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How did the British occupy India?
...today's colonials fight back. Britain occupied India with a tiny force because the Indians mostly let them, and on the rare occasions when they rebelled the British (like all the other European colonial powers) felt free to crush them in the most brutal manner imaginable.
No matter how we compare American and British brutalities (we dropped many bombs on Vietnam), I place greater stock in the railroad (later the car and bus) and the radio. In the early days of British control, most Indians couldn't get within shouting distance of a fight if they wanted to. The Brits had only to control some key garrisoned cities and some trade routes. Local rulers did the rest. Radio, which spread in the 1920s, told people what was going on and cemented national consciousness. Those technologies heralded the later end of colonialism, with WWII hurrying along the new equilibrium.
Might some future technology might render colonialism more likely (NB: I am not saying "more desirable")? Extreme surveillance is one possiiblity, but this appears far off for poorer locales. More likely is simply that rich countries buy the loyalty of some (smaller) poor countries, as the French seem to have done with Martinique.
If the world's very poor countries stay in Malthusian traps, how long will it be before wealthy philanthropists can try to "adopt a country"? Measured Haitian gdp, for instance, is only a few billion dollars a year (TC: don't ask about the storms!). Yes many countries have laws against foreign investment and land ownership, but at some point a correct strategy can put the money to good use. Can an entire corrupt government simply be bought out? Just how much money, and what kind of plan, would a private philanthropist need each year to turn Haiti around, or at least bring it to the standards of Martinique?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 25, 2006 at 06:40 AM in History | Permalink
Comments
very interesting question...
Posted by: sa at Oct 25, 2006 9:29:42 AM
And the distinction between a private philanthropist who buys out a corrupt government and a strongman who buys his way to the presidency-for-life will be what, exactly? Both will presumably have the same tools at their disposal, face the same threats to their control, and have roughly the same motivations to act in the country's best interests. The problem is not one of corruption pure and simple; it is also a problem of the lack of acountability of those with power at all levels.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Oct 25, 2006 9:59:40 AM
Radio, which spread in the 1920s, told people what was going on and cemented national consciousness.I'm interested in the above topic (radio & the development of national consciousness). Can you recommend a particular source?
Posted by: James at Oct 25, 2006 10:20:48 AM
Let's also not forget the contributions of Mr. Kalashnikov. Modern small-arms not only considerably narrow the capabilities gap of a professional occupying force and the locals, but their mass-production also dramatically increases their availability.
Posted by: KL at Oct 25, 2006 10:33:47 AM
Leonard Dudley's book is a good place to start on radio...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Oct 25, 2006 10:40:33 AM
...today's colonials fight back. Britain occupied India with a tiny force because the Indians mostly let them, and on the rare occasions when they rebelled the British (like all the other European colonial powers) felt free to crush them in the most brutal manner imaginable.
The brutality is certainly part of it, but this is an absurdly simplistic view of the means by which the British took India. Until the mid-18th century (Clive, Battle of Plassey -- all that stuff), the European powers (British and French) didn't enjoy much military superiority over the Indians, and in fact, generally appeared before the Mughal court as petitioners, to get their trading privileges ratified, or to pursue an Imperial farman, so that provincial Nawabs couldn't just tax their trade out of existence. After Aurangzeb's death, however, the Imperial government seems essentially to have fallen apart, under invasions by Afghans and Persians (carrying off, e.g. the Peacock Throne), and a massive rebellion by the Marathas.
In that environment, the local Nawabs (and the Nizam of Hyderabad) made war on each other, and fought over the succession to this and that province -- the Carnatic, or Golconda, or whatever. French and British military technology had advanced to the point that a comparatively small force of European (or European equipped) soldiery could make a massive difference in the outcomes of these internecine struggles, so that various Indian princes and pretenders looked to the Europeans as key military allies. And when they won their contests, they granted territory (with the associated rents) to their allies, including the Europeans. Later, after the outcome of some European conflict or other, the French possessions were handed over the Britain, and Britain had the majority of her direct-rule provinces, and acquired suzerainity over others (e.g. the Nizamate of Hyderabad) by treaty relations. Alongside these more peaceable acquisitions (well, by colonial standards), there were also wars of conquest, such as the Anglo-Mysore wars. But even in these cases, the British forces intervened in local disputes, supporting (if I recall correctly) an ousted dynasty over that of Tipu Sultan.
There were rebellions, of course. Or rather, one great rebellion -- the Indian mutiny, in 1857. And that rebellion made fairly clear that without the aid of Indian princes, there was no way the British could hold India (not all of India rebelled, after all, many principalities and populations remained loyal to the British). And that rebellion was put down brutally, including some really vicious acts against the impotent remnants of the Mughal court.
