Kenan Malik crushing on Shashi Tharoor.

 Rehashing the old chestnut about how us darkies made Whitey rich, Kenan Malik writes in the NYR

 The historian Robin Blackburn notes that around 1770, total investments in the domestic British economy amounted to £4 million (about £500 million, or $700 million, in modern values). This investment “included the building of roads and canals, of wharves and harbors, of all new equipment needed by farmers and manufacturers, and of all the new ships sold to merchants in a period of one year.”

Britain was already the leading global maritime power. It had colonies. Thus, its domestic product was of much less relevance in determining its national Income. A lot of the 'profit' repatriated from its overseas operations was actually an export of invisibles. Furthermore capital investment abroad- e.g in a West Indian wharf or on the purchase of an Indian made ship- was actually domestic capital formation in that the sea made the area of operation contiguous and the cost of transport, in many cases, less than overland carriage from remoter regions of the British isles.

Around the same time, profits from the slave trade and slave labor came to £3.8 million. Not all profit was reinvested but, suggests Blackburn, “slave-generated profits were large enough to have covered a quarter to a third of Britain’s overall investment needs.” Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did.

'Slave generated profits' included factor payments to expatriate British labour- viz. sailors and soldiers and arbitrageurs and administrators- repatriating earnings to provide for their families. The suggestio falsi here is that Britain extracted profits from abroad without expending labour or assuming risk in doing so. Kenan Malik is quoting Blackburn- who, to be fair, quotes contrary estimates by other scholars- to make it appear that British industrialisation was financed by a 'transfer'. It wasn't. It was financed by factor earnings. Much skill was required and risk undertaken for British ships to girdle the globe. This meant there were high rents on ability and profits on risk accruing to British domiciled sailors and soldiers and merchants and so forth. However, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the purchasing power and stock of savings thus created would benefit British manufacturers or that productivity enhancing investment would occur in the home market. The Econometric work of researchers like Blackburn is worthless and based on bizarre assumptions. More importantly, such research is based on a discredited model of economic growth.

All sorts of people were making money out of capturing and selling slaves all over the world. Few gained any permanent benefit. Why? What matters is how they invested their ill gotten gains. The slave trade- featuring White Christian victims- was far more important to the economy of the Barbary pirates than the assiento was to England. But North African pirate states gained no permanent advantage from it. Indeed, it led to their colonisation.

Consider Korea and Kerala. Both exported 'invisibles' to the Gulf- i.e. workers from both places went to work there- but Korea found ways to mobilise Korean savings into highly productive domestic investments whereas Kerala did not. Korea has gone from strength to strength. Kerala plateaued at a much lower standard of living.

The British Empire began to take shape during the early seventeenth century, with the English settlement of North America and Caribbean islands, and the creation of corporations, such as the East India Company, to administer colonies and overseas trade. The origins of colonialism lie, in other words, in a time when Britain was still a feudal kingdom, with a parliament but little democracy, and when manufacture was dominated by the handloom rather than the factory.

Britain was no longer feudal- the Tudors ended War of Roses type factionalism whereas the Mughals, despite initial appearances to the contrary, did no such thing. When James the First came down to London, he discovered that he couldn't even hang a thief without due process of Law. As Sir Edward Coke explained to the 'Wisest Fool in Christendom', England was a limited monarchy governed by the 'artificial reason' of the Law. This also meant that the gate of King's Equity would have to close. Democracy is irrelevant. All that matters is the supremacy of the Law and thus the relative autonomy of Civil Society.

If Britain could, over the next 250 years, transform itself from a backward, undemocratic state into a modern industrial power, why could not any of the nations it colonized have done so, too?

America was colonised by the Brits. Most people think it is a 'modern industrial power'. So is Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Hong Kong and Singapore may not be democracies but they are modern and industrial. Why? The Rule of Law is firmly established and productive investment, not political rent-seeking, has the hegemonic role.

India could have become a modern industrial power. It produced more cars than Japan in 1950. Till 1965, it was ahead of South Korea. But crazy Government regulations strangled industry in India. Labour militancy was fostered by the State. Productive investment was viewed as Capitalist exploitation. The result was that the Indian steel industry added negative value to crude iron at the same time that Indian technocrats, employed by Lakshmi Mittal, had risen to the top of the Global steel industry. Mittal, like Aditya Birla and many others, had to leave India to invest productively. This wasn't the fault of British colonialism. No. This was part and parcel of India's long tradition of despotic government on the one hand and subaltern volatility on the other.

