On Wednesday, August 16, 2023 at 2:45:00 AM UTC+8, gggg gggg wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 10:16:36 PM UTC-8, Dan Koren wrote:
> > https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
> >
> > https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india
> >
> > Who would have thought?
> >
> > dk
> (Y. upload):
>
> "How Did India Fall to the Europeans? | East vs. West"

For anyone interested in this topic, this podcast is already a classic:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0sBh58hSTReUQiK4axYUVx

-Max

On Wednesday, August 16, 2023 at 11:02:49 AM UTC+10, maxi...@gmail.com wrote:

> For anyone interested in this topic, this podcast is already a classic:
> https://open.spotify.com/show/0sBh58hSTReUQiK4axYUVx
>
> -Max

Among the businesses that profited from slavery, we might include not only them ole plantations, but also the Pittsburg proprietors of the iron and steel furnaces of Birmingham, Alabama, worked by non-union labour and profiting from the use of rented convict labour - largely black men, arrested for trivial offences - from the local penitentiaries.

For theft and violence directed against native populations, see the expansion of the USA beyond its British colonial borders, passim.

For the settlement of former Indian territories, supposedly protected by treaties, see the Alabama Land Rush, in which thousands of dirt-poor farmers trekked south with their families and livestock, for a bright new day of poverty, disease, hopelessly unpayable debt, illiteracy and finally disenfranchisement.

Meanwhile, I have just watched an Indian documentary about prostitution villages - perfectly legal in India - where young women sell their bodies to more prosperous young men, in order to help feed their families. The young woman in question had also to go into debt to pay for a family marriage ceremony, and, as banks do not regard prostitution as employment and therefore would not lend her the money, she had, like a peasant smallholder, to go to a local money-lender who charges usurious amounts of interest. The plump, well-heeled, Indian lady journalist who interviewed this unfortunate girl, was naturally most sympathetic, but in a characteristic display of shameless hypocrisy, managed to blame the British Raj for this horrible trade in human flesh, despite the fact that the said Raj ended in 1947 since when the condition of this young woman and thousands like her have not improved one jot or one tittle for that matter.

Just think: if the USA had remained under British Rule, slavery would have been abolished there in the 1830s and the Civil War wouldn't have happened. And if British rule in America had been as bad as it is now said to have been, Patrick Henry would not have been able to stand up in the Virginia Assembly and say 'Give me liberty or give me death' because he wouldn't have had a Virginia Assembly to say it in. And, of course, Mr Henry's slaves really didn't have any say in the matter.

Andrew Clarke
Canberra