July 22, 2015

"India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%."

"By the time the British left it was down to below 4%. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India."

Reparations?

124 comments:

Big Mike said...

Britain has gone downhill so fast since Thatcher left office that there's nothing left to reparate.

damikesc said...

Who would pay? This asinine assumption of historical collective guilt needs to be stopped. Anybody calling for reparations deserves a harsh bitch slapping.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Can you say Industrial Revolution? India was going to get left behind regardless.

Birkel said...

The "research" cited in the article is shoddy. I followed the links. I suggest nobody take those numbers as anywhere approaching reality.

Expat(ish) said...

I was gonna call a huge BS on that article, but the headline writer ignored the buried lede: "Although didn't provide attribution for his statistics in the speech" dot dot dot as they say.

Plus, Answer Time is nothing to the ruckus in the Indian Parliament, so there is that too.

-XC

Henry said...

Reparations? Of course! And the Britons will pay for them with reparations from Julius Caesar.

etbass said...

To say nothing of the rise of the United States. It's just the numbers. Raise the denominator a lot and the % goes down even if the numerator stays the same.

Brando said...

"Can you say Industrial Revolution? India was going to get left behind regardless."

Exactly--can any serious person suggest that India's "share" might have been affected by things going on elsewhere in the world in the 1800s and 1900s?

Of course, someone could argue that if left on their own India might have adopted market capitalism and used their resources wisely and as an independent country advanced far more than they did during the period of British rule. Just like you can argue that Africans who were enslaved and sent to America might have developed market capitalism and gotten filthy rich if they stayed behind in Africa during that period. But it's pretty damn unlikely.

Rick said...

Birkel said...
The "research" cited in the article is shoddy. I followed the links. I suggest nobody take those numbers as anywhere approaching reality.


It doesn't even matter. Measuring as a percentage of world production immediately before the industrial revolution doesn't mean India's production was hampered, only that it wasn't increasing as fast as some. Nothing inherent to British rule impacted this. I suspect similar nations had even greater economic drops according to this measure.

Sharc said...

Correlation <> Causation. Thanks for playing.

Peter said...

The question to ask is not whether Britain's economy grew faster than that of British colonial India, but whether India would have been better off if Britain had not colonized it. Although a fair comparison should consider the possibility that someone else might have colonized it, and/or that there might have been internal wars (and warlords).

Also, you'd also have to somehow adjust for the reality that the territory contained within British colonial India and that of today's India do not entirely overlap: some of what is now India was never British India, and a good deal of what was British India is not included in today's India.

But in general, since demands for reparations can never be satisfied, the end result is to keep old claims and resentments alive forever. Wasn't it a famous Indian who said, "An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind."

Original Mike said...

"India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%,"

That's very hard to believe.

YoungHegelian said...

Also carefully left out of the discussion was who exactly the British took India from.

The Mughal Empire was not exactly a case of local Indian boys making good, either. But, of course, I'm forgetting --- just like only white people can be racist, only white people can be imperialists.

Michael K said...

Democrat economics. Maybe the Indus River Civilization should sue the Hindus for reparations. That would work.

How about Iran sue the Greeks because Alexander took the Persian treasure hoard? I even have a coin from it that Alexander used to pay his troops.

Writ Small said...

Watch the old "Free to Choose" series by Milton Friedman. He specifically compared Hong Kong to India - two areas controlled by the British but established years apart. The difference? The leading economic intellectuals of Britain were free market when Hong Kong was established and were socialist when India was.

Beldar said...

That "statistic" is ludicrous.

It's certainly true that Britain ruled India as a colony, and exploited it in economic and other ways.

It's also true that Britain's rule was actively welcomed, encouraged, and actively contrived in by some (but not all) of the princes and warlords and regional leaders who'd been there before. (It's a very complicated history.)

Whether, in any sort of net sense, India was, or is, better off for having been under British colonial rule is something we could debate until the cows come home. There's almost no doubt whatsoever, though, that British colonies generally fared vastly better on a relative basis than French, Dutch, Spanish, or especially Belgian and Japanese colonies.

But these reparations arguments are silly and transparent.

Sebastian said...

I think the UK should pay, provided that 1. India compensates all foreign descendants of victims of Indian cholera pandemics, 2. reparations are discounted for every Indian life saved/extended thanks to Western technology, and 3. India returns and/or destroys every single thing it has ever received from the West.

Pettifogger said...

The argument "The Brits only looted and got kicked out when enough became enough" was made on the floor of the Indian parliament. As such, is not the statement self refuting? Did the maharajahs run a lot of parliaments?

The other commenters referring to the industrial revolution are spot on. I strongly urge reading Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskey. It offers a coherent explanation how Northern Europe and North America surpassed much of the rest of the world.

On the other hand, maybe the Brits do owe reparations for how they pushed Fabian socialism on the London-educated Indian elite.

buwaya said...

Ancient Indian-nationalist complaint.
Been seeing this in the anti-colonialist third-worldist literature since the 1960s.
Simpler answer was that the industrial revolution passed India by, just like it did most of the world, for three generations or more.
Persia, China, even Russia fell behind also, at the same time, and at the same rate.

readering said...

