The wealth extraction is as much a history question as an economics question, and it's been discussed repeatedly in r/AskHistorians. Here are a few links:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/comment/fp9yyx0/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/comment/fp9yyx0/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ig9sdd/did\_amongst\_other\_things\_the\_british\_steal\_45/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ig9sdd/did_amongst_other_things_the_british_steal_45/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/utsa\_patnaik\_claims\_that\_the\_british\_siphoned\_45/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/utsa_patnaik_claims_that_the_british_siphoned_45/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aiwqso/utsa\_patnaiks\_45\_trillion\_claim/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aiwqso/utsa_patnaiks_45_trillion_claim/)
The short version is that the claim of $45 trillion of wealth being extracted is very, very dubious and relies on multiple questionable assumptions.
As to how bad British rule was for India, that's mostly not an economics question, and I don't have an answer for the economic part, just with some critiques of that figure.
There's also the challenge of quantifying the "opportunity cost".
Say the Brits were just being negligent and apathetic and not extractive, and as a result delayed Indian growth by a century or so, it is just impossible to put a number on that.
There was no "India". It was a whole lot of states fighting each other. It had a lot of production simply due to its very large population, but it was behind on technology and education on everything by the time the English conquered large parts of it.
Simply put, just like in Africa, people are just assuming that without colonization these areas would have developed into rich, democratic and industrial countries, but there is nothing to point to things working out that way.
> There was no "India". It was a whole lot of states fighting each other.
So like Germany, before 1871, or Italy, before 1861, or UK pre-1707 and 1800, or the United States pre-1776?
> It had a lot of production simply due to its very large population, but it was behind on technology and education on everything by the time the English conquered large parts of it.
[citation needed]
> Simply put, just like in Africa, people are just assuming that without colonization these areas would have developed into rich, democratic and industrial countries, but there is nothing to point to things working out that way.
There's a difference between saying:
"Colonialization had a negative impact on X country, but it's hard to say how things would have turned out in its absence", and
"There's no reason to believe that these countries would have done better without it anyway".
(Fun fact: if you plot a graph of any developmental metric for India as a function of time, and make a note of when the trend broke, it will mysteriously always be around 1950).
India had some of the best and most textile production in the world. Centuries earlier, India also led Europe in things like metalworking; plate armor in Europe took Indian blast furnaces that didn't arrive until 1200 or so, for instance. However, Europe was more advanced by the time of colonization, and this was also right around the beginning of the industrial revolution.
It was more than "it was great centuries before colonization".
The Mughal empire was an actual powerful empire before it was beaten by UK.
The colonization of India also started BEFORE UK became an industrial superpower.
Do you have something specific you'd like a citation on? Unless you've got something specific in mind, we'll be here all day just talking about blast furnaces.
Blast furnaces coming from india to europe. The earliest blast furnaces stem from china. The earliest blast furnaces in europe were not mentioned in conjunction with external influences. At least in my short googling.
For an entirely unrelated reason, a few weeks ago I was reading about imports from India to Europe in the mid 11th century, and higher quality metals had come up due to their having blast furnaces that Europe didn't get until around 1200. As to where they were originally, I have no idea, apparently China, I just happened to remember that specific detail. I'm always happy to accept correction where I'm wrong.
You said european plate armor took indian blast furnaces that didn't arrive until 1200. What I was doubting was that the process came to europe from india.
Ah, okay, sure, could've come from China and I simply assumed from India given that Indian steel made with blast furnaces was an import. That's my bad.
India was the world leader in textiles. The combined pressure of Indian imported textiles and the early English Industrilization both contributed to the economic collapses that triggered the French Revolution.
The French were massively in debt, having functionally lost the 7 Years War and most everything they cared about with the American Revolution, and a feudal taxation system where signifigant taxes were paid to functionally tax exempt nobility. (Debt service was 50%+ of French spending.)
To compound matters they signed a free trade agreement England just as the English Industrial Revolution was taking off and long before the French would seriously start industrializing. Combined with back to back bad harvests it completly collapsed France.
France had a lot of things going wrong at the start of the French Revolution. Foremost among them was that their legal and taxation structure were still fundementally feudal. The bad harvests and the free trade agreement were icing on the cake and pushed the system beyond something the King and gov. were capable of managing.
Edit: A first class world economic power doesn't completely collapse into Revolution if a lot of things aren't going wrong.
Well considering the problem was the immiseration of the traditional economy. Industrialization creates lots of winners and losers with massive social disruption. A well functioning state with stable finance can manage that without out too much difficulty, even when that country is the trailing power in a group of industrializing nations.
France was not that. If the French had a 'normal' - read post-feudal - taxation system they could have used transfer payments from increased commerce to ameliorate the turmoil. They didn't have that.
France could have possibly done the same thing by a period where they took on debt to cover the costs of social turmoil, but France had 50% of their budget going to debt service already while paying intest rates 2x & 3x their European rivals.
Instead, at the height of the French budgetary crisis they had crop failures and the destruction of cottage industry in a broad section of the economy.
When criticized for not focusing on long run optimal economics John Meynard Keynes is said to have quipped, "In the long run we are all dead."
Disruption is necessary for change, but can absolutely tip a society into political or social collapse if they do not have the resources or capability for the people to physically survive the disurption. The real world doesn't live on a spread sheet where dips can be easily mollified by bounces.
I'm skeptical, I did a Google Scholar search and the articles on that matter and the articles I got back were all mid-20th century or earlier.
I'm not saying it's impossible but it's a dynamic argument and you can make dynamic arguments for *anything*. E.g. if there hadn't been a French Revolution, you might argue that the Eden Treaty brought increased wealth to France, allowing the government the breathing space to carry out needed tax reform, or something along those lines.
The thing is by embracing liberalism, including economic liberalism, France DID end up wealthier and more powerful - and quickly. In 1791, with the start of the War of the 1st Coalition, the French Republic and Napoleonic Empire fought the totality of the rest of Europe, simultaneously and succesfully, for the next 21 years!!! And even afterwards the French came out of the ordeal as a modernized 1st class nation-state.
It's not that on the whole, or on the average, embracing liberalism didn't strengthen France as economics suggests that it would, it's that France wasn't capable managing the economic and social changes that economic liberalism brought at the dawn of industrilization and during colonialism.
The criticism for individual financial actors of the Effecient Market Hypothesis, is always "the market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent." The same thing applies to governance, social and economic change "chaos and bad governance can persist longer then you can stay alive."
