British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years: How colonialism inspired fascism

British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years:​

How colonialism inspired fascism​

A scholarly study found that British colonialism caused approximately 165 million deaths in India from 1880 to 1920, while stealing trillions of dollars of wealth. The global capitalist system was founded on European imperial genocides, which inspired Adolf Hitler and led to fascism.

By
Ben Norton
Published
2022-12-12

British colonialism caused at least 100 million deaths in India in roughly 40 years, according to an academic study.
And during nearly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire stole at least $45 trillion in wealth from India, a prominent economist has calculated.
The genocidal crimes committed by European empires outside of their borders inspired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, leading to the rise of fascist regimes that carried out similar genocidal crimes within their borders.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his co-author Dylan Sullivan published an article in the respected academic journal World Development titled “Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century.”
In the report, the scholars estimated that India suffered 165 million excess deaths due to British colonialism between 1880 and 1920.
“This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust,” they noted.
They added, “Indian life expectancy did not reach the level of early modern England (35.8 years) until 1950, after decolonization.”

Hickel and Sullivan summarized their research in an article in Al Jazeera, titled “How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years.”
They explained:

According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, 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.
In a recent paper in the journal World Development, we used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 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.
While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere 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.

This staggering figure does not include the tens of millions more Indians who died in human-made famines that were caused by the British empire.
In the notorious Bengal famine in 1943, an estimated 3 million Indians starved to death, while the British government exported food and banned grain imports.
Academic studies by scientists found that the 1943 Bengal famine was not a result of natural causes; it was the product of the policies of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.


Churchill himself was a notorious racist who stated, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
In the early 1930s, Churchill also admired Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Italian dictator who founded fascism, Benito Mussolini.
Churchill’s own scholarly supporters admitted that he “expressed admiration for Mussolini” and, “if forced to choose between Italian fascism and Italian communism, Churchill unhesitatingly would choose the former.”


Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, who served as an under-secretary general of the United Nations, has exhaustively documented the crimes of the British empire, particularly under Churchill.
“Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does,” Tharoor stressed. He pointed to “the decisions that he [Churchill] personally signed off during the Bengal famine, when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or endorsed.”
Award-winning Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has estimated that the British empire drained $45 trillion of wealth from the Indian subcontinent.


In a 2018 interview with the Indian news website Mint, she explained:

Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion (equal to $45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5% rate of interest. Indians were never credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget—something you’d never find in any independent country. The ‘drain’ varied between 26-36% of the central government budget. It would obviously have made an enormous difference if India’s huge international earnings had been retained within the country. India would have been far more developed, with much better health and social welfare indicators. There was virtually no increase in per capita income between 1900 and 1946, even though India registered the second largest export surplus earnings in the world for three decades before 1929.
Since all the earnings were taken by Britain, such stagnation is not surprising. Ordinary people died like flies owing to under-nutrition and disease. It is shocking that Indian expectation of life at birth was just 22 years in 1911. The most telling index, however, is food grain availability. Because the purchasing power of ordinary Indians was being squeezed by high taxes, the per capita annual consumption of food grains went down from 200kg in 1900 to 157kg on the eve of World War II, and further plummeted to 137kg by 1946. No country in the world today, not even the least developed, is anywhere near the position India was in 1946.

Patnaik emphasized:

The modern capitalist world would not exist without colonialism and the drain. During Britain’s industrial transition, 1780 to 1820, the drain from Asia and the West Indies combined was about 6 percent of Britain’s GDP, nearly the same as its own savings rate. After the mid-19th century, Britain was running current account deficits with Continental Europe and North America, and at the same time, it was investing massively in these regions, which meant running capital account deficits too. The two deficits summed to large and rising balance of payments (BoP) deficits with these regions.
How was it possible for Britain to export so much capital—which went into building railways, roads and factories in the U.S. and continental Europe? Its BoP deficits with these regions were being settled by appropriating the financial gold and forex earned by the colonies, especially India. Every unusual expense like war was also put on the Indian budget, and whatever India was not able to meet through its annual exchange earnings was shown as its indebtedness, on which interest accumulated.

