By: FE Online | October 1, 2019
There have been various reports and studies that have shown that the Britishers plundered the Indian economy during 200 years of their rule.
Foreign Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said that the British took away $45 trillion during their rule of two centuries in India. He also said that India faced two centuries of humiliation by the West. “India had two centuries of humiliation by the West. The West in its predatory form came into India in the mid 18th century and continued 190 years after that. A year ago, a very serious economic study which tried to estimate how much British took out of India in value terms and a very calculated maths ended up putting a number of USD 45 trillion at today’s value. So that should give you a sense of what really happened in those 200 years,” Jaishankar said while speaking at Atlantic Council.
The minister was referring to an economic study conducted by economist Utsa Patnaik. According to her research published by Columbia University Press, the British Raj siphoned out at least USD 44.6 trillion — as the exchange rate was USD 4.8 per pound sterling during much of the period Britishers ruled in India. There have been various reports and studies that have shown that the Britishers plundered the Indian economy during 200 years of their rule.
Former Union Minister and senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has written a book — An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India’ — explaining the cruel ways in which Britishers bled the farmers and small craftsmen by imposing unimaginable taxes on their produce. In 2017, Tharoor delivered a speech at the Oxford Union arguing why Britishers must pay reparations to India.
“The weavers in India became beggars and India went from being a world-famous exporter of finished cloth into an importer when from having 27 per cent of the world trade to less than 2 per cent,” he said while speaking at the union. The minister said that Britain’s rise was financed by its depredations in India. “In fact, Britain’s industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialization of India,” Tharoor added.
The article appeared in the Financial Express .financialexpress.com/