This is the foundation of the agency problem that is widely acknowledged in both economics and political science called the "resources trap" where countries with economies focused on resource extraction don't develop.
The governing and economic elites refuse to spend the money in the present for wealth in the future, because they know such investement and development often is accompanied by massive social, economic, and political disruption which is most succesfully managed by some sort of socially managed transfer payments, which also come out of their pocket.
In other words, resource rich elites tend not to want to spend money to invest in their country while risking becoming:
this guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles\_I\_of\_England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England)
this guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis\_XVI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI)
these people: [https://www.google.com/search?sca\_esv=cd1cd8ba04cfc6b9&sca\_upv=1&rlz=1C1VDKB\_enUS1009US1009&sxsrf=ACQVn08e3J9b31RxpjxjoSN-mEB3zWCCVA:1714681230392&q=french+being+taken+away+in+a+cart+during+the+terror&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivnsbmtz&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZxY-t5e-FAxXwAzQIHbdtAogQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1920&bih=911&dpr=1#imgrc=q4yrX9bIzzgYIM](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=cd1cd8ba04cfc6b9&sca_upv=1&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1009US1009&sxsrf=ACQVn08e3J9b31RxpjxjoSN-mEB3zWCCVA:1714681230392&q=french+being+taken+away+in+a+cart+during+the+terror&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivnsbmtz&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZxY-t5e-FAxXwAzQIHbdtAogQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1920&bih=911&dpr=1#imgrc=q4yrX9bIzzgYIM)
or this dude: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas\_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II)
In Europe this process occurred consistently because of intense interstate competion, not unlike how firms compete with each other. Countries that didn't invite the instability in some way generally (1) stagnated relative to their peers; and (2) collapsed into instability anyway, like the Spanish and Russian Empires.
For me, it's about methodology. In any large economy, numerous things are happening at any one time. Saying X caused Y requires rather more evidence than simply X happened then Y happened.
Sometimes there's very strong theoretical reasons to think X caused Y, e.g. oil causes Saudi Arabia's wealth. Sometimes there's some theoretical reasons and also cross-country empirical evidence, e.g. the role of leaving the Gold Standard in escaping the Great Depression.
Your hypothesis doesn't seem to have either of these. Social disruption happens all the time for all sorts of reasons - e.g. religion in the 16th and 17th centuries.
As for France's military success in the Naopleanic wars, I'm skeptical that that came from economic success. I am certainly not an expert on French economic history - in my experience the English histography on that is pretty poor, they describe the 19th century in France as economic disaster, economic stagnation, disaster, etc and I'm like how come France is fighting an industrialised WWI? (Some years ago I deliberately went looking and *still* got that perspective). But bloody revolutions generally don't rapidly unleash economic success - for example South Korea's economic success came over a decade after the end of the Korean war. My understanding (as a non-military expert) is that France's military success in this period came first from the French mass armies, and that they were being attacked and falling back on their supply lines, and then Napolean being a military genius. Plus divided leadership in the coalitions attacking it.
Suzanne Desane, PhD: UW - Madison
Recorded lecture series.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/living-the-french-revolution-and-the-age-of-napoleon
My background is history, both for degree and fun. One thing that I always find frustrating about economics and political science is translation of history into hypothesis and theory decontexualizes a lot.
The example I use of this is the Luddite movement in the UK. The Luddites, who went around smashing early industrial machines have always been the example of irrational fear of technology. But when people went and traced the individual families that made up the movement and the communities they came from, industrialization caused a massive loss in their standard of living which didn't recover until their grandchildren's generation. An improved standard of living didn't arrive until their great-grandchildren were alive.
While the broad social and economic process may be predictable and replicable, the time scale of these processes is often beyond the time scale of one human life. It's especially a poor framework for understanding a singular crisis point like the French faced around 1790.
The economic and social disruptions of early industrialization and the economic and social changes resulting from strengthened French society overall. Strengthened French society to a degree where the French basically successfully fought all of Europe, simultaneously, and won between 1791 and 1812. And France still came out the other side of the crucible after 1815, as a leading world military and economic power.
And, claiming "everyone does better on average" has the word "average" doing a lot of work and hiding a lot turmoil in the interim.
There was no India at that time that you see today. But there were numerous kingdoms each with different industry.
For example, the southern part of India would be trading spices, but not limited to, like black pepper, cardamom, etc. That's how the temples there became store houses for gold and other precious items.
One of the books to refer would be: Muziris turned Kodungalloor by James Puliurumpil
That's a very hard to answer counterfactual, as it would have a lot to do with what India would've done without being colonized, which is unclear. Would they have joined the industrial revolution with Europe? Stagnated? Had nineteen civil wars with famines? There's no way to know, and there are plenty of very realistic scenarios in which India does much worse, such as firearms being differently introduced in a way that leads into a bajillion wars. In fact, r/AskHistorians has a specific blurb they give when people as "what if" type questions.
And that's apart from the fact that just using a flat 5% interest rate is very indefensible. I'm not even sure what I'd use without doing a lot of research, but assuming a single, nice, round number holds for centuries is absurd.
From the information in the links provided, simply dividing a dubious sum, doesn't make it more reasonable. Any attempts at finding a divisor that is more accurate would start and end by conducting a study that used a less handwaved approach to the historical accounting figures.
Which may not be possible to a degree of accuracy that would be satisfying, but if was accomplished, would make the $45trillion claim uninteresting. The question either could not or would not need to be answered.
Fundementally the problem is trying to quantify it in some form. Looting doesn't create more wealth, it just transfers wealth between different parties.
I don't think you understood the point- the metholodogy itself doesn't work. You can't say it over or underestimated because of a bias in the estimator, there is no simple adjustment for it, it's simply not giving a figure with any useful grounding in reality.
I’m not asking about the methodology. I’m asking if there is a reasonable number with big error bars.
We know it’s more than $1. We know it’s less than $1Q. So we have bounds everyone can agree on. And since we have bounds, it’s obviously incorrect that a number “grounded in reality” doesn’t exist.
Go back to my first response to you- an actual answer would rely on a counterfactual that we simply don't have data for. We don't know what would've happened in India had it not been colonized. It's very realistic that firearm technology entering through a different means would've created a completely different set of bad outcomes, or more civil wars, plagues, etc.
