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.'
