Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757–1858)
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Pilar Nogues-Marco | Colonial Extraction and the EICpublished in the New-York Daily Tribune, including "The East India Company: Its History and Results" (1853), "The British Rule in India" (1853), and "The Future Results of British Rule in India" (1853). 1 Espousing Marx's views, numerous Indian nationalist scholars, beginning with Dadabhai Naoroji, made the drain of wealth a major grievance against British colonialism.Naoroji, a Parsi intellectual, cotton trader, politician, and social leader, provided the first estimates of the drain of wealth and its relationship with starvation in India in speeches he gave at the East India Association, which he had helped found in London in order to raise awareness about India's plight among the British public.Two such speeches, " England's Duties to India" (1867) and "Poverty of India" (1876), together with contributions later compiled in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), amount to the earliest and fullest articulation of the wealth drain theory.In 1867, the Indian National Congress officially adopted Naoroji's theory and in the 1940s Mahatma Gandhi's in de pendence movement against British rule drew considerable intellectual legitimacy from it.2 Po liti cally active nationalist intellectuals, such as Mahadev Govind Ranade and Romesh Chunder Dutt, further developed Naoroji's theory and established the contours of the nationalist economic history whose influence is still felt today.3 After Indian in de pen dence in 1947, Marxist Indian scholars systematized this theory and identified three direct channels through which wealth was redirected toward Britain to India's detriment: (1) oppressive land taxes weakened local agriculture; (2) unproductive expenditures on the army and civil administration for imperial purposes deprived India of productive investments; and (3) the systematic unrequited export of goods from India to Britain-that is, Indian goods for which Britain "did not pay"-amounted to the or ga nized extraction of wealth.4 In short, the Marxist-nationalist approach holds the drain of wealth-which was caused 1 These articles are collected in Husain, ed., Karl Marx on India, and Marx and Engels, On Colonialism.
Source: Capitalism
Author: Pilar Nogues-Marco
Institutions: University of Geneva, Centre for Economic Policy Research
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3103113178