[adjejmxbdjdn]

The history this article presents is complete nonsense.

India didn’t fight a “war of independence”, but India fought for its independence. Lots of Indians died in that fight for Independence.

This article also ignores the massive transfer of wealth, and resources from India to the UK during WW2 (and before).

And the author seems to forget entirely about the existence of Pakistan with which India fought multiple wars, engaged in a war to liberate Bangladesh, and also has been in a state of essentially a Cold War ever since.

History would have liked very different if the Indian government had not kicked out US companies and nationalized them while they were looking for cheaper manufacturing destinations. So they chose China instead, brought a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise.

The differing geopolitical starting points of India and China is most evident by the fact that China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council while India isn’t.

In reality, someone who was actually in 1950 and not someone who was pretending to be in 1950, would not have expected India to survive another 75 years, never mind compete with China.

[rayiner]

You’re ignoring the most important point. India had a larger per capita GDP than China until the 1990s. As the article points out, China’s median income was lower than India’s until 2000. All those historical things you mention about India happened before that time period and were already baked into the numbers as of 1990-2000.

Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.

[oa335]

> Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.

Can you expand? What was the EIC doing in India?

[rayiner]

“Wealth transfer” implies that there’s a pile of money in one place that’s moved to another place. That’s not what happened with India. At first, the EIC was a very profitable middleman. It was like Ticketmaster—it made a profit on a trade monopoly between Indian producers and European customers. The nature of middlemen monopolists is that they get rich through a tax on value creating transactions. But they don’t represent a transfer of wealth from one country to the other.

Say a shipment of tea is worth 100 pounds in India, but 400 pounds to the British. EIC has a monopoly on the transaction. They pay the Indian producer slightly over 100 pounds, and charge the British consumer slightly below 400 pounds. They collect the surplus of 300 pounds. But money isn’t being taken from India! Instead, India’s loss is the lost opportunity to get an higher price for their goods. But British consumers also lost—they were overcharged. The EIC captured the value created by the Britain-India transaction.

When the EIC became a government, they got into the business of wealth extraction. They usurped the Mughals prerogative to levy taxes. But this wasn’t profitable! Within less than 20 years of the Battle of Plessay, the East India Company was in dire financial straights. It couldn’t make royalty payments to England and owed large sums of money to the Bank of England. That’s what precipitated the government takeover of the EIC.