“... we must not forget that these idyllic [sc. Indian] village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.So who was it?
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”
None other than Karl Marx in this source:
Marx, Karl. 1853. “The British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853.Today it would be regarded as extremely politically incorrect, but that doesn’t worry me, since I don’t have much respect for political correctness.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
What does interest me is this:
(1) for all his sympathy with the plight of suffering people in India, Marx was clearly saying that (1) the worldwide communist revolution required the sort of social and economic breakdown in India that he also described in this article, and that (2) British imperialism was unwittingly bringing this about and that in the grand communist scheme of things, it was a good thing. How is this not apologetics for British imperialism?To make my position clear, I think British rule in India was a terribly mixed bag.
(2) as a pure counterfactual argument, let us assume that the Western European powers of Marx’s time had become communist, how then would the communist revolution have been achieved in the non-Western world? For example, say that Britain had been taken over by communists in 1848–1850. Such a government would have inherited the British East India Company’s rule in India. Would a British communist government have set India free or imposed direct British communist imperial rule in India? If the latter, what would a communist British Empire have looked like?
The outstanding problems were these:
(1) British rule brought about the de-industrialisation of large parts of India, as I have shown here.However, would communist rule have been better or even worse?
(2) British incompetence, callousness and fanatical adherence to laissez faire brought about quite preventable famines in late 19th century India, as shown by Mike Davis in his book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001).
Whatever Marx's opinion, I'm surprised you call it a "mixed bag". To me, points (1) and (2) seems quite straightforwardly to indicate British rule in India was up with with some of the worst crimes in modern history.
ReplyDeleteWell, this is when we get into the irrational inability of some people on the left to see that Western imperialism was not all bad.
DeleteWhat did the British do in India that was good?
(1) abolition of the Thuggee cult
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee#British_suppression
(2) suppression of Sati (wife immolation)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_%28practice%29#Principal_Hindu_reformers_and_1829_ban
(3) Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Infanticide_Prevention_Act,_1870
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_India
(4) Indian Slavery Act, 1843
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Slavery_Act,_1843
Numerous Indian friends tell me they think on balance it was good to be conquered by the British. They are glad it ended, but confess they are also glad it happened.
DeleteExcept I never used the words "all bad". Virtually no government in history was "all bad": they all did/do both good and bad things, from the British Empire to the Nazis to the current Conservative government in the UK (legalising gay marriage was good).
DeleteThe right questions to ask are:
(a) Whether the British had a right to rule India in the first place, which I believe they didn't, simply because countries almost never have justification to occupy other countries and disallow them their right to self-determination and government.
(b) Whether the bad thing the British government did were simply inexcusable - and if you believe your cited source, LVH, then they were - no matter what good things they did as well.
Ken B, funnily enough I don't care what your Indian friends think or whether or not they're Indian. I have British friends who believe things I disagree with about Britain, and the fact they're from Britain doesn't change that.
I am certain if British communists took over Britain prior to the time Indian independence, they would have supported keeping India.
ReplyDeleteWhy?
George Orwell, f.e., said that India was in no condition to sustain itself on its own and had to be modernized and industrialized as quickly as possible. Communists would not see their dream of a global social and economic upheaval fulfilled if they left the undeveloped world alone.
Why else did the Soviet Russians take control of Central Asian republics? Let us not say resources, because it certainly cost the Soviet Unión more to keep them than not to, as evidenced by the drastic fall in their economies after the fall of the Soviet Unión.
Do you think communist rule in India would have been better or worse than British capitalists? E.g., let us look at what it took to force industrialisation in the Soviet Union under Stalin. That sort of thing applied to India would have been terrible indeed. Not that this excuses the British at all.
DeleteI am certain the consequences would have been very similar.
DeleteI find that imperialism and communist foreign rule have both had similar consequences. They both uplifted people in very rural corners of the world, but involved implementation of brutal pólice states with some drastic short term economic consequences.
All things being equal, self-determination is preferable to external domination. All things are not equal, though, and insofar as imperialism serves any historically progressive role, it is in bridging such gaps in historical development, and creating the conditions where, if self-determination is once more achieved, it will proceed in a modernizing fashion.
ReplyDeleteGoing by the example of other nations, India would have undeniably benefited from proletarian revolution. Just to put it into perspective: There was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Think about what that entails, and compare that to any effort in history to build socialism, from China to Burkina Faso.
Whatever good things the British accomplished in India could have likewise been accomplished without bleeding the Indian people dry. Soviet nations, not without their squabbles, were nevertheless mutually beneficial arrangements that took pains to preserve cultural difference without enshrining inequality and regressive practices (such as blood feuds or the subjugation of women) within them. For a more thorough discussion of this, I strongly recommend Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire.
