p.54
G.W.F.Hegel, the great German Philosopher, wrote: From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the Earth presents...The way, by which these treasures have passed to the West, has at all times been a matter of world-historical importance....
p.55
This by the end of the seventeenth century India controlled a quarter of the world trade in textiles. "India cottons transformed the dress of Europe...Lighter and cheaper than woolens, more decorative....cotton was made for a new wide world...
p.56
The English learned about cotton textiles from India and soon they turned the tables. English textiles brought the industrial revolution to Britain but destroyed life of millions of Indian weavers.
The annual revenues of the Moghu emperor Aurangzeb...were more than ten times those of his contemporary Louis XIV....
India had a 22.6 percent share of the world's GDP (in the 17th century...
p.57
Why did India b ecome instead one o f the most impoverished countries? Despite a dynamic and a growing commercial sector which responded to market forces and extensive foreign trade, the truth is that 18th century India was significantly behind Western Europe in technology, institutions, and ideas. Neither an agricultural revolution nor a scientific revolution had occurred.
..the peasant was extremely poor. the dramatic inequality between the rich few and the impoverished many. Because the rapacious Mughal state.....
p. 59 (on the theory that Britains colonial rule was the source of Indians poverty)
..Britain taxed the Indian farmer heavily..Agriculture lost its capacity to generate savings, and a series of famines followed...Food also declined in areas where jute, indigo, cotton tea, and coffee plantations were set up... cash crops were profitable.. the surplus remained with the Euroeans...
According to Sat Pal, this represented a massive drain of Indias wealth - 8% of our gross national product was transferred to Britain each year....
p.60
As the yease went by, however, a new generation of historians emerged who began to challenge the classic picture. These serious expended great time and effort interpreting the historical data.
..."drain of wealth" from India to Britains...was only 1.5 percent of GNP every year.....argued that India's payments to Britain were for real military and civilian services and to service capital investments. Also, the oerhead cost to maitain the British establishmet - the so called home charges - was in fact quite small. If India had maintained its won army and navy, it might have had to spend more money. They concluded that India did have a balance of payments surplus which Britain used to finance its part of its deficit, but they said that India was partially compensated for it through the import of gold and silver into India
...
p 61
The revisionists most serious challenge was to the nationalists thesis that Britain had deliberately deindustrialized India. They agreed with my uncle that Indian industry declined in the nineteenth century. They calculated that India enjoyed 17.6 percent of the worlds industrial produciton in 1830, while Britains share was 9.5 percent. By 1900, India's share had declined to 1.7 Percent, while Britains's had grown to 18.6 persent. But this decline, they argued was caused by technology.
...
Handlooms all over the world gave way to mill-made cloth and weavers everywhere lost their jobs no less than in India. Unfortunately there were more weavers affected in India because India was the largest maker of textiles in the world.
....
By 1875, India began to export textiles again and slowly recaptured the domestic market. In 1896, Indian mills supplied only 8% of total cloth consumed in India. In 1913 20 percent, in 1936 62 percent and in 1945 76 percent.
......
p. 62
Manufacturing output grew 5.6 percent per annum between 1913 and 1938, well above the world average of 3.3 percent.....
...
By the Second World War, the pre-First World War supremacy of British business was broken and Indian entrepeneurs were now stronger and in a position to buy out the business of the departing foreigners.
...
The truth is that the Indian colony was not terribly profitable to Britain. After the crude period of exploitation in the eighteenth centuty was over, Britain's rising prosperity in the next century owed more to its free trade with the "new world" and to its investments in America.
p 63.
Max Weber, the German sociologist, who admired the richness of India, attributed the absence of development to the caste system. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal found that India's social system and attitudes were an important cause of its low productivity, primitive production techniques, and low levels of living. According to Myrdal, poor work discipline, contempt for manual work, lack of puncturality, alertness, and ambition, low aptitude for cooperation and superstition were the result of inhibiting attitudes.
...
p-64
Thus, capitalism developed in the Eastern countries only when they came into contact with the West and its ideas of economic modernity.
...
p. 65
He blames India's enervating heat. For this reason, rich countries lie in temperate zones....
...
I am always sceptical of easy cultural or geographic explanations. In my experience successful Hindu entrepereneurs can be both extremely religious and aggressive in business. The Indian farmer responds quickly to market-based incentives, a s the een revolution demonstrates. Brahmins will plow their own land in traditional Uttar Pradesh if they have to....
..
p 68
Indias leaders took this to mean that foreign trade and foreign capital were responsible for our poverty, and closed our economy and pursued a policy of self-sufficiency. In the process, they wasted an opportunity. They forgot that India had a centuries old traditionof trading before the British came, ....
Asian tigers demonstrated that it can be done - a pook nation can become rich, and very quickly. They took less than thirty years to transform their societies, whreas the West needed a hundred. Latecomers too are sometimes blessed.