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I'm not dredging up the long-forgotten past to claim victimhood, sympathy or to embarrass certain parties.
The criminal Rothschild run UK STATE, with what was at one time the largest empire, does not have a monopoly on genocide, war crimes, extermination, predatory disaster capitalism that starved 10's of millions specifically in India, extreme racism of natives in their own country...and extreme religious bigotry as a justification of the preceding crimes (We are doing Gods' work).
I'm doing it for Afghanistan, the country next door which has on and off been part of India, and so intertwined with the history of India, even though geographically it is considered part of Central Asia.
I consider myself as a Pashtun in spirit born in Bangladesh. Bangladesh historically experienced waves upon waves of Pashtun rulers, or Pashtun's working for Turkic masters in Bengal converting a lapsed waning Buddhist final part of India into Islam.
The Mongol EMPIRE was appalling, committing mass genocide in Northern China, Turkic Central Asia and Russia. It is well documented. This aspect of Mongol history is overlooked, and instead, Mongol uncivilisation of drinking fermented goats/yak milk, throat singing and military skills are lionised.
The Spanish EMPIRE was appalling, committing mass genocide in North, Central and South America. It is well documented. This aspect of Spanish history is overlooked, and instead, Spanish uncivilisation of flamenco, plucky smart Europeans Christopher Columbus 'discovering' America for the West, and Imperial Spain, Christianity, Predatory Capitalism Plantations and military skills are lionised.
NAZI Germany...was appalling, committing mass genocide in......
The British Empire was different from the above in that the horrible crimes of the British Empire were hidden from the British public and the wider world. Propaganda from Hollywood to Newspapers, literature, the media played a critical part in this. The Evil British Empire cared about its image, in a way the above 3 Empires did not.
- There was a moral justification to encourage the Scottish highland foot soldiers and ordinary working-class Englishmen to fight for Empire--they had to fight, massacre, destroy and kill for the greater good....to civilise the natives; for Jesus and for loot, free bounty.
- When the British Empire got going, it was also the age of enlightenment, of enquiry through reason and logic,,,,,and the expansion of Parliamentary democracy. Thus in this modern sophisticated society, there was a large body of educated men who would object to the moral absolutism of empire, genocide in their countries name, mass looting, mass institutional racism in a society which was after all the first to abolish slavery. TO OVERCOME THEIS BARRIER A VERY SOPHISTICATED VEIL WAS COVERED OVER INDIA, where the British public received very little news of what was really going on in a society ruled by 500 pliant Indian semi-autonomous Maharajahs, and 100,000 British soldiers and bureaucrats. Tea and cucumber sandwich, splendid pageants, processions and images of plaint grateful Indians serving the Empire, and receiving dollops of British civilisation. Everything was calm and happy.
Hollywood Parody-mocking of from the flower power sixties of/about Hollywood movies from the 1920's, especially 1930's 1940's and 1950's and the PORTRAYAL of the evil British Empire as a glorious spiffing Jolly good show, by Hollywood.
At another level it could be a film about Satyajit Ray, India's greatest movie director, and why he couldn't get any support in Hollywood for his pet project to make a movie about Aliens visiting earth (Sci-fi)....'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and especially 'ET', ALLEGED to have been plagiarized by Hollywood/Spielberg (Though very appropriately invited to London for negotiations of his ideas, plots, the dialogue was ultimately sent off with racism and ridicule by Hollywood and notably Peter Sellers) Satyajit Ray left 60's London bitterly and vowed never to work with 'Westerners' until Sir Richard Attenborough gently coaxed him out of his sullen stupor, and the two collaborated with the 'The Chess Players' 1977 with Ray as the Director and Attenvborough acting as Lord Dalhousie. Or at another level the racist Monopolistic idea that ONLY Jews could make good Sci-fi movies in the USA.
Yes, Hindi commercial movies are filthy smelly awful and Westerners from the UK can come in and make even better Hindi Masala movies than the locals, 'Slum DOG millionaire'. 2008, which wins 8 Oscars from Hollywood. So there!
The USA is an empire with 1000 military bases around the world, with full-spectrum dominance as its goal and PNAC as its guiding light.
It is an evil Empire, that is committing a lot of evil crimes, unbeknownst to ordinary Americans.
The USA possess the best propaganda machine in the world and is allied with Western media in EUROPE and the wider world (Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Singapore etc)
The USA, the leader of the Pack is committing crimes in Afghanistan, the most significant aspect of which is Opium cultivation and the processing of it into heroin to export to Afghan neighbours, and ALL around the world, using American military logistics, and in cooperation with mafia networks in Iran, Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine and Europe....and of course into America, which kills Americans.
All the top brass peacocks from FIELD Marshal Milley Cyrus, Mad Dog Mattis who planned the invasion of Afghanistan in the 1990's and Trump hero Mike Flynn who has served in Afghanistan, down to your basic American lieutenant know about this Urban Legend, but like any good Mafia foot soldiers remain silent. This is exactly what the Evil British Empire did in India, exporting Opium to China with disastrous consequences for that Great civilisation. Along with CIA death squads killing Afghan kids for fun, and importing ISIS CRISIS ACTORS from Syria/Iraq to keep the pot boiling. It is not a surprise that this American created Failed State of 20 years yearns for the USA to stay to sustain the Global Narco trade, bribery, kickbacks and the free money from the American taxpayer to buy their fealty....with massive corruption of the $1 trillion spent on the country by Afghans and of course plucky Americans.
When the British arrived in India, the country had experienced a very long civil war and the product of Mughal over-extension. It was specifically the fault of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and his devotion to orthodox Islam and religious zeal which resulted in him spending the better part of his grinding futile reign (1658-1707) invading the 5 Deccan Sultanates, The Hindu Maratha Confederacy and finally the Southern Hindu Vijaynagar Empire. Emperor Aurangzeb was rarely in Delhi, ruling the country dealing with mundane civil matters, and watching warily what the Persians were up to in the West. Administratively he was the best Mughal Emperor, but when you have war in your mind all the time, and enemies to crush...sustaining a military of 700,000 fighting a constant war for half a century, even with the biggest economy on earth and biggest military budget, was unsustainable.
Out of these 3 invaded entities, due to the leadership of a charismatic leader, despite the foreign occupation, death, desolation, destruction the Marathas came out on top of the situation. When the Persians under Nader Shah invaded and defeated the Mughals, it spelt the end of the Mughal empire and the ascendency of the Marathas. The Marathas themselves were then defeated by the Afghans in 1761.
So when the British arrived on the scene the country was without the power to defend the country, exhausted by war 1660-1761, and rudderless.
- Occupation by a foreign power using its military was/is never good for the occupied country, using whatever creative excuses they may have to invade a country wether in the 1750s or 2001, based on the false flag of 9/11. In India, the excuse was the Black Hole of Calcutta....initially. After full conquest, it was the civilisation movement of the savages.
- To be a third-class citizen in your own country. Destruction of self-identity and the value of heritage.
- Divide and conquer.....the propagation of minority identity.
- Introducing religion into national social and political life.
- 30 million dead from Predatory Capitalism
- The theft of $45 trillion worth of money from India.
- De-industrialisation
- The permanent arrival of mass poverty in India
- Using India's resources and personnel to fight the Empires wars around the world, and subjugate other nations
And lied about it.
Jason Hickel
Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts at Aljazeera, Qatar.
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
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.
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.
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.
After the British Raj took over in 1858, 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.
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.
Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”
And that’s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.
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.
These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.
All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped “develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.
This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.
Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear – India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely.
Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies.
In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.
