Quote (Plaguefear @ Oct 29 2024 04:50pm)
You forgot to mention the estimated FOURTY TRILLION DOLLARS the british stole from india, might have something to do with it.
I have no love for the British Empire, but let's take a closer look.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-indiaQuote
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
The article is describing taxation. When any government provides healthcare (or any other service) it does so by way of purchasing goods and services with resources from the very same population which they just extracted those resources from. The doctor even has to pay the government back part of what the government just paid to him!
It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
The Indians selling the goods were compensated in currency which they could then use to purchase other goods and services. If you produce 100 units of goods, the government taxes you 30 units of goods, and then buys 70 units of goods from you, how many units of goods do you have? This is the case today for any government supplier. They are taxed on income and the government purchases goods from them with a part of the very same income they paid in the first place. That doesn't stop supplying the government from being a very lucrative business model, just ask Lockheed Martin.
Quote
On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.
Which the British could do because they possessed the ability to pocket the arbitrage by way of their ships and a trade network. This was happening long before the British monopolized Indian trade, and well before the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese had found or traded directly with India at all. If European trade ships couldn't expect to profit by arbitrage, there would be no incentive to trade. The British monopoly allowed them to maximize profit, so the extraction should be the difference between the fair market price and what was paid to the Indian producers. The calculation we've walked through so far goes well beyond that.
Quote
How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded./QUOTE]
The Indian producers were being paid in currency which they could use to buy other goods and services. Unless the British were taxing the Indian producers at an effective rate of 100%, they were clearly being paid. The British working through fiat allows them to effectively tax trade, which is why routed the Europeans through London in the first place. It was an exploitative system, no doubt, but the article is overstating the case.
Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.
I don't want to be unfair to the author as a result of the article, perhaps he accounts for the administrative cost of running India, any government services the British provided, the cost of infrastructure built, and the difference between the free market cost of goods and services versus the monopolistic price which the British enforced. But that's not the argument the article is making.
The 5% interest rate compounded by ~150+ years is fantastical. We're no longer talking about what the British took from India, but rather some sort of punitive figure which India is now owed. I have no opinion on whether they are or aren't, but India would not be $45 trillion dollars wealthier today if but for British colonization. It's hard to even say whether India would be a unified state at all.