Well that was the calculation in 2018 by “renowned” Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik (they’re always “renowned”). But by 2020 it was up to $64 trillion. Truly amazing, that’s 28 times as much as Britain’s GDP in 2023! In just two years! Shocking!

Before getting to the modern calculations you have to see what they’re based on:

Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.

Even when the East India monopoly was no more the cunning Poms had another way of getting their pound of flesh:

Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.

And of course all these goods were either consumed in Britain or flogged to other parts of the world for huge profits. Brilliant! But why didn’t Britain pull the same stunt with all its other colonies, like Canada and Australia where “Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism”.

Bastards! No wonder Marxists hate them. Capitalists that is. But probably all of the British as well; the Working Class could have stopped this but they sold out.

Of course this has always been the Marxist argument; if you (or your nation) got rich you must have stolen it, if not from the Toiling Masses then their even more starved comrades in your colonies overseas. As I noted in a post five years ago on then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his issues with Jews:

No, I think all this goes back to Corbyn’s basic Marxism. More precisely his Lennism, and even more precisely the World Systems Theory and Dependency Theory pushed by Marxists like Wallerstein, Baran and Singer. As with Lenin’s take on Imperialism decades earlier the whole idea is that the workers of a nation-state have been bought off by colonialist exploitation; producing enough goodies to prevent the “scientifically predictable” uprising of the domestic Toilers. In effect an intra-national exploited class of workers is replaced by an international exploited class of workers.

No word yet on how many trillions Britain screwed out of their other colonies.

There was a good response to this crap almost immediately back in a 2021 article. It acknowledges that at the time the Google query ‘$45 trillion’ got three million results, including India’s Minister of External Affairs (Hindu Nationalism – Yay). But it then looks at the shady calculations, which I’ll work backwards:

[Patnaik] decides to compound it at 5 per cent annual interest right up until 2016. The choice of interest rate outstrips the modern economic growth rate which “greatly exaggerate[s] the magnitude of the drain” as the historian Clive Dewey puts it. In addition, the assumption that an investment would provide such returns is unlikely and unprovable. If such returns could be guaranteed, then Britain’s drain fails in comparison to the drain caused by some lowly thief in the early Mauryan empire who stole a loaf of bread: assuming he stole the equivalent of two pounds, he has robbed some poor sod’s family of a figure so obscenely large, it outstrips the combined GDP of every country on Earth! 

Compound interest and time. Cool. No wonder she could re-visit the subject just a few years later and crank it up to $64 trillion. Pity the Marxists don’t apply that to the idea of a minimum wage worker investing in the stockmarket over forty years instead of relying on tax-based State pension, basically the cure for poverty. But the article nails more of the bullshit in Patnaik’s analysis. Herewith a summary of the analysis of the “costs” piled up by Patnaik even before she applies interest to it:

  • Money was borrowed from London and that, plus interest, was public debt.
    It built railways, roads and irrigation networks and provided millions of jobs, and the interest rates were low thanks to its position in the empire.
  • “Exorbitant” salaries paid to the British.
    Nothing compared to the Mughal elite who handed over 82% of the empire’s entire budget to a few thousand people. That built palaces, not modern India.
  • They paid for the army.
    Every nation maintains an army, and India was no exception, especially during its own civil wars, which actually repaired all the broken Mughal trade routes, re-establishing the country – and they didn’t need a navy thanks to the RN.
  • The other costs of wars.
    The same argument applies to things like the 1857 mutiny and even those waged by the East India Company. Hardly a pur “drain” when they pull your country together rather than either tearing it apart or letting it fall apart.
     
  • Repatriated business profits.
    Like every other colony in the world, plus more jobs for millions with incomes in India that would have not been created otherwise. Even modern Nationalist Hindu India pushes hard for foreign investment.
  • The subsidised imports of goods.
    For a thirty-year period (1757 to 1784) a small amount of Bengal’s tax revenue was siphoned off to pay for exports to Britain – and was vastly outweighed by British capital investment in India.

In other words the usual bullshit of assumption piled upon assumption. Fortunately even these dickheads acknowledge that it literally cannot be paid back, so it’s all just propaganda grist to their usual Marxist mill of “capitalist exploitation”. Aside from anything else they refuse to acknowledge that India since independence in 1947, has not recovered or advanced as far as non-European nations like Japan that were almost completely destroyed.

Maybe it’s something other than British colonisation weighing India down?