This sounds like the kind of guy I’m talking about. The mentality is either be King or Prince, but never a servant. There is no social mobility for servants.
China was like Microsoft circa 1995. They were so much ahead in the game.
But, Asian countries became insular. This was China’s big problem They had everything they needed for the Industrial Revolution long before the West. Instead they basically shut out the world. They stopped innovating. They effectively went into a dark age of their own creation. It’s really hard to blame colonialism for this, just like you can’t really blame the visigoths for Rome’s collapse. Rome let it happen.
Then Europe invented the iPod, the iPhone, the IPad and basically nobody wanted Microsoft anymore except for some resources and shit. By the time Microsoft started to fight back it was too late.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_India
Indian economy had been largely agricultural before and during the rule of the British. However, during British rule, there was a major shift from the growth of food grains to the cultivation of cash crops. This change was fostered by India’s British rulers in order to provide for the textile mills in England, the most important of them being the cotton mills of Manchester and Lancashire which were fed with raw cotton produced in India. Since 1858, committees were established to investigate the possibility of cotton cultivation in India to provide raw materials for the mills in Lancashire.[1] New technologies and industries were also introduced in India, albeit on a very small scale compared to developed nations of the world.
An estimate by Cambridge University historian Angus Maddison reveals that India’s share of the world income fell from 22.6% in 1700, comparable to Europe’s share of 23.3%, to a low of 3.8% in 1952.[2] India’s per-capita income for the year 1904 was ₤2.[3] Most economists feel that this decline was due to a systematic exploitation of India’s resources by its British rulers.
Fair enough, I was mainly thinking about China / East Asia and the Arab countries. I’m actually not real great with Indian history, just kinda lumped them in.
Now back to online dating advice for a damsell in distress.
Talk about desultory coversation…FFS!
I dated a girl who lives in Kuwait for awhile that I met in Egypt, went over to visit her in Kuwait for a spell earlier this year. She explained “wasta” to me while explaining how the legal system works there. You’re absolutely right about how the young guys hang out and people’s view on jobs being “beneath them”. It’s a luxury oil allows them to afford, but ultimately makes them unemployable outside their bubble. They do have sweet cars though, can’t argue that.
India has a serious problem with this too, as you well know, poor people get treated like s****, but that’s just the direct function extreme inequality in a poor country. Arabs on the other hand…KSA had slavery until the 1960s…Dubai pretty much still has slavery today.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the colonies got poorer. Many colonies benefited from infrastructure investments (railroads, post offices, schools) or economic activity (agriculture, mining, shipping) which were introduced by colonists, and which continued after independence.
There is always an anti-colonial sentiment in ex-colonies due to national pride. However, the truth is, colonization created a path to wealth for many local residents. My father attended a local school built by British colonists, and this enabled him to go to college/graduate school at MIT. Colonization transplanted my family into the modern world - without the British, I would be working in a rice field instead of sitting here.
Colonization established Singapore, Hong Kong, Goa, and other places as international trading hubs. Raffles Colleges across the world are still regarded as premier institutions in their respective countries. And of course since everyone speaks English now, countries like India and the Philippines were able to develop lucrative international service industries.
These benefits might have been side effects of British rule, but they are still real. Certainly, some colonies might not have benefited to the same degree as others. However, just looking at some random 100-year-old unverified income statistics does not tell us the whole story of colonial influence. We have to consider the extent to which colonization has shaped the culture and economy of ex-colonies. From my perspective, the colonies would have been worse off today without contact with the western world.
Fair points, Ohai.
The US had colonization. It did just fine.
In India and Pakistan 50 years after indepence things weren’t much better, and arguably much worse (especially Pakistan). When did they get better in India? When a) the Internet created a huge opportunity for Indians worldwide to do business in India yet with paying foreign customers b) these newly wealthy NRI’s were able to incentivize or convince the government to loosen up more regulations.
I’ve watched it happen in 6 years in India. It’s incredible. Mumbai has gone from a dump to a world class city pretty much in the time since Lehman went bankrupt. What have we done in the US? Dick.
