SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: The "only elites benefited" argument is one of the most effective deflections in this conversation

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2053516337130172589

Sony Thăng

The "only elites benefited" argument is one of the most effective deflections in this conversation because it sounds radical, almost anti-capitalist, while doing the work of exoneration.

If only elites benefited, then ordinary British, French, and Belgian people are also victims of colonialism, alongside the Congolese and the Indians and the Vietnamese.

Everyone suffers.

No one is specifically accountable.

The crimes dissolve into a universal story about class.

But this requires ignoring something basic:

The industrial infrastructure that created the British working class, the railways, the factories, the financial institutions, was substantially capitalized by colonial extraction and slave trade profits.

Eric Williams documented this in 1944.

Utsa Patnaik calculated Britain extracted the equivalent of $45 trillion from India alone over colonial rule.

The ordinary British worker who got a job in a textile mill that processed colonial cotton was not unconnected to the system.

He was downstream of it.

Quote

Mark E Weinburg

@Naumkeeg

Replying to @nxt888

What is equally true, almost no colonizing country profited economically from imperialism. Narrow, elite interests within those countries did. Colonialism was also tied to global power projection and prestige - and providing employment for surplus aristocrats.