Arindam Bannerjee vs Tirthankar Roy

 Tirthankar Roy is an Indian historian. Sadly, he does not tell stupid lies. Therefore he is not really a historian in the opinion of some of his colleagues. A few years ago, EPW published the following.

Historiography sans History A Response to Tirthankar Roy,

whose PhD is from India 

by Arindam Banerjee, Chirashree Das Gupta,

whose PhDs are foreign 

Surajit Mazumdar 

who is named last because his PhD is from India (unless JNU has seceded) 

 Responding to Tirthankar Roy’s article “The Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look” (EPW, 11 April 2015), which reinterprets the economic legacy of British rule in India, this article critically interrogates

by telling stupid lies 

the relationship between ideology, perspective, and method in an emerging strand of economic history.

Economic history is useful for economists provided it is alethic rather than paranoid. Tirthankar Roy's work is useful. These nutters are useless for all purposes save saying 'Modi is Hitler!'  

This strand tries to make history writing on colonialism consistent with the rationalisation(s) of contemporary globalisation.

In other words, the rationalisations of rational enterprises which supply us with electricity and computers and the internet 

This article traces the ideological basis of “neutrality,”

It is 'utility'- what is useful. It is useful to have medical doctors who can tell you what disease you are suffering from and what medicine you should take for it. It is useless to listen to a nutter who says that the reason you are ill is because Capitalists stole your health and well-being.  

explores the conceptual and historical fallacies of the “openness” paradigm,

i.e. the fact that trade and the division of labour on a wider and wider scale have led to a massive improvement in material standards of living 

and assesses the methodological inconsistencies of cost–benefit analysis in the historiography of reinterpretations of colonialism in India.

Inconsistencies don't matter provided the analysis is useful.  

Tirthankar Roy “The Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look” (EPW, 11 April 2015) in taking “another look” at the “economic legacies of colonial rule in India” argues that British colonialism fostered India’s openness to the inflow of ideas, skills and knowledge from Britain, which served India well in terms of new institutions and the overall “modernisation” of the economy.

Which is why India retained much from the Raj.  

This was supposedly achieved through the military-fiscal state, started by the East India Company, and consolidated by the British Crown after 1858;

It was achieved by the Brits. They actually did rule the country. 

and the integration of sea-trade by the British on a world scale, leading to “early globalisation.” The former is claimed to have politically unified the Indian subcontinent

till Muslims divided it 

like never before, while the latter integrated India within the global economy.

This is true enough.  

“Openness” increased commercialisation, which allowed the survival of artisanal skills, and led to a reorganisation of the handicrafts sector on more efficient lines. This was one of the main benefits that India accrued, apart from cosmopolitanism, modern English education and investments. The costs of acquiring such benefits were also modest, and not as claimed in nationalist and Marxist writings. Dadabhai Naoroji’s theory of drain is deemed to be the “price India paid to tap into a mobile market for skills and capital” (imports which India could not have done without) which enabled “extraordinary” industrialisation from the mid-19th century to independence, for which otherwise the conditions did not exist.

Which is why they did not appear in Nepal. Of course, one could say that if India, or portions of it, had been well-ruled by stable dynasties, the outcome would have been as good or better. But such dynasties were lacking. Every King feared being killed by his General or his cousin or even his own son.  

Roy’s aim to “reiterate the virtues of openness” has contemporary significance since

both China and India had risen rapidly by opening up their economies. 

the “misreading” of the consequences of British rule by nationalists is held responsible for the “retreat from openness” that descended on India after independence till 1991.

It is a fact that India pursued 'dirigiste' policies. The Planning Commission endorsed 'export pessimism' at precisely the time when World Trade was taking off as never before.  

Using Roy’s article as an entry point, this article offers a critical examination of the relationship between ideology and perspectives in economic history, and the concomitant debates on methodological approaches.

This article has zero alethic component. The authors say 'Roy is not a Commie nutcase. That means he can't be a genuine historian who spouts nothing but stupid lies.'  

In particular, it probes the methodological basis of aggressive resurrection of liberal imperialist historical thought on colonialism which seeks consistency with the rationalisation of contemporary globalisation.

Roy is hand in glove with evil English men like Narendra Modi (real name Nicholas Maugham) who are entering the jhuggis of starving Indian peasants and stealing their vital bodily fluids through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. 

The emphasis on the virtuous implications of openness for economic development makes it imperative to re-examine what openness means,

it means White peeps are sucking you off while you sleep. Wake up sheeple! 

and its historical relationship with capitalist development.

Did you know that the Albert Memorial was constructed entirely out of calcified jizz confiscated from starving Indian peasants by the Viceroy?  

Finally, a reassessment of the “costs and benefits” of colonial rule in India taking Roy’s arguments into account leads us to a more fortified comprehension of the material legacies of British rule in India in connecting the past and the present.

One legacy is that these guys are writing in English, not Arabic or Japanese.  

The role of ideology in economic history writing is evident from Roy’s selfcharacterisation: Economic history of India

if done by politically inclined Indians 

as a field emerged as a tool in the service of economic nationalism. That original link is still strong. I see my work as a critique of that brand of economic history that comes pre-loaded with patriotic sentiment. Doing the history of India is an enterprise to free the past from political narratives (Roy nd).

Nothing wrong with this even from the Leftist point of view. Essentially, clamouring for protection for 'infant industries' meant transferring surpluses from poor farmers to rich industrialists. The problem was that those industrialists were seldom tech-savvy or innovative in any way- at least in India. America was a different story because ab ovo it was a nation of corporations. This meant there was considerable portfolio diversification and thus an 'internalization of externalities'. Moreover the more populous North which secured protection, simultaneously kept raising productivity and living standards. This meant that the agricultural areas could see there was a rapidly expanding internal market for their produce. In other words, there was a virtuous circle where by productivity increases in manufacturing caused higher wages which drove rural emigration which in turn led to productivity improvement and a boost for the agricultural capital goods sector. 

The asymmetry in this statement— the effective denial of not only the existence but also the possibility of any interpretation or narrative of Indian economic history serving imperial imperatives—is stark.

The Brits didn't produce much in the way of Economic historiography though there is plenty of source material in the archives. The fact is, the Raj was a 'night-watchman state'. A.O Hume wrote a short book on the agricultural problem but his scheme did not meet with much enthusiasm from 'Authority'. That's one reason he started the I.N.C. Sadly, Indian barristocrats cared even less about agriculture because they firmly believed that if the farmers got hold of a bit of money, they would promptly stab their neighbour and then pay a lawyer to get them acquitted by the Court.  

A historical method which renders oblivious such imperial necessities

What necessity? No Viceroy or Governor commissioned an economic history of any part of India. On the other hand, some economic history of India was taught as part of Degree courses in Econ or Poli Sci. Lawyers too were taught about the evolution of the land tenure system.  

but enables one to see how imperatives of nationalism influence the interpretation of history, leads to two outcomes. First, the method considers the enhanced flow of ideas under colonialism as a distinct “positive” for the colony without recognising that this infl ow also included ideas about the imperium and the society that it dominated which would serve its political purpose.

In 1912 a guy who had returned with an MA from Aberdeen did a survey and found that the vast majority of Indians didn't know there was foreign rule. The inflow of information about Japan certainly gave an impetus to the Freedom movement though, it must be said, there were Britishers who had denounced John Company even in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, British women like Margaret Noble and Annie Beasant were taking an active part in the Indian freedom struggle.  

Second, one ends up summarily ignoring the crucial role that material dominance plays in determining dominance in the world of ideas.

These nutters imported this idea from Gramsci who was as Italian as Sonia. Sadly, it is nonsense. If you see a billion people, who are not Arab, saying their prayers in Arabic, it is not because Arabs have 'material dominance'.  

Thus the argument that much of Indian economic history scholarship is motivated by nationalism and has created a “narrative trap,” which has served economic history poorly in order to advance a political agenda, can itself be seen as caught in the narrative trap of its own historical approach.

In other words, if you truthfully say 'x is telling stupid lies', you have fallen into the trap set by cunning White Capitalists who are draining you of all your jizz while you are asleep. Also, you may end up voting for Narendra Modi whom everybody knows is an evil English Lord of the Jewish persuasion.  

The very basis of the question “did the Empire, on balance, modernise and develop the regions that it ruled, or left them poorer than before” has been the preoccupation of British liberal imperialists since Adam Smith’s first full-fledged exposition of this question in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, published a year after American independence.

Smith was a great critic of the East India Company.  

The assertion that Indian economic nationalism’s joining the “study of history with a political battle that served politics very well but history rather badly” (Roy 2015: 52) suggests a wilful ahistoricity which has three dimensions.

No. Either Roy is right- i.e. 'drain theory' contributed to dirigiste policies which benefitted crony capitalists- or he is wrong in which case these nutters need to produce historical facts and figures to show that this is the case. 

Of course, if you believe that true history is about Viceroys sucking off starving Indian peasants, then you will dismiss as 'ahistorical' any type of historiography which does not highlight this rapacious and relentless fellatio. 

