Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Jason Hickel.
He is an academic at the University of London and a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.
He wrote this important thing.
You got to read this.
It's going to blow your mind.
It's at aljazeera.com from back in December.
How Britain stole $45 trillion from India and lied about it.
How are you doing?
I'm very well, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
What an interesting article.
First of all, $45 trillion, that sounds like a lot.
Are we adjusting for inflation?
Yeah, so that's converted from pounds into dollars.
It's raised at an historical rate of interest that's actually conservatively calculated, so a little bit less than the historical rate that actually applies in order to make sure it's not overblown.
But this would be then not measured in 18th or 19th century dollars, but in 2019 dollars.
That is in today's money, exactly.
These are calculations made by the economist Utsav Patnik and published in Columbia University Press.
Now listen, I got to admit to you, as a mathematician, I'm a great anti-war guy.
I wonder how much of that total is really the compound interest.
Just for understanding's sake, charging interest or calculating it, it sounds fair.
Don't get me wrong, but I just want to know how much of the total is the compound interest versus just the total stolen.
That's a good question.
It's really difficult to say because it's over almost a 200-year long period.
It's impossible to really divide it up because it wasn't all in one year, if you see what I mean.
It had to be adjusted by every year.
The average adjustment is about 5%, which is lower than the market rate.
The reason that's important is because basically we're talking here about income on foreign trade.
If that income had been kept in India, it would have been invested in India's own productive capacity.
That's why those market rates, interest rates are really important to include.
Before they added the 5% interest, which I agree with you, sounds fair, but was there a previous total before that?
I'm not sure.
It's divided up into three different periods.
Each period has a different total.
Basically, what we did is we take the figure for the very middle of the period and then we go years from there until 2019.
It's really difficult to give a single total figure for the original amounts just because it varies by period.
I see.
Now, you do link here to the original study so that people can go back and dig through the numbers if they want.
But suffice it to say, trillions and trillions and trillions of modern-day dollars worth of wealth taken from the people of India and by the British Empire.
It's really an interesting story, the way that the scam worked.
They didn't just say, stick them up, your money or your life here.
That's interesting.
For a long time, people have known about how Britain forcibly extracted money from India through tax revenues.
But it's been very little known up until now how they managed to use not only that, but also extraction through the international trade system.
The way it works basically is this.
It's important to understand that before 1765, Britain bought goods from India, like textiles and rice and so on, just like they would from any other country, like from France or from Italy, by paying India silver.
After 1765, the East India Company, which is a British company, established the right of direct taxation over India and a monopoly on international trade.
All international trade had to go through the company.
What they did is, instead of buying Indian goods with silver, as was the usual practice, they bought Indian goods with tax revenues extracted from Indians.
Effectively, with one hand, they would forcibly collect tax revenues.
Remember, they were not a legitimate government.
Forcibly extract tax revenues with one hand and then use a portion of that, about a third of it, to then buy Indian goods with the other.
Those goods were shipped abroad, stored in London, and then shipped elsewhere for sale to other countries.
Basically, they pocketed 100% of the markup on those goods, plus the original value, which they didn't pay for in the first place, if that makes any sense.
It's so funny.
It just reminds me of last week, where they're saying, oh no, the government shutdown cost the economy $60 billion or whatever it was.
Well, they sound like they're just parroting the British Empire here.
If we didn't take this money from you and then spend it on you, then what would you do without us?
Yeah, that's an interesting comparison.
The difference, though, is that in this case, we're talking about an external power that was extracting taxes.
Yeah, well, I'm talking about Washington, D.C., an external power.
Right, okay.
No, I get it.
No, I'm just joshing with you.
But it is basically the same accounting trick, right?
Yeah, in a way.
It really depends on how you define international borders and the legitimacy of power.
I guess if you believe that Washington, D.C. is not a legitimate power, then yeah, you could make that claim, I suppose.
But then the money that D.C. extracts and then spends doesn't go abroad.
