Colonial Exploitation of India: The Hidden Financial Mechanisms of British Imperialism

is very I mean we are very grateful that she accepted our invitation last two

years the University Center for alternative economics and economic Association wish to bring both Prof and

Prat here and to interact with most of our students largely and of course the teaching Fraternity in the in the state

so finally it is materialized on behalf of all of and The Institute of uh finance and

Taxation too because we are three institutions part of this large adventure and uh on behalf of all of us

I would like to extend a warm welcome to Professor so uh as an introduction what I would like to make is the two points

one is uh why uh the work of mean of course the title is imperialism and all normally people think that imperialism

is and all especially in the academic sense of Economist but it is not that and her

work is in fact talks about a lot of things which is completely uh non the soal theoc

classical mainstream understanding of water's economic history especially the trade for example we know that Manan

sing has done a work saying that the trade between India and England is always beneficial but uh her work is the

the oppos of it and uh with empirics this is quite importantly and acceptably dispro the very idea of the mainstream

understanding same the case with the Kian understanding of I mean in fact the K who based on the policy the Bengal for

was was actually perpetrated by the Britain that is the kind of argument she was actually making it's very important

and uh it is completely a very uh new fr perspective when you look into the uh discourse of Economics uh and which is

completely missing in the mainstream idea so in that sense you have always a critical perspective both in theoretical

sense as well as in empirical sense that is what is a kind of rigor as well as uh Insight Professor p is trying to give to

all of us and in that note she's the best person to speak especially to interact with the younger generation

and I would like to uh welcome the president of Ka uh Dr Professor G har who is actually going to moderate the

session so we don't need to speak much on that aspect and we will take care as well as the

KA general secretary s s as well asash is here as representative of

gulati Institute Dr Nal is also well and on behalf of all of us I welcome all of these dignitaries and esteemed

institution and last not the least the audience because at the end of the day you are a beneficiary as well as you are

the participant in that so I welcome all of you to this particular function and of course we can make the ENT a success

thank you so much you I take just two

minutes uh in fact I joined Center forment studies for my program after my ma here

in K uh during early 80s but uh fortunately for me I have

heard Professor Prat PN on several occasion before that because used to come to

tantum uh on several occasions I had opportunity to and

later uh maybe every year three four occasions I used to listen to professor and I also had opportunities

to Listen to Professor talking on uh Rel things and uh it's my personal

experience that every time I listen to them I feel that I've learned something

new some more Fresh Light fresh inight I got from those lectures so every

time I prepare to go and listen to I go with this great expectation that I'm going to get some more clarity on

certain aspects of what he try to learn and uh the last lecture I mean uh the lecture that we had yesterday also

was a similar kind of experience uh that's what uh most of the participants felt and uh I got uh such uh uh

references from many of my friends who tried to contact me after yesterday's lecture of

profor now let me also uh say something about uh the value of uh their presence in this

Workshop it's a great opportunity for all of us uh for all the participants who are going to spend 3 days uh in this

political economy Workshop uh I'll just uh give uh the experience of a scholar recently joined

in King College uh last week I got a message from her she did Internship uh in CDs

with me and she got admission in King College London and she just send me the reading list for a for a development

economics course and uh I was just going through the reading several uh references to Professor uh

and in the klege uh it's a development economics course when I mentioned the St she was

telling that usually for colonialism de colonialism kind of fores now our work is referred to but uh that is not true

for mainstream fores also eom world over uh their work is being used by schol they are uh participating in

online classes and they visit many of these universities so probably they are the best in the business the best in the

academic world as far as these kind of issues are concerned and uh mainstream is also very keen to

listen to them because now they give a very different view uh which which provide food for thought for uh for the

mainstream economics mainstream schols also so uh we should try and make use make maximum use of their time here 3

days and uh we don't want to make uh uh formalities affect the uh the program so um try to make maximum use uh ask

questions you can give your suggestions and then outside the uh the the seminar room also they'll be available and uh

let us make uh this uh very active process of Engagement deliberations and uh K has this great

idea that this this circle this uh group of students and teachers and researchers who came here should uh form a uh a a

kind of uh Network so that now we can continue to learn continue to collectively uh uh know read discuss uh

and also your own work can be sort of publicized through this network we'll plan it out through the process of this

workshop with these few words let me humbly invite again once more thanking Professor prad for accepting our

invitation I I didn't mention about my experience of working with Professor now there not in very

difficult to explain the experience Uh u in fact those five years uh used to be

very different very different in the sense know I've had experience in various

institutions working with various people but now this is this used to be very very very different uh so I'm uh looking

forward to this these 3 days I'll be here for all the uh classes [Applause]

thank thank you very much Dr haral for that introduction now I have been given a

brief to deliver three lectures over the starting today over 3 days and I think I sent

some topics but I've forgotten what exactly I sent but anyway my first lecture will basically be uh about the

historical Origins and impact of colonialism on India and on imperialism generally in so far as uh India was um

inserted within a global economy dominated by the then capitalist leader Britain the second lecture I proposed to

deal mainly with the uh period of uh Independence and the attempt to follow an autonomous development trajectory for

40 years after Independence and in the last lecture uh well partly also in the second lecture I

will then discuss the reversal of the policies followed for 40 years with the Inception of neoliberal economic reforms

and in the last lecture I would go into some detail about the impact of neoliberal economic

reforms particularly on the working masses and with relation in relation to the question of poverty about which much

is being claimed by the government nowaday but today my focus will uh generally be on uh the historical period

of India's subjugation to Britain now in my jointly author books with Prat a theory of imperialism which

was published in 2016 and in capital and imperialism published in

2021 we have uh drawn attention as an important part of the explanation of why a handful of West

European Maritime countries embarked on violent external expansionism as a an explanation of this

uh we have drawn attention to the historically very poor resource base in Europe particularly their extreme

poverty in relation to the primary sector now you might find this surprising because generally we tend to

think of Western Europeans as being rich and our countries as being poor exactly the opposite is the case the Western

Europeans were extremely poor poorly endowed with resources uh particularly The primary

sector is what we uh focus on and The primary sector of course is crucial for providing populations anywhere in the

world with food with fuel with raw materials for manufacturer and with energy for cultivation and for

transport we stressed a basic material reality that was true in the past and remains True to this

day the climatic constraints in the global North limits Limited in the past and continues to limit today its

agricultural output very severely to a very small range of crops producible only in one season of the year that is

the uh in the northern hemisphere the warm season extending from May to September October whereas in our lands

and this is a reality which no economics textbook talks about in the warmlands of the global South we can produce a very

large range of crops because we have at least two cropping seasons in the year in a given year and in more uh favored

regions where water is available uh the same plot of land can be cropped three times in the year compared to only once

in North America America and in Western Europe now these crops include not only the crops produced in the north that we

can produce but additionally of course a very large range of tropical crops that could never be produced at all in the

global North that is the supply from domestic uh sources of this crops for the northern countries was in the past

and remains today zero at any price and no economics textbook will tell you this base basic material reality I will come

a little later to Ricardo's theory of international trade which again ignores this basic reality in fact assumes it

away now in short what we argued is that unlike any other sector of production The primary sector in for the primary

sector import dependence became mandatory for Northern populations which wish to escape the