Without Britain (and France and Portugal), chances are that India would look a lot more like Europe, with lots of smaller, ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, states, now trying for some kind of IU that also included smaller ethnically and linguistically homogeneous Islamic neighbors. All fearful of their nationalistic neighbor to the north.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

In addition to the Industrial Revolution passing India by, a good deal of its exports would have been luxury agricultural goods. And as I recall, their monopoly on those evaporated as areas outside of India started to produce those goods.

You could blame that on the Brits, but with the increased mobility and communications of the then modern world, someone was going to produce those goods regardless.

traditionalguy said...

The War of 1776 to 1782 saved the Colonists in North America from being treated worse than India was treated by the British Empire.

Great Britain kept its armies in Canada ready to reclaim us as their enslaved property until late 1865 when the GAR was seen as a clear winner of a United States and also strong enough to defend it from the military conquest by the British Empire.



lgv said...

I am against all this stupid reparations crap. But, hypothetically, how much does Britain owe us, its former colony. Just saying.

First, I'm kind of questioning that 23% and 4% stat, just like I would question 1 in 5 women being raped on campus. Doesn't pass the smell test.

There are many scenarios for India if not a colony. Most would end up worse than where they are now. Maybe we can get five thirtyeight to run the outcomes for us. I'm thinking the one where they mostly speak Hindi and spent 50% of their history fighting amongst themselves would be the most likely outcome. Would there be an India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh? Doubtful. Would life be better? For some, I'm sure. For most, not so much.

Anonymous said...

The King and Country debate took place at the Oxford Union debating society of Oxford University in England on 9 February 1933. The motion, that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country, was carried by 275 votes to 153. -- Wikipedia

buwaya said...

Also note that "when Britain arrived" is measured (how ? no real comparable data existed) from the high point of Mogul power in the 17th century.
Britain was irrelevant as a power in India until they took major ground, such as Bengal and the south, after 1750. Before Robert Clive and Eyre Coote Britain or the East India Company was in no position to make any Indian potentate do anything.

Between 1650 and 1750 India fell into a long series of rebellions, wars and foreign invasions (not by the British, it was Persians and Afghans - which gave the British an opening to power to begin with). Wars with Sikhs, Rajputs, Mahrattas, besides the Persians and Afghans, broke the Mogul regime, made its governors into independent rulers, and their wars and exactions turned much of India into a wasteland. It was a bit like the crisis conditions upon the collapse of a Chinese dynasty.

Jimmy said...

Another colony the British stole from was in North America. They also stole from the scots, the celts, and others.
So what? get over it.
Lets all divide up into as small a tribe as possible and then demand someone pay us. The Left loves tribes, divisions, and lack of common sense.
Idle minds produce mental masturbation-no where is this more evident than Universities.
Serious scholarship my ass.
As with government agencies, university and college intellectuals are a sad joke these days.
Lots of BS, politically driven nonsense. Very little else.

Fernandinande said...

Why?

Simply because India couldn't govern itself for the benefit of India.

ddh said...

The Taj Mahal is a tomb that embodies the concern for the welfare of the poor Indian masses exhibited by the rulers of the Mughal Empire.

Quaestor said...
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Quaestor said...

This is an example of why statistics used in the context of politics should always be treated skeptically. The sad fact is most people aren't bright enough to grasp that an unqualified statement such as this one is a virtually a deliberate lie.

The British colonial enterprise in India began by stages as a private venture by the joint-stock East India Company in the mid-18th century. Almost the entire sub-continent was under British control by the establishment of the Raj in 1858. At the start the world economy was almost entirely agrarian. Under the prevailing conditions, India, with it's massive population of subsistence farmers, might well represent 23% of that output. Population and production data for Indian in 1790 would necessarily be highly inexact, so confidence interval of 10% would be conservative at least. The Raj ended in 1947 in a much-changed world with manufactures constituting a larger share of global wealth than agricultural output. In short 24% of the world's per capita wealth in 1790 is considerably less than 4% of the global GP in 1947.

damikesc said...

Exactly--can any serious person suggest that India's "share" might have been affected by things going on elsewhere in the world in the 1800s and 1900s?


I had an argument in college when I said that, even if the Confederacy won, slavery would've been dead within 10 years.

Because cotton as coming from OTHER places and was cheaper, making slavery an economic drain.

Nobody wants to look at other factors. Which is why Progressives are convinced if we return to 1950's tax rates, we'd have prosperity --- ignoring the rest of the world and our much smaller government at the time.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Much the same is true of China, although they are rapidly correcting the problem.

Quaestor said...

To put my thesis another way - what would you rather have, 23% of $10 or 4% of $100?

Ambrose said...

How about this? Britain pays reparations. Henceforth all Indians must cease using English.

Bill Harshaw said...

While the skepticism above is warranted, India was exporting textiles before the Industrial Revolution, so much that it evoked protectionism. A tidbit: "[Indian]Cottons were prohibited first in France (1686), in England (part prohibited in 1702 and totally in 1721), and later elsewhere in the Continent. It is difficult for us to understand the animosity that accompanied the passing of these laws. In London, for instance, after the ban of 1721, several women were stripped naked in the street because they were found wearing forbidden cloth. A certain Dorothy Orwell was assaulted by weavers in Hoxton in London “who tore, cut, and pull’d off jer Gown and Petticoat by Violence, threatened her with vile Language, and left her naked” in the square. In other cases, women found wearing calicoes, had acid thrown at their clothing, a bitter act reminiscent of assaults on women wearing fur at the end of the twentieth century. - See more at: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2013/05/when-cotton-was-banned-indian-cotton-textiles-in-early-modern-england/#sthash.B2r0Knhs.dpuf

Quaestor said...