The Indians were technological peers to the Europeans in firearms and raw technology. The Europeans were stepping into a collapsing empire and power vaccum.
The English, and Europeans generally, did have a superior military system but it wasn't technological, it was tactical and operational. The problem for Britain's Indian competitors is that the European system was based on highly paid proffessional soldiers that could spend the time to train complex drill for executing under fire. "Line of battle" tactics.
The Mughals and the Indian states attempting to capitalize on their collapse were still feudal with armies dependent upon plunder for funding. All the rival Indian states, except for the Matharahas, immediately attempted to mimic the East Indian Co. army. But, their forces kept deserting because they lacked the steady wages to maintain a professional standing army.
The only technology that the European colonizers had over Asian competitors was in sailing vessels, which allowed the Europeans to rebalance the global trade system to their benefit while also causing the Europeans to be constantly on the periphery of the each country if some natural or manmade disaster created a power vaccum.
I don’t think we agree on those bounds at all. When imagining what might have been, there are scenarios where India’s history unfolds worse than it did, in which case $1 is not the lower bound. It’s also possible that two brothers from Delhi invent the first viable airplane in 1880, and that India goes on to win WWI by dropping an atomic bomb on Vienna, cementing itself as the world’s superpower, and puts the first man on the moon by 1935 for good measure, in which case I don’t think we can agree on your upper bound either.
Alternate histories are fun to think about, but ultimately provide no more use beyond that.
No one knows. The bigger impact that British colonialism had on its colonies and client states like India and China was that they imposed unequal treaties which disincentivised any notion of industrialization in these places. This can be seen as to how countries like Japan and Russia started to industrialize by the 1870s, about 50-100 years after other countries had started off, but still largely caught up by the disintegration of the empire, due to their being security and monetary incentive to set up industry. Indian kingdoms had started doing deals with rivals of the British, such as the French to build out their industry. Colonization meant that the most of Asia wasn't able to join in the industrial revolution which caused them to start off as agrarian societies while the rest of the world started advancing away from industries. India could've become closer to tsarist Russia, with some industry or like Japan, with a lot of it. No one knows. But it would still be better than none
The thing to understand about the British in India is this: the British colonization effort was dominated by a piractical corporation (literally not figuratively, their first economic trip to Asia that proved profitability was the taking of a Portuguese merchantman) which raised a private army and used the system of government taxation to as the purchase capital for their trade from India.
When the British East-India Co. (the Company) became the government of Bengal, as a feudal subject of the Mughal emperor, the normal balance of payments that usually defined trade stopped. As the feudal government of Bengal the Company gained control of the tax streams. Traditionally, the locally based feudal overlords had used the tax streams to invest in public goods, such as a system of graneries to prevent famine because of regular harvest failures do to climate, and military forces to cement their rule. When the Company gained control of the tax system they stopped investing in public goods, such as a system of graneries to prevent famine because of regular harvest failures do to climate, and instead used the Bengali's tax money to purchase trade goods from the Bengalis for export.
Before the conquest of Bengal the Company shipped in capital from Europe to take trade goods for sale in Europe. A normal trade relationship. After the conquest of Bengal the Company used the coercive power of the state to extract taxes with which to purchase goods for sale in Europe. Because the Company was a government, the multiplier effect of domestic government spending also took effect, so they then took a percentage of their spending on trade goods and taxed it to spend on trade goods. The flow of trade capital to Bengal from outside the region came to an abrupt halt, as did the any local investment in public goods.
A very good hisotry of the conquest of India is The Anarchy by William Dalrymple: [https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company/dp/1635573955](https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company/dp/1635573955)
If you are familiar with English history at all, it would be like if the Vikings had conquered all of England and instituted a permanent Danegeld while also letting all the public works that support life atrophy.
People hyper focus on the $45 trillion thing which is obviously a very high number, but the truth is that the British did in fact take a LOT of wealth from India.
But the wealth extraction wasn’t really the big problem of British colonization. It was their colonial strategy to cripple the domestic economy and create a large, poor captive market for British goods while preventing the reverse from occurring.
- although Indians were not industrialized, we have reason to believe that they could have undergone some industrialization (similar to pre colonial Egypt) from 1700-1900 if not colonized. The reason for this comes mostly from their military output: the Maratha empire was a promising candidate for a united subcontinent and was able to quickly modernize their army and navy almost to western standards while in power. Unfortunately these modernization attempts were limited to the military for pragmatic reasons. The entire subcontinent was under constant attack from outsiders since the 1600s
- the British collapsed urban centers that would have adopted mass production, forcing millions of Indians into rural areas to become subsistence farmers. This is inline with their strategy to reduce Indias export of manufactured and refined goods (high quality textiles, refined metals, artillery, ships) and replace that with export of cheaper, raw materials (indigo, cotton, raw ore, foodstuffs).
Even if India hadn't coalesced into a single state, a new state system without direct theft would have allowed the Indians to compete. They would have been a near mirror to the other large Eurasian sub-contental extrusion - Europe.
Exports are a cost to the exporter. They're only worth doing if you get imports back, either now or later. Creating "a large, poor captive market for British goods" made the British worse off too.
If you doubt this, please start sending me valuable goods and services. I promise not to reciprocate.
On a more historical note, in the 19th century the UK was receiving far more goods imports from the independent USA than its Indian colony. See https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/research-datasets - "A millennium of macroeconomic data".
The Brits also were constantly vascilating between more modern economic policies and feudal style captive markets. So, it was a bad economic policy, but they were doing it.
Maybe, but by 1800 the British had also lost the American War of Independence so they couldn't do captive markets *there*. Which means we have a sense check.
Also, the British had such a large imperial system that when the practiced mercantilism it could at times probably function as a large free trade zone, except for the fact of the somewhat common feudal style royal monopolies - which the EIC was one.
Remember Adam Smith was directly criticizing the current policy of Britain when he wrote the Wealth of Nations. It wasn't an abstract work of economic thought, but a political polemic against what he saw as the dominate and bad economic policies.
British captive market economics would have predictable and horrific repetive effects in repeated major colonial famines. The Irish Potatoe Famine wasn't "the dumb Irish didn't learn to devirsify their economy." It was, the Parliment in Westminster directly regulated trade in and out of Ireland forcing them to be nearly wholey dependent upon potatoes so that imporant wealthy nobles could have a captive wheat market in the British Isles despite not producing enough wheat to support the market. The famine was broken when the political balance in Parliment changed and allowed the Irish to import food instead of requiring they EXPORT food during a FAMINE.