Trap of low and monotonous consumption imposed by their own very limited domestic production

capacity since import substitution for tropical Goods was impossible they initiated a fanatic

competition amongst themselves for accessing these Goods that they could never produce from better endowed

Societies in the global South fuel for plowing and transport was also provided mainly by agriculture in

the form of feet grains of animals right up to the mid 19th century fossil fuels really did not become uh started to be

used in the 1830s and really did not become important until the 1850s the fossil fuels themselves

considered as a primary resource are available to Northern countries within their own territorial limits at present

only to the extent of 11% of total known global supplies now 11% is very small whereas the commercial use of energy by

the industrial North amounts to 40% of global supplies but their own endowment is hardly

11% in recent years we have seen both abortive external aggression for oil and a return to agriculture as a source of

biofuels because the aggression has failed to ensure supplies to the global North

not only were Northern countries heavily dependent historically on Imports of primary products including food and

incidentally not just raw materials but food stuffs were formed the largest share of their

Imports right up to uh wrong after the Industrial Revolution so there's a wrong idea that it was mainly raw materials

they needed from the global South not at all food stuffs were proportionately higher than raw materials and they

continue to be very high today in physical terms not in value terms necessarily because they don't pay us

enough for what we export today's Advanced industrial countries continue to be if anything

even more import dependent for primary product import and energy import on the global South than

in the past so this is not something what we're talking about is not something which is over and done with it

is even more important for them today for one thing in the past our economies were protected to a certain extent by

the fact that it took at least 3 weeks even after the opening of the sews Canal for goods to be transported safe from

India to Britain now with the cheapening of Air Freight you know in a matter of uh 15 to 16 hours fresh produce can be

lifted from Bangladesh from Sri Lanka from India to uh New York and Los

Angeles and of course in an even shorter time to Britain and to Western Europe and you think of the uh warm countries

of uh Africa of subsaharan Africa they're vertically below if you look at the back Europe so it's a matter of just

five or six hours in which fresh produce can be transported so that protection of long distance and times has gone now the

global Norm demands not only the produce it demanded in the past but additionally fresh produce so at an analytical level

if you go to a supermarket in New York or in London or wherever and you find there are fresh roses on sale in January

or fresh vegetables in sale then these analytically speaking are tropical Goods because these cannot be produced in

their own lands they all have to be imported so their dependence on the global South is even greater today for

imports than it used to be in the past very important to remember when we come to my second and third

lectures now in today's lecture I would like to focus on some aspects of the great contrast I want to go right back

to the period when India became colonized became a colony of Conquest uh you know in Western

literature sometimes you do not find a distinction being made between colonies of of settlement and colonies of

Conquest but this is a very crucial distinction because you know the Europeans initially became colonists for

example in North America but North America uh a country of Continental proportions is something where they

settled in large numbers after of course uh virtually Exterminating the local populations and driving their remnants

into reservations they took over all the land resources and by land resources I mean not just the crop producing land

but everything the land has below the surface the mineral resources the timber resources the Water Resources they

appropriated all that and then they migrated from Western Europe and later on from Eastern Europe in very large

numbers so North America is a colony of settlement and which soon acquired as you know

Independence at roughly the time of the French Revolution in the 1780 and similarly uh South Africa Australia

New Zealand to some extent Argentina became colonies of settlement and the these were became

independent some of them became part of the British Dominion but they were independent in terms of their economics

now this is very different from the colonies of Conquest like India uh Sri Lanka what is today Pakistan

Bangladesh uh then Malaya and Britain's colonies of Conquest in the Caribbean and in West Africa Kenya

and today's Tanzania so this distinction is very important because in the colonies of Conquest Britain retained

full control over the capacity to tax the population and it retained full control it Acquired and retained full

control over these uh the foreign trade of their colonies of Conquest so we are talking now about India which

became a colony of Conquest uh not from PL not from uh 1757 PL was important but it became a

colony of Conquest from 1765 because that is the year that Robert Clive acquired the diwani of

Bengal that is the right of Revenue collection of Bengal from a morbent mugul Empire and the right of uh Revenue

collection it is what marks sovereignity on the part of the colonizers and subjugation on the part

of the colonized that is the crucial thing whether they have the right to tax you or

not so I would like to focus on the great contrast between the East India companies rule in India up to the mid

19th century namely up to the Great Rebellion of 1857 to 59 and the later perod of direct rule by the British

government after 1859 up to independence in 1947 during the first period we find

that company officials themselves were often extremely Frank and open about the highly exploitative nature of the

economic relations that England had with India they termed as tribute what Indians were made to pay

every year to England and they criticized the tribute and they made actually made

estimates of what they call the drain of wealth from India to England so these the terms tribute and drain of wealth

were not invented by dhai naroji or by Ramesh Chandra du they were terms which were first used and used repeatedly by

the company officials themselves so I'll come to in a moment why they were talking about the

tribute and drain of wealth nari and that simply used the company officials terminology and their

discussion they took it over uh after due references to them now all this frankness changed

drastically with the direct rule by England after the Great Rebellion and the earlier openness was replaced by

active obfuscation by the government officials in Britain and also by intellectuals like John manard KES

fiscated the actual mechanism through which England continued to exploit India now going back to the beginning

which is always a very good place to start the East India company's trade relations with India started from the

year 1600 that is when it was formed the company was formed with a monopoly of trade with the East

Indies but as I mentioned the Sovereign right of Revenue collection by the company dates from

1765 now this was the Inception of India's status as a colony of Conquest the colonial Financial system

by the 20th century the later period had become quite complex and difficult to understand without the insights provided

by a study of the simpler system prevalent earlier I will therefore start with an overview of the period from the

Inception of Conquest to the end of the 19th century now India occupied a unique

position among the colonies of conquest of the European powers of all the European powers if you take all their

colonies of Conquest Java colonized by Netherlands uh you know Laos Vietnam today's laws Vietnam Etc colonized by uh

France and of course France also had uh conquests in the Caribbean and in North Africa now out of all the colonies of

Conquest India occupied a unique position by virtue of the vast extent of its Arab land its large population and

Workforce and its immense biodiversity um the workforce of course I refer not only to peasants but

Artisans and laborers so control over this the taxation revenues generated by this

Workforce combined with control over their earnings from external trade gave an economic and financial advantage to