It goes back into the country.
So whether you think that's legitimate or not, that's the way it's defined.
But with the case of India, it was very different, where you had an external occupying force extracting taxes and then using that to buy goods, which were then siphoned away from the country.
And then the income from those goods were kept in London, not sent back to India.
And then, of course, things changed after the Raj took power, after the British crown took direct control in 1858.
Basically, the East India Company's monopoly broke down so anyone in the world could buy goods from India suddenly.
So Britain had to figure out a way to sort of keep maintaining their control on the yield of Indian goods.
And they did it through an even sneakier method.
They basically allowed people to buy goods from India using special council bills, which were only issued by London.
To get those council bills, you had to pay gold or silver to London, and then you would get the council bills and then buy goods from India.
The Indian traders would then have to cash those council bills in for local currency.
And the local currency was paid to them from tax revenues.
So once again, they were not actually paid.
They were defrauded.
And all of the gold and silver that was paid for Indian exports ended up in London.
And that's really important because the consequence of this is that even during a period where India was running a massive trade surplus with the rest of the world, it showed up as a deficit in the accounts because all of the income from that trade was being captured in London.
And so as a consequence, India had to borrow from its colonial overlords to finance its own imports, putting them further into debt and further cementing the control that the British Empire had over India.
So it was really quite a scandalous scheme.
And of course, Indians typically didn't notice because the person that came to collect their taxes was not the same person that was paying them for goods, if that makes any sense.
If it had been the same person, they would have quickly smelled a rat, but that was carefully covered up.
Well, and also, I mean, in the worst, most obvious case scenario, you have, you know, they come and tax one town and then they show up a week later to buy stuff from the same people with their same money or whatever.
Typically, it wouldn't be like that anyway, right?
It would be take the tax money from one region and spend it in another one town from one town and spend it in a way that it seems like it's new money coming to the local economy from the British, but it actually is just coming from over the hill, that kind of thing.
Right.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Amazing.
And they pulled it off for hundreds of years, 200 years.
They pulled it off for a very long time.
I mean, of course, look, there was a lot of Indian resistance to colonization and people were aware of this.
And it was an argument being made at the time that Britain was draining from India.
But the extent of it was not clear until now.
Well, I like how you call it the tax and buy system is once it has that clear definition and an explanation behind it, it helps.
So I wonder when Gandhi led the revolt in the 40s, then, was this part of the argument or did they even understand it?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, definitely.
I'm not really sure, like, to what extent the average Indian grasped this.
I think we could probably assume that at some point they became quite aware.
But I don't, you know, I don't have data on that.
And they knew they were being ripped off one way or the other.
That's for sure.
They knew they were being ripped off one way or the other.
I mean, you don't you don't suffer under an occupying force without without that being clear to you.
But, you know, the other key part of the story here is that is that is that Britain benefited tremendously from this windfall.
This windfall of basically free money from India.
Right.
Not only did they use it to buy key industrial goods that they needed for their own industrial revolution from other parts of Europe.
Right.
So in other words, the Industrial Revolution in Britain would not have been possible were it not for this windfall of cash that allowed them to sort of to invest in that revolution.
But it also allowed them to invest in the expansion of industrial capitalism across other other regions of European settlements.
Right.
So like Canada, Australia, the United States even.
So places like the US, Canada, Australia benefited from Britain's extraction from India.
So in a way, you know, Indian traders who were defrauded financed the industrialization of the West.
And this is such an important part of the story.
And then furthermore, also, the last the last key part of this is that Britain used that surplus to fund their imperial wars.
So the opium wars against China were funded by, you know, extraction from India, you know, and across their colonies.
They used they used money extraction from India to suppress rebellions against against their colonial rule, et cetera.
So it really allowed them to cement and expand their imperial domination of the global South.
It's really difficult to overstate, you know, the role that the extraction from India played in the shaping of the world system.