In this article:Britain, capitalism, colonialism, famine, fascism, genocide, India, Shashi Tharoor, UK, United Kingdom, Utsa Patnaik, Winston Churchill

 

[Joe Shearer]

Horrifying.

 

[SaadH]

Yes they did, they also took our women and children as slaves. They robbed us of our wealth and most importantly our cultural heritage. It's fortunate we are self aware people, we are 5000 years old so we know how to preserve our culture through harsh times.

View attachment 925365

Bakastanis are a myopic bunch, your religion is not your personality.

Your culture is still preserved, you speak the same basic language, eat the same food, worship the same diaries, albeit in horizontal position and behold the same slave mentality you had 3000 and/or 4000 thousand years ago.

 

[Redbeanpaste]

just to play the devil's advocate for a bit

the empire was horribly exploitative toward this part of the world, our subcontinent in particular

but they also made, most famously, the railways and some other infra.

so there was some value added.. enduring scene hai, we still using that xhit lol

What makes you think that south Asia would not have railways if the British didn't make them?

Japan has railways better than Britain and it was never colonized.

They built railways to take the wealth out of the colonies as fast as they could. If they could have ripped it up and taken it back with them in 1947 , they would have.

It's very important as a national ideology we move away from religion being the key driver.

I have explained this in my other posts. Making a foreign religion the mainstay, the core ideology opens up to interference from hostile agencies. TTP is a classic example where Afghans used Islam to cultivate an anti state militancy and compromised the army. Same with Iran and shias, they ideologically lean towards Iran. Can they be trusted with our nuclear secrets if they hold office? No.

In order for Pakistan to take its final form and become impenetrable, it needs to separate religion from the state and the ideology is solely pakistaniat. That's not to say you can't practice whatever faith in the privacy of your own homes or places of worship, whatever floats your boat. But the ideology of the state must be secular, it must recognize its history, accept ALL of its history as its own, see all foreign invasions as negative regardless of who the invader was, reduce the space India has in claiming ownership of our history, become congruent with who and what we are.

Pakistan was taken over by the establishment in the 50s and its ideology warped when it went from a republic to an Islamic republic. Once again our development was retarded and a half a century long campaign of creating this breed of Pakistani that is overdosed on religion to the point it's literally their personality. Flirting with violent extremist ideology which brings into question the concept of Pakistan as a state, lack logic and reasoning and ultimately interference from hostile foreign agencies in the form of AQ, TTP, and countless other anti state militant groups which ended up costing 80k Pakistani lives, 20 years lost and counting, $100 billion loss, loss in trade, loss in key relationships and gave a clear road for India to steam ahead. This all could have been avoided had we stuck to Jinnah's original design.

What then was the point of shedding so much blood to create Pakistan in the first place ? If we are to have separation of church and state might as well have remained part of India.

 

[Redbeanpaste]

Now they complain about immigration in UK. Their whole economic might is built on our stolen wealth.
Let's breed every white woman with a subcontinent sperm until the white man be seen only in a museum. As a rare and endangered species.

How and who would this help ?

 

[Joe Shearer]

British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years:​

How colonialism inspired fascism​

A scholarly study found that British colonialism caused approximately 165 million deaths in India from 1880 to 1920, while stealing trillions of dollars of wealth. The global capitalist system was founded on European imperial genocides, which inspired Adolf Hitler and led to fascism.

By
Ben Norton
Published
2022-12-12

British colonialism caused at least 100 million deaths in India in roughly 40 years, according to an academic study.
And during nearly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire stole at least $45 trillion in wealth from India, a prominent economist has calculated.
The genocidal crimes committed by European empires outside of their borders inspired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, leading to the rise of fascist regimes that carried out similar genocidal crimes within their borders.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his co-author Dylan Sullivan published an article in the respected academic journal World Development titled “Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century.”
In the report, the scholars estimated that India suffered 165 million excess deaths due to British colonialism between 1880 and 1920.
“This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust,” they noted.
They added, “Indian life expectancy did not reach the level of early modern England (35.8 years) until 1950, after decolonization.”