Why assume that it was only colonization that allowed India or Ghana to develop?

This is not an assumption but an empirical fact. People could compare areas administered by the British- which did develop economically- to adjacent areas with similar endowments which stagnated in a revolting manner. Moreover, both India and Ghana reversed some of the gains made under Colonialism after independence.

One answer might be that the countries that Britain colonized were even more backward than Britain was at the time, and lacked the social and intellectual resources to transform themselves as Britain did.

'Social and intellectual resources' don't matter. What matters is the Rule of Law underpinning a hegemonic role for productive investment. India had greater social and intellectual resources than China in 1950 or again in 1980. But its leaders were not interested in productive investment. They preferred to play a blame game. Thus the shithead Tharoor, now a senior opposition politician, concentrates on blaming the Brits for the legacy of the dynasty he himself serves.

But the reality, at least in some of its colonies, was the opposite. Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.

Tharoor is the servant of the dynasty that has ruled India for much the greater part of its post independence history. He, quite naturally, wants to show that the British had chopped off the legs of the Indian economy before they left- which is why the country crawled economically while the dynasty preened itself and gave high sounding, moralising, speeches.

Two hundred years ago, India's share of  global trade in 'visibles' was high. But visibles don't matter as much as invisibles (unless economies of scope and scale continually increase) because only the latter yield market power and thus capture more of the dynamic benefits. That's why rising up the value chain means moving towards the invisible side of the spectrum.

Back in the eighteenth century, it was the ship that carried the cotton or the sugar or whatever which made the bigger share of the profit.
Similarly, the provision of Law and Order and Markets and so on is a service. The factor income it yields is an 'invisible'. The statistics given above are meaningless.
Did India, post independence, develop into a Shipping giant? Nope. Japan did. Korea did. But, to this day, Colombo handles more container traffic than all the Indian ports put together. This was not because indigenous entrepreneurs shied away from the maritime sector. The Indian Scindia Shipping company was set up in 1918. It languished under the license permit Raj. Ravi Tikkoo did not dream of setting up his tanker empire in India. Why? The Indian State strangled Indian industries. The British did no such thing. Why? They were only in India to make money. You can't make money by doing stupid shit. Politicians can fancy themselves great statesmen and liberators of their people by doing stupid shit. Merchants, sooner rather than later, go bankrupt if make a habit of promising one thing and doing another.

 It is a stupid lie to suggest that corrupt East India Company officials would destroy Indian workshops so as to benefit strangers in Manchester or Glasgow. They simply weren't that patriotic. What actually happened was that the Indian artisan, like the Indian agriculturist, was preyed upon by a vast class of intermediaries with the support, tacit or open, of the State. In many post-colonial countries- Ghana, Burma etc- Great Liberators fucked over the people by reducing the reward for the primary producer so as to coddle a small urban elite and provide 'bread and circuses' for a lumpen urban class. That is why some countries did worse after the Brits left. It was a choice made by urban elites. Nothing constrained them to do stupid shit. It just made them feel soooo good to do it.

Suppose the Brits, in a fit of pique, had destroyed every factory or railway track or foundry before leaving India in 1947. Provided India had sensible leadership, this would have been a blessing in disguise. State of the Art technology could have been adopted and export led growth pursued.

Suppose the Brits had been cruel savages who hadn't maintained Law Courts and, as time went by, Legislative Assemblies and so forth. In that case, Indians would have had to develop their own community based institutions to enforce contracts and provide public goods. One such public good would have been resistance to the Brits. Sooner or later, it would have succeeded. But, in that case, the dynasty would have had no salience. Cambridge educated shitheads could not have fucked up the economy and defence policy and so on. Moralising speeches- or Tharoor type mythology- would have been no substitute for proper mechanism design and pragmatic policies. The upshot would have been that India- at least parts of India inhabited by sensible people- would have been better off.

Malik has a different view. He thinks a country only develops decent institutions and non coercive mechanisms if it has unjustly enriched itself through slave trading and opium trading and so forth.

What of democracy and liberalism? The Enlightenment helped transform the intellectual and moral culture of Europe in the eighteenth century, and laid the ground for modern ideas of equality and liberty. “All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies,” as the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, “are implicit in it, and indeed come out of it.”