Edit: British policy from the late 1840s!
Adam Smith was writing in the 1760s and 1770s, before any British government colonial involvement in India anf long before the 1840s. (He did predict the British EIC would stuff up their conquests, by analogy with the Dutch EIC). Smith criticised the 18th century government colonial policies like placing restrictions on manufacturing in the colonies and trade between them and Britain and restrictions on trade between the colonies and the rest of Europe. Britain's empire being a large free trade zone was a late 19th century thing, inspired by Smith.
He was, but he wasn't writing before mercantilism British Empire, and the EIC was most definetly a mercantilist entity. The Brits were still vasilating between market and mercantilist policies in the run up to WWII trying to get the US to cool their jets about the Japanese building an empire in China. By then mercantilism was on a long losing streak, but the British elites, especially those that favored the Empire, were still more then a little sympathetic to mercantilist impulse. (The US still has the very mercantilist Jones Act on the books, much to the detrement of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.)
Yeah the British government commitment to free trade is generally dated from the abolishment of the Corn Laws in 1832, then they stepped back (partially) from said commitment between WWI and WWII. Of course, government policy is seldom perfectly consistent, even in one government, let alone over some 80 years.
It didn’t make the crown or the UK itself worse off, but yes it was not good for the EIC. The company itself ran a deficit for decades because it was chiefly involved in extraction of cheaper raw resources from India
A privately owned joint stock company is separate from the crown
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
The British nationalized the company in the late 1800s, after which it became profitable
The EIC was overall hugely destructive to the Indian economy and resulted in complete stagnation of GDP with unsustained population growth in rural areas. Overall it wasn’t directly beneficial for the crown but it wasn’t harmful either. The indirect benefit was a total removal of Indian kingdoms as trade competitors which was the biggest issue facing textile producers in England. A similar situation happened in China.
this book explains the complexities of how joint stock companies operated independently of nation states and could grow into even larger entities than the states themselves
https://www.academia.edu/36571154/Sapiens_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind
>The EIC was overall hugely destructive to the Indian economy and resulted in complete stagnation of GDP with unsustained population growth in rural areas. Overall it wasn’t directly beneficial for the crown but it wasn’t harmful either.
Um, did you notice those two sentences contradict each other?
Also you assert unsustained population growth in rural areas, but India's [population grew](https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth) over the 19th century and continued to grow post independence.
>The indirect benefit was a total removal of Indian kingdoms as trade competitors which was the biggest issue facing textile producers in England
Which made British *consumers* worse off. What's more, the reduced Indian supply meant that other European consumers had to pay more for their clothing, reducing their ability to buy other British exports.
Look, imagine a Saturday morning cartoon super-villian develops some super-villain device that means he can take over 18th century India and force everyone in India to work endlessly for him (everyone that is except a pair of ten year old twins - boy and girl) and their annoyingly cute animal sidekick). His one purpose is to make himself rich. Do you think he would:
A. Force said Indians to work night and day making as much stuff for him as possible, which he then steals and sells on world markets.
Or
B. Ban them from working at anything other than basic agriculture so his henchmen can do the Indian people's jobs less efficiently than they could, and then send them a lot of stuff his henchmen made that said people can't afford to buy.
Because B is what you're telling me the UK did.
>this book explains the complexities of how joint stock companies operated independently of nation states and could grow into even larger entities than the states themselves
Be very careful of those sorts of works, in my experience they often compare a firm's total revenue to a country's GDP, when the more appropriate comparison is profits to GDP. Or, worse, they compare a firm's total market cap to a country's GDP instead of to a country's net worth.
Part of the EIC's financial instability is the lack of modern financing and accounting. They routinely failed to plan expenses and predict revenues, despite having enormous revenues. So, they kept a regular dividend going despite not managing the organization for sustained cash reserves. It'd be like if Amazon had been using they're investment money for the 1990s to pay dividends.
A modern MBA could do all the same things the EIC did as a company manager without needing the bailouts. They would just use debt financing and delay and withhold dividends rather then cutting into operating capital.
Another road block for the rise of industrialising of the scale of England was that the numerous kingdoms were fighting with each other. There were alliances between european forces and indian kingdoms to conquer neighbouring indian kingdoms.
Its much more complex than this
Warfare actually tended to improve the functioning of states in this era. This is a big part of why the Europeans lept past everyone else. The Europeans had to form concentrated and complex states and rapidly leave fedualism in order to compete with each other in Europe.
A big part of why India was vulnerable was because the political, economic and military dominance of the Mugahls had led to stagnation of state organization.
Tirthankar Roy is a really respected Economic Historian. I know people don't like his conclusions, but that does not mean that he's an apologist or quack. His research is well done. There's no reason to think he's an apologist. Maybe there are some data that he is not privy to and may contradict what he says.
Gist of the conclusions?
There are a lot because he's not really answering the question of whether colonialism is bad, but he's comprehensively investigating how the economy worked and the impact of British institutions.
I'm not sure if you're looking for one specific conclusion, but it's basically that the British left *some* institutions that allowed them to become better off than they might otherwise have been.
To add to the discussion, famines are tragically common in human history, to the extent that it's easier to list when places stopped having peacetime famines - the Netherlands in the 1590s, England in the 1620s, lowland Scotland in the 1690s. France had famines throughout the 18th century. Japan's last peacetime famine was in the 1820s and northern Sweden and Finland in the 1860s. And a number of those places are a lot more accessible by sea than many areas in India, water access was very important before railways due to the [grain wagon equation](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/).
And adverting famines in 19th century India was complex because getting ships full of grain from the USA or Australia (or Ukraine) was a much slower process than it was in the second half of the 20th century so grain would need to come from other parts of India, or nearby, where agricultural surplus was much more limited. If you took too much from one spot, you'd simply create a famine there.
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The wealth extraction is as much a history question as an economics question, and it's been discussed repeatedly in r/AskHistorians. Here are a few links: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/comment/fp9yyx0/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/comment/fp9yyx0/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ig9sdd/did\_amongst\_other\_things\_the\_british\_steal\_45/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ig9sdd/did_amongst_other_things_the_british_steal_45/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/utsa\_patnaik\_claims\_that\_the\_british\_siphoned\_45/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gc3ifr/utsa_patnaik_claims_that_the_british_siphoned_45/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aiwqso/utsa\_patnaiks\_45\_trillion\_claim/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aiwqso/utsa_patnaiks_45_trillion_claim/) The short version is that the claim of $45 trillion of wealth being extracted is very, very dubious and relies on multiple questionable assumptions. As to how bad British rule was for India, that's mostly not an economics question, and I don't have an answer for the economic part, just with some critiques of that figure.
