Thread by @BenjaminNorton

Over roughly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire extracted $45 trillion of wealth from India. (For context, the UK has a GDP today of less than $3 trillion.)

And the scars of colonialism still remain, says renowned economist Utsa Patnaik
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"In the colonial era, most of India’s sizeable foreign exchange earnings went straight to London—severely hampering the country’s ability to import machinery and technology in order to embark on a modernisation path similar to what Japan did in the 1870s."
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From 1765-1938, the British empire siphoned $45 trillion from India.

The UK ‘drain’ was 26-36% of the central government budget.

There was virtually no increase in per capita income between 1900 and 1946, even though India had the world's second-largest export surplus earnings.

In India in 1911, under brutal British colonialism, expectation of life at birth was just 22 years. 22 years!

Because purchasing power of ordinary Indians was squeezed by high UK taxes, per capita annual consumption of food grains *decreased* from 200kg in 1900 to 137kg by 1946

A large part of India's tax payment to the British empire was converted into export goods—ie, the UK simply took these goods

The only Indian beneficiaries were intermediaries or dalals. Some of modern India’s well-known businesses built themselves up doing dalali for the British

Economist Utsa Patnaik: "The modern capitalist world would not exist without colonialism and the drain."

Britain used wealth it extracted from colonies, especially India, to export capital to North America and Europe, which financed industrial development
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