M&D: East India Company

[David Morris]

Yes.  As were also the Jesuits.

David Morris

On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 8:09 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> In some respects the East India Company can - especially with view on
> Pynchon's work - be characterized as an early IG Farben ...
>
>
> https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-east-offering-its-riches-to-britannia-191140
> http://brugger.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/1/4/2014824/empire.pdf
>
> > ... It is sometimes said that the British acquired their empire in a fit
> of absent mindedness. The evidence as shown in this painting dating from a
> time when the British colonial expansion in India was really just beginning
> may, however, suggest that the early founders of the British Empire were
> not absent minded at all but knew exactly what they wanted ... <
>
> Am 29.07.2017 um 08:42 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>
>
> "Something richer than many a Nation, yet with no Boundaries, --- which,
> tho' never part of any Coalition, yet maintains its own great Army and
> Navy, --- able to pay for the last War, as the next, with no more bother
> than finding the Key to a certain iron Box, --- yet which allows the
> Britannick Governance that gave it Charter, to sink beneath oceanick Waves
> of Ink incarnadine." (M&D, p. 140)
>
> > ... The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation
> and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the
> systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of
> indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and
> patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the
> obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their
> identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was
> established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while
> India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700). By 1940, after nearly two
> centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while
> India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and
> starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a
> society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic
> industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty
> line.
>
> The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercialising
> society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the
> first place. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, pre-colonial India
> exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s
> fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks,
> decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and
> craved Indian spices and seasonings. In the 17th and 18th centuries,
> British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as
> Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.
>
> The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old
> civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions,
> magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the
> world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and
> abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity
> today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been
> the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British ... <
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-empire-railways-myths-gifts
>
>
>
>
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