Britain that no other European country could rival they were equally aggressive the other European countries but they

colonized smaller countries they did not have access to the enormous resources that a vast country like India could

provide to Britain and it helped to propel that small country that is Britain to the position

of the leader of the industrializing capitalist World by the middle of the 19th century what was the population of

Britain when it in 1765 it was around 8 to 9 million maximum it is half the population of

just the Metropolis of Delhi today it was nothing actually but yet it Rose to the position of the world cap capitalist

leader so how did it do that and moreover it was the first to initiate the Industrial Revolution not any other

country not Spain not Portugal which had acquired its colonies much earlier but it was Britain which pioneered the

Industrial Revolution unfortunately the magnitude and importance of colonized India's

trade in World Trade the role it was made to play in underpinning the international gold standard and how it

allowed Britain to to become the world's largest Capital exporter is hardly either understood or

mentioned in the literature today it is of course not mentioned at all in the northern literature literature coming

from northern universities which do not recognize Colonial exploitation in economic terms at all it is not even

mentioned in the writings of our own economic historians because most of our economic historians and indeed I to have

been trained in our economics and in our history in Northern universities so we have read the textbooks that have been

produced there which really do not deal with the questions that I'm talking about

today now the focus as regards global trade is usually on the trade and investment relations between the

Metropolitan countries alone neglecting the centrality of colonial trade in the pattern of Metropolitan trade itself you

actually cannot understand North North trade without understanding Ing and integrating north south trade

historically into the north North trade underlying this is a theoretical failure to recognize as I've said that

Metropolitan countries lack the ability to ever produce o to climatic reasons a very large range of goods produ

producible only in tropical lands and therefore became increasingly dependent entirely on Imports of large

volumes of food stuffs and raw materials for not only improving and diversifying the very poor initial consumption basket

inherited from the medieval period for but also for undertaking Industrial Revolution now we mentioned deliberately

in our uh book Capital uh theory of imperialism that in the late medieval period in Europe uh production

conditions sometimes so became so bad because there was only a single crop of grain over the entire year for which

human and animal populations competed because animals ought to had had to be fed grain as feed stuff through the long

winter months and when the Harvest failed in successive years you have records in the European Chronicles of

community cannibalism okay when people were reduced to such dire States when there was no food Harvest failed year

after year that they were obliged actually to engage in cannibalism they would go to church they would pray for

for forgiveness foress but then in order to stay alive uh they would actually engage in this I am saying Community as

opposed to uh some kind of pathological uh individual you know you do have individuals who are pathologically mad

who even in modern days do this now this is something you find only in one history book that is slicker van Bart's

agrarian history of Western Europe from ad uh 1500 to 1850 so

uh I'll give you the reference later the full reference all right and this is never taught to any English or North

American students never mentioned ever again let me uh make a short but necessary digression to Modern trade

Theory which is taught to students of Economics derived from David Ricardo's argument that there is necessarily

Mutual benefit to trading partners if they specialized in producing Goods according to their comparative or

relative cost of production and exchanged through trade according to their comparative advantage now I

pointed out in a paper I wrote a long time ago which is published in 2006 it's titled Ricardo's fallacy there is a

logical mistake in Ricardo's argument because Ricardo assumes the very opposite of what I've have been

talking about he assumes the opposite of the material reality that a large range of actually traded Goods could never be

produced in cold temperate lands and hence their cost of production cannot even be

defined so if the output is zero there there is no cost of production if there is no absolute cost of production there

is no relative cost of production what is the cost of production of sugar cane in Germany what

is the cost of production of coffee in the US the United States consumes millions of gallons of coffee it cannot

produce coffee what is the cost of production of raw cotton in Britain Britain cannot produce raw cotton so no

cost of production is even definable so uh Ricardo's assum assumption

actually meant assuming away the actual basis of colonial exploitation why did the Europeans undertake a very long and

hazardous sea journey and face the rigors of a climate they were not used to face the rigors of uh you know uh

being dead from colera and other things that they did not have their own country obviously because there was enormous

economic gain for them and the economic gain consisted in the past and continues in the present of their acquiring access

to Goods that they can never import substitute it all right so Ricardo's uh example famous

example of Portugal and England is two commodity two good uh two country two good model you know uh production of

cotton cloth and wine uh in Britain and in Portugal now there's a problem with the example itself because Britain is

too cold to produce grapes particularly at the time Ricardo was writing when there was no no genetic modification of

plants and the climate was even colder than it is now so Britain could not produce Grape Wine this is not true of

the warmer valleys in France or even in Germany but could not produce commercially Grape Wine so uh Ricardo's

example had a problem one of the goods could not be produced at all so what cost of production does not

exist even if you take uh if you and and the grapes are you know a warm temperate crop they can be grown in warm tempered

climates but think of the purely tropical crops which cannot be grown at all except in the global South right so

Ricardo's Theory of what is not applicable is mutual benefit from Trading when one of the Traders trading

partners simply cannot grow a range of commodities for which the cost cannot be defined in fact uh the fallacy involved

in Ricardo's theory is what logicians call the converse of the fallacy of accident now the fallacy of accident is

when you make um a general assumption an assumption which which people think is

generally true for example all persons can see their eyes and then you apply it to a special case where the assumption

is not satisfied uh saying that all persons can see uh the poet Homer is a person

therefore person Homer could see actually the poet Homer was blind so if you apply it to Homer you know the

theory the inference is not true the converse of this is when you make a special assumption a restrictive

assumption and reach a certain inference that trade is been beneficial in this case and then you wrongly apply it to

cases where the restrictive assumption is not satisfied so here Ricardo is assuming that both countries can produce

both Goods in fact he assumed all countries can produce all Goods implicitly duw the inference that uh

trade according to comparative advantage is necessarily beneficial for both countries but then economists have

applied this inference wrongly to cases where the assumption is not true they have applied it to

colonial trade as well okay so this is a fallacy in record's Theory and by the way it is not

as though I'm the only person who has spotted the fallacy Paul Samuelson spotted the fallacy but what did he do

what he did did was to quietly change Ricardo's example in his textbook book and he also has an article called Market

mechanisms and maximization you will find it in the collected works of PA Samuelson Market mechanisms and

maximization in which he applies linear programming analysis to Ricardo is's specifically talking about Ricardo and

you can see why linear transformation is applicable because in the in his theory there's a transformation you know linear

transformation Frontier between cloth and wine so in the example also he says Ricardo's

example but he changes Ricardo's example he puts cloth along one axis and instead of wine he puts food along the other

axis quietly he doesn't tell you that Ricardo had a different example he doesn't tell you that he's changing the

and if an academic is presumptuous enough to change Ricardo's example surely he should be honest enough to

level with you to level with the reading to tell you why he's changing the example but he does it quietly and

clandestinely because he knows there's a problem but changing the example does not make the theory right you can always

find a particular example which fits your theory okay but that does not make make the theory correct or get rid of

the fallacy all right because we can always find a particular example where Ricardo's assumption both countries

produce both Goods is true but it's still is a restrictive example which cannot be applied to global trade so

finding a particular example does not put it right so you know what I'm trying to say is that you have to have a very

critical attitude to your textbooks unfortunately since we in the global South I tend to be generally

intellectually survi and I'm using very strong terms here because I think we are intellectually survived you know look at

the way we keep talking about world class world class now having a worldclass institution in India is okay

maybe if you're talking about technology or science but world class in the humanities is not okay because in the

humanities the literature is not world class it is not first class 80% of it is very inferior it is intellectually

dishonest okay so we should stop talking about world class building world class institutions but say rather that we will

be the institution which will be considered world class by other countries in the world you have

to change your entire mindset uh in this regard all right I think I've spent enough time on uh Ricardo and the moment