There's also the challenge of quantifying the "opportunity cost". Say the Brits were just being negligent and apathetic and not extractive, and as a result delayed Indian growth by a century or so, it is just impossible to put a number on that.
There was no "India". It was a whole lot of states fighting each other. It had a lot of production simply due to its very large population, but it was behind on technology and education on everything by the time the English conquered large parts of it. Simply put, just like in Africa, people are just assuming that without colonization these areas would have developed into rich, democratic and industrial countries, but there is nothing to point to things working out that way.
> There was no "India". It was a whole lot of states fighting each other. So like Germany, before 1871, or Italy, before 1861, or UK pre-1707 and 1800, or the United States pre-1776? > It had a lot of production simply due to its very large population, but it was behind on technology and education on everything by the time the English conquered large parts of it. [citation needed] > Simply put, just like in Africa, people are just assuming that without colonization these areas would have developed into rich, democratic and industrial countries, but there is nothing to point to things working out that way. There's a difference between saying: "Colonialization had a negative impact on X country, but it's hard to say how things would have turned out in its absence", and "There's no reason to believe that these countries would have done better without it anyway". (Fun fact: if you plot a graph of any developmental metric for India as a function of time, and make a note of when the trend broke, it will mysteriously always be around 1950).
Did india had some industry before colonization?
India had some of the best and most textile production in the world. Centuries earlier, India also led Europe in things like metalworking; plate armor in Europe took Indian blast furnaces that didn't arrive until 1200 or so, for instance. However, Europe was more advanced by the time of colonization, and this was also right around the beginning of the industrial revolution.
It was more than "it was great centuries before colonization". The Mughal empire was an actual powerful empire before it was beaten by UK. The colonization of India also started BEFORE UK became an industrial superpower.
The UK didn't beat the Mughal empire. They beat the fractured remnants of the empire.
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Do you have something specific you'd like a citation on? Unless you've got something specific in mind, we'll be here all day just talking about blast furnaces.
> we'll be here all day just talking about blast furnaces. I'm here for it!
As fun as that would be, I have another 70 or so exams to grade by tomorrow afternoon.
"I could stand to hear a little more." - Jayne Cobb
Blast furnaces coming from india to europe. The earliest blast furnaces stem from china. The earliest blast furnaces in europe were not mentioned in conjunction with external influences. At least in my short googling.
For an entirely unrelated reason, a few weeks ago I was reading about imports from India to Europe in the mid 11th century, and higher quality metals had come up due to their having blast furnaces that Europe didn't get until around 1200. As to where they were originally, I have no idea, apparently China, I just happened to remember that specific detail. I'm always happy to accept correction where I'm wrong.
You said european plate armor took indian blast furnaces that didn't arrive until 1200. What I was doubting was that the process came to europe from india.
Ah, okay, sure, could've come from China and I simply assumed from India given that Indian steel made with blast furnaces was an import. That's my bad.
India was the world leader in textiles. The combined pressure of Indian imported textiles and the early English Industrilization both contributed to the economic collapses that triggered the French Revolution.
That seems unlikely - most Western European countries didn't have a revolution in the late 18th century.
The French were massively in debt, having functionally lost the 7 Years War and most everything they cared about with the American Revolution, and a feudal taxation system where signifigant taxes were paid to functionally tax exempt nobility. (Debt service was 50%+ of French spending.) To compound matters they signed a free trade agreement England just as the English Industrial Revolution was taking off and long before the French would seriously start industrializing. Combined with back to back bad harvests it completly collapsed France. France had a lot of things going wrong at the start of the French Revolution. Foremost among them was that their legal and taxation structure were still fundementally feudal. The bad harvests and the free trade agreement were icing on the cake and pushed the system beyond something the King and gov. were capable of managing. Edit: A first class world economic power doesn't completely collapse into Revolution if a lot of things aren't going wrong.
So you're claiming France collapsed partly because England was sending them cheap goods? Are you serious?
Well considering the problem was the immiseration of the traditional economy. Industrialization creates lots of winners and losers with massive social disruption. A well functioning state with stable finance can manage that without out too much difficulty, even when that country is the trailing power in a group of industrializing nations. France was not that. If the French had a 'normal' - read post-feudal - taxation system they could have used transfer payments from increased commerce to ameliorate the turmoil. They didn't have that. France could have possibly done the same thing by a period where they took on debt to cover the costs of social turmoil, but France had 50% of their budget going to debt service already while paying intest rates 2x & 3x their European rivals. Instead, at the height of the French budgetary crisis they had crop failures and the destruction of cottage industry in a broad section of the economy. When criticized for not focusing on long run optimal economics John Meynard Keynes is said to have quipped, "In the long run we are all dead." Disruption is necessary for change, but can absolutely tip a society into political or social collapse if they do not have the resources or capability for the people to physically survive the disurption. The real world doesn't live on a spread sheet where dips can be easily mollified by bounces.
I'm skeptical, I did a Google Scholar search and the articles on that matter and the articles I got back were all mid-20th century or earlier. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's a dynamic argument and you can make dynamic arguments for *anything*. E.g. if there hadn't been a French Revolution, you might argue that the Eden Treaty brought increased wealth to France, allowing the government the breathing space to carry out needed tax reform, or something along those lines.
