"The colonies had very limited investable capital." This sentence inverts the causality so completely it requires a full stop.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2045237422452351357
"The colonies had very limited investable capital."
This sentence inverts the causality so completely it requires a full stop.
The colonies had limited capital because it was extracted.
India's share of global GDP was approximately 24% when British colonization began.
It was approximately 4% when the British left.
That is not a coincidence of development stages.
That is the measurable result of two centuries of systematic transfer.
The British collected taxes from Indian subjects and used those taxes to fund the British Indian Army, which was then used to expand British imperial interests across Asia and Africa.
Indian textile industries, which were globally competitive, were deliberately dismantled to protect British manufacturing.
By 1850, India, which had been a net exporter of textiles, was importing them from Britain.
The deindustrialization was policy.
The poverty it produced was policy's outcome.
To then point at that poverty and say there was not much capital there to extract is to complete the erasure the policy began.
"Why is lending at commercial rates extraction? Countries should be competitive for the debt they take on."
This argument assumes the borrowing is voluntary in a meaningful sense.
It assumes the country has alternatives.
It assumes the conditions attached to the loans are not themselves part of the extraction.
When the IMF lends to a country in crisis, a crisis often produced by the same trade architecture the IMF helped design, the conditions attached require:
Cutting food subsidies.
Cutting healthcare spending.
Privatizing state enterprises, often sold at distressed prices to foreign capital.
Liberalizing capital accounts, allowing profit to flow out freely.
Maintaining currency arrangements that favor creditor nations.
These are not neutral efficiency requirements.
They are a specific economic model, implemented under duress, that consistently produces the same outcome:
Public assets transferred to foreign ownership.
Social spending cut.
Populations more vulnerable.
Countries more dependent.
The IMF's own Independent Evaluation Office has documented this.
This is not a radical interpretation.
This is the institution's own internal assessment of its own record.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2045237422452351357
posted by Satish Sharma at
07:50
0 Comments