How about this? Britain pays reparations. Henceforth all Indians must cease using English.

A good case can be made for India owing an unpaid debt to Britain:
1) Railroads, highways, and ports built and maintained.
2) Hospitals and schools built and staffed
3) Mass death by famine and disease reduced.
4) Princely states controlled
5) Sectarian violence suppressed
6) Less liberal colonial powers (tsarist Russia, especially) excluded.

Gahrie said...

The question to ask is not whether Britain's economy grew faster than that of British colonial India, but whether India would have been better off if Britain had not colonized it

India would have been much better off now, If the British had stayed 70 years longer.

buwaya said...

England, France and the Netherlands were responsible for creating the market for Indian cottons in the fist place. It was European shipping that opened a significant international market.
And every country was protectionist. Usually more so than England.
Spain, for instance, banned all such trade in all its colonies. All shipping was to be limited to Spanish-owned ships licensed for trade. The Spanish Empire was a much bigger market than Britain.
There were also plenty of riots and anti-import actions all over Europe, most directed against import from Britain or the Netherlands.

Gahrie said...

"India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%,"

That's very hard to believe.


Actually it is very possible. India was a source of spices, dyes and fabrics in the ancient world. Remember, Columbus discovered America trying to find a shortcut to India.

It was indeed the industrial revolution combined with free market capitalism, that left India behind.

Anonymous said...

If the Brits were so oppressive to India and the other colonies, why did so many of the latter become proud and active members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, right after their independence?

buwaya said...

India for the most part paid its way, in a financial sense.
Human resources may be a different matter. A lot of British talent did get to spend a lot of its time in India.

The only exceptions were in the cases where Imperial wars elsewhere using Indian troops.

One could say though that the Royal Navy was significantly larger than it would have been otherwise because of the need to protect global British trade, a large amount of which was with India.

Hagar said...

The Brits arrived in India a long time ago, when not much was going on in the rest of the world, except perhaps China.
When they "left" in 1947 there had been a few things happening, such as the Industrial Revolution" all over the world, and the rise of some nations, such as f. ex. the U.S. of A, which did not amount to much back then, but certainly does now.

And in any case, Tata industries likely will soon buy Britain, or what is left of it, from the Windsors and thus make this issue moot.

Original Mike said...
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Known Unknown said...

23% of what vs. 4% of what?

I once toured the Crown Jewels at The Tower of England when I noticed an Indian couple in front of me. As we passed by the glass cases holding the prized crowns and scepters, etc, it took a lot to suppress my instinct to say to them "Those used to be yours."

Static Ping said...

I remember seeing a chart that provided the percentage of the world GDP by region. Before the Industrial Revolution India had a very large percentage of the world GDP. As others have mentioned here, before the Industrial Revolution the main form of wealth was agriculture and farming was very labor intensive compared to today. Large population equaled large agricultural wealth, as long as the land was cooperative. (Ancient Egypt's wealth was very much a product of the Nile which allowed Egypt to produce a huge amount of food for the time.) Once industrialization grew, agriculture's value of the overall GDP shrank rather dramatically. England had no real interest in industrializing India significantly, given it would become a competitor to England, so a 23% to 4% drop in world GDP is not absurd.

Could an independent India have industrialized like Europe and North America? When the Brits showed up India was anything but a unified state and it could be quite violent. I suppose it is possible that if the Europeans stay out - not just the English - that one or more of those states could modernize with one of them eventually conquering the rest of the subcontinent and becoming a rival to the European powers. Japan did something similar to great effect, but I am at a loss to come up with a second example.

Lewis Wetzel said...

If people get rich by making other people poor, I want my share of Pelosi's money, both Chris Dodd's and Barney Frank's money, the Kennedy millions, the Clinton millions, the Gore millions, and of course the Obama millions.

buwaya said...

China under the Qing (Manchu) dynasty had an opportunity to modernize and industrialize. The Europeans in Asia were in no position to oppose China militarily in the 18th century. China then was the dominant power in Asia without question, should they have wanted to use it.

Only in the 1830's-40's did the Europeans even try to fight the Chinese, and the force levels used in the original Opium wars were trivial. The Chinese could have swatted them away with ease, had they wanted to exert themselves.

The real problem with China was that its regimes, both the Qing and the Ming they conquered, were paranoid and conservative beyond any European state, and actively opposed foreign trade, travel, and technological change. The Asian ideal national policy was a hermit kingdom, like Japan and Korea.

This was foolish. The foreigners just got stronger and stronger, and the Chinese state declined into complete inutility.

D.E. Cloutier said...

1. Re: "India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%."

India has the world's second biggest economy until the arrival of the British. And China had the world's biggest economy in 18 of the past 20 centuries. If I remember correctly, you can find those two facts in Henry Kissinger's 2011 book "On China."

2, Subj: Louis Mandrin (1725-1755), French smuggler

From the description at Amazon of the 2014 book "Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground" by Michael Kwass (Harvard University Press):

"France's economic system was tailor-made for an enterprising outlaw like Mandrin. As French subjects began to crave colonial products, Louis XIV lined the royal coffers by imposing a state monopoly on tobacco from America and an embargo on brilliantly colored calico cloth from India. Vigorous black markets arose through which traffickers fed these exotic goods to eager French consumers."

