SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: "The Industrial Revolution began before formal colonization. India wasn't formally colonized until the 1850s. The Scramble for Africa was a 19th century development."

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2047713428169773087

@nxt888

"The Industrial Revolution began before formal colonization. India wasn't formally colonized until the 1850s. The Scramble for Africa was a 19th century development."

This is the kind of sentence that sounds like a fact and functions as a misdirection.

The British East India Company was chartered in 1600.

It was extracting wealth from the Indian subcontinent for 250 years before "formal colonization" in the 1850s.

The argument that India wasn't colonized until it was formally colonized is a definitional trick. It defines colonization as the moment the British government took over from the British corporation that had been running a colonial extraction operation for two and a half centuries.

The extraction didn't begin in 1858.

The extraction began when the ships arrived.

The label changed. The direction of the money did not.

And the Scramble for Africa arrived at societies that had already been losing people for four centuries.

The slave trade removed an estimated 12 to 15 million people from the African continent at the peak of productive working age, the demographic that builds institutions, accumulates knowledge, and compounds capital.

That began in the 15th century.

The four centuries are the missing variable.

The Scramble found what four centuries of demographic extraction had produced, called it evidence of African underdevelopment, and used it as justification for colonial rule.

This is what the curriculum erases.

Ask any secondary school student in Britain, in the United States, in France, in any formerly colonized country with a Western-format education system, to explain why some countries are rich and others are poor.

The answers will be: they worked harder. They innovated more. They had better institutions. They had better governance. They had better culture. They made better choices.

Ask them who built the wealth of the British Empire.

British ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution. The entrepreneurial spirit of the Victorian age.

Ask them about the slave trade's contribution to British capital formation.

Silence.

Ask them about the drain from India.

Silence.

Ask them about the deliberate deindustrialization of Bengal's textile industry.

Silence.

That silence is the evidence.

The curriculum is what produces the silence.

And the silence is what Lee is defending when he asks where the proof is.

Quote

Lee Gregory Peck

@LeeGregoryPeck

Replying to @nxt888

Where is the evidence that the curriculum teaches the first? Besides,   the industrial revolution began before formal colonisation. The scramble for Africa was a nineteenth century development. India wasnt formally colonised until the 1850s.