In reply to KTom
It says 45 trillion...todays money almost 90 trillion
From diamonds to marbles and stones to rings, during the colonial period, the Britishers took a lot of objects and many remain unreturned.
Check your Royal Jewels
How much wealth did England take from India?
Nearly $45 trillion in 200 years.Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion (equal to $45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5% rate of interest. Indians were never credited with their own gold and forex earnings.
This story takes a major hit with the publication of a new study by prominent economist Utsa Patnaik from Columbia University Press. Using extensive tax and trade records spanning almost two centuries, Patnaik determined that between 1765 and 1938, Britain stole nearly $45 trillion from India.
This is how it functioned. The East India Company deftly utilized a third of the taxes it collected in India to pay for the acquisition of Indian commodities by the British. Basically, British businessmen "bought" products from peasants and weavers in India using money that had just been stolen from them; therefore, the things weren't really paid for.
The gold and silver that were supposed to go to the Indians as payment for their exports instead ended up in London.
India had a sizable trade surplus with the rest of the world that lasted for 30 years in the early 1900s, but because of this corrupt system, Britain took the entirety of India's real export income, making it appear as a deficit in the national accounts.
British imperial aggression, including the 1840s invasion of China and the 1857 repression of the Indian Rebellion, was fueled by the windfall from this fraudulent system. This was in addition to the money the Crown had already taken from Indian taxpayers to fund its wars. The expense of any British invasion outside Indian territory was "always wholly or mainly charged to Indian revenues," as Patnaik notes.
In his analysis of colonial India's economy from 1765 to 1938, Patnaik separates the years into four separate economic periods, determines the extraction for each, and then applies a moderate interest rate—about 5%—from the middle of each period to the present. This rate is lower than the market rate. After tallying everything up, she discovers that the overall drain is $44.6 trillion. She claims that this sum is modest since
it does not account for the Raj-era debts incurred by India by the British.
These amounts are mouth-watering. However, it is impossible to determine the actual expenses of this drain. Nothing could have changed in the course of history if India could have followed Japan's lead and invested its own tax income and foreign exchange earnings in growth. India has a great opportunity to become a global economic superpower. We could have spared ourselves centuries of misery and poverty if we had tried.
British rule over India was short-lived. As Patnaik's research shows, it was actually India that helped shape Britain.Not only Britain, but the whole of today’s advanced capitalist world flourished on the drain from India and other colonies.
British Raj siphoned out $45 trillion from India: Utsa Patnaik
