More Jesuits.Nixon.

[Mark Kohut]

https://twitter.com/americamag/status/895357514061144064

On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 9:50 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170809/4b4be940/attachment.html>