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How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

And lied about it.

There is a story that is commonly told in #Britain that the colonisation of #India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major #economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the #empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india/


How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

Jason Hickel (Al Jazeera)
#britain #empire #India #economic
Als Antwort auf tom s

harry haller
harry haller
• •
The famine also served to awaken educated Indians about the effect that British rule was having on India. The fact that during the Orissa famine India exported more than 200 million pounds of rice to Great Britain even while more than one million succumbed to famine outraged Indian nationalists. Dadabhai Naoroji used this as evidence to develop the Drain Theory, the idea that Britain was enriching itself by "sucking the lifeblood out of India" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orissa_famine_of_1866

one of the biggest famines in India

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
Als Antwort auf tom s

harry haller
harry haller
• •
Utsa Patnaik:
Since all the earnings were taken by Britain, such stagnation is not surprising. Ordinary people died like flies owing to under-nutrition and disease. It is shocking that Indian expectation of life at birth was just 22 years in 1911. The most telling index, however, is food grain availability. Because the purchasing power of ordinary Indians was being squeezed by high taxes, the per capita annual consumption of food grains went down from 200kg in 1900 to 157kg on the eve of World War II, and further plummeted to 137kg by 1946. No country in the world today, not even the least developed, is anywhere near the position India was in 1946. — https://www.livemint.com/Companies/HNZA71LNVNNVXQ1eaIKu6M/British-Raj-siphoned-out-45-trillion-from-India-Utsa-Patna.html

British Raj siphoned out $45 trillion from India: Utsa Patnaik | Mint

Economist Utsa Patnaik says West should set aside a portion of its gross domestic product for unqualified annual transfers to developing countries
Ajai Sreevatsan (mint)
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