It is often argued by the classical liberal thinkers that ideas of individual liberty were the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution. Intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Deirdre McCloskey see the revolution in a very linear fashion. They argue that people lived in pitiful conditions before the great industrial revolution came as a knight in shining armor to lift them up. However, the Industrial Revolution also provided newer tools which acted as catalyst for the exponential growth of colonialism, which curtailed individual liberty across the continents. Can we then, as classical liberals/libertarians, claim the credit of the Industrial Revolution, but choose to overlook the loss of liberty in the colonies established by the newly industrialized nations?
It is time for the libertarians of the 21st century to acknowledge the elephant in the room: colonialism. It’s essential because many argue that the Industrial Revolution or even the ideas of Liberty—that Pinker and McCloskey cherish—were the causal forces behind colonialism. I am not suggesting that these people are correct; however, their point resonates favorably among a sizable population group, even beyond the former colonies.
If the history of enlightenment and Industrial Revolution has to be seen in a linear fashion, what should we make of colonialism? A part of the linear transformation towards the Liberal world order? If liberty should be valued for its consequences, why should postcolonial thinkers go down the path? History, as some argue, perhaps, is the history of discourse and discourse, in itself, is a game of articulation. If we as libertarians lose the game of discourse and articulation, what lies ahead for the movement?
When the British—who kick-started the Industrial Revolution—became better-off and moved to distant lands for more opportunities to trade, they forgot the values of liberty. In my country, India, they stole over 45 trillion dollars over the years of their rule. Not only that, they went on to acquire the forests by alienating local communities and forest dwellers, who lived there for centuries. Throughout, they acted as if the notion of property rights was not relevant in colonial India. Let’s not forget that property rights are intrinsic to the ideas of liberty. Libertarian thinkers like Murray Rothbard consider property rights as the sine qua non of Human Rights.
There may be an argument that the ideas of liberty helped in the development of countries which went through the industrial revolution. As per McCloskey, the ideas of liberty allowed the English people “for the first time to experiment, to have a go, and, especially, to talk to each other in an open-source fashion about their experiments and their goings, rather than hiding them in posthumously decoded mirror writing out of fear of theological and political disapproval.” Furthermore, others argue that the Industrial Revolution could very well have happened in China, but it didn’t, because the rulers there did not support innovators and in fact restrictive on them when they started attaining success.
China did not have an Industrial Revolution and the British did. However, we must note that China—at that point—did not go on to take away resources of people across the globe, but the British did. Business is not a zero-sum game of resources, but a positive-sum game instead. While exploring the newer lands for business opportunities, had the British adhered to their liberal principles, the British would still have grown, and so would have been the other countries.
Liberty, we must remember, is not relative. If the ability to choose is violated, even for a single human being, there is no liberty. It is still not late. Libertarians of the 21st century should stop resting on the laurels of the ‘Industrial Revolution’, and look into the degeneration of newly industrialized nations into illiberal colonial powers. We should do some soul-searching and try to understand these ideas of the Enlightenment- what was their soul, what went wrong, and why it went wrong. This will help us to present a strong narrative about a world based on the soul and principles of liberty for all.
Adnan Abbasi is currently pursuing Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) degree majoring in Social and Political Science from Ahmedabad University. He is a Writing Fellow at Students for Liberty’s Fellowship for Freedom in India.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Jul 31 2022 at 11:08am
Good stuff. I have been thinking on these items recently as well. AV Dicey, the great British liberal legal thinker, represents well the conundrum you discuss. He popularized the concept “rule of law” but often refused to extend it to British colonies.
Mark Brady
Jul 31 2022 at 5:26pm
“[A. V. Dicey] popularized the concept “rule of law” but often refused to extend it to British colonies.”
Please elucidate.
Jon Murphy
Jul 31 2022 at 6:35pm
Dicey was far more willing to allow imperial arbitrariness in colonies than in Britain. Indeed, imperialism often required the violation of rule of law.
To be fair, I do not think Dicey liked this aspect of imperialism, but he did defend it.
If you have access, this paper does a good job discussing the tensions.
Adnan Abbasi
Aug 4 2022 at 9:34am
Thanks a lot for sharing. I will check this paper out.