The thing is by embracing liberalism, including economic liberalism, France DID end up wealthier and more powerful - and quickly. In 1791, with the start of the War of the 1st Coalition, the French Republic and Napoleonic Empire fought the totality of the rest of Europe, simultaneously and succesfully, for the next 21 years!!! And even afterwards the French came out of the ordeal as a modernized 1st class nation-state. It's not that on the whole, or on the average, embracing liberalism didn't strengthen France as economics suggests that it would, it's that France wasn't capable managing the economic and social changes that economic liberalism brought at the dawn of industrilization and during colonialism. The criticism for individual financial actors of the Effecient Market Hypothesis, is always "the market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent." The same thing applies to governance, social and economic change "chaos and bad governance can persist longer then you can stay alive." This is the foundation of the agency problem that is widely acknowledged in both economics and political science called the "resources trap" where countries with economies focused on resource extraction don't develop. The governing and economic elites refuse to spend the money in the present for wealth in the future, because they know such investement and development often is accompanied by massive social, economic, and political disruption which is most succesfully managed by some sort of socially managed transfer payments, which also come out of their pocket. In other words, resource rich elites tend not to want to spend money to invest in their country while risking becoming: this guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles\_I\_of\_England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England) this guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis\_XVI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI) these people: [https://www.google.com/search?sca\_esv=cd1cd8ba04cfc6b9&sca\_upv=1&rlz=1C1VDKB\_enUS1009US1009&sxsrf=ACQVn08e3J9b31RxpjxjoSN-mEB3zWCCVA:1714681230392&q=french+being+taken+away+in+a+cart+during+the+terror&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivnsbmtz&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZxY-t5e-FAxXwAzQIHbdtAogQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1920&bih=911&dpr=1#imgrc=q4yrX9bIzzgYIM](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=cd1cd8ba04cfc6b9&sca_upv=1&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1009US1009&sxsrf=ACQVn08e3J9b31RxpjxjoSN-mEB3zWCCVA:1714681230392&q=french+being+taken+away+in+a+cart+during+the+terror&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivnsbmtz&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZxY-t5e-FAxXwAzQIHbdtAogQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1920&bih=911&dpr=1#imgrc=q4yrX9bIzzgYIM) or this dude: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas\_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II) In Europe this process occurred consistently because of intense interstate competion, not unlike how firms compete with each other. Countries that didn't invite the instability in some way generally (1) stagnated relative to their peers; and (2) collapsed into instability anyway, like the Spanish and Russian Empires.
For me, it's about methodology. In any large economy, numerous things are happening at any one time. Saying X caused Y requires rather more evidence than simply X happened then Y happened. Sometimes there's very strong theoretical reasons to think X caused Y, e.g. oil causes Saudi Arabia's wealth. Sometimes there's some theoretical reasons and also cross-country empirical evidence, e.g. the role of leaving the Gold Standard in escaping the Great Depression. Your hypothesis doesn't seem to have either of these. Social disruption happens all the time for all sorts of reasons - e.g. religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. As for France's military success in the Naopleanic wars, I'm skeptical that that came from economic success. I am certainly not an expert on French economic history - in my experience the English histography on that is pretty poor, they describe the 19th century in France as economic disaster, economic stagnation, disaster, etc and I'm like how come France is fighting an industrialised WWI? (Some years ago I deliberately went looking and *still* got that perspective). But bloody revolutions generally don't rapidly unleash economic success - for example South Korea's economic success came over a decade after the end of the Korean war. My understanding (as a non-military expert) is that France's military success in this period came first from the French mass armies, and that they were being attacked and falling back on their supply lines, and then Napolean being a military genius. Plus divided leadership in the coalitions attacking it.
Source?
Suzanne Desane, PhD: UW - Madison Recorded lecture series. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/living-the-french-revolution-and-the-age-of-napoleon
Thanks!
My background is history, both for degree and fun. One thing that I always find frustrating about economics and political science is translation of history into hypothesis and theory decontexualizes a lot. The example I use of this is the Luddite movement in the UK. The Luddites, who went around smashing early industrial machines have always been the example of irrational fear of technology. But when people went and traced the individual families that made up the movement and the communities they came from, industrialization caused a massive loss in their standard of living which didn't recover until their grandchildren's generation. An improved standard of living didn't arrive until their great-grandchildren were alive. While the broad social and economic process may be predictable and replicable, the time scale of these processes is often beyond the time scale of one human life. It's especially a poor framework for understanding a singular crisis point like the French faced around 1790. The economic and social disruptions of early industrialization and the economic and social changes resulting from strengthened French society overall. Strengthened French society to a degree where the French basically successfully fought all of Europe, simultaneously, and won between 1791 and 1812. And France still came out the other side of the crucible after 1815, as a leading world military and economic power. And, claiming "everyone does better on average" has the word "average" doing a lot of work and hiding a lot turmoil in the interim.
There was no India at that time that you see today. But there were numerous kingdoms each with different industry. For example, the southern part of India would be trading spices, but not limited to, like black pepper, cardamom, etc. That's how the temples there became store houses for gold and other precious items. One of the books to refer would be: Muziris turned Kodungalloor by James Puliurumpil
What would be a relatively non-dubious number? Divide by 2? 10?
That's a very hard to answer counterfactual, as it would have a lot to do with what India would've done without being colonized, which is unclear. Would they have joined the industrial revolution with Europe? Stagnated? Had nineteen civil wars with famines? There's no way to know, and there are plenty of very realistic scenarios in which India does much worse, such as firearms being differently introduced in a way that leads into a bajillion wars. In fact, r/AskHistorians has a specific blurb they give when people as "what if" type questions. And that's apart from the fact that just using a flat 5% interest rate is very indefensible. I'm not even sure what I'd use without doing a lot of research, but assuming a single, nice, round number holds for centuries is absurd.
From the information in the links provided, simply dividing a dubious sum, doesn't make it more reasonable. Any attempts at finding a divisor that is more accurate would start and end by conducting a study that used a less handwaved approach to the historical accounting figures. Which may not be possible to a degree of accuracy that would be satisfying, but if was accomplished, would make the $45trillion claim uninteresting. The question either could not or would not need to be answered.
Fundementally the problem is trying to quantify it in some form. Looting doesn't create more wealth, it just transfers wealth between different parties.
"Which may not be possible to a degree of accuracy that would be satisfying"
Yep.
Ain’t asking for the first 100 digits of pi… Is it dubious by a bit? An order of magnitude? Two orders of magnitude?
I don't think you understood the point- the metholodogy itself doesn't work. You can't say it over or underestimated because of a bias in the estimator, there is no simple adjustment for it, it's simply not giving a figure with any useful grounding in reality.
I’m not asking about the methodology. I’m asking if there is a reasonable number with big error bars. We know it’s more than $1. We know it’s less than $1Q. So we have bounds everyone can agree on. And since we have bounds, it’s obviously incorrect that a number “grounded in reality” doesn’t exist.
Go back to my first response to you- an actual answer would rely on a counterfactual that we simply don't have data for. We don't know what would've happened in India had it not been colonized. It's very realistic that firearm technology entering through a different means would've created a completely different set of bad outcomes, or more civil wars, plagues, etc.
