limey colonial loot, the actual numbers and digby's/naoroji's books

sep 20th, 2009

thanks to dr kalyanaraman

Colonial loot, impoverished India, Industrial revolution

1.                           British rule in India condemned by the British themselves by Indian National Party (1915).

          Source: http://ia311307.us.archive.org/1/items/britishruleinind00indi/britishruleinind00indi.pdf 

2.                       "Prosperous" British India by William Digby (1901) 

   Source: https://www.yousendit.com/download/ZW9CTXRiTERYSHcwTVE9PQ   

   Poverty and UnBritish rule in India by Dadabhai Naoroji (1901)  

 

        Source: http://www.yousendit.com/download/ZW9CTXRUQzc5RmJ2Wmc9PQ  

These three well-evidenced reports document the crime by a colonial regime impoverishing India and financing an industrial revolution using the loot of India's wealth.

It is time to claim reparations from the legatees of the colonial regime and institute an International Crimes Tribunal -- on the lines of a War Crimes Tribunal -- to enforce the international law to compensate India.

From a book overview of Angus Madison's The world economy: a millennial perspective (2001):

"Angus Maddison provides a comprehensive view of the growth and levels of world population since the year 1000. In this period, world population rose 22-fold, while per capita gross domestic product increased 13-fold and world GDP nearly 300-fold. The biggest gains occurred in the wealthy regions of today (Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan). The gap between the world leader, the United States and the poorest region, Africa, is now 20 to 1. In the year 1000, today's wealthiest countries were poorer than Asia and Africa.The book has several objectives. The first is a pioneering effort to quantify the economic performance of nations over the very long term. The second is to identify the forces which explain the success of the wealthy countries and explore the obstacles, which hindered advance in regions which lagged behind. The third is to scrutinize the interaction between the rich and the rest to assess the degree to which this relationship was exploitative."

Maddison presents the British 'drain' on India, 1868-1930 as follows:

British colonial 'drain' of India's wealth

	Indian export surrplus as% of Indian Net domestic product	Indian export surplus as% of British Net domestic product
1868-72	1.0	1.3
1911-15	1.3	1.2
1926-30	0.9	0.9

Source: Table 2-21b Maddison (1989, pp. 647-8 with revision of Indian/British income ratio. The 'drain (i.e. the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony) figures prominently in the literature of Indian nationalism, beginning with Naoroji in the 1870s (see Naoroji- 1901).

India's % share of World GDP, 0-1998

Year		1500	1700	1913	1998
United Kingdom		1.1	2.9	8.3	3.3
Total Western Europe		17.9	22.5	33.5	20.6
USA		0.3	0.1	19.1	21.9
India	32.9 in 0 CE	28.9	24.4	7.6	5.0

Source: Table B-20 (Maddison, 2001, p.263)

The impoverishment of India is dramatic between 1700 and 1913. More than a century after its demise, the legacy of the East India Company continues to haunt both Europe and Asia. India's triple anniversaries in 2007 (1. anniversary of Plassey, 2. anniversary of the 'war of independence' (mutiny as the British called it) and 3. anniversary of independence) should be the occasion for a reckoning with this pioneering corporate giant, argues Nick Robins in his book, 'The Corporation that changed the world: how the East India company shaped the modern multinational' (Pluto Books, 2006).

A 'corporate giant' with the connivance and direct involvement of United Kingdom impoverished India in less than 300 years.

"…a corporation that has been defunct for more than a century, Britain's East India Company is undergoing something of a comeback. The onset of globalisation has prompted a resurgence of interest in what the Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay once described as "the greatest corporation in the world". Founded in 1600 by a marginal island state in northwest Europe to gain seaborne access to Asia's luxury trade, the London-based company evolved to become the dominant commercial power in the east. The turning point came in 1757, when one of its more unscrupulous executives, Robert Clive, deployed the company's private army, a healthy dose of bribes and ingenious fraud to defeat the nawab (prince) of Bengal at the battle of Plassey."

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision_reflections/east_india_company_3899.jsp

kalyanaraman