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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31827 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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While I'm bringing up a bunch of stuff from the past, a while back I tried to do a deep dive into colonialism's impact on India. My takeaway was that Britain performed worse than either the independent princely states or post-colonial India on pretty much every factor we care about: economic growth, literacy, life expectancy, etc.

I think the idea that Britain would have kept India from socialism is less likely considering that postwar Britain was also diving headlong into mass nationalizations of the economy, expansive welfare, industrial licensing, high taxes on income and capital, etc.

We did have a productive debate in the comments to that post:

My reply is readily visible, but link for the lazy: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sgv76g/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_31/hvnwsgw/

For the even lazier, the points I brought up were:

  1. No Britain=No unified India, or an India that wasn't unified under another Great Power.

  2. The Brits were doing better at the whole uplifting a subcontinent thing towards the end of their regime.

  3. When people point out that India did a lot better on measures like agricultural productivity and life expectancy in the decades post Independence, that is hopelessly confounded by the fact that most of this was the Green Revolution and the advent of cheap and effective antibiotics. I personally think they did all the heavy lifting.

Yeah, fully agreed the health stats are pretty confounded by general advances in agriculture and medicine - I gave you credit in the original for that point! :) Other stats like growth, literacy, access to roads, hospitals, and schools I think are harder to fudge.

I can easily imagine another colonial empire being worse than Britain (many were), and I even agree in some ways they were improving, or at least planning to improve (like the Dawes Plan for literacy). But I just don't see a good enough record for them pre-war in India, or post-war in Britain, to assume things would really be better.

Your personal experience gives you some insights into this that I don't necessarily have though.

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