a little further down (largely settler states but with a lot of indigenous or African descent), places like Peru further down (mixed but with a lower fraction of settler descent), and mostly indigenous societies like Bolivia and Guatemala are the poorest. (This isn’t really a racial thing: Peru was quite an advanced society at the time of the conquest, but it was treated as a source of labour and resources more than an area for settlement).
