RES: [lbo-talk] Is India Exploited by imperialism?

Alexandre Fenelon afenelon at zaz.com.br
Thu Jan 22 08:54:06 PST 2004


I beg to differ. The Portuguese wine industry is still there, alive and kicking (been there last year, excellent porto, itself a British invention as I was told by local wine makers). But where is the British textile industry today? In the same place as the British Empire, I suppose, on which the sun finally set (btw, as someone in a letter to the satirical column "Straight Dope" once observed, Great Britain should change its name to FGB - Formerly Great Britain).

-Yes, but the survival of Portuguese wine industry didn´t prevent that -country from suffering a long decline in the following 200 years, of -which he emerged as one of the poorest countries in Europe (and the -poorest of Western Europe). And the Methuen treaty helped Portugal -decline as it deprived the country from a captive market for teir -textiles (Brazil was forced to open its market to British products -too). On the ruining of British industry, who is worried about that? -Textiles today are an activity of developing countries. Britain doesn´t -need them. And look to the fact that even after years of relative -decline Britain is still the 4th economy worldwide.

I am pretty certain (I do not have time to look for quotes though), Marx saw British-style capitalism as a force of progress in India, a force that would eventualy dismantle its feudal structures.

-Data I have from India economy under the British point to an unmitigated -disaster from the point of view of economic performance.

1-Almost no growth in 150 years (Maddison) 2-Decline of 80% in the per capita industrial production from 1750-1900 (Bairoch)-Bairoch´s numbers, however, were contested by Maddison 3-A devastating sequence of famines, with 12-30 million deaths in late 1800´s (Mike Davis, Late Vitorian Holocaust) 4-A 20% decline in life expectancy from 1870-1921 (Kingsley Davis, quoted by Mike Davis) 5-85% of illiteracy rate in 1947, life expectancy close to 30 years by the same period 6-India public budget: 2% in agriculture and education, 4% in public works, 33% in the army + police.(Burton Stein, quoted by Mike Davis)

-Not a regime I would like to live under, would you? By contrast, the Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan, brutal as it was, seem to have resulted in some improvements in the economy. The same thing could be said about the Russia empire, where the periphery in some cases had better living standards than the Russians themselves.

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