I start talking about Ricardo people say oh no because I have a critique not only of Ricardo on trade uh but also Ricardo

on rent which I uh don't uh want to go into here because Ricardo also had an incorrect theory of

rent which I've talked about in my preface to volume one in the two volume uh series the two

volume book I published some time ago left word books The Agrarian question in marks and his successes so the

introduction to the first volume has my critique of Ricardo's theory of rent which is completely different from Adam

Smith's Theory or Marx's theory of rent and again Marx's Theory and Adam Smith's Theory have been cut out of textbooks

completely and students are only taught Ricardo's theory of rent which actually is not a theory of rent at all it's a

theory of surplus profit anyway let me not get into that now so getting back to colonized India

the terms tribute and drained from India to Britain were freely and interchangeably used by company

officials themselves to describe the colony Metropolis relationship who were these

officials one was uh John Shore a writing in the 17 uh 80s very early on who made a rough estimate of the gross

domestic product of Bengal Province he placed it very close to the GDP of Britain at that time in

1770 and he also criticized the tribute that the company extracted from Indians he called it the tribute that is

the taxes that the company extracted what exactly was the tribute that the taxes that the company extracted a large

proportion of that was spent in England and was not spent within India so that was a tribute that India was forced to

playay then Robert Montgomery Martin wrote in the 1830s now Robert Montgomery Martin was

actually deputed by the company to summarize a very extensive study which had been earlier

made uh and uh he wrote volume L and critically on the state of the company's Indian positions how the company was

exploiting Indians and he made an estimate of the drain of wealth and he deplored the drain of wealth again said

we are extracting tribute and this tribute which is spent in England is a drain of wealth it reduces the income of

Indians the third person who wrote about the drain of wealth and the tribute was George Wingate he was uh an army man

Colonel uh or was he major major George wingit who was entrusted with establishing the ratar system in

Bombay he also wrote a book on this now these high company officials were addressing their own peers not Indians

for I think it would be fair to say that educated Indians at that time the late 18th century very early 19th century

were less concerned with with economic matters than they were with countering the cultural challenges posed by the

impact of Christianity with his theoretical if not practical message of egalitarianism upon their hierarchical

cast based social system uh you know and this impact was very strong in Bengal in particular

because that's where British rule started it gave rise to the uh movement for reforming Hinduism gave rise to the

EST l m of the Brahma samage so this was at a cultural uh level that people were reacting in India after the Great

Rebellion of 1857 the earlier frankness was replaced in the statements and writings of leading British economists

and administrators as I've said by active obfuscation of the working of the financial mechanism of surplus

extraction which had become more complex after the great uh Rebellion Now what is exactly was the

tribute and why was uh direct uh Conquest necessary considered necessary why could they could they not engage

continue to engage in normal trade why did they have to have first trade at gunpoint and then Conquest which they

did not have viav other countries now the point is that uh East India company as well as the uh Dutch

East India Company um incurred a constant outflow of silver to to pay for its merchandise trade deficit with Asia

because they wanted goods from us they wanted Asian Goods they could not produce but our populations whether in

India or China or other Asian populations had no real demand for Northern Goods we could produce

everything that we wanted uh so for example we I give the quote from the Chinese

Emperor it's a very uh nice thing that the Chinese emperor wrote to King George III uh in a letter when George II had

actually sent an Envoy to uh ask for trade con concessions uh from uh uh from the Chinese but I don't think I can find

it this always the problem with when you're looking for courts you can never find it when you want it anyway if I

find it later I'll read it out to you so these Western countries all of them France Netherlands Britain Etc always

had a trade deficit Visa Asia as long as trade was normal trade even though they tried their best to push down the prices

at which they purchased from us but the moment they conquered the situation changed completely because the Sovereign

right of tax collection meant now they could gather money from the local population by which way of taxes and by

way of operating monopolies like in Britain operated the Opium Monopoly and uh the salt Monopoly which remained very

important right into the 20th century so then they could use the locally raised taxes to purchase the goods they wanted

and therefore uh these Goods became completely free from them they created no external liability not only did the

East India Company benefit because its own outlay in trade became zero it did not have to advance a single

penny to purchase the goods so its profit rate RADS to dising Heights but the British economy benefited because it

no longer had a trade deficit VAV India let us say therefore it did not have to pay out any silver silver continued to

flow into Bengal even after 1765 and that has been wrongly interpreted by some of our old economic historians but

it continued to flow into Bengal for other purposes for financing special periods of military expansion into

Northern India because they used Bengal as a base and then they went on to conquer uh Northern India and later on

of course uh the Bombay Dean and Madras and then finally the last of all was Punjab in 1848 and Kerala of course was

not fully conquered it was only Malabar which was because travan co coochin uh remained uh auton

omous so the silver inflow after 1765 even when it was there was for different purposes and also to meet the Britain's

trade deficit Visa China because it imported silk and Porcelain and tea from China but the Chinese wanted nothing

from Britain so it always had a trade deficit Vis V China now what it did in India as you know was to force uh

Indians to grow opium and then it used that opium and it purchased the Opium out of the Indians

own tax payment so what they paid the Opium grow growers in India they paid out of their own

taxes and then it forced the Chinese to import the Opium the Chinese had a legal ban on import of opium it's a drug after

all they didn't want to try turn their nation into a nation of drug addicts so they used military force to open by

force the ports of China in the three Opium Wars so that they could dump their opium grown in India on China this was

the pattern of triangular trade which was established even before the British crown took over India so the enormous

benefit uh to Britain of this uh of Conquest lay in the use of Taxation revenues but of course I can't leave the

subject without a brief mention of the immediate aftermath in 7 between 17 1965 and

1770 the company officials in Bengal seem to have gone completely mad with aest because you know this was a new

experience for them they were a trading company to have the right of collecting taxes from the population was something

completely new so they increased the threefold by 300% the revenues they collected in