First, the link between politics and history in the contestations of economic nationalism is held as specific to India,

Roy doesn't say that. Plenty of other countries had a drain theory and pursued an economically ruinous dirigiste path.  

quite oblivious to the role of political freedom as the basis of economic nationalism in the making of not only the United States (US) and Germany,

both of which initially followed 'Listian' policies to protect 'infant industries' before gaining economies of scope and scale and thus competitiveness on international markets.  

but also the “success stories” of erstwhile colonies like South Korea

what 'political freedom' did it have under the military dictatorship?  

and practically every sovereign nation state that emerged through anti-colonial struggles (Chang 2002).

most became dictatorships though rising affluence could mean a transition to a less authoritarian style of governance.  

It is peculiar that the argument acknowledges that nationalism and the critique of colonialism emerged in response to imperialism and its actual experience (and not the other way around),

in the Indian context, what is meant is that guys like Noaroji or Kumarappa only wrote 'economic history' because of their political agenda. Roy is aware that there were Indian students of Marshall who preferred a Listian 'sonderweg' even though they were aware of the deficiencies of the Indian entrepreneurial class (not to mention the greater deficiencies of Civil Servants put in charge of public sector enterprises).  

but fails to recognise either any nationalism with economic content in capitalist colonialism itself

Capitalist colonialism is about making profits or keeping trade routes secure. Its 'economic content' is obvious. 'Capitalism' is economic in nature.  

or the economic nationalism(s) that emerged much before it took root in India

Roy knows all about Mercantilism.  

and countries that followed Britain along the path of industrialisation.

Belgium was the closest imitator. But it wasn't interested in colonies though it was forced to take over the Congo from King Leopold.  

Instead of thus seeing economic nationalism in India as a specific outcome of its distinctive history,

Naoroji was a Parsi defending the interests of Parsi industrialists. Nothing wrong in that. 

the argument becomes based on the logic of “incorrectness” in the interpretation of history.

Was Naoroji right? No. There was no drain. Indians knew that the real problem was not British rapaciousness but the indolence of the absentee landlord and the avarice of the usurer and other intermediary.  

But, the “correct” interpretation put forward falls prey to inconsistency and denial.

By fucktards. The fact is every Indian and Chinese person knows that opening the economy and trading with evil Capitalist bastards has meant less poverty and higher life chances.  

Second, it proposes that the historical has to be free of the political.

History should be factual. Any nutter can claim that, throughout history, White peeps only remain White because they bathe in the semen extracted from starving brown folk.  

The political is visible in all other historiography traditions except the one posed as correct.

No. Roy will happily change his theory if contradictory facts and figures are uncovered- e.g. videos of Lord Curzon sucking off Indian peasants on the direct orders of the King Emperor who, obviously, answered only to the City of London.  

It implicitly suggests that the political is “bad”

it is bad if it fucks up the economy and causes the nation to fall relative to similar countries.  

and the historical is “good” conforming to the contemporary neoclassical false dichotomy between the political as bad and the economic as good.

Ordinary people want economic prosperity not paranoid political ideologies. Neo-classical econ is useful. That's why it is taught in Business School.  

The neoclassical techno–economic paradigm is based on

productivity. This can be raised coercively- e.g. by beating and killing people- or non-coercively. Neo-Classical econ focuses only on the latter. It does not deny that the other path exists. 

a very limited range of toolkits that come in binaries of bad and good—public (evil, inefficient, corrupt, political, state, social) and private (good, efficient, transparent, economic, market, individual).

Nonsense! Talk of 'binaries' is Lefty shite. Neo-Classical economists think public goods are vital. They figure out ways to finance their optimal production. This is studied under the rubric of 'market failure' and 'preference revelation'.  

The false dichotomy between politics and economics is a

false dichotomy which only exists in the minds of useless pedants 

fundamental ideological precept in this etymology, which is now being extended to history in general and economic history in specific (Das Gupta 2010).

Why shouldn't we learn from actual history rather than some paranoid fairy tale?  

The third dimension lies in the huge temporal leap in the fetishised characterisation of the “old” and “new” where the old is located in 1901–02 (the two works by Naoroji and R C Dutt)

which went in a different direction to A.O Hume's work. Essentially, the Indians didn't want to raise agricultural productivity but didn't mind making themselves useful to the emerging class of nouveau riche Indian entrepreneurs and industrialists- i.e. the guys who financed Gandhi. The Mody-Lees agreement between Manchester and Bombay was the prize they were after. Incidentally, both Churchill and Nehru disapproved of this (because it hurt vastly more cotton farmers than it benefited a handful of millionaire mill-owners) but only the former had the courage to say so.  

and the new which is traced to new institutional economics (NIE) and the contemporary imperial strand of Anglo–Saxon historiography, both of which can be dated to the 1980s– 1990s.

Did you know Niall Ferguson is secretly the Viceroy of India? He is sucking off billions of starving Indians. 

In the 80's, Western countries had to abandon their own dirigiste Industrial and Regional policies. They had to go in for privatization or else face 'stagflation' because of ballooning fiscal deficits brought on by rising losses in the public sector. This was a case of heeding the anger of the tax-paying voter rather than embarking on an Imperialist adventure- e.g. conquering the Middle East to get cheap oil. 

While there is ambiguity towards NIE and admiration for contemporary Anglo–Saxon historiography, both have in common “the idea of neutrality.”

The idea that facts, not fantasies, matter.  

Why This Ahistoricity The devastating consequences of such neutrality in the moral spectacle and political ecology of the British Empire have been extensively documented

by useless nutters like

(Dirks 2006; Davis 2001).

No doubt, Dirks will blame Biden if Indian-Americans retain caste distinctions.  

NIE’s “faith in superiority of European institutions” considered to be new is also at least 240– years old. Adam Smith had contended in 1776 that the superiority of the British state and the inferior institutional quality of company rule made all the difference between North America and India.

The difference was that America was a settler colony. Whites didn't want to settle in India because dying of dysentery isn't a bag of laughs.  

Neither the “people” of India nor the American “people” seemed to have liked that “idea” and this was demonstrated in the events of 1857 and 1775, respectively.

The troops who put down the 1857 uprising were largely Indian. America won its war against the Brits.  

Why is this giant leap of ahistoricity necessary?

It is ahistorical to suggest that Indians, by and large, supported the Mutiny. The Emperor, poor fellow, wanted no part of it. Still, Hindus were pleased because it was the last flicker of Islamic military power in the Doab. Sikhs, of course, were even more delighted to loot the havelis of 'Babar ke aulaad'.  

The economic history of India was not cryogenically frozen between 1902 and the 1990s,

It got stupider and stupider. Utsa Patnaik now claims that Britain drained India of 20 times more wealth than existed on the entire planet during that period! 

but there is not a single reference to any history writing in 20th century India. The reason is the “vexation” that narrative history writing on India is based more on indigenous agency than European agency.

Just as when Indians take a shit, they are exercising 'indigenous agency'. On the other hand, if they are drained of jizz while they sleep- European agency is involved. 

Actually, there were sound enough chapters on economic history in various textbooks and government reports. 

This is a resort to burlesque

Roy is getting naked and shaking his boobs at us 

about the diverse and contested historical scholarship on India and in India with no references at all except to a handful of Anglo–Saxon historians.

Roy was educated in India. He read plenty of history books written by Indian professors. Maybe if he had gone to Presidency or JNU he'd have been as stupid and useless as these nutters 

This could have been avoided by engaging with the rich material that has informed Indian history writing all through the 20th century in which “agency” has been problematised in many different ways (Sarkar 2002).

useless ways.  

Arrogant denial as an old colonial legacy is evident in the statement that “few original works were published in the field of empire and development in the last 20 years after the last major works by the Monthly Review Press collective” (Roy 2015: 52). Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, and E M Wood’s The Empire of Capital, by way of example, were both written in the last two decades

But they are shit.  Not one of them had studied economics. They were Marxists in countries where Marx had been firmly rejected by the working class before they were born. 

Nationalist and the Marxist interpretations of Indian economic history are collapsed seamlessly into one.

Naoroji attended the Second International alongside people like Rosa Luxemburg.  

The only explicit reference to Marxist interpretations is to the dependency theorists of the world-systems school and that is only to trivialise the Marxist concept of exploitation.

Which is that if any enterprise makes a profit, then exploitation exists. Thus if I hire Beyonce for 100 million dollars a year and make a profit of ten dollars, I have exploited her.  

That Marxist historiography in India and on India continues to be a highly contested terrain

but that terrain is shit. Why fight over a turd? 

in which sharp engagement and critiques of dependency theory have been central to the departures, finds no mention.

Why do sensible people ignore stupid nutters? Is it because they are paid by the Viceroy to cover up the fact that he is sucking off trillions of darkies every night?  

In a teleological sweep, all Marxist writing is castigated for focusing on exploitation as the basis of capitalism and not on its “innovative propensity.” It is contended that “exploitation cannot be the definition of capitalism” as if that is how Marx defined capitalism.

But this is Morishima's 'fundamental theorem of Marxism'. Roy knows enough econ to understand that profit is the reward for combining the factors of production. Even if wealth falls, some entrepreneurs will gain a reward.

Schumpeter’s focus on “innovative propensities” is resurrected (without due reference) to present another old idea as new and without the saving grace of his acknowledgement to Marx’s analysis of capitalism, which was based on the dialectical relationship between “productive forces” and “exploitation.”

