Does Britain owe India reparations? Yes. India's worst economic disasters have been caused by Indians who were educated at Cambridge. Only if Britain follows economic policies approved off by Nehruvians or Sen-apods, will we say that accounts have been squared. But, in that case, Britain's largest ethnic minority- Indian origin people- will head for the nearest exit.
Two guys who know zero about India have a stupid article in Al Jazeera's ezine. One is Dylan Sullivan, a Graduate student in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
The other is Jason Hickel a Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of ArtsRecent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire.
In Britain- sure. The Empire, on balance, contributed to British security and prosperity. Furthermore, there is a substantial colored population originating from ex-colonies. Indeed, the Prime Minister and some other senior Cabinet members are from places once ruled by Britain. It is advantageous to BAME British people to dwell on the positive aspects of the Raj because it increases social cohesion and helps combat racism. Our two White authors disagree.
High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies.
It is a fact that India has retained British institutions- e.g. Elections and an independent Judiciary. Indeed, in some respects India has improved on that inheritance. Britain only got a Supreme Court recently while American democracy would greatly benefit from an independent Election Commission.
Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.
Good for them. Black Britishers should take pride in their contribution made by their ancestors to the defense of the Commonwealth and its values.
This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record.
A bogus historical record- sure- save in settler colonies like Australia.
According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen,
a nutter who thinks Stalin was very good to the Russian people!
extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century.
To be fair, Allen knows nothing about India. Still, it is a fact that the transfer of power from British officials to Indians did, quite predictably, increase poverty and- in the case of Bengal- led to two big famines under corrupt and incompetent Bengali politicians.
Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century,
But rents and profits rose. The countervailing power of the dacoit and thug and Pindari and Nanga Sadhu decreased and this did alter the terms of trade- because that is what the Indians with power wanted.
while famines became more frequent and more deadly.
No. They reduced in frequency and amplitude. In the famine of the 1870's India lost about half the number of people China did while the two big 1780 famines where both probably twice as lethal. By about 1903, the Brits had successfully implemented Famine Code regulations and so Famine returned to Bengal only after 1937- when all power over food was transferred to elected Bengalis. In 1974, there was another big famine under Democracy in Bangladesh. Amartya Sen responded by claiming there was no food availability deficit in 1943 or 1974! The stupidity of Indian mathematical economists is the envy of the Robert Allens of the World.
Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.
Why did the Indian people end up under British rule? Disraeli, addressing Parliament in 1857, acknowledged that India hadn't been conquered anymore than William of Orange could be said to have conquered England. Human tragedies in India were things Indians with money and power were entirely cool with. Indeed, two great Indian heroes- Rajaramohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore had spent their own money lobbying Westminster to end restrictions on European emigration to India. They wanted more cruel and ruthless White planters. Why? Because Whitey would protect oily little Hindu parasites like themselves from 'the turbulent pugnacity ' (in A.O Hume's phrase) of the East Bengali Muslim.
Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India.
Not if they know anything about India. The Great War and the epidemic that followed it were bad for India but Gandhi & Co never made the thing an issue. They were upset because Brigadier Dyer forcibly enrolled the Amritsar Bar Association into the constabulary and thus forced them to deal with piled up corpses. This was 'defilement' of a casteist sort! Later, after the big cyclone in East Bengal at the end of the Sixties, Mujibur Rehman would complain that the local people refused to bury the dead. British soldiers, who had come to assist with relief operations, had to take on the job.
What was bad about the Raj was that it created dependency and a childish culture of complaint. 'Grievance Studies' makes you stupid and leads to very very bad policy advise.
Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s.
These figures are meaningless. Indians very well knew that official statistics were useless because their own relatives simply made them up as part of their clerical duties. One result was that India became very good at sampling and estimation.
Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.
Only in prosperous districts where there was a good chance this would mean a bigger grant in aid. This remains true in India today. Rich districts have the worst poverty- because they have the capacity to spend the budget allocation. Also, 'everybody enjoys a good drought'.
In a recent paper in the journal World Development, we used census data
because foreigners are stupid enough to think Indian statistics mean shit. But then so did Amartya Sen- but he is a very special fellow deserving very special education.
to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades.