D.E. Cloutier said...

Correction, my comment: Make that "India had," not "India has."

Michael K said...

"Dorothy Orwell was assaulted by weavers in Hoxton"

Yes, the Luddites who were the precursors of the present day 99% SJWs.

Britain built a society in India that should have been superior to China since they did not have an enemy like China did with Japan.

In many respects, the presence of black slavery allowed a whole cohort of Africans to learn civilization, albeit at serious cost. In Alabama in the pre-Civil War days, the plantation owners would bale cotton and take it to the river where it would be pushed off the bluffs to the shore below. Slaves would push the bales off the top but Irish workers were below to load them onto the riverboat because injury was a serious problem for those on the bottom. Slaves were too valuable to risk so Irish men were used to handle the bales at the bottom of the bluff.

The worst thing the English did to the Indians is to educate Nehru and other Brahmins in the "public schools " at a time when Socialism was the trendy thing.

Lewis Wetzel said...

In Adam Smith identified China as having the world's wealthiest economy. He also identified China as having the largest gap between rich and poor. Smith wrote that this was due to China's very low economic growth (despite its large economy). When the economy does not grow, the rich invest their resources in plundering the poorer citizens (or subjects). This plundering of the poor by the rich, in a no growth, slow growth, or negative growth economy is as inexorable as water flowing downhill. It cannot be stopped.
So, how is GDP growth in the US these days?

Michael K said...

"before the Industrial Revolution the main form of wealth was agriculture and farming was very labor intensive compared to today."

Yes, there was very little cash economy. China had tea and demanded that the English pay for it in silver ingots. As tea became more popular, there was a serious risk that China would soon have all the silver in England. The English traders, like Jardine and Matheson, soon discovered that the Chinese loved opium. They completed the trade cycle, which mercantilists did not understand, by shipping opium from India to China and selling it for the silver that then went to the Emperor or Empress. Eventually Chinese were bribed to provide tea plants, as well.

Tea was then also planted in India. That is where Darjeeling tea comes from.

The Empress tried to stop the trade of opium for tea and that resulted in "The Opium Wars" and the Boxer Rebellion. The Chinese started it by demanding silver for tea and refusing to export the plants. The common people of course had no role in it. Except in drinking tea, of course, which prevented cholera.

avwh said...

Everybody wants to be the victim and get something they're not actually owed.

No one pays any attention to history. Reparations required to be paid by Germany in the Versailles Treaty (ending WWI) helped cause WWII.

Not requiring reparations of Germany & Japan after WWII (and the implementation of the Marshall Plan instead) helped both Japan and W Germany become successful democracies and booming economies.

Michael K said...

"Reparations required to be paid by Germany in the Versailles Treaty (ending WWI) helped cause WWII."

It did worse. It caused the Depression.

Bay Area Guy said...

I appreciate a good civil argument on important issues.

RESOLVED, the British colonization of India caused great economic exploitation, warranting reparations.

This is a cumbersome proposition, but it's worthy of discussion, at least the first part.

But.

Claiming that India's GDP share dropped from 23% to 4% over 200 years, without mentioning the industrial revolution in the US is the functional equivalent of a lie.

And, whenever a leftist starts an argument with a lie, well, I tend to lose my interest in what he is saying.

On another note, Richard Grenier's take-down of Gandhi is an all-time classic.

RecChief said...

It's called mercantilism. One of the several reasons we fought British rule in the 18th century.

This does nothing to resolve the question of reparations, I know, but at least understand the basic economic concept first.

Doug said...

Wow! A whole Althouse post with comments disappeared! Imagine that!

Doug said...
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JamesB.BKK said...

How could the society that created and enforced the caste system somehow fall behind in an industrializing world?

Carl said...

Wow, how stupid do you have to be to swallow that hypothesis?

Do you know why the difference between the Olympic gold medalist in the 100m and the time the average man can run 100m has greatly increased over the past century? Well, obviously, it's because the Olympics cruelly made the average man much slower.

I'm always amazed that people with this level of impoverishment in their logical reasoning ability are allowed to vote.

JamesB.BKK said...

And the British rid the place of the Thuggee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

Lewis Wetzel said...

"Reparations required to be paid by Germany in the Versailles Treaty (ending WWI) helped cause WWII."
It was worse than that. The Germans surrendered fully expecting to keep the Eastern territory they had acquired from the (Soviet) Russians in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They knew that they could not pay reparations w/o the wealth those territories would provide. The allies knew it as well, and would naturally want Germany to have those territories as a buffer between Soviet Russia and Europe. Even after November 1918 the Germans continued to consolidate their hold on the East. The English and French wanted to punish Germany, however, and they wanted Germany to be weak. So they gave all the territory gained by the Germans in the treaty of Brest-litovsk back to the Soviets. The US opposed this, but could not stop it.

pm317 said...

Yes, plundered and looted.

That can be said of all European countries (colonialists) but none as successful as the English.

pm317 said...
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Anonymous said...

Just like you can argue that Africans who were enslaved and sent to America might have developed market capitalism and gotten filthy rich if they stayed behind in Africa during that period. But it's pretty damn unlikely.

The African's that made the crossing were losers in tribal wars. Absent an external slave market, they would have been internal slaves or dead.

As for the other premise, that if left behind, these losers would have gotten filthy rich, look at the successful culture of science, technology and peaceful existence the African winners built.

pm317 said...