Schumpeter was stupid. One could say he contributed to the 'convergence thesis' such that the USSR and the US would become more and more alike. By the time I got to the LSE in 1979, nobody believed that shite.  

Exploitation in the Marxist sense has characterised precapitalist societies

as has farting. What was novel was Viceroys performing fellatio on trillions of dark folk.  

and capitalism’s distinctiveness lies in its specific mechanisms of exploitation.

Nope. Capitalism only exists if capital is allocated by financial markets.  

Exploitation in capitalism mutually and inseparably constitutes both exploitation within nations and the process of exploitation of nations by other nations.

Only in the sense that all exploitation is founded upon evil Viceroys sucking us off while we sleep.  

Neither of the interpretations is acknowledged or engaged with.

Roy doesn't even mention Viceroy Mountbatten's attempt to suck off Mahatma Gandhi.  Fortunately, the naked little girl he was sleeping with woke up and told Mounty to fuck the fuck off. This is true reason for collapse of British rule in India. Mind it kindly. 

Instead, the straw man fallacy prevails.

in this essay which, as yet, hasn't mentioned a single fact. These guys need to name Indian economic historians who refuted the drain theory. They can't, because there were none though, close reading of certain texts may incline one to form the opinion that the author didn't believe that nonsense but was too cowardly to say so.  

A false dichotomy is evident in the implicit understanding of philosophical traditions in the classification of liberalism and utilitarianism as two tightly compartmentalised and oppositional strands.

Nobody thinks Bentham or J.S Mill weren't Liberals. However, there is a brand of Utilitarianism (i.e. consequentialist rather than deontological (rule-based)) which is not compatible with Liberalism. Roy would have read Sen's 'impossibility of a Paretian Liberal' at Shantiniketan. 

These two traditions have historically not only drawn from each other but the liberal roots of utilitarianism and the utilitarian roots of liberalism are inseparable (Lloyd Thomas 1980; Hardin 1986). Despite this, utilitarianism is often presented as distinct from liberalism because of two reasons.

One reason. Utilitarianism is an economic theory. Liberalism is a political ideology.  

First, this differentiation provides a cosy continuum of the false binary between economic (utilitarianism) and political (liberalism) philosophy.

Economics isn't Politics. True, a political party may have an economic platform and a particular enterprise may pay political lobbyists but the two are as distinct as chalk and cheese. You can seel chalk to buy cheese and vice versa but you can't eat a chalk sandwich.  

Second, utilitarianism forms the foundations of the method that Roy has internalised—cost–benefit analysis.

Nonsense! People have been weighing up the costs and benefits of various courses of action for hundreds of thousands of years. In any case, Moh Tzu, not Bentham, can be considered the first Utilitarian philosopher.  

The fallacies of this method are many and the Kelman–Solow exchange

Kelman's objection to CBA was ethical. What he didn't understand was that 'rights' have to be linked to incentive compatible 'remedies'- otherwise they are unenforceable. If the 'obligation holder' gains some benefit higher than the cost of supplying the remedy (e.g. Amazon refunding me 'no questions asked' because the benefit of my trust in them outweighs the cost) then and only then will there be an effective 'right'.  

is instructive here, especially on the intangibility of costs and benefits which relates directly to Roy’s understanding of “benefits” from skills and knowledge.

These are tangible enough. By studying O.R rather than Social Choice, Purnendu Chatterjee became a billionaire employing thousands of people and paying a lot of money in taxes. Kaushik Basu, who admittedly wasn't as bright, has done well enough for himself but he hasn't brought a lot of jobs and tax revenue to West Bengal. 

Governments need to spend money on stuff which will cause productivity to rise and thus income (and hence tax revenue) to increase more than proportionately. Utility just means money (indeed 'transferable utility' is thus defined)  

But the biggest problem lies in the precept that as long as benefits outweigh costs, the phenomenon under assessment is favourable even when it is acknowledged that those bearing the costs

i.e. guys with money- e.g. tax payers 

and those benefiting may be different.

Work shy scroungers. These nutters are arguing for the abolition of the Welfare State! 

The ethical compunction for practitioners of the method is eliminated through the separation of the abstract economic from the concrete social.

The 'concrete social' features evil Viceroys draining trillions of darkies of their precious precious jizz.  

A ‘Peoples’ History The greatest twist of ideological jugglery comes in the notion of the “people.”

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a worker's paradise precisely because, unlike in the South, evil Viceroys are prevented from incessantly sucking off the proletariat.  

People-centred history and the agency of the people and people–nation have been one of the battlefields of historiography in the 20th century

this was a battle over who got to eat a big fat turd.  

—on the question of what drives social transformation and change. The radical tradition(s) in history writing (Marxism being only one important constituent) for much of the later part of the 20th century moved to people-centric history rejecting state-centric approaches.

But they preferred to do this while comfortably ensconced in Western campuses where they qualified for intellectual affirmative action.  

Roy eulogises the people as the source of ideas, openness, innovation and change but his people are very different from those in the radical tradition—they are the settlers as carriers of useful knowledge, skilled immigrants from Europe and the rising class of Indian capitalists.

It is a fact that Indian industrialists preferred to get in White managers. But they weren't immigrants. They saved up money and left as soon as they could unless their country had turned Commie in their absence.  

The rulers are the people in this epistemic appropriation of not just concept but also agency. If this is not an exercise in politics and ideology, what is?

It is an exercise in truth telling. Viceroy really was White as were many of the managers in Indian industrial concerns back then. What is reprehensible is Roy's failure to mention Viceroy sucking off trillions of starving Indians.  

From the general problems of the historiography and ideological precepts that Roy relies on, we now move to a few specific problems with his method.

He isn't a Marxist nutter. Also he knows Econ and Indian history. How can he call himself a historian? 

A series of conceptual and methodological fallacies follow with conflation of historical time, a fallacious methodological approach to causality, and the inconsistent use of data. For example, Roy (2015: 54) argues that “India had free trade thrust upon it and yet it specialised in agricultural exports to a more limited extent than most tropical countries.”

An example of this is the Governor of the Punjab refusing to allow the export of wheat during the Great War despite Keynes relying upon this happening. The fact is, if you wanted maximal resource-extraction then you needed something like King Leopold's 'free state' of Congo.  

This is presented as a stylised fact based on the assumption that tropical countries should be exporting primary commodities irrespective of historical time.

What else have they exported? Does Ghana sell cocoa or computers?  

For which period of India’s colonial past is this assertion valid?

Roy said it wasn't true of India. He isn't a fool. He knows that India was a big exporter of textiles.  

If this is a reference to the early period, then the fact is explained not by geographical teleology but by the extent of development of both manufacturing and trade in the Indian subcontinent (Habib 1969a). In 1800, the Indian sub continent accounted for 19.7% of world manufacturing output. In 1900, its share was 1.7% (Bairoch 1993).

Because its industrialists were, as Marshall noted, more than a bit crap. He did think highly of the Tatas but they brought in an American manager in Jamshedpur.  

Fallacious method is also evident in the attempt to show that the colonial government was a “small government” and keen to maintain an open economy compared to the government in independent India.

Not only was it a 'small government' but it needed to appease British exporters while at the same time levying enough in tariffs to fund itself.  

Roy asserts this on the basis of one time point, 1931, and two ratios: tax–gross domestic product (GDP) (3%) and public expenditure–GDP (5%). This is compared to 1981 when government expenditure was 22% of GDP in India, an increase that in fact would be observed for any government

only fiscally viable ones who could not finance the administration from royalty payments on natural resources.  

if those two specific years 1931 and 1981 were taken as points of comparison.

Public goods are income elastic. As income rises the Public Sector expands as a proportion of the economy. True, if everything is Nationalized, then GDP falls till a 'black economy' develops or the Government backtracks. In either case, low productivity means limited government.  

Roy thus does away with both linear and historical time by using one time point to generalise over at least one century and comparing with another time point a good 50 years later—in which the preoccupations of the government in India have changed substantively in content and context, not to mention the differences between the colonial and the independent Indian state.

No. Roy could give a graph in 'linear' historical time which would show that, absent total war, there is a secular trend. But only if productivity rises can the Public Sector expand its share of the economy. 

This is despite Roy borrowing the critique of NIE for having compressed history into two dates, one which is the cause and the other the effect leaving hundred years in between unaccounted for. In any case how can 1931, when the colonial government was hardly interested in an “open economy” of the freetrade kind and had erected an elaborate system of racially discriminatory tariff protection (Tyabji 2000), be a reference point for openness?

The answer is obvious. The Indian economy was more open in 1931. You could import a Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce. You couldn't import even a Toyota Corolla in 1981.  

The tenuous causal link between small government and open economy

Closing the economy is costly. A poor country can't do it save under a very ruthless dictator.  

would not stand the test of time also for South Korea—the poster boy of the openness tradition (Cornia 2014).

It is a poster boy for 'export led growth'. But to gain economies of scope and scale you have to import 'intermediate goods'. That is why 'cascading tariffs' are a bad idea.  

How does expenditure–GDP ratio indicate the size of the state?

It shows its relative size. If the thing is high, chances are a lot of people work for the Government or a public sector enterprise. If the thing is low, most people are employed in the private sector.  