Thunderbolt
Jul 31 2022 at 5:19pm
How is 45 trillion possible to steal from India? wouldn’t this number be more than the GDP of India over the years from 1765 to 1938? This sounds like the same questionable math as used in the 1619 project.
Aleksander
Aug 1 2022 at 4:21pm
From the link:
So the word “stole” (or “siphoned out”, as it says in the link) in relation to the number $45 trillion appears to be misleading.
Iskander
Aug 1 2022 at 4:47pm
As I pointed out in my comment further below:
The overwhelming bulk of India’s export surplus was in fact payments for services rendered: for invisible imports, for foreign loans raised at interest rates far below those prevailing in India, for foreign direct investment (most of which was in industry), for the pensions of skilled workers from abroad working in India, and for the services of the Royal Navy etc.
Mark Brady
Jul 31 2022 at 6:26pm
“In my country, India, they stole over 45 trillion dollars over the years of their rule.”
This statement links to an interview with Utsa Patnaik, who declares that “[o]ver roughly 200 years, the East India Company and the British Raj siphoned out at least £9.2 trillion (or $44.6 trillion; since the exchange rate was $4.8 per pound sterling during much of the colonial period).”
Adnan seems to accept this estimate without qualification. Yet her analysis of British rule in India has long been contested by her fellow Marxist economists. See, for example, Tom Brass “Reply to Utsa Patnaik: If the Cap Fits …” in the International Review of Social History, 40, 1 (April 1995): 93 – 117.
As my friends and colleagues know, I am not a Marxist economist but I take Marxism seriously, and I am not a defender of empire but I take advocates of imperialism seriously. What is ironic is that some Marxist critics of British imperialism and some classical liberal defenders of the British industrial revolution neglect the impoverishment of the British laboring classes by illiberal laws that generations of the British ruling class enacted for their own benefit.
I look forward to a lively discussion of the issues you have raised in your post.
Adnan Abbasi
Aug 4 2022 at 9:30am
Interesting take. I am not a trained economist and have cited this number without checking with other sources. I will check the reading you suggested. However, the number has to be above India’s GDP today. Take the case of the richest temple of India; it has an accumulated wealth so far, as far as we know, of above a trillion dollars, which is all in gold, and a lot of the value was actually in, you know, artworks and sculpture, besides the deity. So, many valuations would have been very subjective, like paintings, gems, artifacts, and whatnot. One trillion or even two or three trillion (when accounting for inflation) is nothing compared to that because the British appropriated or looted the wealth that the earlier kings had accumulated in palaces, forts, or temples, as well as a lost opportunity costs for the artisans and traders of Indian textile — which the British textile industry killed.
Also, look at the costs in terms of not just monetary cost but human lives that were lost due to the artificial famines created by the deliberate actions of the Britishers. We talk so much about Stalin and his famines against the Ukrainians, but why do we not talk about multiple such famines that happened in India?
The British not only took away the resources and laborers from India but did so usually by force and not voluntary contracts. You have to take that into account as well.
Iskander
Aug 4 2022 at 5:34pm
Wealth that was supposedly looted from temples and so on was idle wealth: gems and hoarded gold do not produce anything. A few Indians (do Persianate Mughals count as Indians?) were wealthy, India was poor and unproductive. It was not the case that the British were loading steam engines on ships in order to take them back to England. Indeed, the opposite was true as India received foreign investment in industry during the colonial era. The Industrial revolution came early to India, precisely because it had closer contact with Britain.
Pointing to Tata, Birla and so on is showing how Indian business did rather well under the supposed British yoke, especially since they paid little in taxes and did not need government permission to invest neither of which have been the case since “azadi” was achieved.
Share of global GDP arguments are ridiculous. India’s high share before 1800 was purely because it had a large population and everywhere had low incomes. The same occurred with China. India had a low GDP per capita before, during and after colonialism. The causes are much more deep rooted than the skin color of its administrators.
Kurt Schuler
Jul 31 2022 at 8:43pm
Your post is filled with false assertions and assumptions.
“If the history of enlightenment and Industrial Revolution has to be seen in a linear fashion,….” Why should it be seen in such a fashion?
