Getting Ready For Another Trip To India Made Me Think Of The Impact Of European Colonialism There

Not Auschwitz or Dachau, British colonial India

When I graduated from college, I decided I didn’t want to go to graduate school like all my friends were doing. I had no plan and needed time to detox and think clearly about my future. I flew to Europe with my girlfriend, picked up a VW camper van that I had pre-purchased in America and drove around Europe and Morocco for the summer. Morocco gave me a taste for “The East.” I liked it.

We went up to the Isle of Wight Festival in the U.K., saw Bob Dylan perform “I Threw It All Away” in a light drizzle and the next day she flew back to America to finish school. I spent a couple of days were an old friend and famous groupie, Susie Marijuana and then set out for India. I spent the better part of the next two years doing that: Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Nepal… what a gift!

I entered India through the Punjab in the northwest, drove to Delhi, down to Bombay, Goa, Kerala, Pondicherry, into Tamil Nadu, where I took a ferry from Dhanushkodi to Talaimannar in Sri Lanka (where I spent a month), then up the east coast of India to Madras, Mahé, Yanam (two former French colonies), Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Bhubaneswar and on to Calcutta. The year before the King of Nepal had built the first paved road— the Tribhuvan Rajpath— from the Indian border into Kathmandu; that was a breathtaking drive. Anyway, I just wanted to make it clear that I had spent time not just in the former British colony of India itself, but in the French (Pondicherry, Mahé and Yanam) and Portuguese colonies (Goa, where I rented this house on the beach and lived for a while).

That's my van parked in front of my house in Goa, 1970

There was a fascinating report by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel yesterday on the horrors of British rule in India between 1880 and 1920 How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years. “According to research by the economic historian Robert Allen,” they wrote, “extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history. Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920— the height of Britain’s imperial power— was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years… [S]ome 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.”

Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.

…[S]omewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.

How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life? There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector. Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world, exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete. This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.

According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs, allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.

This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country. As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.

To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population and then used the revenues to buy Indian products— indigo, grain, cotton, and opium— thus obtaining these goods for free. These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies— the United States, Canada and Australia.

This system drained India of goods worth trillions of dollars in today’s money. The British were merciless in imposing the drain, forcing India to export food even when drought or floods threatened local food security. Historians have established that tens of millions of Indians died of starvation during several considerable policy-induced famines in the late 19th century, as their resources were syphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies.

Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences of their policies. They watched as millions starved and yet they did not change course. They continued to knowingly deprive people of resources necessary for survival. The extraordinary mortality crisis of the late Victorian period was no accident. The historian Mike Davis argues that Britain’s imperial policies “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”

They don’t mention the former French and Portuguese colonies but their research is generally applicable to French, Portuguese and Dutch colonialism as well. All three European powers were primarily interested in exploiting India's resources and labor for their own benefit— just as the British were— and they all implemented policies that had a devastating impact on the Indian people. The French and Portuguese used forced labor to work their plantations and factories. They also imposed heavy taxes on the Indian people, which often led to poverty and famine. In addition, they both tried converting Indians to Christianity, especially the Portuguese who brought 200 years of Inquisition in Goa, torturing and killing thousands of Indians as well as destroying temples and other cultural sites. Nepal largely escaped the ravages of heavy colonialism.