"There was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947."
Delete(1) And what is your evidence for this?
The standard works on historical GDP and per capita GDP are:
Maddison, Angus. 2003. The World Economy: Historical Statistics. OECD Publishing, Paris.
Maddison, Angus. 2007. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
(2) According to Maddison (2003: 180, 182 and 2007: 120ff.) real Indian per capita GDP in 1757 was $540 international Geary-Khamis dollars and $533 in 1820, but was $709 in 1914 on the eve of WWI.
That is an increase of 33% over 1830 and still 31% over 1757.
(2) In 1929, per capita GDP stood at $728 -- an increase of 36% over 1830 and 34% over 1757.
(3) In 1946, real Indian per capita GDP was $622, since the Great Depression and WWII -- as in many countries -- adversely affected real per capita GDP.
Nevertheless, this was still 16% higher than the 1830 figure and 15% over 1757. But we have to understand the impact of the Great Depression and WWII here, so the figure for 1929 is much better if we want to gauge the long-run impact of British imperial rule. But either way your statement is refuted.
(4) yet another problem for you is that previous historical Indian per capita GDP was inferior to that under British rule: India did worse under Moghul rule, for per capita GDP in 1600 is estimated to have been $550 but by 1757 it was $540 (actually lower).
(5) also, the British actually reduced taxes as compared with the Moghuls: the Moghul tax system took 16% of national income, but this was slashed to 6% by the British by the early 20th century.
----------
Conclusion: your assertion is false according to the best work on historical GDP and lacks historical background.
"Going by the example of other nations, India would have undeniably benefited from proletarian revolution. "
DeleteHow so? Forced deindustrialisation? Gulags? State repression? State-induced famines to steal resources from the peasants?
"Soviet nations, not without their squabbles, were nevertheless mutually beneficial arrangements that took pains to preserve cultural difference without enshrining inequality and regressive practices "
Wait, you are saying that the Soviet Union was a *progressive* torture chamber? Were women's rights and some progressive policies worth Stalin's Great Terror, secret police, gulags and the Holodomor?
Not to mention the "without enshrining inequality " is ridiculous. Tatars. Ukraines. Pretty much everyone but ethnic Russians.
DeleteIt's not false. It's from a source you cited in your post: Late Victorian Holocausts, which itself cites Maddison (and Hyndman and Tomlinson). See the opening paragraph of chapter 10. He is careful to note that this does not mean it was perfectly static for the whole period, but that "progressive forces were always canceled out by regressive ones." For example, "in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent," and so on.
DeleteThis seems to support the claim as well: http://ideasforindia.in/article.aspx?article_id=189
Now, over the course of nearly 200 years, very slight differences in measurement and estimation can produce a difference well in excess of the 15% you're referencing, though I would be interested to see how the method differs in the two cases.
How so? Forced deindustrialisation? Gulags? State repression? State-induced famines to steal resources from the peasants?
In order:
• No. Forced deindustrialization, by your account, is already part of the "outstanding problems" of imperial India and is not a feature of socialism, which if anything is usually criticized for pushing too hard in the other direction.
• No. I don't know what the Gulag system (or any other prison system), has to do with a question of whether India would have fared better under the governance of workers than British imperial forces. The latter was quite brutish and carceral, itself. One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_Jail
• No. "State repression" is a constant of all state societies, most acutely under conditions of total war, which is the historical basis for what you or I would call "totalitarianism." It's not the economic organization of society that determines this, but the political. The same economic system can have any number of political configurations.
• No. As with the first, it's quite the opposite; India was already rife with state-induced famines under British rule. The point is to go the other way.
Wait, you are saying that the Soviet Union was a *progressive* torture chamber?
No. It was progressive in many ways, but it also had its share of problems. There's much to learn from; some things worth emulating, others worth denouncing. I'm not sure what any of us stand to gain from throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (Anyway, isn't that what you're criticizing some leftists for: "irrational inability" to see a given political order as not "all" good/bad?)
Were women's rights and some progressive policies worth Stalin's Great Terror, secret police, gulags
The Yezhovshchina was a inexcusable, and Stalin certainly deserves a great deal of blame for signing off on the excesses. Yezhov was, of course, executed once this came to light, but that certainly does not undo the harm. So, I think we're on the same page here.
Part of this relates to what I said above: the Terror could not have happened outside of conditions of ever-building preparedness for war, which were not without warrant; shortly thereafter, Germany would launch the largest military invasion in history on its eastern front.
and the Holodomor?