“When the British—who kick-started the Industrial Revolution—became better-off and moved to distant lands for more opportunities to trade, they forgot the values of liberty.” Those values were already forgotten much earlier and closer to home, in Ireland. But I doubt that anybody else at the time, including the various native rulers of India, was a lot better.
“China—at that point—did not go on to take away resources of people across the globe, but the British did.” Those resources did not necessarily make Britain as a whole any richer; see the book Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire.
“If the ability to choose is violated, even for a single human being, there is no liberty.” Nonsense. You and I have liberty even though Cubans and North Koreans don’t.
Adnan Abbasi
Aug 4 2022 at 9:32am
Thank you for your critical feedback.
Why should it be seen in such a fashion?
It shouldn’t, but if we read Pinker and McCloskey, this is how they (and the broader classical liberal community) read history.
Those values were already forgotten much earlier and closer to home, in Ireland. But I doubt that anybody else at the time, including the various native rulers of India, was a lot better.
The point about Ireland strengthens my argument. Ireland was the first place to be colonized by England, and as you say, the values of Liberty were lost there, but England was a beacon of Liberty during those times; they could have worked on Liberal principles even in their respective colonies. Regarding other places, yes, people did not value Liberty in general. Still, I will put the West at a higher pedestal when judging their actions because today, they claim (and rightly so) the responsibility for conceptualizing and spreading the ideas of Liberty and see historical movements such as the Industrial Revolution in conjunction with them.
“China—at that point—did not go on to take away resources of people across the globe, but the British did.” Those resources did not necessarily make Britain as a whole any richer; see the book Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire.
I was not aware of this book and will have a read. Thank you for the suggestion.
“If the ability to choose is violated, even for a single human being, there is no liberty.” Nonsense. You and I have liberty even though Cubans and North Koreans don’t.
I made this remark in the context of a single nation/empire. Cuba and North Korea are illiberal countries, to begin with, and do not call themselves Liberal either. Imperial Britain, on the other hand, had a concept of citizenship for itself based on Liberal principles, and those values are cherished by modern-day Liberals as well, but these values weren’t universal throughout the empire; hence, if the ability to choose is violated, even for a single human being in the British Empire, there is no liberty, to add, no liberty in the empire.
Iskander
Aug 1 2022 at 7:55am
This article is wrong, and it is especially wrong regarding India.
In India the British did export metropolitan economic liberalism. There was free trade, free enterprise and low taxes. You could note vote, but you could trade and produce what you wanted. There was no license Raj during the colonial era: you did not need permission to set up a business. Indeed, the main economic arguments made by Indian nationalists against the Raj was that it was too economically liberal. They wanted tariffs and state run industries i.e. the kind of disastrous policies followed by many post-colonial countries. Indian libertarians better face up to this colonial truth rather than indulging in populist anti-colonialism.
The British in India were obsessed with the idea of property rights and they upheld them much more than pre-colonial and post-colonial governments did/have. State management of forests seems like a very minor issue when there are well known collective action problems regarding deforestation. You can point to tribals with ill-defined claims to large expanses of jungle, but one can point to the people of the plains, who formed the majority of the population where, by the late 1800s, the British were minutely recording rights in land – to an extent unparalleled by many countries even today – with the express purpose of protecting property rights.
The $45 trillion figure is commonly cited by Indians and, as other commentators have pointed out, it is garbage. What Patnaik does is to capitalize the value of India’s export surplus during the colonial era. Since this occurred 150 years ago these calculations apply massive weights to small sums: one would like to know what discount factor to apply to Nadir Shah’s loot.
What is worse, is that the overwhelming bulk of India’s export surplus was in fact payments for services rendered: for invisible imports, for foreign loans raised at interest rates far below those prevailing in India, for foreign direct investment (most of which was in industry), for the pensions of skilled workers from abroad working in India, and for the services of the Royal Navy etc. The true “loot” was confined to the 18th century and it was a small sum compared with India’s vast population and, what is much more important, the “loot” that Indian politicians and well connected businessmen take from their own people through present day rent seeking.
