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THE "GREAT THEFT" OF INDIA BY IMPERIAL BRITAIN - PART 1
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FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月3日 00:41:042018/12/3
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THE "GREAT THEFT" OF INDIA BY IMPERIAL BRITAIN - PART 1
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/mughals-british-east-india-companythe-great-theft-of-india-by-imperial-britain/story/1/28102.html
The great theft of India by imperial Britain — Part 1
Why then is there such little anger against the British while the Muslim
rule is (rightly) reviled?
Minhaz Merchant
03-12-2018
They came, they saw, they conquered — and they left with a fortune.
The story of how 190 years of British colonial occupation, from 1757 to
1947, impoverished India is one of the great untold stories of modern
history.
Congress member of Parliament and former junior external affairs
minister Shashi Tharoor tried valiantly to tell the story in his 2017
book, The Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, but gaps
remain. What, for example, was the quantum in inflation-adjusted wealth
siphoned out of India by the colonial British? What was the modus
operandi colonial officials employed? Should India seek reparations —
and how might these be credibly computed?
Some of these questions have now been answered by the economist
Professor Utsa Patnaik. She recently published a collection of essays in
Columbia University Press detailing the method of the two-century-long
British theft, its computation at today’s currency value, and a possible
mode of reparations.
Crucially, Professor Patnaik does what Tharoor in his otherwise fine
book (Indian edition: An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
does not: she puts a figure on the British theft.
In an interview with the business daily Mint on November 19, 2018,
Professor Patnaik said: “Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to
£9.2 trillion, taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure and
compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest. Indians were never
credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local
producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget –
something you’d never find in any independent country.”
When Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, in 1757
in the battle of Palashee (Plassey) by bribing the Nawab’s army
commander, the traitorous Mir Jaffer, the real prize for the British was
the right to collect tax from Bengali peasants, traders and farmers.
The Nawab had levied a modest tax, allowing peasants a reasonable
living. By 1765, within eight years of Clive’s victory over the Nawab,
all that changed. Taxes in Bengal were trebled.
Unable to eke out a living, 10 million people out of Bengali’s
population of 30 million died of starvation in 1770.
Around 173 years later, in 1943, as the Second World War raged and the
British Empire was on its last legs, Prime Minister Winston Churchill
would withhold vital food grains from Bengal, leading to the Great
Bengal Famine in which over three million people died.
But back in 1770, the British were focused on making money. Britain was
still a relatively poor country. The industrial revolution was some
years away.
The British were especially active in the African slave trade. Through
much of the 1700s, Liverpool monopolised 55 per cent of the brutal
Atlantic slave traffic. The United States was still a British colony.
African slaves captured or bought by the British in Sierra Leone, Ghana
and the Ivory Coast were shipped in British vessels to America, their
arms and legs chained in manacles, lying one above the other. Dozens
died during the horrific transatlantic journey.
Back in Colonial India
As Britain began to extort tax revenue from Indian peasants, the
industrial revolution received a boost in terms of funds and raw
materials from India. The British modus operandi was as simple as it was
extortionate: it taxed Indian peasants 35 per cent of their income,
three times what the Nawab of Bengal had taxed them. That excess tax
revenue was then used by the British to buy Indian goods – spices,
textiles and gold – which were in great demand in Europe and North America.
Thus British tax collectors used Indian money to buy Indian goods,
exported them and pocketed the profit – with zero investment.
This system continued unimpeded virtually throughout the colonial
period. In order to ensure that peasants, from whom they extorted steep
taxes to buy Indian goods for export, did not realise how they were
being cheated, a ruse was employed. The British tax collectors and
British buyers of exportable goods were deliberately kept as completely
separate entities so that no connection could be made by peasants whose
taxes were being used to drain the country’s resources.
Professor Patnaik explains the scheme: “A large part of the producer’s
own tax payment simply got converted into export goods, so the East
India Company got these goods completely free. The later mechanism,
after the British Crown took over (in 1858), used bills of exchange. The
only Indian beneficiaries of this clever, unfair system of linking trade
with taxes were the intermediaries or dalals. Some of modern India’s
well-known business houses made their early profits doing dalali for the
British.”
