End Times
20th December 2018, 09:46 PM
https://www.livemint.com/Companies/HNZA71LNVNNVXQ1eaIKu6M/British-Raj-siphoned-out-45-trillion-from-India-Utsa-Patna.html
In a recent paper, you suggest Britain drained out nearly $45 trillion of wealth from India. Could you put that quantum of money in perspective and what difference it would have made to the Indian economy?
Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion (equal to $45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5% rate of interest. Indians were never credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget—something you’d never find in any independent country. The ‘drain’ varied between 26-36% of the central government budget. It would obviously have made an enormous difference if India’s huge international earnings had been retained within the country. India would have been far more developed, with much better health and social welfare indicators. There was virtually no increase in per capita income between 1900 and 1946, even though India registered the second largest export surplus earnings in the world for three decades before 1929.
(...)
The world has changed considerably since the 19th century and China’s recent foray into Africa is sometimes referred to as new age imperialism…
It would be quite incorrect to call either Chinese or for that matter Indian entrepreneurs in Africa as modern imperialists. This is a ploy that the North uses to deflect attention from the crimes that they committed against our people, after getting forcible political control. Britain and other countries taxed the colonized, took their foreign earnings, and drove them into hunger.
(...)
As an economist interested in history, what is your view on the idea of reparations? Should Britain return the large sums of money that you suggest it drained out of India?
Not only Britain, but the whole of today’s advanced capitalist world flourished on the drain from India and other colonies. Britain was too small to absorb the entire drain from colonial India. So it became the world’s largest capital exporter, which aided the industrial development of Continental Europe, the U.S., and even Russia. The infrastructure boom in these countries would not have been possible otherwise.
Colonial drain helped to create the modern capitalist world, from North America to Australia—all regions where European populations had settled. The advanced capitalist world should set aside a portion of its GDP for unqualified annual transfers to developing countries, especially to the poorest amongst them. Britain, in particular, morally owes reparations for the 3 million civilians who died in the Bengal famine because it was an engineered famine.
In a recent paper, you suggest Britain drained out nearly $45 trillion of wealth from India. Could you put that quantum of money in perspective and what difference it would have made to the Indian economy?
Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion (equal to $45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5% rate of interest. Indians were never credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget—something you’d never find in any independent country. The ‘drain’ varied between 26-36% of the central government budget. It would obviously have made an enormous difference if India’s huge international earnings had been retained within the country. India would have been far more developed, with much better health and social welfare indicators. There was virtually no increase in per capita income between 1900 and 1946, even though India registered the second largest export surplus earnings in the world for three decades before 1929.
(...)
The world has changed considerably since the 19th century and China’s recent foray into Africa is sometimes referred to as new age imperialism…
It would be quite incorrect to call either Chinese or for that matter Indian entrepreneurs in Africa as modern imperialists. This is a ploy that the North uses to deflect attention from the crimes that they committed against our people, after getting forcible political control. Britain and other countries taxed the colonized, took their foreign earnings, and drove them into hunger.
(...)
As an economist interested in history, what is your view on the idea of reparations? Should Britain return the large sums of money that you suggest it drained out of India?
Not only Britain, but the whole of today’s advanced capitalist world flourished on the drain from India and other colonies. Britain was too small to absorb the entire drain from colonial India. So it became the world’s largest capital exporter, which aided the industrial development of Continental Europe, the U.S., and even Russia. The infrastructure boom in these countries would not have been possible otherwise.
Colonial drain helped to create the modern capitalist world, from North America to Australia—all regions where European populations had settled. The advanced capitalist world should set aside a portion of its GDP for unqualified annual transfers to developing countries, especially to the poorest amongst them. Britain, in particular, morally owes reparations for the 3 million civilians who died in the Bengal famine because it was an engineered famine.