I will restate the general point: Colonialism in India *was* economic liberalism, independence has been economic illiberalism.
murmur
Aug 10 2022 at 12:25am
While I agree with your general point that independent India is more economically illiberal, British India was hardly a free market paradise. There were punitive taxes like the salt tax against which Gandhi led the salt march. The British created an inland customs barrier (the Great Hedge of India) running through the middle of India to check free trade. If British India was truly a free market polity India would have been far richer at the eve of independence.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 1 2022 at 9:36am
1. Conquest is as old as mankind. Empires have existed all over the globe, formed by people of every race and creed. India itself is an empire. Its Gupta Empire was founded in 320 A.D. – long before England became a nation – and there have been many Indian empires since.
2. England’s first colony was founded in 1584 – 176 years before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1760 – 1840).
3. Adam Smith is considered by many to be the “father of capitalism” thanks to his book “The Wealth of Nations,” which was published in 1776. Wikipedia’s “List of Empires” currently includes 264 empires. Of those, only 28 were founded after 1776 and 15 of those 28 “modern” empires were non-western, non-capitalist polities. The three currently active imperial powers are Russia, China, and Iran.
4. It was Adam Smith who pointed out that conquering people is far less beneficial and far more costly in terms of life and treasure than is trading with them. What is unique about the West is that – thanks in part to Smith and the Scottish enlightenment – it now condemns conquest.
Henri Hein
Aug 1 2022 at 7:04pm
Richard,
Apologies for duplicating your point in my previous comment. I did not see this entry when I posted.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 1 2022 at 10:16pm
No problem!
Henri Hein
Aug 1 2022 at 1:01pm
I honestly don’t understand this line of reasoning. The Portuguese started modern colonialism in the 15th century. The Industrial Revolution started in the 17th or 18th (depending on exactly when you measure from). How could the Industrial Revolution be the cause of colonialism? It seems more reasonable to assume that with or without the IR, the European governments would have been scrambling over each other to colonize the other continents.
Philip Owen
Aug 1 2022 at 7:38pm
India like other colonies was not a beacon of liberty before colonialism. 500 years ago 85% of the world’s population often more was unfree. Tied to the land by serfdom or straight slavery. Things had been that way under the rule of landlords and priests since agriculture was invented 5000 years ago. British trade and modernisation has led us to a world in which people are freer, healthier, 30x wealthier and better educated than ever before.
The $45trn is overstating. There were occasions of looting (that was the traditional way to pay armies in India). The 3rd siege of Serigapatam was such an occasion. But do not forgot Tipu Sultan had himself looted most of that treasure from other Indian rulers. The sums involved were not colossal and half went to the sepoys and the officers spent a lot in India.
Britain came to trade wool and copper for fine hand woven Indian Muslin once demand for spice was dealt with. The Indian merchants made a profit. Without one they could not have traded. British cloth merchants made profits. However, as is usual, the middleman, in this case the East India Company, made the most. That was not loot. The Indian merchants lacked stable private property rights and had no banking system to reinvest profits. The British merchants had both.
Jim Glass
Aug 1 2022 at 9:32pm
…they stole over 45 trillion dollars…
And Manhattan Island was sold for $7.2 billion in beads and trinkets by the Lenape Indians to the Dutch. That’s what applying 5% interest back to colonial days does.
World GDP did not reach $45 trillion until circa 1990 (in 2011 dollars). In 1820 World GDP was $1.4 trillion, and India’s was about 16% of that. So it seems unlikely that anybody stole $45 trillion from anybody back in those days.
If the British did steal that many multiples of total world GDP from anybody they sure squandered it all. Must’ve thrown a heck of a party! Sorry I missed it.
Jim Glass
Aug 1 2022 at 11:15pm
If the history of enlightenment and Industrial Revolution has to be seen in a linear fashion…
What does this even mean?
If liberty should be valued for its consequences, why should postcolonial thinkers go down the path?…
Huh?
When the British—who kick-started the Industrial Revolution—became better-off and moved to distant lands for more opportunities to trade, they forgot the values of liberty….
Methinks you don’t understand the process of the development of law and “liberty” over historical time, in the historically very few cases where “liberty” as a top value has actually emerged.
Impersonal “fair” laws first arise as deals among the power elites, who need a way to maintain their power and positions without resorting to violence against each other. But this justice applies only among themselves, they remain perfectly happy to exploit everyone else, the weaker, because, why not? Incentives! ‘Kings and Nobles’ bear striking resemblance to Mafia families.