Were the British thus more rapacious than the Mughals? Unquestionably.
They impoverished India in a way the Mughals did not. That does not
absolve the Mughal Empire. It was savage, destroyed thousands of
temples, and converted lakhs of Hindus through the sword or through
financial inducement. The Mughals were a destructive, malignant force.
The British though exceeded them in the damage they did to India’s
economy. Why then is there such little anger against the British while
Muslim rule is (rightly) reviled?
The reason is complex. Many Hindus in the 1700s were fed up of the
debauched Mughal Empire. They were relieved when the British defeated
the Mughals. They regarded the British, who brought new technology and
avoided religious conversions, as the lesser evil. There are miniscule
Protestant converts in India compared to millions of Muslim converts. In
a deeply religious country, that mattered.
Between two evils, there is little to choose but let Professor Patnaik
have the last word: “Per capita annual foodgrains absorption in British
India declined from 210 kg, during the period 1904-09, to 157 kg during
1937-41, and to only 137 kg by 1946. If even a part of its enormous
foreign earnings had been credited to it and not entirely siphoned off,
India could have imported modern technology to build up an industrial
structure as Japan was doing. Instead the masses suffered severe
nutritional decline and independent India inherited a festering problem
of unemployment and poverty.”
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/mughals-british-east-india-companythe-great-theft-of-india-by-imperial-britain/story/1/28102.html
The great theft of India by imperial Britain — Part 1
Why then is there such little anger against the British while the Muslim
rule is (rightly) reviled?
Minhaz Merchant
03-12-2018
They came, they saw, they conquered — and they left with a fortune.
The story of how 190 years of British colonial occupation, from 1757 to
1947, impoverished India is one of the great untold stories of modern
history.
Congress member of Parliament and former junior external affairs
minister Shashi Tharoor tried valiantly to tell the story in his 2017
book, The Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, but gaps
remain. What, for example, was the quantum in inflation-adjusted wealth
siphoned out of India by the colonial British? What was the modus
operandi colonial officials employed? Should India seek reparations —
and how might these be credibly computed?
Some of these questions have now been answered by the economist
Professor Utsa Patnaik. She recently published a collection of essays in
Columbia University Press detailing the method of the two-century-long
British theft, its computation at today’s currency value, and a possible
mode of reparations.
Crucially, Professor Patnaik does what Tharoor in his otherwise fine
book (Indian edition: An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
does not: she puts a figure on the British theft.
In an interview with the business daily Mint on November 19, 2018,
Professor Patnaik said: “Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to
£9.2 trillion, taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure and
compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest. Indians were never
credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local
producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget –
something you’d never find in any independent country.”
When Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, in 1757
in the battle of Palashee (Plassey) by bribing the Nawab’s army
commander, the traitorous Mir Jaffer, the real prize for the British was
the right to collect tax from Bengali peasants, traders and farmers.
The Nawab had levied a modest tax, allowing peasants a reasonable
living. By 1765, within eight years of Clive’s victory over the Nawab,
all that changed. Taxes in Bengal were trebled.
Unable to eke out a living, 10 million people out of Bengali’s
population of 30 million died of starvation in 1770.
Around 173 years later, in 1943, as the Second World War raged and the
British Empire was on its last legs, Prime Minister Winston Churchill
would withhold vital food grains from Bengal, leading to the Great
Bengal Famine in which over three million people died.
But back in 1770, the British were focused on making money. Britain was
still a relatively poor country. The industrial revolution was some
years away.
The British were especially active in the African slave trade. Through
much of the 1700s, Liverpool monopolised 55 per cent of the brutal
Atlantic slave traffic. The United States was still a British colony.