This account is over-simplified too, naturally. But it certainly wasn't the case that the Indians "mostly let them." Indian populations fought back all the time, practically every step of the way -- it was just that the British weren't fighting alone. They were fighting with the aid of their local allies, with the aid of local princes and warlords with their own armies. And they fought using giant sepoy armies drawn out of the local population.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Oct 25, 2006 11:30:52 AM
Maybe I'm missing something, but hasn't Martinique ALWAYS been a part of France - albeit a heavily subsidized one - and never an independent country?
Posted by: Anthony Bongiorni at Oct 25, 2006 12:04:27 PM
The divide & rule above is well put. There wasn't a notion of India until Tilak at the round of the 1900's. Railroads made for excellent control. There is the fantastic dissertation bt Daniel Thorner on this topic (published). One must not neglect the ideological side as well. The British represented progress and in many cases reform to intelligent Indians. Its only when the Raj started to calcify and limit educated Indians that a break was inevitable. By and large the role of cruelty was not a positive factor and after the massacre at Amritsar it contributed to the decline of imperial sentiment in India..
Posted by: edwardseco at Oct 25, 2006 12:06:25 PM
That is an interesting question. How exactly would a very wealthy
philanthropist go about buying out a country?
Posted by: Xanthippas at Oct 25, 2006 12:07:38 PM
In the early days of British control, most Indians couldn't get within shouting distance of a fight if they wanted to.
This may have been true for the average peasant, but it wasn't the average peasant who was problematic -- it was armed confederations, bandits, or Marathas or what-have-you. Or hostile princes. The Marathas come out of the province around Bombay, and by the mid-18th century (again, Clive et al.), they can attack (and have attacked) pretty much every part of India. Moving goods across all of India, prior to the railways, seems to have been extremely time-consuming and expensive. The British attempt to buy a farman off the Emperor (after Aurangzeb died, I think) involved a caravan spending several months just reaching the imperial capital. But raiders travelling light don't seem to have run into the same problems. Nor did the "pirate" princes who harassed British shipping in the early 18th century have much difficulty getting about.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Oct 25, 2006 12:18:52 PM
I've long had a joke American policy for taking over the world. I call it the "Purchase the World Plan". One by one we purchase different countries, starting with the smallest and working our way up. So we'd start with Nauru. Buy them out, move them all to America with eventual citizenship and homestead Nauru to present citizens. Rinse and repeat. Each country would be more expensive and have a larger population but America would be wealthier with more space. I'd like to reiterate - it's a joke - it would destroy entire cultures and not really work anyway.
Posted by: vc at Oct 25, 2006 12:34:52 PM
I agree with you that low-latency mass media such as the radio makes imperialism more difficult, but I think the effect is important on the imperial nation as well as the colonial one. Historically, empires are maintained by violence. Not the kind of violence that the US military is using today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a higher level of violence. You don't just kill the guy who spoke out against the occupation, you kill his entire village. Once mass media started to enter the picture, civilians back in the home country started hearing about these massacres (in a very visceral, timely way, not in a newspaper weeks after the fact), and they didn't tolerate them; the benefits of imperialism didn't warrant the moral cost of all those lives. And so there was political opposition. This is exactly what happened in Vietnam; the Americans could have one the war easily and occupied the whole country, they just weren't morally prepared to do what was necessary. For countries in which the government has tight control over the media and there is no democracy, much more violent tactics are permissible and imperialism is still alive and well (think China in Tibet, Iraq in Kurdistan, etc).
Posted by: Chris Ball at Oct 25, 2006 12:42:06 PM
One historian I read asked how the tiny numbers of British could defeat huge Indian armies at a roughly equivalent technological level. He answered that it was because the British didn't betray each other.
Posted by: dearieme at Oct 25, 2006 12:46:12 PM
The Republic of Kiribati has a GDP of only $63m and a population of 105,432. They would go REALLY cheap.
As for buyers, they're less than 2 degrees from the equator. Lockheed or Boeing should buy them, Kiritimati would be a fantastic location to place an electromagnetic catapault for a two stage orbital system or a heavy launch pad.
Posted by: Chris Mann at Oct 25, 2006 1:54:18 PM
I wouldn't underestimate the power of ideas. Colonialism became impossible because it became unacceptable. It didn't take radios for that to happen, it did take ideology. Once (i) you weren't allowed to ruthlessly "put down natives for their own good" and (ii) middle class native thought they could run things better themselves, thank you very much, the days of the Raj were numbered.
Posted by: AdamSmithee at Oct 25, 2006 2:52:45 PM
What is the best history written of the European foray into India? That sounds interesting.
To the topic, if we take the Brit-Indian approach, would that suggest that we side with the most powerful tribes of Shiites, a few Sunni or Kurdish tribes, and tell them to secure the peace or be replaced? Where necessary, join the battle? We would have to stomach some-- to us-- reprehensible methods. This reminds me of Marlon Brando's speech in Apocolypse Now:
Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried...I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion...without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us.