They can keep their fucking reparations. Indians don't want it and will not ask for it.

chuck said...

The British should charge for the use of the English language, the common language of the Indian Subcontinent. A penny a word seems about right.

pm317 said...

@Chuck.. congratulations! I was waiting for someone to say it and say it in the worst possible manner and you win the prize.

Chris403 said...

Ta-Nehisi Coates just bought a plane ticket to India. He's going to now be a Traveling Reparations Consultant.

Known Unknown said...

Well they could go to India and rip up all of the railroad tracks and take away all of the rail cars and see how that works out.

JamesB.BKK said...

Note to self: To satisfy the logic requirements of "Carl" in the Althouse blog comments section apply ad hominem to start and close without any apparent direction, use an incoherent non-sequitur for the filler, and close out with self-referential declaration of amazement. References to the Olympics, especially track and field type events, helpful, particularly in context of the industrial / liberty age and lack of feudal societies' capacities to adapt through systematic exclusion of many potential participants and other high barriers to entry.

Henry said...

On the other hand, Hong Kong.

cubanbob said...

More lefty nonsense. Give them a trillion dollar Zimbabwe bill as reparations.

William said...

There are several thousand years of recorded history before the arrival of the British. I'm sure the British did lots of bad things. I'm also sure that the Moguls (ie previous Mongol conquerors) and the Brahmins did their share of bad things. The poorer people of India lived at the subsistence level, except when they starved to death. There was no radical deterioration in their living standard when the British took over because it couldn't get any lower........I think this speaker is most probably a descendant of one of the ruling castes. He should get the reparations ball rolling by agreeing to give,say, 50% of his salary to the untouchables. That's probably insufficient. He should also agree to leave his progeny in ignorance and poverty for twenty generations to make up for the privileged existence of his ancestors. It's only fair.

Freeman Hunt said...

The article links to a blog post for "some historical economic research backs up his account," but the blog post overall disagrees with his account.

Skyler said...

First year law school teaches that one manner of acquiring property is through conquest. Stupid Indians should have defended their property better.

India is better off.

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." Charles James Napier, putting Indian barbarity in its place.

Michael said...

The British arrived before the Industrial Revolution and left in modern times. If they had never seen India, the latter's share of the world's production would still have declined sharply because Europe and North America grew much faster. Besides, the main reason it was so high in the first place is because India's relative population was so high - do the math on a per capita basis and see what you get.

Roughcoat said...

They knew that they could not pay reparations w/o the wealth those territories would provide.

This implies that the Germans forced the Treat of Brest-Litovsk on the Bolshevik state with the intention of using the territories it had taken from Imperial Russia to finance the paying of reparations to the Allies. Not so. At the time of the treaty’s signing the Germans had given no thought to paying any sort of reparations because Germany was winning the war. It had decisively won the war in the East and was about to undertake offensives aimed at winning the war in France, before American armies could make their strength felt. Germany was riding high. Just three months previous German and Austrian forces had shattered the Italian army in northern Italy in the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (Caporetto). The Brest-Litovsk Treaty enabled the Germans to transfer vast numbers of troops from the east where they were no longer needed to France where they were shortly to take part in the first of the spring 1918 offensives (Operation Michael) that came very close to knocking France and Britain out of the war.

The territories in the east that Germany conquered and formally acquired under the terms of the treaty were to be exploited as feudalized vassal states to be ruled by Prussian junker aristocrats. The Slavic populations of those states were to be virtually enslaved. Poland would be annexed and essentially eradicated, Ukraine would be made a German protectorate, and the Baltic states were to be handed over to German princes who would do with them as they pleased.

German reparations did not cause the Great Depression. The reparation issue was moot by the time the Depression started: the Germans had seen to that by very cynically inflating their way out of paying the “real” amount that the Allies had sought to exact from them. There causes of the Depression are various and intertwined but the argument is usually made, correctly, the proximate cause, the trigger that got the Depression going, was the enactment and implementation of the Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation.

Gahrie said...

Yes, plundered and looted.

That can be said of all European countries (colonialists) but none as successful as the English.


And of course it can't be said of any non-European country, who all existed in a state of happiness and sang kum by ya together before the Europeans showed up, and introduced slavery, war and poverty.

chuck said...

@pm317 say it in the worst possible manner

And it only cost me 25 pennies at the going rate. The punctuation was free and I avoided the Indian government charge of a penny per arabic numeral by the clever use of "penny".

Michael said...

India should revel in the fact that it was the scene of the first act in the collapse of the Empire. Violent over reach by the colonials to insurrection sent liberal, progressive, London into a a faint from which it has never recovered. Guilt was found to grow into sanctimony if nurtured. And so it is.

William said...

I second what Roughcoat says above. Germany exacted greater reparations on France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War than were exacted against it at the end of WWI. Those reparations caused the enduring enmity of France, however, and made it impossible for Germany to establish a condominium with their neighbor. So even when they won, they lost. The Germans because of Wilson's 14 Points expected far more generous peace terms then they, in fact, received. So it's all the fault of Progressive Democrats......,The larger point is that it is almost impossible to exact just reparations against a fallen foe and that they more often than not cause more resentments than they salve.

Roughcoat said...

