India then and today
In 1750 India and China accounted for almost 75 per cent of world industrial output.
"In 1600 when East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of world's GDP, while India was generating some 23 per cent. By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India has been reduced to a poor 'third world' country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. [Niall] Ferguson [an apologist historian for Imperialism] admits that 'between 1757 and 1900 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent'. Even that figure masks a steadily worsening performance by the Raj: from 1900 to 1947 the rate of growth of the Indian economy was below 1 per cent, while population grew steadily at well over 3.5 per cent, leavened only by high levels of infant and child mortality that shrank the net rate of population growth to the equivalent of economic growth, leaving a net growth rate near zero.
Freedom from Britain turned these numbers around for India. Net per capita income growth between 1900 and 1950 was nil (economic growth of 0.8 per cent minus net population growth at the same level), but it rose to 1.3 per cent from 1950 to 1980 (growth rate of 3.5 per cent minus population growth of 2.2 per cent), to 3.5 per cent from 1981–90 and 4.4 per cent from 1991–2000, before attaining even higher levels in the following decade, twice crossing 9 per cent and averaging 7.8 per cent from 2001–10. Besides these, other key indices were also extraordinary good after just under 7 (at the time of writing [2016]) decades of independence, compared to the twenty decades of British rule that had gone before.
The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line. Today, the literacy rate is up at 72 per cent, average life expectancqy is nearing the Biblical three score and 10, and 280 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the twenty-first century." — Inglorious Empire, pp. 216-17
Yet today "Switzerland is not only richer than India in terms of annual production of goods and services (the ratio between the two countries’ GDP per capita at market exchange rates is about 50 to 1), but Switzerland is even more richer in terms of wealth per adult (the ratio is almost 100 to 1)."
In 1750 India and China accounted for almost 75 per cent of world industrial output.
"In 1600 when East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of world's GDP, while India was generating some 23 per cent. By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India has been reduced to a poor 'third world' country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. [Niall] Ferguson [an apologist historian for Imperialism] admits that 'between 1757 and 1900 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent'. Even that figure masks a steadily worsening performance by the Raj: from 1900 to 1947 the rate of growth of the Indian economy was below 1 per cent, while population grew steadily at well over 3.5 per cent, leavened only by high levels of infant and child mortality that shrank the net rate of population growth to the equivalent of economic growth, leaving a net growth rate near zero.
Freedom from Britain turned these numbers around for India. Net per capita income growth between 1900 and 1950 was nil (economic growth of 0.8 per cent minus net population growth at the same level), but it rose to 1.3 per cent from 1950 to 1980 (growth rate of 3.5 per cent minus population growth of 2.2 per cent), to 3.5 per cent from 1981–90 and 4.4 per cent from 1991–2000, before attaining even higher levels in the following decade, twice crossing 9 per cent and averaging 7.8 per cent from 2001–10. Besides these, other key indices were also extraordinary good after just under 7 (at the time of writing [2016]) decades of independence, compared to the twenty decades of British rule that had gone before.
The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line. Today, the literacy rate is up at 72 per cent, average life expectancqy is nearing the Biblical three score and 10, and 280 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the twenty-first century." — Inglorious Empire, pp. 216-17
Yet today "Switzerland is not only richer than India in terms of annual production of goods and services (the ratio between the two countries’ GDP per capita at market exchange rates is about 50 to 1), but Switzerland is even more richer in terms of wealth per adult (the ratio is almost 100 to 1)."
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