Here is the most banal conceptual conflation derived from the dominant neoclassical instrumentalist approach to the state— the state and government collapse into one.

Because they are one and the same in law and political theory. If a government servant does something which isn't ultra vires, his action is an action of the State and of the government. Moreover, even a private body which does something for which it is ultimately paid by the government may be considered to fall within this category.  

The colonial state is what the colonial government does, rather than an institution (in which the executive arm of the government and its bureaucracy are one of the many apparatuses) in a specific social and historical context.

That is a justiciable matter. A given act of a government may be deemed ultra vires or illegal in some respect. In that case, it is like a 'per curiam' judgment and is deemed never to have been legitimate or licit.  

The government of the British Crown in colonial India was after all an extension of the overarching imperial state apparatus.

It was answerable to the Secretary of State for India who was answerable to Parliament. So what?  

Can the colonial state apparatus be understood without

acknowledging White peeps are only Whit because they bathe in jizz surreptitiously extracted from trillions of starving darkies by evil Viceroys?  

its fundamental links to the British state, which presided over an empire where different arms in different parts of the world were all geared towards the larger interest of maintaining social order, stability of property relations and contractual predictability of economic and political gains across the imperium (Wood 2003)?

Labour came to power in 1945. It was committed to bringing into public ownership the means of production starting with the 'commanding heights' of the economy. Incidentally, it had been committed to giving India independence since 1918 though, sadly, the Mahacrackpot prevented this under two minority Labour administrations.  

Why not estimate the size of that state in all its economic, social and political dimensions and then locate the Indian subcontinent’s role in this giant enterprise?

This is easily done by looking at the proportion of Indo-British trade. This tended to fall because productivity in both places tended to stagnate relative to competitors.  

That methodological route is of course closed by the compulsions of closedness of ideology, perspective and method which (we shall see in the rest of the article) permeates the entire analytical framework of the ahistorical politics of imperialist historiography.

There is no imperialism because the thing is loss making, not to say a fucking nuisance. Historiography doesn't matter. Data-sets, however, can be quite useful.  

 The nebulous concept of “openness” constitutes the method’s core.

It is easy enough to estimate.  

A O Krueger and Jagdish Bhagwati’s attempts in 1978 to define a measure of trade orientation (bias) were based on the ratios of effective exchange rates of imports and exports.

At that time, many Western countries retained vestiges of exchange control. Still, for some purposes, Bhagwati's work was useful enough. Development economists needed to understand that productivity in the primary sector would stagnate if peasants were paid much less than the open market price. This was obvious when you looked at Myanmar (as Myint explained) or Ghana (as Arthur Lewis explained). I may add that Soviet economists were waking up to the fact that their 'shadow price' for oil was much lower than the 'spot price'. Russia would gain by shaking off its 'empire'. 

Krueger had then conceded that by this definition, it is possible to have a liberalised economy with very high tariffs,

though what you would get would be smuggling and a vast black economy.  

but two decades later abandoned her own proposition to argue that “growth prospects for developing countries are greatly enhanced through an outer-oriented trade regime and fairly uniform incentives...for production across exporting and import-competing goods” (Krueger 1997: 1).

By then, this was fucking obvious.  

The ideology of free trade had trumped methodological rigour.

Nope. The fact that India had to ship gold to Britain to stay solvent trumped ideology. India liberalized and suddenly 'foreign exchange crises' were a thing of the past.  

Within neoclassicism itself, there have been very rigorous debates on the validity of the concept of openness, none of which informs the openness frame.

No. There have been useless debates. Academic economists merely play catch up. If they were smart, they'd be as rich as fuck.  

Neither does the context of capitalism nor its uneven phases or levels of development in individual countries.

More reprehensibly, nobody mentions evil Viceroy who is sucking me off every night. Things have got so bad, I feel I am too weak to go to work in the morning. Sadly, my GP is refusing to give me a sick note which explains that I am the victim of nocturnal fellatio by rich White peeps.  

However, the attempt to do history with the fundamentally ahistorical neoclassical framing of the issue runs into obvious inconsistencies in counterposing openness to economic nationalism as binaries.

Nope. You can plot time-series establishing that this is the case.  

To make the case that colonialism opened India to the flow of skills, knowledge and technology, one has to first establish that the subcontinent was closed to these in the precolonial period despite the networks of trade and commerce that stretched across and through the subcontinent.

Colonialism opened India to the flow of skilled British administrators not to mention evil Viceroys who incessantly sucked off our peasants. 

Still, it is true that Aurangzeb imported an Italian Bishop to establish a Church while appointing a Dutch lady as the Admiral of his fleet. The dyke in question sucked off trillions of Mullahs while they slept.  

If Roy accepts that many pre-British Empires in India also had a small government and unregulated markets, then why was British colonialism necessary to facilitate openness?

Pax Britannica. The Brits made India safer and more secure. They got rid of Thugee, Pindari, Suttee but not, sadly, Agarbatti.  

The answer, that it alone had the ability

because Britain ruled the waves and could put down piracy. Later, they established coaling stations and protected trading routes so world trade could increase greatly.  

to impose political unity on India and integrate her with the global markets, conflates market integration with openness—using the latter to deny the significance of the former.

Nobody is doing so. Still, maybe Roy should have highlighted the important role the Brits played in making both land and sea trade routes more secure and cheaper to access.  

The necessity-of-colonialism argument requires a number of counter factuals to hold for the Indian case that were clearly not necessary elsewhere in the world.

They weren't necessary in countries where guys who owned stuff were kept awake at night by the fear that their cousin would kill them and grab their property.  

It would have to be true that in the absence of the political integration of India on a subcontinental scale and its subjugation by the British, in two centuries between 1757 and 1947 there would have been no possibility of either the subcontinent’s history throwing up a “unification” of the German or Italian kind or for its different parts to be open to flows from Britain, in the sense many countries in Europe were in the 19th century without being integrated through the creation of a single centralised state.

It is possible that a capable dynasty could have achieved much but sadly, no such dynasty emerged.  

It further has to be assumed that Indians were fundamentally incapable of not only developing the skills that they came to receive through colonialism but also would have rejected them had colonial rule not forcibly demonstrated their value to them.

No. This assumption is not necessary. The fact is, if Shivaji's dynasty or that of Ranjit Singh or the Nizams etc. had been more fortunate, then some sort of federal India might have been cobbled together. We must admit that if foreign rule succeeded in India, it was because there was some defect in India's own monarchical tradition. Maybe, rigid monogamy and primogeniture would have helped. Maybe not.  

The upshot of this people-centred history is that the people of the Indian subcontinent, left to themselves, would not have been capable of making any history unless colonialism endowed them with that ability.

No one says that. They think that India would have been a collection of warring states but that sooner or later some sort of Zollverein would have been cobbled together. One could say the Brits were paid to bring about this outcome though, in fact, lots of internal barriers to trade remained.  

Further, if such great significance is to be attached to the integration created through the construction of a British Empire for the flow of skills,

e.g. British Governors and Viceroys serving a term of office in India. Recall, Nehru was so impressed with Mountbatten's skills that he asked him to stay on as Governor General. He also retained a British admiral till 1958.

how can the significance to the politically shaped character of that integration, and the totality of the flows and transactions it resulted in, be denied for explaining the polarisation that took place within the Empire?

What polarisation? Oh. I get it. How come Viceroy was sucking off only darkies? Why was the British Prime Minister not performing fellatio on starving Cockneys or Geordies? It is because they were White.  

The flows were not unidirectional

Very true. In 1832 Raja Ram Mohan Roy was appointed Lord Protector of Yorkshire. He drained trillions of starving Tykes of their jizz.  

and were characterised by fundamental asymmetries.

e.g. the King Emperor getting to rule India whereas Mahatma Gandhi wasn't allowed even to rule the Isle of Wight. That's why he went on a hunger strike.  

Other regions, which were relatively more autonomous of Britain

because they weren't shit at ruling themselves 

and adopted economic nationalism were able to make more out of the flows from Britain during the same period than India could despite being open.

Either a nation wants to raise its productivity or it prefers to talk bollocks. Punjab wants productivity. Buddhijivis, speaking generally, want the other thing. 

If the argument is that India was not self-sufficient in possessing the conditions for industrialisation in 1850,

It was. Industrialisation could have taken off. But Indian entrepreneurs were a bit shit. In Japan, by contrast, innovation began very soon and, in some cases, surpassed what was best in the West.  

the same could be said for every country at the point that their modern industrialisations took off, including Britain.

But no one is saying anything so foolish.  Talk about a strawman! 

It is also true that the development of modern factory industry in the 19th century in many parts of the world, and not just India, “gained” from the flows from Britain— which at the beginning of the century had a monopoly over industrialisation,

No. They were ahead but 'catch-up' growth was highly feasible. Perhaps if Russia had a second Peter the Great, they would have surged ahead. But Tzar Nicholas was against railways and factories.  

went on to become the “workshop of the world” and ended the century as the largest exporter of capital even as the US and Germany had displaced it from leadership on the industrialisation front. The point is that they gained much more, and such a comparative exercise would not support any unadulterated adulation of openness over economic nationalism.