Bengal compared to what the naab had been collecting so between 1765 and 1770 Revenue collections were

trebled now the naab was already he was not uh you know somebody who did not collect enough Revenue he collected

enough Revenue to leave The Peasants with enough to survive on and to continue production now imagine within 5

years if the collection is trebled it means that the seed corn was taken away the consumption grein cons rice

consumption that the farmers had kept for themselves that was taken away so within 3 years there was a massive

famine in Bengal by 17697 this famine again discussion of it is completely suppressed in the

literature according to the company officials themselves the board of directors of the company sent uh their

officials on a tour of the Bengal districts and they said that one third of the population of Bengal had perished

in the famine and why did they not resist because it was so sudden I mean for decade after decade The Peasants had

been producing yes the nawab took taxes for them but in moderation to a sensible extent not so

much that they stared and suddenly you have the foreigners coming using local mercenaries to raise the taxation to

unheard of limits and as a result they star to death they were simply not prepared to resist there was resistance

later on there was the sasi rebellion and other rebellions but not from the peasantry from groups who were on the

fringes of the peasantry and who did undertake armed Rebellion which was crushed now you will not find a single

discussion the Cambridge economic history of India has more than 1,000 pages on the economic history of India

not a single discussion of this massive famine I mean 10 the population of Bengal at that date was 30 million

according to the East India company estimates 10 million people died that is one3 of the population died in the

famine not only is there no discussion by Foreign authors there is no discussion by Indian authors Al also no

proper discussion of the Bengal famine to this day of this first famine there were subsequent famines also of course

for this very first famine you find no proper discussion because as I've said the sad thing is that we take our cues

as far as research is concerned from which the foreigners right we are completely uh sub subservient to this

idea that whatever they write must be the uh the vas and the opon you see whereas they have a very strong

incentive to suppress what actually happened and that is what they actually did now from 1765 onwards the company

used um more than half of the gross revenues to extend its rule while at least a quarter of the gross revenues

gross revenues means gross and if you deduct the cost of collection the and onethird of the net revenues net of the

cost of collection was used to purchase export goods so you had a completely Costless inflow in Britain of an

enormous range of food that is rice salt peter at that time manufactured goods manufactured textiles because Britain

could not produce cotton textiles at that time in the 176 from up to the 1760s

um and so on so I have an estimate of uh the drain at that time which closely follows Montgomery uh Martin's

estimate which uh and I find in that uh it is uh published in an article called the free

lunch um and it's in a book edited by KS Jomo I'll give you the references to those who are interested I'll send a

list of the references to you and people can consult it and if you can't get it in the live library or online easily

then I can always send a soft copy for circulation to those of you who are interested it is very important to know

our own economic history because the most ideological of disciplines are two one is economics the other is history

where you get falsification of facts if you add the two together what you get you get economic history right so you

have a double dose of falsification of facts as well as Theory so it is very important you know to look at what

actually uh happened okay um so uh

yeah so the reason that conis was sent to from Britain to uh and he uh made the permanent settlement of Bengal in 1792

coralist lost the battle uh in the war of independence in North America and he came straight from North America to

India he was deputed to look at what was happening in Bengal by the East India Company officials and he made a

permanent settlement of the revenue there a lot of discussion what kind of settlement there should be permanent

settlement meant that uh a certain amount was imposed on the zamar of Bengal as tax but it was fixed in

perpetuity it would never be raised in future all right um so the reason behind the permanent

settlement was because of the depopulation that uh Bengal had undergone uh conis wrote in a minute to

the directors Court of directors of the East India Company I quote I may safely assert that onethird of the company's

territory in Hindustan is now a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts there had been so much depopulation hold V

Villages were completely dep populated there was oneir of the population was not there to cultivate at all so to

restore cultivation and therefore to restore Revenue collection he said it was necessary to assure the zamas that

you would have to pay a fixed amount which would never be raised in future if you increase cultivation you will get

more money but you can keep the extra money you only have to pay this fixed amount to the company that was the

reason behind the permanent settlement do you have any discussion of that by Indian authors no

uh ranit gar wrote a book called a rule of property for Bengal which was entirely on the permanent settlement of

1792 not a word about the Famine of 17697 it is entirely at the level of ideas what was the ideas of Philip

Francis what were the ideas of conis but the material basis for that background to those ideas why were they putting

forward certain policies and why were they debating the fact that Bengal had a massive population

deficit that is not mentioned anywhere you know I'm sorry to be uh criticizing you know uh explicitly our own academics

but that is what students read that is the only literature they have and they form an idea in their minds which is

actually very far from the truth now um yeah so let me very briefly

mention or maybe I shall go straight on to the because I've taken already a lot of time

I only have about 20 minutes left I think let me go straight on to the system that the British crown

established after the Great Rebellion when it took over from the company took over the rule of India from the company

now it was certainly not going to um uh give up the very lucrative

uh company uh procedure which meant that you know onethird of the net revenues which were being

collected and now it was not only Bengal revenues had were being collected from uh the United provinces later utar

Pradesh revenues were being collected after 1818 from the Bombay Dean uh after the ratar settlement revenues were being

collected from Madras presidency also from the second decade of the 19th century onwards so the whole

Revenue collection had grown trebled compared to the initial and up to oneir of the net collections was uh still

being used for purchasing export goods but what the crown did from 1859 onwards when it took over was that it put in

place an extremely clever System earlier the company was taking Goods directly to British ports and then of course the

value of the goods was so huge that Britain with its small population which was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars it

was only 15 million again much less than the population of Delhi today at the in 1815 Britain could not possibly absorb

the enormous volumes of goods food stuffs and raw materials that was pouring into the country which was

completely tax financed and therefore free so what it did it was kept a part of it and the rest it

re-exported to North America and to the Carib Ian Islands in order to get the goods from the Caribbean for example

Indian cloth was re-exported to Caribbean islands to get coffee and cotton it got the coffee and cotton

free Indian goods were re-exported to North America to get food grains Indian goods were re-exported to uh the

Continental countries to get the uh food and other Goods that Britain could not produce and therefore these goods from

the Continental countries and North America also became free for Britain through

re-exports okay it did not have to it had trade deficit Vis A France Vis North America those trade deficits were

reduced by the amount by the value of re-exports that it made to these regions so it was of immense value to

Britain to continue this collection of land revenue and using the land Revenue to get export goods out of India

therefore not pay the Indian producers actually but to tax them out of their goods um so however the financial

mechanism became more complex what they introduced was something when you understand it it is quite simple but you

have to try and understand it because it was different from the earlier mechanism of the East India

Company now an officer now a minister of the British cabinet who became the second most important Minister after the

foreign minister second most important minister in Britain was Des designated as the Secretary of State for

India there was no Secretary of State for North America there was no Secretary of State for Canada no Secretary of

State for Australia or South Africa there was only the one Minister who was designated as the Secretary of State for