By the 16th century imperial expansion was a global phenomenon. All the world's great powers and many of the lesser powers as well were expanding their realms through conquest, colonization, and aggressive migration. Western civilzation-hating historians remain curiously blind to this circumstance. The Manchus were driving west across Central Asia while the Russians were driving east. In Mesoamerica the Mexica were expanding in every direction from Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco in central Mexico until the Spanish, expanding west across the ocean, arrived. In North America the Siouan peoples were pushing south and west from the upper Mississippi into the Great Plains, pushing tribes like the Abasaroka out of the Black Hills. And so and so forth. Everyone with the wherewithal to conquer territory was busy conquering territory: and this included the myriad states of the Indian subcontinent.

Roughcoat said...
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Roughcoat said...

German resentment over reparations did not cause World War II. Rather, the cause of war was German resentment that Germany had been thwarted in their drive to achieve hegemony over the European continent in 1914-18. Another related cause was the failure of the Allies to smash Germany and eradicate German militarism once and for all when they had the chance in 1918. The Allies ended the war too soon and, indeed, the Americans were formulating plans to take the war into German in 1919. The Allies could have and should have invaded Germany, occupied Berlin, and partitioned the German kingdoms in much the same fashion that Germany was partitioned after its defeat in 1945. (By then, finally, the Allies understood that the only solution to the "German Question" was to make it clear to the Germans through total war that they could not continue with their militaristic behavior.) The Germans at the end of World War I got better than they deserved. Revisionist historians in Germany and their sympathizers elsewhere promulgated the vile canard that Germany had been ill-treated by the Allies, and this idea still has currency among many scholars of the war. But, as I said, it is canard.

MacMacConnell said...

When exactly was India a nation prior to British rule?

JamesB.BKK said...

@cubanbob 820 - or one of Krugman's zany giant fix-all coins.

Anonymous said...

What was the total value of the world economy at the beginning of the 200 year period and then again at the end? The world experienced an industrial revolution during this period. My guess is that the Indian economy could have grown in this period and still shrank as a share of the world economy - I imagine that's possible.

pm317 said...

It is painful to read most of the comments here.

@EMD, India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth. See, it is not that difficult to think that.

Anonymous said...

pm317: It is painful to read most of the comments here.

I suggest you get over being pained by the non-Indian world-views of people who are not Indian.

@EMD, India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth.

Maybe, maybe not. Assuming there was such a thing as "India" before the fucking Brits showed up. "India", which had been looted for millenia by forces indigenous and exogenous, like most other places have been looted indigenously and exogenously, before the fucking Brits existed, and will be looted, indigenously and exogenously, when the fucking Brits are finally one with Nineveh and Tyre.

See, it is not that difficult to think that.

Not difficult at all, but post-colonial butt-hurt is beyond tedious.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Blogger LibertarianSafetyGuy said...

What was the total value of the world economy at the beginning of the 200 year period and then again at the end? The world experienced an industrial revolution during this period.

Brad Delong put out a post on that. The number is huge. World GDP per capita went up by a factor of 6 between 1800 and 1900. Between 1900 and 2000 it was even larger than that -- a factor of 40, if I'm remembering correctly.

Gahrie said...

India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth.

How? Why?

Before the British arrived, India did not exist. There were instead dozens of small, petty states, ruled by petty tyrants, all constantly warring against each other. There was religious and caste strife.

India would look like Africa (a collection of miserable failed states)if the British hadn't shown up.

Known Unknown said...

"@EMD, India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth. See, it is not that difficult to think that."

Question: Is India's increased GDP growth since 1980 due to non-British rule or the modernization brought about by the influence of British rule?

Frankly, I could care less and my railroad comment was pretty tongue-in-cheek.

From an actual article with statistics and stuff, written by an Indian:

"How does one begin to explain India's economic performance over the past hundred years? The Indian nationalist blames the first fifty years' stagnation on British colonialism. But a trade economist will counter this by showing that the world economy was also stagnant in the first half of the 20th century (especially after World War I) when world per capita GDP grew annually at just under one percent.2 The main culprits, he would say, were conflict and autarky. Disgraceful protectionism by most governments between the Wars slowed both the world and the Indian economy.

Although the Indian economy picked up after 1950, the neoclassical economist would argue that it performed below the world economy, which experienced a “golden age” driven by trade expansion until 1971. Like the rest of the Third World India did not benefit from global trade expansion because it had closed its economy and pursued 'import substitution'. Moreover, Nehru's socialism had shackled the economy with fierce controls on the private sector, pejoratively called 'Licence Raj'; hence its annual GDP growth was 1.5 percentage points below even the Third World average between 1950 and 1980.3"

Known Unknown said...

All you need to know is "You're a better man than I, Gunga Din."

Lewis Wetzel said...

Geographers, anthropologists, and economic historians aren't idiots (though some are fools). They have spent a century and half looking at the uneven distribution of wealth in the world. There are certain patterns (Global North versus Global South is an obvious one). The marxist colonialist exploitation model was favored for a long time. I'm not sure how many people in those disciplines actually believe it these days. The exploited colonies should have improved after colonization ended. In many cases it did not. The intellectual world of social scientists is narrow. They simply cannot imagine a world with complexities they are unable to grasp within the set of tools that they have (stats, mostly). When it comes to actual international politics, greed and envy drives most governments. For example, one reason that there has not been an update to the UN's Outer Space Treaty (1966) is because countries without the ability to run an airport properly believe that they have a right to a share of any wealth produced from extra-orbital space exploitation by more advanced countries.
The social sciences were formed with the hope that they could duplicate the positive advances of the physical sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. Man was a machine. Society was a group of machines. The slow, steady accumulation of knowledge would be able to improve the way that human society is run, just as it had made it possible to do things like create artificial fertilizer, and locate valuable mineral deposits without sticking a shovel in the ground. A lot of 19th century physical science resulted in removing spirit from nature. For example early chemists thought that the material that made up living things had a mysterious “vital force” that non-living materials did not have. They thought the stars might be made of matter with properties different from the materials found on Earth.
If the problem of human social organization can't be solved with the tools of science, it reintroduces the idea that people are not merely material machines. A lot of people don't like that idea.