Very true. Did you know that the guy who manufactured your COVID vaccination serum is as rich as fuck? Personally, I think billions should have been left to die so as to prevent that dude from getting a lot of money.  

The sense in which the term “openness” is employed for the period after 1850 is with respect to a greater integration of the subcontinent with world trade under a liberal free-trade regime, argued to have an enabling effect on the Indian economy.

Railways and screw propelled steam-ships dramatically reduced the cost of transport. That's what enabled oceanic trade to reach a much higher plateau.  

However, this free-trade view of openness has an even more spurious linkage with development given the history of capitalist development across the world.

Nope. The linkage is authentic wherever there was both free-trade and rapid development. True, you could have development under a tyranny but no examples of this could be found at that time.  

Protectionism is neither a product of economic nationalism as an idea that came with the decolonisation of the South,

it preceded it 

nor that of the 20th century import substitution industrialisation (ISI) policies.

 You can't have import substitution without protection. 

Trade protection in Europe has a long history going back to the medieval period. Early instances of this were the increasing discrimination against the Flemish merchants in the Champagne Fairs in the 13th century, including bans and exorbitantly high import duties (Abu-Lughod 1989).

Italian mariners bought Flemish cloth and took it to non-French markets. But this whole episode has no great importance.  

Without such protective measures French textile production stood no chance against the threat posed by the superior woollen textiles of Bruges and Ghent.

No. France could have copied what the Dutch were doing.  

England fought the Hundred Years’ War with France in the 14th–15th centuries

because it wanted French territory 

vowing to protect the Flemish industries and merchants against French tyranny;

Hence Henry V's famous speech at Agincourt- 'St. Crispin wants us to die so some Dutch dudes make more money. Who is with me?'  

ironically the war ended with the irreversible decline of Flemish industries.

because their ports silted up.  

The frequent English embargoes on wool exports to Flemish regions, especially those coming under French influence, were a widely used tool in the warfare (Abu-Lughod 1989). Apart from internal labour unrests, the decline of Flemish textiles was primarily because of the heavy duties on raw wool exports from England and ban on use of foreign cloth and the warfare over staple rights to trade in woollen textiles (Dobb 1946). All this effectively converted England from a raw wool exporter to the centre of woollen textile industry in Europe and led to the simultaneous collapse of the industries of Bruges and Ghent (Abu-Lughod 1989).

but Antwerp, which didn't have a silting problem, thrived. The fact is England was bound to start exporting woollen cloth till the domestic market for mutton grew sufficiently. Also, rising affluence would have resulted in a preference for finer quality, e.g. Iberian, wool.  

The lessons of protectionism leading to this initial success in securing manufacturing advantage over the already established Flemish industries through monopoly and restrictive practices were never lost on the English till the maturity of English capitalism.

It was wholly lost and forgotten. English capitalism followed in Dutch footsteps before overtaking that country. 

The subsequent charters in the 15th and 16th centuries incorporating large monopoly trade companies went a long way in facilitating adventures in the New World, unscrupulous plunders and the process of capital accumulation.

There were also domestic 'Tudor' monopolies which were greatly resented.  

The audacious idea of developing an industry (cotton textiles) with a raw material (cotton) that could not be produced at home gained currency in England with the acquisition of cottongrowing colonies in the Americas in the 16th century. That cotton textiles emerged as the leading industry later in the Industrial Revolution bears testimony to the fact that

rising affluence meant a growing market for lighter fabrics.  

the foundations of capitalism lay in early colonialism.

Actually, these nutters are saying the reverse. Capitalist ventures like the Dutch or British East India Companies led to Imperialism.  

Protectionism continued to remain an integral and necessary component of capitalism,

No. Protection raised money for the State. Sadly, it could be self-defeating- i.e. lead to stagnating productivity and hence lower tax revenue than competitors.  

mediated through colonialism, till the first half of the 19th century. H H Wilson observed: It is also a melancholy instance of the wrong done to India

not to mention blokes like him who had worked for John Company 

by the country on which she has become dependent. It was stated in evidence [in 1813] that the cotton and silk goods of India … could be sold for a profit in the British market at a price … 50 to 60 per cent. lower than those fabricated in England. It consequently became necessary to protect the latter by duties of 70 and 80 per cent on their value or by positive prohibition. Had this not been the case, ...the mills of Paisley and Manchester would have been stopped in their outset, and could scarcely have been again set in motion, even by the power of steam. They were created by the sacrifice of the Indian manufacture... (Mill’s History of British India, Wilson’s continuation as cited in Dutt 1902: 262–63).

In other words, the fact that half starved weavers in India were able to find some less taxing employment was the fault of the good folk of Paisley and Manchester. Wilson wasn't worried at all by the profits of his Anglo-Indian, or Indo-Anglian, chums in Calcutta.  

The clamour for free trade in England began only in the early half of the 19th century

With the Corn Laws. Everybody, except big landowners, wanted cheap bread. 

when English industries had attained a competitiveness far ahead of her rivals.

They had gained economies of scope and scale.  

The political leadership in England’s closest rivals in terms of industrialisation—US and Germany—were no more convinced about the free-trade doctrine than India and many other ex- colonies were at the time of their political independence. The following US presidential statement elaborates this lucidly: For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it... After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything... my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade (Ulysses Grant, 18th USA president, 1869–77, cited in Frank 1967: 164).

Neo-Classical economists understand that 'non-convexities' (i.e. economies of scale) cause market failure. Protecting infant industries can be justified. The problem is that such infants may never grow up.  

Were the US and German political leadership of the late 19th century, when they industrialised rapidly, blinded by left-nationalist politics and captive to a politics of competitive patriotism?

No. They were aware of 'non-convexities' even if the mathematical economics of the period had no means to represent such things. Still, if the North hadn't won the Civil War or if Prussia hadn't united Germany by the sword, primary producers would have opposed a type of protection which benefitted urban manufacturers.  

Liberalism, characterised by the so-called period of free trade after 1846 (when the Corn Laws were finally abolished in Britain), and till the Great Depression, is exclusive to Britain and her colonies (forcibly imposed by Britain).

Protection was forcibly imposed by wealthy industrialists and bankers. Ordinary people wanted cheap bread, cheap cloth, cheap everything no matter where it came from. Indian mill-owners paid Gandhi a lot of money to get Indians to burn foreign cloth.  

Britain’s competitive edge in industries also declined with the newly industrialising countries in this same period of free trade as she maintained her supremacy through financial and capital lending interests (Mukherjee 2010).

Brits, like everybody else, would prefer to get rich sitting in an office rather than sweating on the factory floor.  

The neo-liberal search for that mythical period in the history of capitalism, when an economy has emerged as industrially competitive and undergone a progressive economic transition primarily based on liberal trade policies, thus remains elusive.

Nope. That period was post-War. Europe had to get rid of internal trade barriers so as to gain economies of scope and scale for supply chains crossing borders. The phenomenon of 'disintegration'- whereby a small supplier specializes in a particular intermediate good and thus is able to supply the entire industry more cheaply and with better quality- means that competitiveness depends on being able to participate in global supply chains. The old dirigiste 'vertical integration' model was obsolete. Sadly, the Indian finance ministry still doesn't understand this.  

The importance of protective, restrictive and strategic trade policies has been so important for industrialisation historically

only if there are non-convexities 

that every country that benefits from these wishes to prevent others from traversing that path (Chang 2002).

To protect rents- sure. But voters want cheap foreign stuff.  

It is no wonder that the US, Germany and most advanced capitalist countries work overtime to sermonise developing countries regarding the virtues of free-trade

Whereas these nutters work overtime to argue that India should return to poverty by preventing its people from buying from the cheapest or best quality international vendor.  

. Their efforts are strengthened by those academicians and policymakers from ex-colonies, who repeatedly revisit this debate based on methodological denial of their own economic histories, and that of the colonial masters.

Tata and Birla should have more money. Indians should pay three times the global price for cars. Also, they should only use Indian computers made entirely of cow-dung manufactured by disabled Dalit Lesbians.  

Cost–Benefit of Colonialism

The benefit was that Hindus in East Bengal or West Punjab weren't killed or chased away. Still, it was very cruel of Churchill to deny the Bengalis the benefits of Japanese rule.  

Denying their importance for explaining India’s economic backwardness, the drain is rechristened as the cost of services received,

My bank has been draining me of wealth. I paid in my salary cheque every month for the last forty years. Where has that money gone? The Bank manager says they deducted money from my account every time I wrote a cheque to some guy. But I was giving that guy a nice piece of paper graced with my own beautiful signature! It is daylight robbery to drain my bank account and then say 'this deduction is the cost of the goods and services you received. 

What can I say? Capitalism is a total fraud. Also Viceroy is sucking me off any time I fall asleep.  

the benefit of which was a process far removed from deindustrialisation—a great dynamism of the secondary sector, including the development of industrial capitalism.

The plain fact is that Indians aren't that keen on working in factories. Everybody should get a PhD in Gramscian Grammatology after which a Professorship should be provided- preferably on a Western campus.  

Why was colonial rule then necessary if India was paying for these services—or was that rule itself the service being paid for?

Yes. Britain protected the country. That was worth paying for. Sadly, once the price of that protection rose too steeply for the British tax-payer to tolerate, Imperialism disappeared.  