Four decades when India turned from being a collection of feudal principalities, or tax-farmed shitholes, into a modern nation state worthy of inclusion in the League of Nations.
Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s.
That data is about as robust as a baby with dysentery.
If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we
are being as stupid as shit.
find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.
Why stop there? Why not find that Viceroy Sahib was sneaking into the huts of poor folk at night and draining them of their 'vital bodily fluids' through repugnant acts of fellatio and cunnilingus? Indians don't buy that foreigners stole their wealth because they know their own Princes stole anything they had. Thus we must teach them that Viceroy was raping their ancestors with his mouth. This is why population growth was so slow under the Raj. At Independence, India's population was 348 million. Thanks to Rajendra Prasad's refusal to suck off Ind's teeming masses, our numbers have increased by over a billion. Sadly, the Satanic regime of Narendra Modi is planning to suck every one of us off so as to please Wall Street. This is the reason we must all join Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo- aur hamara jizz chodo- Yatra.
Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate.
You must factor in all the jizz stolen by greedy Viceroys. Many a poor Indian had heart attack and died when he suddenly woke up and realized that Viceroy Curzon was sucking him off.
Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels.
The living standards of White ICS officers had declined greatly- that's true enough. But Indian Princes and compradors had never had it so good. On the other hand, some hardworking Parsi carpenters and Marwari or Chettiar traders had become very rich through thrift and enterprise. That's why there was money available for the Nationalist movement.
Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.'
They were often better for reasons of climate and resource endowment. But if your Princes are- as Gandhi said- robbers and rapists incapable of presenting a united front to foreign invaders then you suffer a 'resource curse' as more and more ruthless 'Stationary Bandits' establish themselves on your territory. There is little point fighting for a Prince whose main recreation is looting his subjects and raping their women.
We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.
Furthermore India, being much bigger than England, would have had a much bigger Empire- right? I mean if you assume India was the same as England in 1600, then it must have made tremendous strides in technology and the naval and military sciences.
While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism.
Sadly, this also means that Nehru presided over 200 million deaths during his 17 years in power.
This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history.
There was no 'policy-induced' mortality. There was no policy and there was death as there always had been. Then there was a policy which succeeded because State capacity had increased. Sadly, elected Governments in Bengal were responsible for two big famines in 1943 and 1974. But corruption and incompetence don't represent a policy.
It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
Unless you use a similar methodology to estimate their excess mortality. The fact is Stalin and Mao had 'policy-induced' famines which killed millions. The Brits, in their own economic self-interest, went the other way- if they had administrative capacity.
How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life?
In the same way that it caused the theft of trillions of metric tons of jizz from poor Indian people who were quietly sleeping in their huts while the Viceroy sucked them off.
There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector.
No. They encouraged it. They were happy buying handloom cloth and even warships from India. But the country fell behind technologically. Still, the greatest harm was done after Independence when India decided not to go for export-led 'wage-good' based growth.
Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world,
It was ranked higher in 1947 than in 1987.
exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete.
Because English weavers had to pay for heating. Also, they objected to going blind for very little money. Indian weaving collapsed because weavers would rather cut off their thumbs than be kept to a horrible trade.
This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.
Things certainly began to change for the better for Hindu compradors as well as those Muslim magnates who backed the rising power.
According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs,
i.e. gave the Indian customer cheaper, better quality, cloth! Similarly, evil Neo-Liberals have practically eliminated the British Wine industry by allowing the virtually tariff free importation of Wines from sunny Australia.
allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.
This is nonsense. Anyway, Indians are very good at smuggling- though the need to do so only arose after Independence. On the other hand, it is true that Viceroy Sahib sucked off each and every Indian cock.
This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country.
A good thing surely? Industrialization is CAPITALISM. Capitalism is EVIL.
As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.”
i.e. Indian farmers get paid more money while the industrialist has to find some other way of extracting 'surplus value'. Why are these two cretins pretending Mercantilism is compatible with woke ideology?
English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.
Which raises the question, why did Indians not chuck out the Brits? There were very few of them and they came from a place which was very far away.
To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population
less than they had been previously taxed- that's the reason they were tolerated.
and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free.