MacMacConnell said...

India was saddled with Hinduism before, during and after the Brits left. It's not a religion that encourages progress in one's lifetime.-

Alex said...

Bragging about 23% of pre-Industral Revolution is like Microsoft bragging about having 40% marketshare in smartphone pre-iPhone. Nobody gave a shit.

Birkel said...

Giant economy in which almost everything is spent on subsistence living is NOT wealthy.

GDP is a poor marker for wealth versus povert. So the idea that Great Britain impoverished India is not supported b the offered facts (which are bull shit anyway).

richard mcenroe said...

When you stop to consider that 23% represented millennia of the nobility at the peak of an oppressive caste skimming off, well, pretty much anything, added to by the rapacity of their Mongol conquerors and the depredations of their Muslim states within their states, and that the nearest major competitors and trading partners they had were Imperial China and the Caliphate/Ottoman Empire, it's not surprising their piled up a pile.

It's also not surprising they lost it the same way they gained it. By Conquest. Don't lose to invaders, kids.

mikesixes said...

Baloneyalism

MPH said...

The size of the world economy was a hell of a lot larger by the time Britian left India. I'm sure that 4% was worth a lot more than the 23% from 200 years earlier.

Mountain Maven said...

Sure, that's why India is the most successful economy in the region

McCackie said...

India would have ended up as a continental sized "Balkans" mess without the British. Providing law, common core language, trains and suppressed more extreme features (Thuggee, suttee?).
Proof is the (relative) microcosm of the Kashmir with its historical Hindu rulers and Muslim populace being an awful mess.

Milwaukie guy said...

Last post from the Left Coast! Seriously, I have been reading at Althouse for at least 10 years. I am finally kicking back after a long day, it's just after midnight here in Milwaukie, OR, drinking a glass of pinot gris.

I read these comments about the particular history on topic here, and I am learning much and seeing things in new ways, and I consider myself a historian on the Anglosphere.

Kudos to all above. What a great way to end a day.

Quaestor said...

Terry wrote: [Social scientists] simply cannot imagine a world with complexities they are unable to grasp within the set of tools that they have (stats, mostly).

On top of that most social scientists don't have enough grounding in math to interpret statistical results or, if they're doing what they consider basic research, to know what data to collect and what statistical method to apply. In fact most undergrads in social science think that statistical results are data, and will use them as inputs into other methods.

Allow Quaestor to tell you a little story. There's a lesson in statistics there that bright people will grasp almost immediately.

In 1914 the British Tommy went to war with nothing to wear on his noggin but a cloth cap - peaked caps, glengarries, balmorals, whatever. The theory of war in 1914 was that modern military operations would be so swift and mobile that the soldiers needed ammunition and rations more than anything as antiquated as body armor, thus the cap. Of course by the end of the First Battle of the Marne, warfare on the Western Front had become a completely static contest of trench versus trench. The staff officers whose job it was to collect and interpret data saw that most British casualties weren't gunshots in the torso or limbs, but wounds to the head caused by artillery bursts. They recommended the immediate issuance of some kind of steel helmet to help reduce those wound figures, thus the birth of the "tin hat," the "battle bowler," the characteristic helmet worn by British and Empire soldiers through two world wars. However, the tin hat was almost banned within weeks of its début. Instead of a reduction in head wounds the staff officers saw an alarming increase in head wounds, almost a 70% increase in head wound hospital cases. This was caused by:

a) Overconfident helmeted soldiers not taking adequate cover during artillery attacks.
b) Untrained soldiers wearing or otherwise employing helmets incorrectly.
c) Defective helmets.
d) All of the above
e) None of the above

The answer was None of the above, but why?

Quaestor said...

Gahrie wrote: Actually it is very possible. India was a source of spices, dyes and fabrics in the ancient world. Remember, Columbus discovered America trying to find a shortcut to India.

15th century European notions of geography don't correspond well with modern geography. When Columbus told Ferdinand and Isabella he could reach the East by sailing west, he and everyone else understood the term India as it came down from classical and Roman geographers like Hipparchus, Strabo, and Pausanias, which is the world east of the River Indus and south of the Hindu Kush. Today India is a nation with defined borders, back then India was a vast area extending far to the east and south of Bengal to Borneo, the Celebes, and beyond. Cinnamon did come from what we consider India, but most of the cinnamon consumed by Europeans in the 1400s came from the Horn of Africa. The most desirable spice, the one literally worth it's weight in gold, came not from India but from 4,000 miles further east in the Maluku Islands, part of modern Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies (there's that concept, straight out of Strabo).

JamesB.BKK said...

More head wounds in hospital instead of the morgue?

ddh said...