India so what did he do who by this time by the 18 late 1850s Indian goods were going not only

to Britain directly they were going as I've said they started going directly to the Continental countries started going

directly to North America later on to Japan they were already going directly to

China and why were Continental European countries and North American countries interested in Indian Goods they were

cold tempered countries they could not produce tea and coffee they could not produce sugar can sugar they could not

produce rice they could not produce a whole range of Commodities at all so even when they did not have colonies

they had a demand for these Goods so they purchased these goods from those European countries which had tropical

colonies from Britain from Netherlands from France so the reexport trade was very important for the West European uh

countries now the uh Secretary of State for India invited foreign importers of Indian Goods to deposit their payment to

Indian exporters with him now the foreign importers owed money let us say an American importer Imports uh $11,000

worth of Indian Goods now he wants to remit that $1,000 to the Indian exporter the Secretary of State in

London says you give me your $1,000 and I will give you an international bill of exchange which can

be cashed in rupees you can send this bill of exchange either by Telegraph or by post to India to The Exchange Bank

where to the Indian exporters they will deposit the bill in the Indian bank and they will get the rupee equivalent of

$1,000 which at that time since the exchange rate between the dollar and the rupee was three rupees could purchase $1

at that time so $1,000 that the American importer was paying would translate into 3,000 rupees that

the Indian importer would get from the bank but where did this 3,000 rupes come out of the Secretary of State for India

had a legal claim on a certain portion of the Indian taxation revenues of the budget

revenues it was that portion was marked off and called expenditure in England expenditure in England is a misnomer it

was expenditure by England because it was not necessarily expenditure in England itself it was expenditure all

over the world in payment by England for what it owed to other countries so let us call it expenditure by England he had

a claim on oneir roughly it varied it varied between 1/3 to 40% of the entire budget revenues in India was year marked

for use by the Secretary of of State in London so the payment to the American uh importer of Indian Goods to the French

importer to the German importer Scandinavian importers Japanese importers was via this bill of

exchange uh and it all came out of Indian taxation revenues so ultimately the exporters did

know were not the producers the actual producers were the peasants and The Artisans The exporters Source their

goods they bought their goods from The Peasants and The Artisans and they paid the peasants and The Artisans out of the

money let us say the $1,000 would be 3,000 Indian rupees they would keep anything I mean 10 to 15% for themselves

as their commission or profit and the rest they would give to the actual producers The Peasants and The Artisans

now this meant again that the British were getting their uh Imports free because look at it from the present or

Artisans point of view who were the contributors to the Indian budget of taxes the overwhelming bulk of the

contribution at least 95% came from taxation on the peasants by way of the land tax where they did

not pay land Revenue directly uh but paid to an uh to the they were tenants and they paid to the uh actual SS that

SSC took rent from them and paid Revenue new to the state indirectly so ultimately it was coming from The

Peasants and it was coming from the working population who had a very heavy burden of indirect taxes to pay of which

the Opium Monopoly as well as the salt tax you know the salt Monopoly of the British Indian government meant that the

price of salt was per unit was 7 to eight times what it would have been if salt had been allowed to be manufactured

freely it was not for nothing that Gandhi uh you know launch the salt saaga it was a very heavy impost on the Indian

population no matter how poor you are the poorest laborer who only eats uh you know uh some chapatis in North India or

whatever uh you eat in South India some ragi balls in Karnataka or uh rice product in uh Kerala the poorest laborer

would need to consume salt you know so salt is a basic necessity so uh ultimately the people

who paid the taxes for The Artisans and the The Peasants and The Artisans and the laboring class generally uh laborers

only about 5% of the total tax revenues came from the welltoo and the Indian capitalist class which

had started growing at this time as well as the British Indian Chambers of Commerce they all opposed income tax on

themselves the said no we don't want income tax the government can easily raise the revenue they want by

increasing the salt tax so you have a very clear class bias which Sabas bhatacharya talks about in his book

Financial foundations of the British Raj he gives a quotation from the minutes of the Chambers of Commerce both the

British Indian Chambers of Commerce and the other Chambers of Commerce and they all said no income tax we oppose income

tax on us or income tax generally you raise the salt tax and get your uh get your Revenue so the British did not also

rule India on their own a few thousand Englishmen did not rule on their own over millions of Indians they integrated

the prop property classes into their rule they made sure that the property classes within India not only the

zamindars but those who monopolize money Capital those who are uh uh had something to invest

uh they were treated very differently by the colonizers from the way they treated the mass of the population this is

important to remember what the Latin Americans called the comprador class was very important and the Bengal zamas are

a very clear example of such a compor class because of the permanent settlement of Revenue they became Ardent

supporters of the British R there were individual uh exceptions individuals Zas who joined the freedom struggle

uh who were very important figures in the anti-british colonial struggle but by and large the class itself became Pro

British and uh that is a legacy which continues in the educational system of Bengal I would say to this day because

by and large even the modern Bengal intellectuals tend to be uh on the whole Pro British even unconsciously so if

unconsciously so is very different from the classes which joined the Great Rebellion

in North India because they were the talars they were the zamar and talar of Northern India who led the Revolt in

which the peasantry of course provided the Canon F why were the talukas and zamas why did they behave so differently

from the zamar of Bengal it is because you know under the settlement land settlements there was no permanent

settlement in Northern India every 30 years the revenue would be increased and if the Dar could not manage to pay the

enhanced Revenue his uh talari Zari would be put up for auction and anybody who had money Capital like uh well-to-do

Traders money lenders and so on could buy that zamari or talari so the hereditary principle was completely

ignored by the British in the system and large numbers of zamindars and talar were dispossessed of their hereditary uh

possessions land landed Estates owing to British rule and that is the reason why they participated and gave the

leadership to the Great Rebellion of the late 1850s where the Bengal Samar were Pro British in that period so ultimately

the system that the British put in place this bill of exchange this International bill of

exchange proved to be uh not only so clever that even our

most highly educated people who have written on the financial system of colonial India or who have written on

the banking system of colonial India have never really understood it or highlighted the system and yet it was a

very simple system it was an international bill of exchange it was called the council

bill it was issued it was called a council bill because it was issued the full title of the Secretary of State for

India was Secretary of State for India in Council he had a council of advisers so that was the full title that is why

the bill he issued was called the council Bill the second thing I want you to

remember is that there is no discussion in our literature of the importance of India's

trade as a fraction of global trade you have any number of studies of colonial trade but they all focus on exports and

what exports India did the value of those exports and Indian Imports they do not even give you the trade balances all

right but that you can easily work out if they give you the exports and the Imports subtract one from the other you

can get the merchandized trade balance but in no single reading that I have said and I've read very extensively is

there any mention of you know all that I'm saying somebody could Shug off and say

as in fact David Harvey did in his rejoinder to us he said well you know India was hardly very important in

global trade without knowing anything about the subject India was extremely important in terms of global trade

because at least from the 1880s right up to 1929 for a period of 50 years for which we have international trade data

