How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

[Winehole23]

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.

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.


Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain's industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.


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.https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html

[Winehole23]

After the British Raj took over in 1847, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company's monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.

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.


Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.

[Winehole23]

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India's exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.

Some point to this fictional "deficit" as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the "deficit" meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.

[Millennial_Messiah]

pajeets eat poop tbh so well deserved.

[Winehole23]

pajeets eat poop tbh so well deserved.Your mouth is a sewer. Be a shame if it clogged.

[Nathan89]

Stole $45 trillion and still sucks. Leftist blueprint country.

[TDMVPDPOY]

and what was india going to do with 45trillion when they cant even build a toilet?

[Winehole23]

Seriously, all hate for India?

No admiration for the derring-do and frank cultural rapacity of the British?

[AaronY]

Stole $45 trillion and still sucks. Leftist blueprint country.
This makes zero sense lmao

[boutons_deux]

Seriously, all hate for India?

No admiration for the derring-do and frank cultural rapacity of the British?

USA's AfriCom protects the extraction and export of minerals to industrial countries, not to go after terrorists. Rapacious, predatory (white) Capitalism fucks up the planet, murders $Ms

[diego]

Seriously, all hate for India?

No admiration for the derring-do and frank cultural rapacity of the British?

Welcome to planet Earth, where human beings ruin everything.

If it had been the other way around you'd have pages and pages of crying about brown people being lazy, dishonest, murdering thieves.

[spurraider21]

This makes zero sense lmao
What part of Bernie to Trump in 3 weeks flat makes sense?

[Winehole23]

Welcome to planet Earth, where human beings ruin everything.

If it had been the other way around you'd have pages and pages of crying about brown people being lazy, dishonest, murdering thieves.No thank you, sir, we already got that.

I already knew the English were thieving bastards, but the scale and deviousness of the scam opened my eyes a little wider.

[Winehole23]

England deindustrialized India and throttled its domestic and foreign trade. Tens of millions died as a result.



Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.

In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169) in the journal World Development, we used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.

Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.

While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians

[FrostKing]

India is a global IT hub today because of their British roots.

[diego]

India is a global IT hub today because of their British roots.

Do explain the relation because all I see is a pathetic attempt to justify colonialism

[Ef-man]

Do explain the relation because all I see is a pathetic attempt to justify colonialism

He meant to say that “India is a global source for 7/11’s staffing because of their British roots” and claim he is not racist for saying that.

Go figure.