Well, as they said, you know, the sun never sets on the British Empire.
And in those days, you know, they didn't call it a commonwealth.
They called it an empire and they meant it.
And there was so much racism built into the thing anyway, where all of this, you know, was a competition between different European powers.
And the question of the morality of oppressing the people in the global South, as you call it, wasn't really much in question.
Right.
Noam Chomsky likes to famously quote Lord Gray saying, well, we must reserve the right to kill, you know, N-words, as he put it.
Of course we can kill them.
I mean, if we can't, then how are we supposed to steal all their stuff?
You know, it's that blatant.
And yet at the same time, though, you you really talk about in here that even back then, there was still a healthy dose of propaganda built in about how essentially we are Christianizing and civilizing these, I guess, maybe not Christianizing, but at least civilizing these poor Indians from their ancient and backward ways and this kind of thing.
Oh, yeah, that was a strong part of the discourse.
And of course, exactly the opposite is true.
You know, in fact, there's this narrative that people that people in Britain tend to have, which is that, you know, that, you know, maybe colonialism was morally bad, but, you know, it's sort of economically benefited Indians and helps, you know, develop their human development indicators, etc., etc.
But in fact, there's no data to support that claim.
In fact, exactly the opposite.
We know that something like 60 million Indians died needlessly of policy induced famine under the British Empire, which is, I mean, it's almost unfathomable to contemplate that many, that many corpses piling up during that period.
In one single famine alone between 1875 and 1902, 30 million Indians died needlessly of famine having to do with British agricultural policy, basically overtaxing people, you know, forcing them to to shift to export crops, controlling the prices and so on.
If you take that, you know, I mean, 30 million bodies that stretches the whole length of England's, you know, 85 times over if they if you lay them head to foot.
I mean, it's it's more than we can even wrap our minds around.
Right.
Yeah, we go down in infamy right with the Holodomor and Stalin in Ukraine in the 30s, except that it's our friends, the British that did it.
So never mind.
That's exactly right.
You know, I think that's exactly right.
And there's been much ink spilled on this question.
Right.
So, like, I mean, of course, it's important that we that we remember the Holocaust and we, you know, we recognize the atrocity that was.
What is that six or seven million people killed?
I mean, it's horrendous.
But, but even before that happens, I mean, there were tens of millions of people being killed by British policy in India.
And that, you know, nobody batted an eyelid about that.
And the reason, of course, is because it's not in Europe.
Right.
I mean, you know, they just were not considered human in the same kind of way.
It was only once that's that's sort of like that fascists racist impulse was applied within Europe that it became a threat that everyone denounced.
Do you see?
So there's a real historical double standard, I think, that's applied to to this question.
And it's not just, you know, it's not just death due to famine.
I mean, all sorts of indicators show, you know, travesty during that period of British rule.
There was zero increase in per capita income during the entire 200 year period of British rule.
Life expectancy at the very heyday, the very heights of the British Empire dropped by 20 percent from 1870 to 1920.
I mean, over and over again, we see this, that, you know, that Britain didn't develop India, de-developed India.
And in fact, India developed Britain in very substantial ways, to the point where we can say that, you know, the Industrial Revolution itself would not have happened had it not been for this extractive relationship with India.
And now those famines, those coincided with England's worst wars in other places.
They're just stealing the grain so that they could feed their army in South Africa or whatever it is, that kind of thing or what?
You know, in some cases, like the Bengal famine, that, you know, that's what happened.
They basically diverted food to British soldiers in other parts of the world who were already well fed and had no real need of them.
And, you know, that happened under Churchill, and he was openly racist about not really caring if Indians were dying.
But the really big famines basically happened because when Britain colonized India, then their primary intervention was to reorganize the logic of the agricultural sector.
Right.
So prior to British intervention, most Indians had access to their own lands, you know, as subsistence farmers, and they, you know, they made use of abundant commons like forests and rivers and waterways and granaries that they shared and so on.