Then, in a historically very small minority of “lucky cases”, lower groups within a society gain the importance to earn/force the extension of that justice downward to them, incrementally.
King Edward I was weak and couldn’t force his nobles to pay for his war, so he submitted to make a deal with them and England got a Parliament … as towns and merchants became a more important source of money (that they could withhold) Parliament was expanded to include a House of Commons, which gradually grew more powerful than the House of Lords … Charles I decided to go back to being an absolute monarch so the Parliamentarians chopped off his head — and the basic principle of liberty that “no man is above the law” was established … […] in the early 1900s economically rising British women fueled an extremely violent suffragette movement that got them the vote … etc.
See: Violence and Social Orders, by the Nobelist Douglas North & Co.
In none of these cases was “liberty” ever brought to a population as a generous gift by prosperous fans of Adam Smith or enlightened libertarian-type thinkers. In the mid-19th Century, the British had good self-interested domestic reasons to value and further develop their increasingly liberal society at home — but had no reason to spread “liberty” to foreign lands as some sort of religion. So Britain sailed its fleet to China to force open the opium trade and start the opium wars. Because … incentives! Self-interest. And a good part of our problem with China today results from Chinese leaders still remembering this.
New groups that attained liberty earned it via the force of hard economic-political bargaining power, or violence.
And note the attempts to bring enlightened western-style “liberty” to populations that don’t want or respect it have repeatedly failed disastrously — in my memory, from VietNam and South East Asia to Iraq and Afghanistan among others. “Liberty” may be the most important value to libertarians, but it’s not and never has been to most peoples and populations.
Nick O'Connor
Aug 2 2022 at 8:50am
Indian empires and Indian colonialism didn’t start with the British. Were they worse than the Mughals? Worse than the Sikh empire? They certainly weren’t seen as such at the time, or the relatively small British forces would never have been able to conquer India, or to rule it post-conquest. Not to say that British rule was benevolent, or morally acceptable – of course it wasn’t. But I haven’t read anything that convincingly suggests that the alternatives were better.
Having said that, the Mughals, Sikhs and other rulers didn’t – to the best of my knowledge – talk nearly as much about liberty as the British did, and their rule didn’t potentially hold out hope for the spread of the Industrial Revolution to India, as British rule did. Might India have had its own explosive growth of prosperity over a century before it actually started to happen, if British policy had been different?
British weakness in India was a problem – the Macaulayite Liberals who wanted to transform India were always opposed by conservatives who pointed out, rationally, that the British ruled India with the consent of powerful Indian interests and powerful Indian rulers, and they couldn’t afford to rock the boat. After the Mutiny, the conservatives decisively won the argument. The Liberals may not have been deliberately breaking the caste of Indian sepoys with cow fat greased cartridges, but their policies were consciously aimed at remaking Indian society, and ultimately destroying the caste system, the power of local rulers and administrators, etc. If the British Empire in India had been more profitable, might more money have been found for British soldiers and administrators, and the Liberal project to transform India have won the argument, starting a virtuous circle that ended in India as a wealthy and free country in the early to mid 20th century?
The British should never have ruled India. It’s just difficult to think that things would have gone much better if they hadn’t done so.
Adnan Abbasi
Aug 4 2022 at 9:33am
No one claims that the Mughals or the Sikh Empire were the beacons of Liberty, so I do not understand the point of comparing the British to them. The British, though, do idealize several elements of their Liberal principles, which existed contemporaneous with colonialism.
If anything, the British made India poorer. As Shashi Tharoor puts it in An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, India had as much as 27% of the share in World trade during the Mughal rule, which became less than 1% by the time the British left India.
Think about the question of historical what-ifs in this way. If Arabia — that was nothing for most of part of its existence, except for a Golden Age, which didn’t last long — could develop after discovering oil, how is it that India, a country that has been one of the wealthiest societies in the world before its colonization, couldn’t get industrialized even though British rule was here. Industrialization in India started during the later years of the Industrial Revolution, and the key drivers were Indian entrepreneurs such as Jamshedji Tata, GD Birla, and others.
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