This is the Utsa Patnaik thesis. Using a similar methodology, I can prove that my Bank has robbed me of millions of pounds. This is because I have been paying my salary into my Bank Account for four decades. True I buy stuff with my debit card but that doesn't mean the Bank has any right to take money out of my account to pay for that stuff.
One could say that Britain forcibly exported public goods- Defense, Law and Order etc- to India and used the revenue from these 'invisible exports' to buy goods and services. However, the 'consumer surplus' from those public goods was still much greater than the trade deficit. That's why there was a Pax Brittanica. Sadly, this meant minorities thrived which is so not what God wants to happen. That was the 'Satanic' aspect of British rule.
These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state
Nope. Britain was very lightly taxed. The State was kept dependent on Parliament which alone could raise revenue. Otherwise, England would have ended up like Spain or Portugal.
and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.
So, the profit from trade was used to finance industrial development. How very wicked!
This system drained India of goods worth trillions of dollars in today’s money.
But it kept the country safe from the Pindari and Thuggee and possible invaders more rapacious than the Brits.
The British were merciless in imposing the drain, forcing India to export food even when drought or floods threatened local food security.
i.e. farmers were allowed to sell their produce rather than have it confiscated by the State. How very wicked!
I may say that Rishi Sunak is just as merciless because he forcing my neighbor to go to work in a Merchant Bank even when my food security is imperiled. Sunak should show compassion and pass a law requiring that pretty young lady to first come and cook me breakfast and do the washing up before going off to her fancy-shmancy job.
Historians have established that tens of millions of Indians died of starvation during several considerable policy-induced famines in the late 19th century, as their resources were syphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies.
But, as Amartya Sen has proved, no famine arises from food availability deficit! The plain fact is that Indian agricultural productivity was very low for reasons A.O Hume explained in 1879. But Britain didn't have the coercive power to change this because the Raj was wholly reliant on the 'loyalist' class of Princes and Zamindars. That's one reason Hume and Wedderburn &c set up the INC. But Gandhi & Nehru were even less bothered by agricultural issues. They were only happy when money was syphoned off to pay for crack-pot schemes.
Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences of their policies
They were aware that if their policies weren't beneficial to the loyalist Indian class, then they would have nothing to administer. They would be slaughtered in their beds. That's also why even the Reds in India gave up on their dream of fucking over the peasantry by collectivizing land.
. They watched as millions starved and yet they did not change course.
They instituted an effective Famine Code by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. No doubt, there were sound fiscal reasons for this. Famines cause a rise in real wages and a fall in rents and thus Land Revenue.
They continued to knowingly deprive people of resources necessary for survival.
In the same way that Amartya Sen accused Manmohan Singh of doing. According to Sen, his old pal was very evil. He wanted to turn India into an 'economic super-power' by using starving, sickly, Indian people. This was very wrong. How can you expect a man to be productive until he has spent a decade being treated in Harley street and another decade being educated at Cambridge?
The extraordinary mortality crisis of the late Victorian period was no accident. The historian Mike Davis argues that Britain’s imperial policies “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”
Imaginary bombs- sure. Why does Mike Davis not mention the confiscation of billions of tons of jizz personally carried out by Viceroy Sahib? Is it because he is afraid of appearing homophobic?
Our research finds that Britain’s exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period.
If anyone will pay us to do some more research we will find that the true figure was 100 trillion.
This is a straightforward case for reparations, with strong precedent in international law. Following World War II, Germany
Herr Hitler made some marvellous contributions to International Law.
signed reparations agreements to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and more recently agreed to pay reparations to Namibia for colonial crimes perpetrated there in the early 1900s. In the wake of apartheid, South Africa paid reparations to people who had been terrorised by the white-minority government.
Black politicians paid some Black voters. But they didn't enrich themselves. Perish the thought!
History cannot be changed, and the crimes of the British empire cannot be erased.
especially if we just keep inventing new ones
But reparations can help address the legacy of deprivation and inequity that colonialism produced. It is a critical step towards justice and healing.
My ancestors may have thrived under Colonialism- or, at least, they may have been enabled to practice their own religion- but I am owed reparations because Viceroy Sahib was incessantly inflicting fellatio and cunnilingus upon them. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
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