And so even during times of drought or uncertainty, they still had, you know, ways to survive and thrive.
When the British came, they decided that those sort of safety nets, those mechanisms they had, were preventing the Indians from being as productive in export agriculture to London as they should have been.
So they like basically closed off the commons, privatized the forests, privatized the waterways.
They taxed people so that they would have no choice but to pay those taxes by shifting to export agriculture, you know, selling goods basically to England.
And all of that basically decimated their traditional security systems.
And so that when droughts did happen, they were profoundly vulnerable.
So prior to British rule, we never had mass famines in India.
There's no record of them.
Because, you know, again, people had the safety nets they needed.
During British rule, those safety nets were destroyed.
And when when droughts appeared, as they had always appeared, then the consequences were absolutely devastating.
So that's really kind of how it happens.
Sorry, hold on just one second.
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So I guess questions are raised here about how they were able to get away with this for so long.
I mean, they had better rifles.
I know that.
But boy, were they outnumbered by Indians?
How could this have happened?
How could they gotten away with this for so long?
Yeah, I mean, the military presence was an important one.
There's no question about that.
You know, there were a number of sort of critical rebellions and uprisings against the British that were just brutally quashed with massacres.
You know, so I mean, that was always a possibility of horrible retaliation like that if you resisted British rule.
But the other crucial factor is that they very successfully managed to cultivate and manipulate divisions in Indian society, right?
So they're responsible for cultivating Hindu-Muslim animosities, caste system animosities, animosities between kingdoms that used to cooperate, etc., etc.
Over and over again, they basically captured local elites, pitted them against one another, you know, exacerbated existing differences in order to divide and rule.
And they did it very effectively, not just in India, but across the across the British Empire.
It's sort of the tactic they were known for.
Yeah.
Again, reminds me of the way Washington, DC treats the USA and everybody else, too.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that definitely in terms of US foreign policy, that's that's clearly an objective in many cases, I would say.
Yeah.
Yep.
And what's funny, though, is there's not nearly as much revenue extraction, right, as Donald Trump likes to complain.
How can we don't just steal all the oil from everywhere we go?
So you could just scoop it up with one big bucket and just take it with you somehow.
But he's right, though, that what's the opposite of that?
We just all of the wealth really is extracted from the American people.
Right.
Not so much from the Iraqis, but, you know, Lockheed and and the banks and whatever arms merchants and special interests involved in the war making.
They're making all their money off of us mostly rather than the countries that they're invading.
I guess they get cheap labor and access to cheap resources in some places, but doesn't seem nearly as clear cut as the British Empire, where the thing is essentially about theft from the people you're invading rather than the people back home.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
I think that the primary mechanism that the US has used in terms of extraction is, you know, is actually, again, largely through the trade system.
But this time in the guise of something that's more legitimate.
But effectively, globalization has allowed U.S. companies to take extraordinary advantage of cheap labor and cheap resources elsewhere in the world.
And that's, you know, that's a major and also has maintained wages at relatively low rates through their domination of the World Bank and the IMF voting power and so on.
So, yeah, I think that's a that's a key feature of American empire today.
But but, you know, I mean, you're also right that that's a lot of the wealth at the top.
I mean, the majority of the wealth at the top in the US system has basically been extracted from people lower down in the system.
Right.
I mean, it's a deeply unequal economic system that that funnels the nation's resources and yields up to a very small elite.
And that's a problem that that needs to be addressed.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So now one of the things here that and you're kind of referring to this when you're talking about the the claims, even to this day, half, according to a poll, half of Brits say that, you know, the empire was a net benefit to the people of India.
Someone actually just asked me this the other day that it was a well-meaning criticism, I think, passed on from someone else.
What about people who say that overall think of all the benefits that have come?
Just like we're joking that Monty Python skit about the darn Romans, but they did build a really nice aqueduct and all that kind of thing.
Right.
And and the trade offs there.