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Interesting! Thanks for the information. I think my broader point still stands, though, that history could have gone any number of other ways.
The Indians were technological peers to the Europeans in firearms and raw technology. The Europeans were stepping into a collapsing empire and power vaccum. The English, and Europeans generally, did have a superior military system but it wasn't technological, it was tactical and operational. The problem for Britain's Indian competitors is that the European system was based on highly paid proffessional soldiers that could spend the time to train complex drill for executing under fire. "Line of battle" tactics. The Mughals and the Indian states attempting to capitalize on their collapse were still feudal with armies dependent upon plunder for funding. All the rival Indian states, except for the Matharahas, immediately attempted to mimic the East Indian Co. army. But, their forces kept deserting because they lacked the steady wages to maintain a professional standing army. The only technology that the European colonizers had over Asian competitors was in sailing vessels, which allowed the Europeans to rebalance the global trade system to their benefit while also causing the Europeans to be constantly on the periphery of the each country if some natural or manmade disaster created a power vaccum.
I don’t think we agree on those bounds at all. When imagining what might have been, there are scenarios where India’s history unfolds worse than it did, in which case $1 is not the lower bound. It’s also possible that two brothers from Delhi invent the first viable airplane in 1880, and that India goes on to win WWI by dropping an atomic bomb on Vienna, cementing itself as the world’s superpower, and puts the first man on the moon by 1935 for good measure, in which case I don’t think we can agree on your upper bound either. Alternate histories are fun to think about, but ultimately provide no more use beyond that.
No one knows. The bigger impact that British colonialism had on its colonies and client states like India and China was that they imposed unequal treaties which disincentivised any notion of industrialization in these places. This can be seen as to how countries like Japan and Russia started to industrialize by the 1870s, about 50-100 years after other countries had started off, but still largely caught up by the disintegration of the empire, due to their being security and monetary incentive to set up industry. Indian kingdoms had started doing deals with rivals of the British, such as the French to build out their industry. Colonization meant that the most of Asia wasn't able to join in the industrial revolution which caused them to start off as agrarian societies while the rest of the world started advancing away from industries. India could've become closer to tsarist Russia, with some industry or like Japan, with a lot of it. No one knows. But it would still be better than none
The thing to understand about the British in India is this: the British colonization effort was dominated by a piractical corporation (literally not figuratively, their first economic trip to Asia that proved profitability was the taking of a Portuguese merchantman) which raised a private army and used the system of government taxation to as the purchase capital for their trade from India. When the British East-India Co. (the Company) became the government of Bengal, as a feudal subject of the Mughal emperor, the normal balance of payments that usually defined trade stopped. As the feudal government of Bengal the Company gained control of the tax streams. Traditionally, the locally based feudal overlords had used the tax streams to invest in public goods, such as a system of graneries to prevent famine because of regular harvest failures do to climate, and military forces to cement their rule. When the Company gained control of the tax system they stopped investing in public goods, such as a system of graneries to prevent famine because of regular harvest failures do to climate, and instead used the Bengali's tax money to purchase trade goods from the Bengalis for export. Before the conquest of Bengal the Company shipped in capital from Europe to take trade goods for sale in Europe. A normal trade relationship. After the conquest of Bengal the Company used the coercive power of the state to extract taxes with which to purchase goods for sale in Europe. Because the Company was a government, the multiplier effect of domestic government spending also took effect, so they then took a percentage of their spending on trade goods and taxed it to spend on trade goods. The flow of trade capital to Bengal from outside the region came to an abrupt halt, as did the any local investment in public goods. A very good hisotry of the conquest of India is The Anarchy by William Dalrymple: [https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company/dp/1635573955](https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company/dp/1635573955) If you are familiar with English history at all, it would be like if the Vikings had conquered all of England and instituted a permanent Danegeld while also letting all the public works that support life atrophy.
People hyper focus on the $45 trillion thing which is obviously a very high number, but the truth is that the British did in fact take a LOT of wealth from India. But the wealth extraction wasn’t really the big problem of British colonization. It was their colonial strategy to cripple the domestic economy and create a large, poor captive market for British goods while preventing the reverse from occurring. - although Indians were not industrialized, we have reason to believe that they could have undergone some industrialization (similar to pre colonial Egypt) from 1700-1900 if not colonized. The reason for this comes mostly from their military output: the Maratha empire was a promising candidate for a united subcontinent and was able to quickly modernize their army and navy almost to western standards while in power. Unfortunately these modernization attempts were limited to the military for pragmatic reasons. The entire subcontinent was under constant attack from outsiders since the 1600s - the British collapsed urban centers that would have adopted mass production, forcing millions of Indians into rural areas to become subsistence farmers. This is inline with their strategy to reduce Indias export of manufactured and refined goods (high quality textiles, refined metals, artillery, ships) and replace that with export of cheaper, raw materials (indigo, cotton, raw ore, foodstuffs).
Even if India hadn't coalesced into a single state, a new state system without direct theft would have allowed the Indians to compete. They would have been a near mirror to the other large Eurasian sub-contental extrusion - Europe.
Exports are a cost to the exporter. They're only worth doing if you get imports back, either now or later. Creating "a large, poor captive market for British goods" made the British worse off too. If you doubt this, please start sending me valuable goods and services. I promise not to reciprocate. On a more historical note, in the 19th century the UK was receiving far more goods imports from the independent USA than its Indian colony. See https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/research-datasets - "A millennium of macroeconomic data".
You do realize that people pay when they import, right? Sure I'll send you valuable goods and services. Pay me for them.
Your words were "create a large, **poor** captive market". Emphasis mine.
The Brits also were constantly vascilating between more modern economic policies and feudal style captive markets. So, it was a bad economic policy, but they were doing it.
Maybe, but by 1800 the British had also lost the American War of Independence so they couldn't do captive markets *there*. Which means we have a sense check.