The Mughals were the Muslim descendants of the Mongols who settled in Central Asia and Afghanistan. They invaded northern India and stayed to rule the Hindus. Why doesn't India demand reparations from Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan? And why don't northern Indians pay reparations to southern Indians?

The British brought parliamentary democracy to India, but Indians discovered demagoguery on their own.

Bad Lieutenant said...

What do you call those trains the Indians and Paks send each other, the ones on fire, full of people? Ghost trains?

Those naughty Brits, bringing railroads!

deepelemblues said...

I don't understand the strain of thought that insists white people need to pay non-white people for what other white people did to other non-white people a century ago or more. I mean if you want a new way for non-white people to be dependent on white people I guess it makes sense, but otherwise?

Lewis Wetzel said...

Quaestor-
I think the answer is that more soldiers with helmets survived head wounds. I've heard a similar story about the armor on WW2 airplanes. Engineers would look at where the bullet holes were in the planes that returned from battle and reinforce the armor in those areas. Supposedly some smart engineer decided the proper thing to do was to reinforce the armor in place where the bullet holes did not appear, since the planes hit in those locations did not return from battle.

Quaestor said...

More head wounds in hospital instead of the morgue?

Exactly. The 70% wound increase represented the success rate of the helmet, not the failure rate. Those 70 percent without the helmet would have been listed not as WOUNDED, but as DEAD.

Todd said...

Quaestor said...

However, the tin hat was almost banned within weeks of its début. Instead of a reduction in head wounds the staff officers saw an alarming increase in head wounds, almost a 70% increase in head wound hospital cases. This was caused by:

a) Overconfident helmeted soldiers not taking adequate cover during artillery attacks.
b) Untrained soldiers wearing or otherwise employing helmets incorrectly.
c) Defective helmets.
d) All of the above
e) None of the above

The answer was None of the above, but why?

7/23/15, 3:12 AM


e, cause they now lived long enough to be counted (i.e. lived long enough to get to hospital).

Static Ping said...

Hey, even the ancient Greeks ruled in India for a time. Maybe Greece could pay reparations. Don't see a downside to that...

cubanbob said...

pm317 said...
It is painful to read most of the comments here.

@EMD, India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth. See, it is not that difficult to think that.

7/22/15, 10:08 PM

Railroads don't build themselves. To build one you first need all of the engineering, technology and industry needed to build it. India didn't have that. Britain did. See, its not that difficult to think that.

Brando said...

Once again the argument boils down to "you have money, we want money, give us money" and any stupid excuse will be used to justify the transfer.

First, it's by no means clear that British influence was a negative for India rather than a positive--perhaps we can imagine an alternate universe where India was able to voluntarily adopt the best of British culture and advance in a more efficient, peaceful manner, but it's just as easy to imagine it remaining a backward, superstitious backwater ruled by a caste system and local tyrants with an undeveloped economy.

Just accept history for what it was and try to learn from it going forward. Everyone can find some reason to claim someone else owes them for something long ago if they try hard enough.

mikee said...

That Margaret Thatcher rant about socialists, who want everyone equally poor rather than allow some wealthy while some are not so wealthy, but better off than under socialism, applies here.

Had there been zero exports or imports between Europe and India, what would be the status of India today?

Quaestor said...

pm 317 wrote: It is painful to read most of the comments here... India perhaps would have built its own railroad with its 23% share of the world economy if the fucking Brits had not looted its wealth. See, it is not that difficult to think that.

Idiots have no difficulty thinking like idiots, else they wouldn't be idiots

Gospace said...

According to the CIA Facebook, there are 14 official languages in India. Hindi is spoken as a first language by 41%, with 5 other languages spoken by 5% or more of the population. Where would India be today without British colonization? A bunch of other countries, but not India.

Gospace said...

According to the CIA Facebook, there are 14 official languages in India. Hindi is spoken as a first language by 41%, with 5 other languages spoken by 5% or more of the population. Where would India be today without British colonization? A bunch of other countries, but not India.

southcentralpa said...

Was India's actual economic figure reduced? Only in relation to other countries. A very misleading way to express it.

Gospace said...

On the helmet thing, something similar during WWII. The Brits outfitted merchants travelling sans convoy in the Med with AA guns. After a few months of doing this,some people in the war department wanted them removed as a waste of manpower because they weren't shooting down many planes. The shipping department won the day by pointing out that vessels with AA batteries weren't being sunk as often.

Anonymous said...

"The War of 1776 to 1782 saved the Colonists in North America from being treated worse than India was treated by the British Empire.

Great Britain kept its armies in Canada ready to reclaim us as their enslaved property until late 1865 when the GAR was seen as a clear winner of a United States and also strong enough to defend it from the military conquest by the British Empire."


And here we have TraditionalMoron producing BS a la volonte to express his second greatest hatred.

Unknown said...

While Britain's mercantilism was not in India's interest of course, the primary reason for the drastic decline of India's economy was the importation of Fabian socialism from Britain through politicians and economists educated at Cambridge and elsewhere. India used to export tremendous quantities of grain, for example, but this stopped when farmers had to sell (at non-market prices) through state-controlled agriculture boards. There is a great deal of literature on this, for example in the works of the late B.P. Shenoy and his also-deceased daughter Sudha. The Institute for Economic Affairs in England, will probably have all anyone needs on this subject.
http://www.iea.org.uk/ and use the search box.