Posted by: Myreon at Oct 25, 2006 2:59:12 PM
The Republic of Kiribati has a GDP of only $63m
Yeah but GDP is income, not net worth or wealth. When you buy out a company you don't pay for it the equivalent of 1 yr's profits. You pay something like the discounted present value of the stream of profits.
So it'd be something like:
63m+63m*(1+g)/(1+r)+63m*((1+g)/(1+r))^2+...
where r is the discount rate and g is growth rate of Kiribati's GDP.
If r>g this sum converges. Let's take an r of 5%, which is not implausible. According to wiki Kiribati's GDP growth has been 1.5% (though it's not clear if this per capita or total) and actually their present GDP is 79m (I think that's real)
So I'd price Kiribati at about 2.3 billion, though I guess this would represent the maximum possible value (given g) that can be extracted from this possible colony.
Complicate it as you'd like and don't trust my maths.
Posted by: radek at Oct 25, 2006 4:20:06 PM
Radek,
What if an intelligence service -- I cannot say of which Western country -- reports that the Republic of Kiribati is giving support (and perhaps also refuge) to a very dangerous terrorist who is in possess of mass-destruction weapons?
What should your estimate be of the Republic of Kiribati's share?
Jacopo
Posted by: Jacopo at Oct 25, 2006 4:41:29 PM
I clicked the on the "many bombs in Vietnam" link. In the first paragraph it said that America dropped 8 million
tons of bombs on Vietnam, which was "approximately 300 tons for every man, woman and child living in Vietnam."
So lets do the math on this one. 8 million tons/300 tons per person = 26667 Vietnamese. There are only 26 thousand
Vietnamese! Man we must have killed a bunch of them, because last I heard there were about 76 million people in
Vietnam.
Posted by: Joseph at Oct 25, 2006 5:13:22 PM
Huh? Share of what? And it was meant as a... nevermind.
Posted by: radek at Oct 25, 2006 6:49:26 PM
I'd disagree with James' argument earlier today: strongmen who buy their way into government have a direct and personal interest in staying in power - their own safety and monetary security.
Assuming someone had the means to 'buy' a country, they would probably have that country's economic development in mind to earn a reasonable ROI. Brutal oppression, summary imprisonment and execution of opponents doesn't seem to be the order of they day for most modern day MNCs.
Posted by: Alex Ambroz at Oct 25, 2006 6:52:46 PM
I don't think the country valuations you guys are doing make any sense. ROI uses income, not revenue. These countries probably aren't generating a lot of profit from their taxes. If you wanted to price a country I think you'd need to assume you were going to run the government as a non-profit (as opposed to the US negative-profit system), and price the capital assets, starting with the land.
Posted by: BillWallace at Oct 25, 2006 7:32:47 PM
If a wealthy philanthropist was willing to buy a country run by a corrupt government what happens after they have control? Would the people their really benefit, the philanthropist may have good intention but if they don't know how to effectively run a country than isn't it possible the country would be better off with the corrupt government. With all the resources they would have to devote to the country's upkeep what would be the actual benefit for them? While I do think that it is possible to invest enough money in a country to own it I don't see how a person could really benefit from that. If the local people rose up and overthrew the philanthropist then they just wasted a lot of money.
Posted by: Robert S at Oct 25, 2006 7:39:55 PM
There's another approach.
Take Nauru, population about 13 000. So say there are 7 000 voters. GDP $5000 per cap.
So what if you offered each voter $5000, to be paid in the event that your candidate wins the election? Would a majority of voters change their vote for a year's wages, or rather a year's GDP?
That would be like offering Americans about $43 000 each. How many American's make their decision on economic grounds, and that is about a 5% tax cut or a minimum wage pay rise. Would you not vote for someone who would give you an extra year's salary?
And this can be placed in escrow via an international bank. Much more reliable than any normal political promise.
So you get a real country, with a UN seat and everything, for $35 million.
Of course you have to repeat the payment every 4 years. But you can adjust the payment so you just get a majority vote.
Posted by: Patrick at Oct 25, 2006 11:00:56 PM
Well, it does seem kind of bad if a wealthy philanthropist was able to buy a third-world or small country. But it also could actually help that country pull itself together and jump start its economy by the aid that they possibly will recieve from the wealthy philanthropist. It might even spark anger towards the philanthropist from the enhabitants of the country causing them to gang up together and start a resistance that could strengthen their country. After all it was a war that brought the US out of a depression and turned us into a economic world power. I'm not saying that the death and destruction that world war II brought us out of the depression but instead it was the act of all the people in the US joining together for one cause and busting their butts to get our war machine rolling adn making equipment for the troops to use in battle.
Posted by: John B. at Oct 25, 2006 11:50:02 PM
