"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
> [From a discussion by Noam Chomsky in *Understanding Power* (2002), ed.
> Mitchell & Schoeffel, p. 257. --CGE]
>
> Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on
> industrial revolutions -- but they didn't get very far, because England
> has more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example...
>
> The same thing also happened in Britain's earliest "experiment" with these
> ideas, in what was called Bengal, in India. In fact, Bengal was one of the
> first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive
> [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise:
> Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as
> "the Manchester of India." It was rich and populous, there was
> high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources,
> jute, all sorts of things -- it was in fact comparable to England in its
> manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off.
> Well, look at it today: Dacca, "the Manchester of India," is the capital
> of Bangladesh -- the absolute symbol of disaster. And that's because the
> British just despoiled the country and destroyed it, by the equivalent of
> what we would today call "structural adjustment" [i.e. economic policies
> from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund which expose Third
> World economies to foreign penetration and control].
>
> In fact, India generally was a real competitor with England: as late as
> the 1820s, the British were learning advance techniques of steel-making
> there, India was building ships for the British navy at the time of the
> Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815], they had a developed textiles industry, they
> were producing more iron than all of Europe combined -- so the British
> just proceeded to de-industrialize the country by force and turn it into
> an impoverished rural society. Was that competition in the "free market"?
>
> ***
>
> [See notes 45-47 at <http://www.understandingpower.com/chap7.htm> for
> documentation.]
>
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--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901