India was uh India had the second largest merchandise export Surplus in the world the largest was the US and

India was the second largest India was a long way behind the US quantitatively now these data we can

get from a United Nations um United Nations online uh material on International Trade flows which was put

online uh with the date its date is 1962 okay and it covers the period from 1900 to 1960 I have not seen a reference

to this material anywhere in the literature of our economic historians it's a very rich source because it gives

you the country-wise uh data of exports and imports of every country in the world

which had a statistical system between 1900 and 1960 so from this we can work out what India's merchandise Trade

Surplus was trade balance was rather but it was always a trade surplus except for two or three years India never had a

trade deficit Visa the world was remarkable and it was the second largest after the US Trade

Surplus it was ahead of Argentina Argentina was just behind India okay so India's trade was not unimportant but

the way it is it is not been talked about it has not been written about at all the people even if you say that

Britain took India's export Surplus earnings people say Well it couldn't have been very important on the contrary

on the contrary without appropriating India's earnings and remember India's earnings became this large because India

was exporting not only to Britain but to the whole world and the entire cold temperate World which was developing and

industrializing at that time in North America that is the US Canada Japan as as well as the dominions which were

developing and industrializing which are getting richer because they were not colonies of Conquest they all had a

demand for tropical Commodities okay and India was the largest followed by countries like Malaya Malia had enormous

rubber export Surplus earnings but for a much briefer period that India did for something like 20 to 30 years in the

20th century similarly you had export Surge from Kenya or Tanzania isn't takeen years done year but for short

periods of time but in the case of India this lasted for almost 200 years so that is why it followed it provided a solid

base for the rise to Imperial dominance of Britain which became the world capitalist

leader until the Great Depression Struck from 1929 when of course India's export Surplus earnings collapsed along with

the collapse of the earnings of other developing countries countries other countries of the global South which are

now EXC Colonial countries and when India's export Surplus earnings collapsed the main prop of Britain's

balance of payments sound balance of payments situation was removed because India had been the main prop now owing

to the enormous amounts that it appropriated from India and the only study that we get from a Northern

University which is a very valuable study is by S SP Saul it's called studies in British overseas trade it is

the only study which looks at what kind of surpluses and deficits Britain had Vis A other countries and this found

that uh but however Sal does not give you time series okay now I have looked at the time series from the statistical

abstracts of British India for the entire period for more than Cent from the 1830s right up to Independence so

that is the basis for the figures that I have been writing that I have been the time series that I've been giving in my

various Publications and also some of it has been uh given in our joint books on imperialism the more than 100 Years of

statistical data now Saul gives you just a brief single year as it were snapshot

pictures 1880 1910 if you take 1910 he points out that Britain had uh not only current account deficits Visa North

America and Continental Europe it had balance of payment deficit because it was simultaneously exporting Capital to

develop North America and Continental Europe it was building factories Railways now you know Capital export for

those of you who may might be economic students be careful uh merchandise export is a credit on a

country's balance of payments Capital exports are a debit item on the balance of payments all right because Capital

exports is import of I so it figures on the negative side of the balance of payments so usually a country can only

export Capital if it has a current account Surplus all right if you have want to

have bilateral balance uh India can only export Capital to a country if it has a current account

Surplus Visa that country but Britain was running for decades on end not for just one or two years it was running

current account deficit Vis the US Vis Canada Vis Australia and so on but despite its current account deficit it

was also exporting Capital it was the world's largest Capital export exporter it was exporting capital and it exported

to the largest extent to North America and Continental Europe and the colonies of White Settlement like Australia New

Zealand and so on the Dominion so how did it manage to build up even larger balance of payments

deficits than it had current account decision It could only manage to do so because it took the whole of Indian

export Surplus in and the whole of the gold and the foreign exchange that India earned from the rest of the world did

not was not credited to India at all it was preempted it was taken at source through the council Bill mechanism it

went straight into the account of the Secretary of State for India straight into the British treasury now this is a

mechanism of which you will not find any discussion but this was the actual mechanism if you look at the Cambridge

economic history of India there is no no mention of council bill at all in its more than 1,000 Pages there is one

single small mention of casual mention of council draft by annand chander he has written the chapter on

finance uh and he was at that time serving in the international monetary fund so he's somebody who was very clued

on as far as Global Finance is concerned but as far as the historical operation of the mechanism of financial mechanism

of exploitation of India is concerned nothing not even our modern uh economic historians uh have anything to take say

about the council bills and that is because canes had nothing to say about the council Wills I will wind up in 2

minutes canes had not you see kanes had a very long association with India the first job he ever had was at

the India office in London the first book and he uh he was only about 23 when he joined the Indian

office India office in London which was the office run by the Secretary of State everything to do with India happened in

the India office and the first book Cades ever wrote was Indian currency and finance

which was published in 1913 he used the experience he gained when he was working in the India office

in London to write Indian currency and finance later on he joined Cambridge University

as a teacher as a lecturer and in Cambridge University he gave lecture courses to students for many years

before the first world war on Indian currency and finance at least for four years he gave one or two lecture courses

every year on Indian currency and finance now in the book Indian currency and and later on because of he was

considered to have become an expert on the Indian Financial system in the colonial period so he was is put on

every single commission that the government British government set up to look at Indian currency and finance

starting with the babington Smith committee to the Hilton young commission then the Indian fiscal commission he was

either an adviser to or a member of the four or five commissions which were set up uh during and after 1913 all right so

he was a very important person in the formulation of Indian uh Financial policy and monetary policy

now in Indian currency and finance KES give gives you uh the accounts of the Secretary of State for India credit

items and the debit items on the credit side the debit items or all the expenditures incurred by England out of

Indian revenues all right of course he doesn't mention that they were incurred out of Indian revenues on the credit

side he doesn't tell you the actual credit what was the actual credit the actual credit that the secretary of

state had was all the gold in foreign exchange that India earned from the world which went straight into the

Secretary of State's account that was his credit he gives you only the rupee equivalent that is the claim that the

secretary of state had on the Indian budget as the on the credit side why did the Secretary of State have

a claim on the Indian budget which is in rupees at all why did he need to have a claim that is not mentioned anywhere in

the book nor is the fact mentioned that it was Indian earnings of gold and foreign

exchange against which you had that rupee claim that the rupee equivalent is what was shown under in the Indian

budget in rupee terms in expenditure in England but I can find it out easily because from the statistical abstracts

for British India which cover more than a century the expenditure in England part is given both in rupees and in

pounds in pounds are study all right and the council bill values are given in pound

sterling so when I match the two I find that the expenditure in England part of the Indian budget is exactly equal to

the council Bill's value which is India's export Surplus earnings they're two different series but they are equal

over a run of years they're not equal for 10 years or less but if I take more than 10 years 15 years 20 years 30 years

remarkably equal for example from 1861 to the year 1900 India earned 530

million as its Global export Surplus earnings that is exactly the amount that was

spent by Britain you know as expenditure in England in

Sterling of course it was not expenditure in England as by ear England and that is the sum that I have

compounded at a 5% rate of interest which is a very modest rate of interest because Montgomery Martin compounded at

a 12% rate of interest 50 years drain from India that is from the time that Britain started taking the drain from