Careful here; the famine was real, and it was severe, but the idea that it was an anti-Ukrainian state policy was a piece of (actual, not epithetical) Nazi propaganda that modern scholars discount. Not to mention it erases the countless Russian and Kazakh victims of the same period of famine.
It's cracked to say Yezhov was killed when things came to light. Worst kind of dishonest apologetics.
DeleteWell, Ken B, maybe they got rid of Stalin when things **came to light**. lol...
DeleteTrue believing lunatics will think up anything to justify this stuff.
(1) "It's not false. It's from a source you cited in your post: Late Victorian Holocausts, which itself cites Maddison"
ReplyDeleteAnd Maddison shows it is false. You or your source are wrong. There was a slow but upward trend in per capita Indian GDP from 1757 to 1846. It was higher in 1946/7 than in 1757. You are refuted.
"in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent,""
lol.. that is plainly false. Maddison's figures do not show this. Even the post you link to shows it's false.
Conclusion: you're peddling nonsense.
(2) "Forced deindustrialization" is just a typo for "forced industrialization".
(3) " There's much to learn from; some things worth emulating, others worth denouncing. I'm not sure what any of us stand to gain from throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
If you take this view of Soviet totalitarian insanity, you ought to be capable of appreciating the progressive aspects of British rule in India.
Your words suggest you think the British empire was actually worse than the Soviet Union.
(4) "but the idea that it was an anti-Ukrainian state policy was a piece of (actual, not epithetical) Nazi propaganda that modern scholars discount."
Ah, yes the appal to unnamed authority fallacy... Some modern scholars might, others do not. But we know what side of the debate you would reflexively take by your comments above.
And Maddison shows it is false.
DeleteHe was citing a different source by Maddison than you. It stands to reason that different figures could obtain over different studies, since, as I said, long-period data of this sort is very bound up in estimation and method. That's why I said I'd like to know how the methods differ between Maddison's different documents.
Conclusion: you're peddling nonsense.
It sounds more like you misunderstood my point and perhaps are not used to having a commenter present a grounded, good-faith counter to your position.
If you take this view of Soviet totalitarian insanity, you ought to be capable of appreciating the progressive aspects of British rule in India.
I do, and I don't believe I've indicated otherwise.
Your words suggest you think the British empire was actually worse than the Soviet Union.
I do, and I don't believe I've indicated otherwise.
Ah, yes the appal to unnamed authority fallacy... Some modern scholars might, others do not. But we know what side of the debate you would reflexively take by your comments above.
It's not "reflexive" at all. Robert Conquest, perhaps the most outspoken proponent of the intentional view of the famine, eventually walked it back and settled for saying they could have done a better job of responding to it. Few would dispute this. I definitely don't.
(Indeed, most contemporary history-writing on the Soviet Union is implicitly a critique of Conquest's early work.)
>Your words suggest you think the
Delete>British empire was actually worse
>than the Soviet Union.
I do,
So now we have the truth.
Only in a world of Communist apologetic insanity would anyone think that the British empire was a worse and more monstrous evil than the Soviet Union.
In your view, the British empire -- which no doubt did more to abolish slavery on this planet than any other empire in history -- is worse than the Soviet Union, a system which (apart from its other horrific crimes) really did enslave millions in gulags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
You are one sick bastard.
"He was citing a different source by Maddison than you. "
Deletelol.. what, was it an out of date one done years ago? I see no evidence Maddison's work is inconsistent on this issue.
"It stands to reason that different figures could obtain over different studies, since, as I said, long-period data of this sort is very bound up in estimation and method. "
Yet you've backed up your statements with no evidence and have been caught out asserting statements not backed by the sources you cite.
There was economic decline in India during British rule.
ReplyDelete[Indeed in long periods during the epochal British rule the per capita real income of India actually declined. When there was growth, it was so moderate that falling behind other countries was not a hard feat. S.Sivasubromanian's detailed study of 'THE National Income of India in twentieth century' places annual growth rate of India per capita income at .o1 percent between 1900-1 and 1946-7. Growth was positive (through barely so) in this period because the dismal and here we do mean 'dismal' GDP growth of .o9 percent was counterbalanced by a low population growth rate {.o8 percent} reflecting high mortality rate that characterized the British India. And this was occurring over the centuries in which the changes initiated by the Industrial Revolution were elevating real incomes and transforming living standards in Europe and America and even in parts of some Asia and Latin America. An Uncertain Glory- Jean Dreze And Amartya Sen.] This seems contrary to your assertion .