Leaving aside this obvious question, let us examine the three components that constitute the argument. The denial of deindustrialisation in 19th century colonial India primarily hinges on two arguments.

It relies on one fact. Modern factories began to be built in India. Sadly, they tended to be badly run.  

First, the votaries of deindustrialisation have disproportionately focused on cotton textiles.

Weavers want to buy mill-cloth for themselves though they may be happy enough to sell high quality handloom fabrics.  

Second, there was a significant reorganisation of the handicrafts sector (outside cotton textiles but also in whatever remained of textile handicrafts) in the face of competition and artisanal skills survived through this process. This also led to an improvement in productivity and therefore was not something negative as far as industrialisation and development is concerned (Roy 1999, 2015).

In other words, those who wanted to work could move to higher productivity employment.  

The debate on whether destruction of handicrafts was a necessary precursor to capitalist development in India is an old one (originally between Daniel Thorner and Amiya Bagchi).

It was a debate that nobody gave a fuck about. The fact that handicrafts exist side by side with factory produced items explains why.  

There is also no doubt that the trends in deindustrialisation were uneven across regions in India and various handicraft sectors due to a range of factors enumerated by Bagchi (2010). A more diversified study of the secondary sector in such circumstances

will still be useless. If this weren't the case, private enterprises would pay for such a study to be done by someone smart.  

can enrich the discussion on industrialisation and deindustrialisation. Ignoring the macroeconomic employment trends and pitching the debate on whether artisanal skills survived or not,

some did. Others- e.g. production of Wootz steel- didn't.  

amounts to deflecting attention from the central argument of the deindustrialisation hypothesis.

Nobody paid any attention to it because it was stupid shit only of interest to senile Leftist pedants. 

This consistently has been about the declining employment capacity of handicrafts

in India, this depended on whether there was an agricultural surplus with which to feed artisans adding enough value to reach distant markets.  

since the beginning of the 19th century and handicrafts and modern industry together after the latter developed. The fact of this decline, which even Roy registers elsewhere (Roy 1999: 17, Table 2.1), underlay the importance attached to the trends in cotton spinning and weaving, the largest secondary sector activity accounting for 62.3% of secondary workers in Gangetic Bihar (Bagchi 2010: 99, Table 4.5). That this continued up to 1931 has been recognised by scholars with polar opposite assessments of colonial rule (Roy 1999; Chattopadhyay 1975).

But what should also be recognized is that most Indian mills weren't well run. Entrepreneurs were speculative rather than innovative though, no doubt, some successful business dynasties emerged. Sadly, family feuds could ruin such enterprises.  

That therefore there was a process with asymmetric and opposite effects on Britain and India cannot be countered by quibbles over its characterisation.

There was some structural unemployment linked to deindustrialization in Britain even at that time. This may have been because the 'invisible surplus' meant a high real exchange rate.  

No one has claimed that all forms of handicrafts and associated skills were completely obliterated during colonial rule. The contention that handicraft sector after the 1850s was more efficiently organised and experienced productivity increases does not in any way contradict the centrality of the destruction caused by imports to explain the overarching macroeconomic trend of contraction in employment in the secondary sector in the 19th century.

What explains it is poor people not wanting to do boring, poorly paid, work.  

Avoiding that eventuality could have been possible only if the new branches of handicrafts that emerged with the reorganisation had compensated for any employment losses in other segments, or modern industry expanded to the extent needed to create enough new employment.

People want government employment. They don't want to do any work.  

That either of these occurred in colonial India is yet to be demonstrated.

What can be demonstrated for Bengal is that its working people became poorer and worse fed. Still, they did well if they went off to Burma or Bombay.  

This leads us to the second constituent of the argument—the characterisation of Indian industrial development after 1850 as “extraordinary.”

Roy gilds the lily somewhat. Still, particular communities- first the Parsis, then the Marwaris- did well for themselves.  

This is based on the rate of expansion of the modern factory sector inevitably exaggerated by the narrow base from which that began, while simultaneously eliminating from the picture the destructive effects on traditional industry.

There was no such effect. Gandhi knew that what the weavers wanted was equal access to mill yarn- especially high quality imported yarn. They didn't want the unusable produce of his chakra.  

The result, however, presents this process as anything but impressive. At independence, India had one of the lowest per capita incomes of the world, 75% of the workforce was in agriculture and the modern factory sector accounted for barely 8% of output and less than 3% of employment. India’s narrow industrial sector was still dominated by the industries and core technologies of the first Industrial Revolution, more than half a century after the second Industrial Revolution.

Indians had had an increasing say in Government from about 1920 onward. They were bound to do stupid shit. The question was whether they could learn from their mistakes? Punjabis could. Bengalis, speaking generally, could not.  

The absurdity of the framework would have emerged even if it was carried to its logical conclusion—and the cost in terms of the tribute paid for a century before that impressive industrialisation began and continued to do so for the next nine decades being compared with its benefits.

The benefit of British rule was Pax Britannica and the fact that if your cousin killed you, instead of inheriting the ancestral property, he might have to go to jail.  

Such a relative exercise could not have escaped the conclusion that India’s must have been one of the most costly processes of industrial development in history.

Yes it could. Did Indians want to work in factories? No. They wanted to be paid not to work at all.  

Colonialism would then again be necessary for explaining why this was the case— unless of course one attributed such high costs to the racist premise of the fundamental limitations of Indians!

Indians in India. Once they get out of the country they rise rapidly.  

Hiding the ‘Drain’

by suppressing the videos I posted on Youtube showing Viceroy Curzon sucking me off while I slept.  

The treatment of the “drain of wealth” as payment for services rather than as a unilateral transfer, the third and final prop of the argument, adds insult to injury.

Viceroy got fat salary in addition to lots and lots of my jizz. Will Sir Keir Starmer apologize and pay reparations for this historic crime? No! That bastard is himself sneaking into the homes of Nigerian people and sucking them off with vim and vigour.  

While it is recognised that the monetary system was tightly controlled by the secretary of state for India in London, the intricate link between the revenue management and the trade surpluses in goods that colonial India consistently maintained is ignored.

Because the thing was ad hoc and of no great importance unless, obviously, the Indians had shown an interest in developing a monetary policy of their own. They didn't bother. 

The process of India paying for her own exports rather than earning from them

is similar to my actually paying my employer- through my bank- for employing me. That's why, despite depositing each and every one of my salary cheques for the past four decades my account is mysteriously 'overdrawn'.  

began ever since the company gained control over revenue collection in Bengal in 1765.

Once they took over the administration, some people with names like Bannerjee, Das Gupta & Mazumbdar became rich and relatively immune to a Muslim knife in the gut. 

Under company rule this was a fairly straightforward system where part of the land revenues were earmarked as “investments made abroad” and used to buy Indian exports—converting what earlier was a bilateral exchange into a unilateral transfer.

Very true. Aurangzeb used to give lots of money to Britain in return for which they sent him Admirals and Generals and Viceroys with an insatiable thirst for the jizz of starving Indian peasants. Sadly, once the British established paramountcy, they would unilaterally transfer Indian wealth and Indian jizz to themselves. Nizam of Hyderabad was reduced to utter destitution. Maharaja of Patiala was often seen begging outside the Gurudwara. The Tagores and Tatas could not even produce tatti from their anuses because they had nothing to eat. Indian population collapsed because Indian vaginas were denied access to sperm. This is the main reason Rani of Jhansi took up arms. Why Bollywood is not showing depredations of jizz guzzling Viceroys? Is it because Tirthankar Roy has brainwashed them? 

In the first half of the 19th century, these transfers were primarily in the form of opium, on which the company had a trade monopoly.

Only in directly ruled areas. There was plenty of Malwa opium to make Parsis rich. The Chinese finally realized that they should themselves grow and tax opium. It was foolish to let foreigners and Hong Kong merchants and corrupt officials to grab all the profits.  

To make a case against the drain one has to be able to show that somewhere along the way there was something which restored the bilateral nature of Indian exports.

Pax Britannica. Not having to kill your uncle if you wanted a share of the ancestral property. Still, I admit, Churchill was very wicked for having prevented Japan from conquering India.  

This is not possible because the only change over time was that the drain essentially happened in the form of different commodities in different phases, which made it imperative for India to always maintain an overall export surplus.

The alternative was to pay for its own Navy and Air Force. Also Indians would have had to trust each other as much, or more, than they trusted Britishers.  

Under British Crown rule, when the straightforward system of “tribute transfer”

Land revenue could be seen in that light. 

was no more possible with diversification of trade, the system of council bills was introduced as a medium of payment for any import from India by foreign trading companies.

But John Company's 'hoondis' had been highly liquid much before the Brits controlled any sizable chunk of territory. It was only during the Napoleonic wars that British capital started to squeeze out Indian capital in the financing of British rule.  

The council bills were financed in India by the home charges, a part of Indian revenues.

used to pay pensions etc.  

Thus, all the foreign exchange that was due to come into the Indian economy found its way to the secretary of state’s office in London.

Nonsense! Anyone was allowed to sell stuff for any currency, or bullion, whatsoever to any third party.  