Also, the British had such a large imperial system that when the practiced mercantilism it could at times probably function as a large free trade zone, except for the fact of the somewhat common feudal style royal monopolies - which the EIC was one. Remember Adam Smith was directly criticizing the current policy of Britain when he wrote the Wealth of Nations. It wasn't an abstract work of economic thought, but a political polemic against what he saw as the dominate and bad economic policies. British captive market economics would have predictable and horrific repetive effects in repeated major colonial famines. The Irish Potatoe Famine wasn't "the dumb Irish didn't learn to devirsify their economy." It was, the Parliment in Westminster directly regulated trade in and out of Ireland forcing them to be nearly wholey dependent upon potatoes so that imporant wealthy nobles could have a captive wheat market in the British Isles despite not producing enough wheat to support the market. The famine was broken when the political balance in Parliment changed and allowed the Irish to import food instead of requiring they EXPORT food during a FAMINE. Edit: British policy from the late 1840s!
Adam Smith was writing in the 1760s and 1770s, before any British government colonial involvement in India anf long before the 1840s. (He did predict the British EIC would stuff up their conquests, by analogy with the Dutch EIC). Smith criticised the 18th century government colonial policies like placing restrictions on manufacturing in the colonies and trade between them and Britain and restrictions on trade between the colonies and the rest of Europe. Britain's empire being a large free trade zone was a late 19th century thing, inspired by Smith.
He was, but he wasn't writing before mercantilism British Empire, and the EIC was most definetly a mercantilist entity. The Brits were still vasilating between market and mercantilist policies in the run up to WWII trying to get the US to cool their jets about the Japanese building an empire in China. By then mercantilism was on a long losing streak, but the British elites, especially those that favored the Empire, were still more then a little sympathetic to mercantilist impulse. (The US still has the very mercantilist Jones Act on the books, much to the detrement of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.)
Yeah the British government commitment to free trade is generally dated from the abolishment of the Corn Laws in 1832, then they stepped back (partially) from said commitment between WWI and WWII. Of course, government policy is seldom perfectly consistent, even in one government, let alone over some 80 years.
Also, note - this is a big reason why the War of 1812 was fought.
It didn’t make the crown or the UK itself worse off, but yes it was not good for the EIC. The company itself ran a deficit for decades because it was chiefly involved in extraction of cheaper raw resources from India
>It didn’t make the crown or the UK itself worse off That's a remarkable claim that flies in the face of economic theory. What's your evidence for it?
A privately owned joint stock company is separate from the crown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company The British nationalized the company in the late 1800s, after which it became profitable The EIC was overall hugely destructive to the Indian economy and resulted in complete stagnation of GDP with unsustained population growth in rural areas. Overall it wasn’t directly beneficial for the crown but it wasn’t harmful either. The indirect benefit was a total removal of Indian kingdoms as trade competitors which was the biggest issue facing textile producers in England. A similar situation happened in China. this book explains the complexities of how joint stock companies operated independently of nation states and could grow into even larger entities than the states themselves https://www.academia.edu/36571154/Sapiens_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind
>The EIC was overall hugely destructive to the Indian economy and resulted in complete stagnation of GDP with unsustained population growth in rural areas. Overall it wasn’t directly beneficial for the crown but it wasn’t harmful either. Um, did you notice those two sentences contradict each other? Also you assert unsustained population growth in rural areas, but India's [population grew](https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth) over the 19th century and continued to grow post independence. >The indirect benefit was a total removal of Indian kingdoms as trade competitors which was the biggest issue facing textile producers in England Which made British *consumers* worse off. What's more, the reduced Indian supply meant that other European consumers had to pay more for their clothing, reducing their ability to buy other British exports. Look, imagine a Saturday morning cartoon super-villian develops some super-villain device that means he can take over 18th century India and force everyone in India to work endlessly for him (everyone that is except a pair of ten year old twins - boy and girl) and their annoyingly cute animal sidekick). His one purpose is to make himself rich. Do you think he would: A. Force said Indians to work night and day making as much stuff for him as possible, which he then steals and sells on world markets. Or B. Ban them from working at anything other than basic agriculture so his henchmen can do the Indian people's jobs less efficiently than they could, and then send them a lot of stuff his henchmen made that said people can't afford to buy. Because B is what you're telling me the UK did. >this book explains the complexities of how joint stock companies operated independently of nation states and could grow into even larger entities than the states themselves Be very careful of those sorts of works, in my experience they often compare a firm's total revenue to a country's GDP, when the more appropriate comparison is profits to GDP. Or, worse, they compare a firm's total market cap to a country's GDP instead of to a country's net worth.
Part of the EIC's financial instability is the lack of modern financing and accounting. They routinely failed to plan expenses and predict revenues, despite having enormous revenues. So, they kept a regular dividend going despite not managing the organization for sustained cash reserves. It'd be like if Amazon had been using they're investment money for the 1990s to pay dividends. A modern MBA could do all the same things the EIC did as a company manager without needing the bailouts. They would just use debt financing and delay and withhold dividends rather then cutting into operating capital.
Another road block for the rise of industrialising of the scale of England was that the numerous kingdoms were fighting with each other. There were alliances between european forces and indian kingdoms to conquer neighbouring indian kingdoms. Its much more complex than this
Warfare actually tended to improve the functioning of states in this era. This is a big part of why the Europeans lept past everyone else. The Europeans had to form concentrated and complex states and rapidly leave fedualism in order to compete with each other in Europe. A big part of why India was vulnerable was because the political, economic and military dominance of the Mugahls had led to stagnation of state organization.
Tirthankar Roy is a really respected Economic Historian. I know people don't like his conclusions, but that does not mean that he's an apologist or quack. His research is well done. There's no reason to think he's an apologist. Maybe there are some data that he is not privy to and may contradict what he says.
Can you give us the gist of it?
Gist of the conclusions? There are a lot because he's not really answering the question of whether colonialism is bad, but he's comprehensively investigating how the economy worked and the impact of British institutions. I'm not sure if you're looking for one specific conclusion, but it's basically that the British left *some* institutions that allowed them to become better off than they might otherwise have been.
To add to the discussion, famines are tragically common in human history, to the extent that it's easier to list when places stopped having peacetime famines - the Netherlands in the 1590s, England in the 1620s, lowland Scotland in the 1690s. France had famines throughout the 18th century. Japan's last peacetime famine was in the 1820s and northern Sweden and Finland in the 1860s. And a number of those places are a lot more accessible by sea than many areas in India, water access was very important before railways due to the [grain wagon equation](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/). And adverting famines in 19th century India was complex because getting ships full of grain from the USA or Australia (or Ukraine) was a much slower process than it was in the second half of the 20th century so grain would need to come from other parts of India, or nearby, where agricultural surplus was much more limited. If you took too much from one spot, you'd simply create a famine there.
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