This is Eurocentric garbage. Academic availability cascades, as well as Tardean mimetics, militate for claims that every ideology or system of governance is compatible with- or, indeed, is a superior development of- the globally hegemonic ideology.
The Enlightenment did not transform Society. Changes in the mode of production caused the Enlightenment availability cascade which could lead equally to Prussian militarism, Tzarist autocracy, Nordic gradualism, French mania, Swiss sobriety, corrupt Turkish Tanzimat, Fascism, Communism, Social Democracy, anything at all except what actually prevailed in Britain and America- viz. the slow burgeoning of 'the artificial reason' of the Law and the mechanism design  pragmatics of Taxation based on Representation.
Condorcet represents 'Enlightenment'- he got his head chopped off. John Adams represents 'artificial reason' and fiduciary pragmatics. Adams kept his head and so the American Revolution had a very different trajectory for that of the French.

Why does Malik believe that Indians and Japanese and Africans and Arabs were horrible savages till Whitey came along? Was Islam just despotism? Hinduism just Casteist coercion? Confucianism just Mandarin oppression? Did no 'progressive social ideals' exist anywhere save Western Europe?

But if the European Enlightenment was crucial to the development of progressive social ideals, European colonialism as a practice denied those ideals to the majority of people. It maintained slavery, suppressed democracy, and was rooted in a racialized view of the world. It was not colonialism but anticolonial movements that truly developed Enlightenment ideals. From the Haitian revolution of 1791, the first successful slave revolt in history,

The Gokturks claimed to have been slaves working iron mines before they rebelled and created a great Empire.  

to the Quit India movement, to the liberation struggles of Southern Africa, the opponents of empire demanded that equality and liberty applied to them, too.

France and Britain and Holland had colonies- but those colonies (unless Ireland is counted as a colony) seldom had any impact on domestic politics. Spain and Portugal don't count as they weren't particularly Enlightened and were subject to their own internecine problems. Other European countries did not have colonies. Some- like the Nordic countries moved towards Feminism and Social Democracy faster than England. Ibsen inspired Shaw and Joyce- not the other way around. Germany, of course, has a checkered history. But Switzerland has not.

There have been many successful 'slave revolts' in history. The Haitian wasn't particularly successful- which is why the place isn't exactly prospering. How is it that Malik- a Muslim- does not know that the Gokturks were originally slaves as were the Mamelukes and the various 'slave dynasties' of the Delhi Sultanate? The Gokturk revolt was the most successful in history because their descendants ruled much of Asia and Europe and Africa.

No anti-colonial movement truly developed Enlightenment ideas. The American Revolution was precisely that- a Revolution, not a movement. Americans may say it 'developed Enlightenment ideas'. People my color- or Malik's- may respectfully disagree. Most of us couldn't emigrate there till 1965 because of racialist immigration laws. Indeed, prior to that year, many dusky people like ourselves couldn't vote in some States or even get service in a diner.

No doubt, Malik means non-white anti-colonial movements. But which of them 'developed Enlightenment ideas'? None. The best of the bunch was the Indian National Congress but, under Nehru, it restricted freedoms- including that of emigrating to the UK- previously available, till the Judiciary intervened.
Under Indira, of course, things got worse. Still, it must be said it was Shanti Bhushan who abolished the fundamental right to property under the Janata regime.
Philosophically, all this was perfectly compatible with Kantian Deduktionshrifften- but then, it is not the letter of the law, or even its harmonic construction which matters. What matters is the quotidian pragmatics which in turn only has an incentive compatible trajectory if productive investment takes the hegemonic- that is leadership- role

It was the Law which 'developed Enlightenment ideas'- but all systems of Law, if incentive compatible, tend to restrict arbitrary action and gravitate towards the non-coercive solution in a repeated game.

Leaving aside the lawyer led Indian National Congress and the highly elitist politics of Ceylon, the fact remains every other anti-colonial movement quickly turned into a dictatorship or else featured ethnic cleansing and secessionist movements. 

As the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought.” The problem was that “Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them.” So, it was left to the anticolonial struggles to “start a new history of Man.”