This is objectively untrue on pretty much every point you mentioned. Under British rule there is a clear record of destroying local industries, famines, and genocides that resulted in India losing a huge level of its economic output and wealth over the period of British rule. There was plenty of agriculture, mining, shipping, and trade in India prior to British colonization. India had deep trading links all over the world.
India is poor today because it has been unable to defend itself from Western, Arab, and Central Asian forces because it has not usually been united as a nation. That has changed.
It might have been good for you and your family, but on the whole the economic policy of imperial Britain were nothing more than ploys to siphon off resources from the colonies. And they built ports, railway, schools, postal service not because they wanted to uplift the quality of life of the natives but because it facilitated exploitation. For example, most rail routes in colonial India connected ports to resource rich places not people.
Ask a descendant of a family that was forced into cultivating cash crops, such as robin and opium, how good colonialism was for them.
Also, did you know that famines were regular in British India but there hasn’t been one in India since 1947
Objectively untrue? I’m sitting in the US in the 99th percentile of income. This would not be possible without British schools (which I also attended, by the way), or if I was not fluent in English since childhood. Surely, not everyone has the same experience, but your account is not balanced at all.
Sniper, you’re not being accurate here. India had ports, and schools, and all these things (Railway was a british invention, but railways did not exist because each of these Indian states was a feudal kingdom at this time).
The only good thing about British rule was that it allowed India to organize and unite against a foreign power, just like how Spain united from a consortium of warring feudal states against Moorish rule.
Ohai you’re a millionaire ??
The point I’m trying to make though is that you can’t blame the colonizers. You gotta blame yourselves for letting it happen. When the US gets fat, complacent, and loses its edge and somebody kicks are ass, it won’t be that’s somebody’s fault. It’ll be the US’s fault for letting it happen. Innovate or die.
My account is well supported by pretty much all accounts of British rule.
Your uplifting from poverty (Congrats?) has nothing to do with British rule in India.
Er, China was not a colony of anyone (and the Opium war was not an equivalent event to colonial conquest). The legacy of colonialism does have some effect on India, but it is not at all clear that India would be a developed country like the Europeans and the US if they just had been independent, like China or Latin America (since the 1820s).
Germany had a very very limited colonial empire (a few islands in the Pacific, and a few tiny bits of Africa), yet was effectively second only to Britain. After WWI, Germany had zero colonies, massive reparations, and still rebuilt strongly enough to nearly conquer all of the other industrialized countries (basically, if Hitler hadn’t invaded Russia, we might all be speaking German today, and many of us wouldn’t be here at all).
Colonization doesn’t fully or even mostly explain European power, although the political subordination of colonial countries does help explain why many of the resources of colonies were not optimally used for the benefit of colonized peoples. Whether not being colonized would mean that these countries would industrialize efficiently is a separate question. Really, the only country which did this successfully outside of Europe and North America+Aussieland was Japan. Latin America partially succeeded in many parts. So self-determination is a helpful but not sufficient condition (in the case of Canada and Australia and Singapore and Hong Kong, self-determination was not even a necessary condition, although considerable lattitude for self-rule no doubt helped).
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As for KanKan, I was just saying how the post came across; I hoped you noticed that I said several times that what I perceived might not reflect the true you, but it was just how it sounded. So just be aware of that. My main gripe was that you seemed awfully impatient for results after less than a day - it often takes a little time for a new profile to get in the system and circulate and for people to decide to say something thoughtful to you. 
It doesn’t matter what the intentions of the British were. The fact is, they built a bunch of stuff and people used that stuff even after the British left. Are you saying India did not benefit from railroads all over the country?
Not sure what the famine thing shows. Were there no famines before British colonization?
I do blame ourselves btw. I blame it firmly on Nehru. We elected him and suffered for years.
That will be McDonald’s, Burger King’s,Taco Bell’s, Carls Jr’s, Jack in the Box’s, Pizza Hut’s, KFC’s fault.
Certainly not yours!