Hickel and Sullivan summarized their research in an article in Al Jazeera, titled “How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years.”
They explained:



This staggering figure does not include the tens of millions more Indians who died in human-made famines that were caused by the British empire.
In the notorious Bengal famine in 1943, an estimated 3 million Indians starved to death, while the British government exported food and banned grain imports.
Academic studies by scientists found that the 1943 Bengal famine was not a result of natural causes; it was the product of the policies of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.


Churchill himself was a notorious racist who stated, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
In the early 1930s, Churchill also admired Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Italian dictator who founded fascism, Benito Mussolini.
Churchill’s own scholarly supporters admitted that he “expressed admiration for Mussolini” and, “if forced to choose between Italian fascism and Italian communism, Churchill unhesitatingly would choose the former.”


Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, who served as an under-secretary general of the United Nations, has exhaustively documented the crimes of the British empire, particularly under Churchill.
“Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does,” Tharoor stressed. He pointed to “the decisions that he [Churchill] personally signed off during the Bengal famine, when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or endorsed.”
Award-winning Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has estimated that the British empire drained $45 trillion of wealth from the Indian subcontinent.


In a 2018 interview with the Indian news website Mint, she explained:

Patnaik emphasized:

In this article:Britain, capitalism, colonialism, famine, fascism, genocide, India, Shashi Tharoor, UK, United Kingdom, Utsa Patnaik, Winston Churchill

One's blood boils on reading this.

Forgive.

Never forget.

 

[Muhammed45]

One's blood boils on reading this.

Forgive.

Never forget.

Our blood also boils when we see our brothers and sisters in Palestine being murdered, terrorized and displaced by the same colonialists, terrorists, fascists and Zionists in Israel, you Indian hypocrite.

They say we have every right to do them all with Palestinians because of Holocaust. I ask, why don't they occupy a part of Germany for compensation?

Talk about your hypocrisy, if you hypocrite gave a damn about those people murdered by British colonizers, then you would have also sympathized with innocent Palestinians being displaced for a lame lie of Holocaust.

 

[Foinikas]

And yet,all I see on this forum is "The French! The French! France! France in Algeria!"

 

[iamnobody]

Aryans invaders wiped out the Moolnivasis from Pakistan and North India.

Atleast something good came out of the British rule.

If the British had taken care of the useless eaters up North. India would be 1st world country.

 

[Samurai_assassin]

Yet Pakistans establishment and politicians still bow down in prostration to the white western colonial master.

 

[jamahir]

Our blood also boils when we see our brothers and sisters in Palestine being murdered, terrorized and displaced by the same colonialists, terrorists, fascists and Zionists in Israel, you Indian hypocrite.

They say we have every right to do them all with Palestinians because of Holocaust. I ask, why don't they occupy a part of Germany for compensation?

Talk about your hypocrisy, if you hypocrite gave a damn about those people murdered by British colonizers, then you would have also sympathized with innocent Palestinians being displaced for a lame lie of Holocaust.

Hypocrisy is you doing it. Instead of shaming @Joe Shearer about Palestinians you should have considered what your Irani mullah government is doing to Iranis since last year and since 1979. Secondly, the Irani mullah government in supporting the Israel-government-seeded mullah group in Palestine - Hamas - is doing more harm to the Palestinians than any good.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Our blood also boils when we see our brothers and sisters in Palestine being murdered, terrorized and displaced by the same colonialists, terrorists, fascists and Zionists in Israel, you Indian hypocrite.

They say we have every right to do them all with Palestinians because of Holocaust. I ask, why don't they occupy a part of Germany for compensation?

Talk about your hypocrisy, if you hypocrite gave a damn about those people murdered by British colonizers, then you would have also sympathized with innocent Palestinians being displaced for a lame lie of Holocaust.

We do, and unless you were blinded by sheer stupidity, you would have known that.

That we keep strong relations with Israel at the same time is based on our recognition of the right to exist of Israel. The two are not mutually exclusive, as your theocratic state seems to think.