Fanon died before he could see the nature of the regime he had ignorantly supported. We can't blame him too much. He didn't know Arabic. Still, it is sheer bad faith to quote the poor fellow now- as if this deluded psychiatrist knew anything about Islam or African civilization or, come to that, any Economics worth the name.
There is only one 'solution' to the economic problems of humanity- it is Game theoretic mechanism design. I can find 'all the elements' of this solution in the Nalophkhyanam because it depicts the Just King having to learn Statistical Game Theory in order to overcome his akrasia. The Japanese 'peasant-savant' Ninomiya found a more restricted solution of this equitable sort in the conjunction of Confucianism, Shinto and Buddhism. This can be expressed in terms of a general equilibrium which isn't anything goes- i.e. it is free from 'under-consumption' type crises.

By contrast this solution is simply not present in European Enlightenment thought. Arguably, it is implicit in the 'artificial reason' of Common Law Jurisprudence but it is severely missing in Locke, Hume, Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill and so on.
That is why there is a racialist essentialism- the same one Malik is parroting- in their thought. But, those guys were ignorant. We have smartphones and wikipedia. Why is Malik writing this cringeworthy Eurocentric shite? Well, there's a globalised market for brown people writing cringeworthy racialist shite because...urm...only Whitey can kiss the boo boo of their injured self-image and make things better by saying 'Sorry we were so mean to you. Promise to give you lots of kisses and sweeties from now on.'

But, respond defenders of empire, the “new history” created by anticolonial struggles has been disastrous. There is no gainsaying that, in the decades following independence, many former colonies descended into chaos and worse. The reasons are manifold, and partly lie, as Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire shows, in the policies enacted by the colonial powers themselves before independence and in the economic and political conditions imposed by Western powers after. The horrors of the postcolonial world seem, however, to have created an amnesia about the horrors of colonialism. Gilley, for instance, commenting on the current disorder in the Democratic Republic of Congo, suggests that “Maybe the Belgians should come back.”

 This is a crock of shit. In every case where a former colony descended into chaos or worse, the reason was endogenous and unitary, not manifold or exogenous at all.
What was that endogenous and unitary reason? The answer is simple. Unfairly fucking over a section of people who are either productive or who can't mount a costly resistance. Why did leaders chose to fuck over such communities? They were myopic in their megalomania. It was never enough that their country prosper. They wanted their country to prosper only in a certain way- with everybody speaking one particular language or belonging to one particular religion or ethnicity or making all their transactions through only one approved mechanism. Since the project was incentive incompatible or incompossible with reality- naturally, chaos followed.

It is easy to blame foreigners for one's self-created problems. However, once people saw that a neighboring country which had followed a different path was doing well, they naturally questioned the paranoid assertions of their 'Great Liberators'.

Nobody is saying 'the Belgians should come back' so as to repeat the crimes of King Leopold's company. They are saying let us get in some sensible guys who know they will be put in jail if they start killing people and unjustly enriching themselves. But sensible people of this sort exist everywhere. What matters is the Rule of Law. It is naive to think this should be imposed from outside. Why? There will always be doubt whether, at the margin, the cost of enforcing the Law will be felt to be worthwhile by the foreign power. So, on the one hand, the Rule of Law is eroded, while, on the other, it is gamed- i.e. manipulated into enabling or assisting unjust enrichment. Thus it loses its legitimacy and collapses.
By contrast, an incentive compatible Rule of Law- i.e. one able to provide public goods like honest policemen and Judges and so on- is sustainable and a foundation for endogenous growth.

Malik doesn't get this. Apparently the guy is a scientist. Why can't he apply scientific method to filter the foolish availability cascades which render his article worthless? Is it because, as a brown man in post Brexit Britain, he feels obliged to write puerile shite? Or does he have a crush on Shashi Tharoor? Sad! Tharoor only has eyes for Rahul Baba. As do I. Rahul will certainly marry me and bring me home to Soniaji as her bahoo. Then, because 'saas bhi kabhi bahu thi'- since mother in law too was once a daughter in law- Soniaji will buy me nice saris and pay for breast reduction surgery on my man-boobs and then I will defeat that evil Narendra Modi in General Election and become Prime Minister! Rahul Baba, having attended Harvard and Cambridge, will no doubt come to me and say 'Amartya Sen wants you to fuck up the Economy because Growth is very wicked. Kindly do the needful, darling'. I will immediately sing 'Jhoot bole tho kauva katte! Main maikhe chali jaoongi, thu dekhte rahiyo' and, to drive my threat home, immediately return to Britain where I will challenge Theresa May to a dance-off so as to reverse Brexit.
In this way, the British freedom struggle will be quashed and European Enlightenment will reign supreme.