Courtesy: https://twitter.com/sarahlgates1/status/1598826504477376513?s=46&t=hVjNFJvaPidpNkDfkDICMA
A new study by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel with Australian, Spanish and UK universities argues British Colonialism killed 100 million Indians.
The study notes ‘this is more than WW1 & WW2 inc the Nazi holocaust.’
Key Points:
“First, it is unlikely that 90% of the global population lived in extreme poverty prior to the rise of capitalism…The second conclusion is that the rise of capitalism coincided with a deterioration in human welfare…”
“Our third conclusion is that in those regions where progress has occurred … it began much later than the Ravallion/Pinker graph suggests […]
The first indicator we analyse is the real wages of unskilled urban labourers…”
“The second indicator we analyse is average adult male height. Malnutrition and poor health tend to limit childhood growth, so the average height of a population can be used as a rough proxy for access to basic-needs satisfiers […] “
“The third indicator we analyze is the mortality rate. As Amartya Sen…argues, economic welfare has a substantial influence on mortality. If the share of people unable to access essential goods required for survival increases, then mortality may also be expected to increase.”
Figure 11. Daily income per person for a family of four, with one family member working 12 months a year as an unskilled urban labourer, decadal averages (1 = extreme poverty line). Source: De Zwart & Lucassen, 2020, De Zwart et al., 2014; Allen (2007)”
“Figure 11 shows that, prior to colonization, India’s real wage was generally higher than the extreme poverty line. As with other regions, this data suggests extreme poverty only arose in times of extreme distress.”
“This pattern changed, however, as India was forcibly incorporated into the capitalist world-system, with wages regularly falling below subsistence in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was some recovery following Indian independence in 1948. “
[Summary: India gained economic strength immediately after Independence and then became stunted into the 2000s.]
Height analysis
Mortality
“We see that in the 1870s India’s crude mortality rate had already risen considerably higher than early modern England. The situation deteriorated thereafter, with mortality rising by 19%, and life expectancy plummeting to 22 years.”
“If we estimate excess mortality from 1891 to 1920, with the average death rate of the 1880s as normal mortality, we find some 50 million people lost their lives under the aegis of British capitalism (see Appendix V for a full discussion).”
“But this estimate must be considered conservative. India’s 1880s death rate was already very high by international standards. If we measure excess mortality over England’s 16th- & 17th-century average death rate, we find 165 million excess deaths in India between 1880 and 1920.”
“This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust.”
Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century.
Source: Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel
Full story https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#s0065