When we see the international situation, from our point of view, while we wish Israel to restrain herself, and to deal with the people of Palestine with equity and keeping human rights on the same level as her national security, we also do not see the possibility of Palestinians gaining anything from a campaign of terror.

It is also not useful for a state that brutalises its own citizens, and batters young women to death, to mount a campaign of terror through proxies against Israel. The result is only what has been seen: a series of inglorious defeats, behind a smokescreen of tall talk about what will happen, what can happen, what should happen. It has not happened, and it will never happened, until people bring peace and tolerance within their own countries, rather than venturing out to solve other problems that have nothing to do with them.

a lame lie of Holocaust.

Are you one of those creeps that denies the Holocaust?

 

[jamahir]

It is also not useful for a state that brutalises its own citizens, and batters young women to death

@Muhammed45 knows that unlike against Iraq, Libyan Jamahiriya, Syria, Venezuela etc the US government and rest of NATO will not wage a regime change war against Iran. The mullah government of Iran is just what NATO desires. When Mohammad Mossadegh began Socialistic steps NATO did regime change against him in 1953. Khomenei, Khamenei and whatever similar nonsense comes after them, need not fear regime change.

 

[Redbeanpaste]

Hypocrisy is you doing it. Instead of shaming @Joe Shearer about Palestinians you should have considered what your Irani mullah government is doing to Iranis since last year and since 1979. Secondly, the Irani mullah government in supporting the Israel-government-seeded mullah group in Palestine - Hamas - is doing more harm to the Palestinians than any good.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. What the current Iranian government is doing to its own citizens is at least as bad if not worse than anything Israelis did to Palestine.

 

[iamnobody]

Hypocrisy is you doing it. Instead of shaming @Joe Shearer about Palestinians you should have considered what your Irani mullah government is doing to Iranis since last year and since 1979. Secondly, the Irani mullah government in supporting the Israel-government-seeded mullah group in Palestine - Hamas - is doing more harm to the Palestinians than any good.

Joe Shearers Brahman ancestors wiped out Moolnivasis and made untouchables wear shoe necklace and imposed breast tax on their women.

 

[Muhammed45]

Hypocricy is you doing it. Instead of shaming @Joe Shearer about Palestinians you should have considered what your Irani mullah government doing to Iranis since last year and since 1979. Secondly, the Irani mullah government in supporting the Israel-government-seeded mullah group in Palestine - Hamas - is doing more harm to the Palestinians than any good.

Israel is a military outpost of western neo colonial powers. Israelis are the same cancers that had affected Indian sub-continent and murdered Indians by 4+ million per year. Holocaust on the other hand was introduced to colonize Palestine. We taught Palestinians how to fight back.

Whenever i post something about Holocaust the turd comes and leaves an angry emoji under the comment. @Joe Shearer i am talking about you hypocrite.

We do, and unless you were blinded by sheer stupidity, you would have known that.

No you don't, hypocrite!

That we keep strong relations with Israel at the same time is based on our recognition of the right to exist of Israel. The two are not mutually exclusive, as your theocratic state seems to think

That you recoginze the Zionist cancer, just goes to show your inferiority complex as an Indian sub human (from fascists' point of view currently occupying Palestine)

When we see the international situation, from our point of view, while we wish Israel to restrain herself, and to deal with the people of Palestine with equity and keeping human rights on the same level as her national security, we also do not see the possibility of Palestinians gaining anything from a campaign of terror.

As an Indian, you have no right to talk about human rights, as the rape capital and as the oppressor of kashmiris.

It is also not useful for a state that brutalises its own citizens, and batters young women to death, to mount a campaign of terror through proxies against Israel.

Hey piece of shit, first of all you are a cow urine drinking already drown in cow dung. Whatever Iran has done so far is its own internal matter. And believe me, no one gives a shit about the mindset of an Indian urine drinker.

Are you one of those creeps that denies the Holocaust?

It looks like an Indian rapist has raped your mother and you turd has popped out of her rear.