India 50 to 50 years after that he added it up the annual values and he comp compounded it at a 12% rate of interest

because he said that this is the uh interest rate prevalent in the Indian market and he arrived at a sum of 8

billion pounds that Britain had already extracted by the 1830s okay so when I am compounding at a

5% rate of interest it's a very low interest rate of interest compared to what the East India Company officials

had done and um you know I arrive at a sum uh which is available in in our jointly uh published books you can look

at it which has caused a great deal of international interest up to 1947 the year of Independence if I look at the

compounded sum that um Britain drained from India if I look at the uh compounded sum that

is 40 times Britain's 1947 GDP Britain's 1947 GDP was 10 billion pounds the compounded sum that they drained from

India was 470 billion pound okay so the absolute amount uh is of course uh much less because this is

the compounded the value is that I'm uh mentioning to you and if I express it in dollar terms it will become very huge

and it did become very huge why because the exchange rate of the Indian rupee against dollar at the time of

Independence was just 3.13 rupees for one1 dollar what is it now 83 so the rupee now has Vis the

dollar less than 4% of the value it had then but for 200 years the exchange rate of the Indian rupe visa the British

pound was deliberately kept absolutely sought to be kept absolutely stable by the British coule why because it treated

India's earnings external earnings as its own earnings it took all of it and it wanted stability of the exchange rate

so it kept the rupee Sterling exchange rate as stable as possible could not manage to keep it absolutely stable

there were International developments uh which meant that there was a depreciation of but not much

around about 25 to 30% 25% or so was the maximum some depreciation then they pulled it back uh to a rate which was

around you know 13 Rupees to 1 Sterling whereas it had been 10 Rupees to 1 pound sterling earlier but in the 70 odd years

after Independence the interest of the advanced capitalist countries is to depreciate our

currency because you know they want to get our Goods as cheaply as possible so you have seen a slide not only of the

Indian rupee but of all developing countries currencies a enormous slide so it has only a very tiny proportion of

the original value okay let me stop there I'm sorry to have taken a little more than one hour but you know the

matter to be covered was rather large and rather complex so thank you for your attention could you use the mic I can't

you for yes yes yes yes it's right here in front of

me but you know when you're talking you don't notice yeah King George the thir of

England had sent an Envoy to negotiate trade concessions um so the Chinese emperor at

that time was called Chang Long quong quong ah maybe changlong is from quong is from

changlong yeah yeah of course there was a very close relationship between Chinese trade and

India particularly Kerala yeah so in 1791 the emperor wrote a letter to King George uh it's a long letter says uh

quote our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders but as

the tea silk and Porcelain which the celestial Empire producers are absolute Necessities to European nations and to

yourselves we have permitted as a signal Mark of favor that foreign homes should be established at

Canton so you know he says that we don't need anything from you but you need products from us so as a great Mark of

favor we're allowing you to set up trading posts in Canton but of course the thing is that

the they wanted the goods not through normal trade they wanted them free completely free and therefore the Opium

Wars and they've got into a bad habit since they enjoyed uh you know so many centuries of

getting free products from the global south of thinking they have a divine right to get free virtually free

products from us so therefore the whole of modern day Neo Imperialism consists in trying to get our products on the

best possible terms for themselves and the worst possible terms for us so that will be the subject of

my uh next lecture when we go on to the period of Independence and what were the measures that were taken to try to dink

from the global trade system the exploitative nature of the trade system that we inherited

and to what extent it succeeded or did not succeed you have

a on the Japan and China Japan was never a colony for centuries and I think China also was

like that what the no China was in in some ways even worse because as maum characterizes China it

was semi fudal semic Colonial now semic Colonial meant it was not one imperialist country it was practically

all imperialist countries were located themselves in China and through the unequal treaties

that is in China you had not just Britain you had Belgium you had France you had the United States uh you had

Russia you had Japan which was a imper IST country in the late uh in the 20th century so China had to contend with its

territories and its resources being demanded by every single imperialist power every single one of them it did

not acquire formal political control but it virtually acquired political control because the emperor you know um was

Paris the child Emperor who inherited the uh Throne from the when the daers daer empress passed away uh it was a

child Emperor who ascended the Throne of China you know and the Chinese Empire was virtually powerless against the

demands of the western powers and they made China sign 99e leases on its mineral

resources on very favorable terms to themselves so I would say that you know it's not to say that China not at all

not at all China did not Escape it had its own unique form of domination subjugation that is what gave rise to

the resistance movement both on the part of the King dang and on the part of the Chinese Communist party which both

fought the imperialists unitedly for a time but then you had the Chinese Civil War because the kingan had a different

political vision for an independent China and the Chinese Communist Party had a very different political vision

for independent China now as far as Japan is concerned and you know uh I think

Japanese uh do invasion of China first of Korea they controlled Korea as a colony for a short

period but they very intensively exploited Korea the uh Japanese invasion of China from

1937 meant the Chinese uh for the Chinese the War lasted not for 5 years but for 7even

years and during that period the Japanese killed 6 million Chinese so the cost in human lives was enormous for the

Chinese it became an outright colony of Japan very large parts of it the parts that Japan directly politically

controlled and as you know the uh the child Emperor who was a young man by that time was actually uh in 1931 he was

physically kidnapped and he was made to be the head of the puppet state that the manchuko which they set up in northern

China which was the most mineral Rich part of China now muko did not last very long

from 1931 to 1945 but the Chinese emperor they made him the uh the head of that in order to

convince the Chinese population that uh the place is being run by a Chinese not by the Japanese though the Japanese

controlled the entire entire area baluchi made a very famous film on the kidnapping of the child

Emperor he was not a child he was a young man by the time called The Last Emperor The Last Emperor so some of you

may have seen that film if you have not you should see it very interesting and after

Liberation uh and uh going forward of China against under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party after the

Chinese Revolution in other words uh this young man Pui I don't know whether I'm pronouncing it correct Bui

was brought back to China and he was put on trial and he uh confessed to having betrayed the Chinese people and he asked

for for forgiveness so he was forgiven he said that I was very young at that time I did not know what was happening

Etc he was forgiven he was given a job as a gardener and he spent the rest of his

life as an ordinary Chinese citizen engaged in gardening which he seemed to

enjoy should