-----Mensagem original----- De: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]Em nome de C. G. Estabrook Enviada em: quarta-feira, 21 de janeiro de 2004 21:20 Para: LBO Assunto: Re: [lbo-talk] Is India Exploited by imperialism?
[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"?
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[See notes 45-47 at <http://www.understandingpower.com/chap7.htm> for documentation.]
-Yes, and according to Maddison, India under the Bristish rule had a per capita GDP growth of miserable 20% from 1820 to 1950, while UK grew by 300% in the same period. Actually India in the first 23 years of independence grew more than in 130 years of British rule. And this process of forced desindustrialization explains a lot. Still, it is hard to say to what extent independent India is exploited by imperialism. I don´t think if the word "exploit" is the best for the situation. I would simply say that imperialist countries establish "the rules of the game" (trying to impose to poor countries an agenda that included financial liberalization, privatization, intellectual property rights and so on). Powerful countries like China and India are much more able to resist this agenda by ignoring some pressures (India, for instance developed a pharmaceutical industry by ignoring intelectual property laws),and so they get the benefits from wordwide trade expansion withouth paying the full price. Still, with increasing dependency on external trade and FDI, they will become also more vulnerable to external pressures. China will be probably more vulnerable than India due to its increased exposition to external trade and FDI (Hi, Ulhas, how is FDI as % of India nominal GDP???) --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.558 / Virus Database: 350 - Release Date: 02/01/04