But of course, I mean, ultimately, the answer is that they didn't have a choice.
Right.
They didn't buy these services from the English.
This this was forced upon them.
And that's the first clue.
Right.
And then also there's the question of, like you're saying, essentially, the unseen.
So we know that the British, OK, they built this road and that road and maybe they established black robes on some judges somewhere or, you know, some kind of thing.
But we don't know what would have happened otherwise.
And when you're talking about this much money that could have been reinvested by Indians in India, then it's much more likely that this is, you know, by far a net loss.
There's no real comparison at all.
That's absolutely right.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, there's no way to say for sure.
But, you know, we have other examples from elsewhere in the global south, like Japan, for example, which, you know, which was allowed to invest its significant foreign exchange earnings in its own developments with extraordinary results.
Right.
And there's really no reason.
I mean, there's no reason that India could not have done the same with its foreign exchange earnings.
Let's not forget that India, you know, prior to colonization, India controlled 27 percent of the world's of the world's economy, 27 percent of world GDP.
It was one of the I mean, it was alongside China, the key economic powerhouse in the world.
Its textile sector was was easily the best in the world.
All of that was was actively destroyed under British colonial rule because Britain could not abide the idea that they would have to compete with superior Indian textiles.
And so the Indian textile industry, for example, in India was actively was actively ruined through a system of, well, sometimes just direct destruction, you know, destroying looms, crushing the thumbs of weavers so that they would not be able to produce their famous wares, but also through an unequal tariff system that basically allowed British textiles to flood into India, undercutting markets there, but disallowed Indians from selling their goods directly to to Britain.
Right.
So.
So, yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of evidence to suggest that had India been left alone, there's really no reason why it couldn't have continued its dominance of the world economy and also even expanded it by reinvesting its foreign exchange earnings.
See, that's an important point.
I mean, I guess I'm ignorant enough about the history of India and in that time period before, as you're saying, before the British came where, you know, I was still just leaving it kind of completely up in the air, the seen versus the unseen, whatever social forces and economic forces inside India.
I don't know what they are, but it's still despite the claims otherwise, it's pretty easy to see how they almost certainly whatever benefits they got from from British colonialism were certainly outweighed by their costs of being oppressed and and occupied and exploited in this way.
But then I didn't even know the part, what you're saying about they were already on the path of industrialization before the British showed up.
And already they were one of the most powerful economies in the world.
That was why the English conquered him and stole it all from him.
So absolutely.
There would otherwise have been no incentive for the English together.
I mean, I mean, if you think about it, India was celebrated in the years prior to colonialism as this, you know, incredible place full of riches and wonders.
Right.
I mean, that's why.
Yeah, Christopher Columbus was on his way there from when he found here.
Yeah.
During the colonial period.
And that's I think that's really important to keep in mind.
Yeah.
I wonder, have you ever been to India or do you have any kind of measure of what is the Indian opinion of Britain now?
Like overall, how hard feelings are still left over from this thing?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I have been to India.
And of course, I've read a lot about this question.
And the answer basically is that it's quite split.
I mean, there's definitely an elite that believe that Britain did great things for India.
The consensus seems to be the best thing that Britain did was introduce the English language, which a lot of Indians use.
But there's also a substantial undercurrent of really profound discontent against the history of British rule, and especially the fact that Britain has not effectively apologized for it in any meaningful way.
And that remains a really sore spot.
And it has to be addressed at some point.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today.
And this is such an interesting little history lesson for me here and, and for the people appreciate it.
Oh, yeah, it's my pleasure.
And if you want to follow up more, or if your listeners do, I've written about this history much more extensively in my book called The Divide, a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions, which was published last year by Penguin.
Okay, great.
Appreciate that.
And we'll have a link to it in the show notes there, too.
All right, y'all.
Jason Hickel, here at aljazeera.com, how Britain stole $45 trillion from India and lied about it.
Thanks again.
Yeah, thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