African slaves captured or bought by the British in Sierra Leone, Ghana
and the Ivory Coast were shipped in British vessels to America, their
arms and legs chained in manacles, lying one above the other. Dozens
died during the horrific transatlantic journey.
Back in Colonial India
As Britain began to extort tax revenue from Indian peasants, the
industrial revolution received a boost in terms of funds and raw
materials from India. The British modus operandi was as simple as it was
extortionate: it taxed Indian peasants 35 per cent of their income,
three times what the Nawab of Bengal had taxed them. That excess tax
revenue was then used by the British to buy Indian goods – spices,
textiles and gold – which were in great demand in Europe and North America.
Thus British tax collectors used Indian money to buy Indian goods,
exported them and pocketed the profit – with zero investment.
This system continued unimpeded virtually throughout the colonial
period. In order to ensure that peasants, from whom they extorted steep
taxes to buy Indian goods for export, did not realise how they were
being cheated, a ruse was employed. The British tax collectors and
British buyers of exportable goods were deliberately kept as completely
separate entities so that no connection could be made by peasants whose
taxes were being used to drain the country’s resources.
Professor Patnaik explains the scheme: “A large part of the producer’s
own tax payment simply got converted into export goods, so the East
India Company got these goods completely free. The later mechanism,
after the British Crown took over (in 1858), used bills of exchange. The
only Indian beneficiaries of this clever, unfair system of linking trade
with taxes were the intermediaries or dalals. Some of modern India’s
well-known business houses made their early profits doing dalali for the
British.”
Were the British thus more rapacious than the Mughals? Unquestionably.
They impoverished India in a way the Mughals did not. That does not
absolve the Mughal Empire. It was savage, destroyed thousands of
temples, and converted lakhs of Hindus through the sword or through
financial inducement. The Mughals were a destructive, malignant force.
The British though exceeded them in the damage they did to India’s
economy. Why then is there such little anger against the British while
Muslim rule is (rightly) reviled?
The reason is complex. Many Hindus in the 1700s were fed up of the
debauched Mughal Empire. They were relieved when the British defeated
the Mughals. They regarded the British, who brought new technology and
avoided religious conversions, as the lesser evil. There are miniscule
Protestant converts in India compared to millions of Muslim converts. In
a deeply religious country, that mattered.
Between two evils, there is little to choose but let Professor Patnaik
have the last word: “Per capita annual foodgrains absorption in British
India declined from 210 kg, during the period 1904-09, to 157 kg during
1937-41, and to only 137 kg by 1946. If even a part of its enormous
foreign earnings had been credited to it and not entirely siphoned off,
India could have imported modern technology to build up an industrial
structure as Japan was doing. Instead the masses suffered severe
nutritional decline and independent India inherited a festering problem
of unemployment and poverty.”
RH156RH
2018年12月3日 02:12:202018/12/3
收件人
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月3日 19:55:052018/12/3
收件人
LOOTING INDIAN WEALTH and YOU are one of those THIEVES. So when are YOU
PAYING BACK THE STOLEN WEALTH?
RH156RH
2018年12月4日 08:57:532018/12/4
收件人
RH156RH
2018年12月4日 08:58:492018/12/4
收件人
On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 12:55:05 AM UTC, FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer wrote:
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月5日 02:51:012018/12/5
收件人
"ADMITTED" that "YOU WESTERN CHRISTIANS GOT RICH BY LOOTING THE EASTERNERS".
Genocidal Racist THIEF Winston Churchill:
"the riches of the West are built on the graves of the East"
https://www.quora.com/Do-the-British-people-know-of-Winston-Churchills-decision-of-starving-Indians-in-Bengal-famine-in-1943
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月5日 02:56:552018/12/5
收件人
RH156RH
2018年12月5日 07:01:162018/12/5
收件人
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月5日 20:40:112018/12/5
收件人
racist THIEVES".
RH156RH
2018年12月6日 02:58:492018/12/6
收件人
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018年12月6日 18:02:522018/12/6
收件人
RH156RH
2018年12月7日 02:54:112018/12/7
收件人
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