This was one of the most innovative imperial ideas which helped to maintain the fiscal–trade linkage in the colony (Patnaik 1984).

This is like saying I was forced to pay my wages into a particular bank. I could have demanded cash instead. Also, I could have changed job or even emigrated.  

The assertion that the export surplus in goods trade financed the deficit in skills and services trade has a fundamental fallacy as it slips into balance of payment accounting problems.

Nope. It just says you can cover a deficit on 'invisibles' with a surplus on 'visibles'.  

If India was never paid in foreign exchange for the merchandise trade surplus, how could she use that non-existent foreign exchange (existing in Britain) to pay for service imports?

How could my grandfather buy an American car? The answer is he told his Bank to issue a dollar draft to an American motor company. They shipped him the car, on which he paid duty, after the money cleared. One reason my grandfather could afford a fancy car was because he sold some property acquired by his grandfather. At that time the Rupee was linked to the Pound which was fully convertible into gold. Thus my grandfather could buy an American or German or Italian car. 

The only way the argument could stand is if the engineers, foremen, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc (skills which India supposedly did not possess) came to India and worked without any payment, that is, provided free service or had been paid in Britain by the British government.

Their pensions were part of the 'home charge'. Their wages, while they were in India, were not. The 'home charge' was paid by the British Government in India to the British Government in Britain. If the former had no money, there would have been no payment. But, in that case, Britishers owed money by the GoI would have taken a haircut. This in turn would mean they would stop supplying stuff to India or lending money to it.  

One failure of British rule—on the agrarian front—appears in Roy’s account, which could be counted among the “free (dis)services” Britain provided to her Indian colony. However, that failure is not attributed to imperial imperatives and consequent actions like Land Revenue Settlements fundamentally geared towards maximising revenue collection

The Permanent Settlement had the opposite effect as the decades went by. AO Hume wanted to get rid of it but was foolish enough to think Indian barristocrats would agree to a scheme whereby their country as a whole would benefit. While the Brits were around, Indians said 'we must do stupid shit otherwise the country will get richer and thus the Brits will grow stronger.' After the Brits slyly fucked off, Indians said 'we must do stupid shit otherwise Neo-Liberalism will grow stronger.' 

and extraction of agricultural surplus.

Not from Bengal. It had no such thing. Burma was a different story. 

There is no explanation for why the poverty-stricken agricultural sector came to be the one which produced the surplus that paid the high price for the skills necessary for industrialisation.

Nor is there any explanation for why poor people are expected to work for a fucking living. Also, how come Bill Gates does not come to clean my toilet? Why am I expected to undertake this depressing task? Is it because I iz bleck? 

Nor is it explained how a dynamic industrial sector emerged in such a context given the historically observed and theoretically established importance of agrarian change for industrialisation.

Nothing of the sort is required. You can import food and pay for it by exporting manufactured goods.  

A peculiar notion of dynamism which has no relationship with the rate of economic expansion is expressed thus—the “great paradox of colonial India was that national income grew at an exceedingly slow pace throughout.”

There is no paradox. Indians just weren't very interested in raising productivity. One reason may be that the landed class didn't want the peasants to be able to read and write or fuck off to the factories. Another may simply have been- India pherry hot.  

This, however, is a paradox only because the explanation staring in the face has been discarded methodologically—the continued backwardness of Indian agriculture combined with the contractionary effects of both the drain and deindustrialisation and the limited enclave-like development of modern industrial capitalism— all outcomes which can be squarely linked with British colonialism.

Which is why Nepal was a great industrial power while Calcutta and Bombay and Madras had no fucking factories to speak of.  

On the Legacy of Colonialism An assessment of the colonial impact on India cannot be done by conveniently identifying the mere presence of elements of “modernism” in 1947 that did not exist in 1750.

It can be done by noting that Indians were speaking to each other in English in British style Courts and Government institutions.  

This is like saying that the fact that a persons hands and feet are tied explains why she is able to crawl some distance!

No. It is like saying that a person whose feet are tied may be able to crawl but can't walk.  

The two centuries of British rule in India covered a period which witnessed large-scale changes in the world economy. These included dramatic shifts in the relative position of the Indian subcontinent—from being one of the great manufacturing regions of the world

but one unable to fend off invaders 

to one specialised in primary commodities.

It specialised in being as poor as shit. Gandhi hoped it would get poorer after the Brits fucked off. 

Yes, India as a nation did not exist before colonialism; but it also emerged at the end of colonial rule as one of the most economically backward nations.

India's share of world manufacturing output may have been about 2 percent. This dropped as other countries industrialized and may now be about 3 percent.  

Yes, a modern factory sector emerged during the colonial period; but in nearly a century it produced nothing that even remotely resembled the industrial revolutions that other parts of the world experienced.

This is still the case for large parts of the country.  

India became,

through being shit at ruling or defending itself 

through colonialism, part of the process through which so much changed globally, but in playing that role its own impetus for progress was thwarted, often even before this could arise.

By 1947, there was a large class of English speaking Indians eager to move into the bungalows and offices of the departing Brits so as to do stupider shit such that the country would become unable to feed or defend itself.  

In that sense, colonialism acted as a regressive force in Indian history,

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was worse than the Windsor dynasty. Thankfully, assassination tempers autocracy.  

or a conservative force at best.

This was by design. True, the country could have become self-garrisoning and self-administering if something like the INC could have acted cohesively and shown that it was interested in creating a virtuous circle of boosting productivity and thus tax revenue. But Indians hated each other more than they disliked the Brits.  

Unlike Roy’s characterisation of it, as a progressive force, this conclusion needs no assumption about what would have happened in the absence of colonialism.

Muslim rule. The extinction of Hinduism. At least, that is what Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore and Rajaji assumed.  

If India’s industrial capitalism is part of that legacy of colonialism,

speaking and writing in English is just such a legacy. I hope these nutters give it up. I suggest they make miaow miaow noises to each other and then try to scratch each others' eyes out.  

so are many characteristics of that capitalism and its internal and international contexts which continue to hold back its capacity to deliver progress to the Indian people.

Industrial capitalism is delivering 'progress' to Indians who now buy quite good Indian cars and so forth.  

The simplistic door–shut–door– open methodological approach to identifying stages in Indian economic history is incapable of assessing

the continuing impact of Viceroy Sahib sucking off trillions of darkies every night 

the post-independence history of Indian capitalism and its uninterrupted interaction with global capitalism— and the continuities and changes that accompanied it.

e.g. Indians being drained of jizz 

For example, Roy’s story of India closing itself immediately after independence is mere assertion bereft of any material evidence.

Save such as he provides or you could easily get by doing a Google search.  

On the contrary, the evidence points to the opposite, whether one looks at policy or outcomes. In 1949, Nehru assured foreign investors that their investment would be treated at par with similar Indian enterprises.

He was lying. Still, that's what politicians need to do. Anyway, Nehru might have needed American help to put down a Commie or Muslim insurrection.  

Displacement of metropolitan capital was only peripherally on the agenda of the state and was not even a key feature of either the First or Second Five Year Plans.

 Hilariously, some Americans did turn up in India in the early Fifties hoping to set up big manufacturing units. After running from Ministry to Ministry, they gave up and went home. 

In 1957,

which is when the Second Plan ran out of money 

the first of a series of tax concessions were granted to foreign firms, affecting salaries, wealth tax, and tax on super-profits. This was followed by the announcement that the “51% rule” requiring majority Indian ownership was no longer required.

It had been brought in by Nehru. 'Free money' from the US enabled him to double down on a stupid type of Socialism.  

Double taxation avoidance agreements were signed with a number of North European countries, Japan and the US by 1964. Thus state policies in this period arguably reflected an even more liberal attitude towards the private sector and “foreign interests” than under British rule (Das Gupta 2015, forthcoming).

How come there were Japanese owned mills under the Brits but not under Nehru?  

There is also sufficient work on postindependence economic history which shows that foreign capital in India proliferated under the ISI regime (Bose 1965; Malyarov 1983; Negandhi 1966).

Not in relative terms. The internal market was too weak.  

In 1948, companies registered abroad but operating in India (63%) and Indian subsidiaries of foreign companies (21%) accounted for most of the total foreign direct investment. In 1955, 18.1% of foreign capital was invested in branches of foreign companies, 70.8% in foreign-controlled companies and only 10% was in Indian controlled companies.

Marwaris tended to very quickly drive any business they acquired into the ground. Yet they kept getting richer. 

Foreign investment amounted to 38.7% of gross capital formation in the economy in 1955 and profits from it were shared between foreign and Indian investors in a ratio of 15.9:1.

India had lots of cheap labour but little capital. It should have had higher fdi.  

Whereas foreign capital accounted for 29% of fixed investment in the private corporate sector between 1948 and 1953, this relative proportion increased to 32% in 1960–61.

Because Indians hid their own investments in various ways.  

The number of foreign collaborations in India also increased dramatically from 81 to 302 between 1957 and 1964, the peak period of planning—in the fields of industrial machinery, heavy chemicals, pharmaceuticals, synthetic oil, iron and steel and aircraft manufacturing.

Whereas much smaller countries- e.g. Taiwan and South Korea had more such collaborations.  

The United Kingdom (UK) was still the leader, but with a declining share, while US’s share was increasing. Despite tax concessions, taxation rates on profi ts were high in India compared to other countries. But earnings ratios of foreign companies in India after tax was much higher compared to other countries (Kidron 1965; Negandhi 1966).

Because of protection. What was missing was the incentive to grow.  

Instead of providing evidence of discriminatory outcomes against foreign capital, the existing corpus of literature, from different perspectives, converges on the viability of foreign capital’s operations in India in the first two decades after independence.

Whereas the experience of foreigners who came to India hoping to set up factories was that the Government wanted to make the thing unviable. True, Indians too had that experience but, speaking generally, they knew whom to bribe.  

Roy’s cavalier assertions about foreign capital right after independence are bereft of historical rigour.

Whereas these nutters display the rigor mortis of brain-dead Marxism.  

If India’s independence had any positive economic significance in the period before 1991 according to Roy, it was limited to the impact on agriculture which was, however, more than neutralised by the closing of India to the world.

China too did badly because it was even more closed. But, when it opened up its people joyously embraced opportunities to raise their collective productivity.  

This is a strange argument indeed. There is no doubt that the state in independent India did relatively better on the agrarian front than the colonial state

not in the Sixties when PL480 food shipments from America averted mass starvation 

and managed to arrest the declining trend in per capita foodgrain production witnessed during  the last half century of colonial rule.

by doing sensible things in places- like Punjab- where people were sensible.  

Roy’s interpretation of this success, however, does not place any emphasis on the post-independence delinking of Indian agriculture from the global market in the making of the result.

To be fair, the Brits would sometimes ban the export of food so as to make bread cheaper in the short-run (though long-run the effect was the reverse).  

At the same time that which has been widely recognised as an important constraining factor on India’s industrialisation—the great failure of the land reforms programme—

it didn't fail in Kashmir or Kerala- neither of which industrialized. Anyway, land-reform in Bengal had begun in 1937. Sadly, this probably made things worse and contributed to the '43 famine. 

is not even a footnote in this story.

The American ambassador was always needling Nehru to do more land-reform. He'd reply that Indian peasants were horrible. If they got more land, they would borrow money and spend it on marriages or building temples.  

The treatment of post-independence agriculture

Agriculture was a State subject. Elected governments in the Provinces could have done as they pleased in this field from 1937 onward. 

mirrors the method of examination of deindustrialisation and industrial development in the colonial period—the big picture is missed by looking with a microscope for signs of dynamism.

There were some success stories- e.g. Jankidas Kapur of Atlas bicycles. But dynamism was lacking. Taiwan was behind India in this field. Giant was only set up in 1972. By 1977 it did a deal with Schwinn so as to produce an OEM version. Now 80 percent of all medium to high end bikes are Taiwanese. India exports about 400 million dollars worth of bicycles. Taiwan's exports are probably worth four times that. Atlas bicycles used to produce 4 million cycles. Currently, they make about 10,000. The first generation and the second were innovative. Atlas had some tie-ups with foreign firms in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were also innovative, introducing a ladies' bike for the saree clad. But the Munjals, of Hero cycles, are still growing strong perhaps because they are still only in their second generation. Giant's founder is still alive. My impression is that Chinese business families manage succession issues more smoothly than Indians. I may be wrong.  

Yet this approach is abandoned when it comes to the industrial sector after independence because there it would be difficult to explain how the closed economy generated the great diversification of the industrial structure through a diffusion of technology from abroad that had not been possible in the open past.

The problem was that that the technology wasn't the cheapest or the best.  I recall the story of a Gujerati businessman in the late Sixties who sent his son to Japan rather than MIT. True the fellow made a lot of money, but it was difficult to find him a 'suitable' bride. If even Gujjus have such prejudices, what hope have the rest of us?

True to the consistent approach of avoiding what is inconsistent in the story, what the much vaunted openness has meant for Indian agriculture and industry after 1991 is completely ignored.

Because it is fucking obvious that Indians are better off.  

The widely talked about agrarian crisis that set in from the mid-1990s and its linkage with the liberalisation policies finds no place in the assessment of the value of openness (Patnaik 2007b; Reddy and Mishra 2007).

Because it is unconnected to it. What the Indian peasant wants is for his son to fuck off to Canada rather than stick around taking drugs and raping the laborers. That's 'openness' for you. 

Equally striking is the complete neglect of the widely noted stagnation/ decline of the manufacturing share in GDP, also from the mid–1990s but at a level more or less attained before 1980.

It would only be striking to a guy who doesn't know that India exports a lot of IT services.  

That India is one among many developing countries experiencing premature deindustrialisation under globalisation alongside the post-industrialisation deindustrialisation underway in advanced economies (Rodrik 2015) is of course not an idea that this method can engage with.

Because it isn't true. Western 'deindustrialization' is not accompanied by disguised unemployment in the informal sector though it may be accompanied by large numbers of working age people being signed off as too sick for work.  

Because, then the application of contemporary conceptions about what constitutes deindustrialisation would not permit the denial of the same in colonial India.

Very true. Did you know that in 1862 many factories in Calcutta had to close down because workers preferred to get jobs delivering pizzas?

The reconstruction of the past to make the case for the present ignores what the present itself says about itself

it says that to businessmen who are making a lot of money and paying a lot in taxes. The present doesn't talk to stupid nutters even if they have been orally raped by evil Viceroys.  

and the lessons it may offer for understanding the past.

In the past, India was just sitting quietly when suddenly Colonialism sodomized it and stole all its money. Same thing is happening now. Did you know that Joe Biden drained India of quadrillion gallons of jizz the one time he visited as Veep? Why else do you think the election was stolen so he could become POTUS?  

In Conclusion Instead of dealing with contemporary reality,

which is that opening up the economy made India much more prosperous and funded universal entitlements of a type the country had never seen before 

what is dished out is a fiction in the form of the apprehension that Indian businessmen are fearful of foreign competition would use the nationalist rhetoric to block the current embracing of openness.

Smart Indian businessmen offshore their assets and use the funds of Nationalized Banks etc to gain control over assets in India. This means they avoid the 'hold up' problem associated with a large bureaucratic class- not to mention Lefty 'activists' or nutters like anti-Advani Rahul.  

That the capitalist class in India today is one of the most aggressive votaries and benefi ciaries of global integration is self-evident.

Moreover, every family of that class has at least one or two brothers with Western passports and a nice mansion kept warm for them in London or Geneva or whatever.  

The ahistoricity of the method is incapable of explaining the evolution of world capitalism and the process within it by which Indian capitalists who were yesterday’s economic nationalists have become today’s globalisers.

Previously, almost all Indian industrialists were a bit shit. Now the stupider and lazier ones have been culled. Indian capitalists diversify globally and can always run away if the country goes back to stupid dirigiste policies. But this will push the country over a fiscal cliff and lead to entitlement collapse.  

The modern education system under colonial rule, which excluded most of the poor population, is another free service that Britain offered India.

No. Schools charged fees though there may have been a small subsidy.  

It created an elite intellectual class in colonial India.

No. There were some wealthy barristocrats. Some Indian industrialists, even if they hadn't been to College themselves, encouraged their sons or younger siblings to go to MIT. Tatas and Birlas etc. did set up some quite good Colleges in India. Still, this was the exception, not the rule. My impression is that Tamil and, later, Telugu, businessmen did a good job in this respect.  

While some members of this class, exposed to European principles of society and governance, challenged the British claims to superiority and their domination over Indians, many others chose to become “brown sahibs.”

Which is the only way to challenge the superiority of white sahibs. Being a beggar and shouting at the Viceroy in Bengali doesn't challenge shit. 

The latter, along with zamindars and other local extractive and parasitic classes, felt genuinely unhappy when British rule came to an end in 1947.

No. Generally, they were pleased. Oddly, even those who had to flee pogroms were glad enough to see the backs of their erstwhile protectors. I suppose this was because they could revenge themselves on the minority community to their heart's content in their new homes.  

Today under the hegemony of neo-liberalism and reflecting the legacy of colonialism is a new breed of brown sahibs

who get phoren PhDs and write in English 

who do not mind rediscovering the virtues of the long British rule in India if it serves their present interests of benefiting by collaborating with international finance capital.

Did you know Viceroy Sahib is not just sucking off Tirthankarji, but is paying him handsomely for his jizz? Meanwhile trillions of starving Marxist historians are receiving no recompense whatsoever for their precious bodily essence which is being heartlessly extracted by Neo-Liberalism at the behest of Fascists like Manmohan, Modi and Mamta Di.  

It is these two groups of sahibs that this one-sided neutrality in method willingly obliges in its ideological jugglery of empire sans imperialism, colonialism sans capitalism, and historiography without history. 

Maybe this sentence makes sense in Bengali. I suppose what it means is 'Tirthankar is a sensible fellow who goes by the facts of the case. But telling the truth is to side with those who deny our paranoid ideology. If people like Roy prevail, people will expect Indian historians to do genuine research and publish a lot of facts and figures. Sod that for a game of soldiers! Indian history must consist of whining about how evil Viceroys drained all the jizz out of India. That way, only very stupid students will take up this subject. They won't object to being taught by drooling imbeciles because they themselves hope to attain a like state of premature senility.'