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Colonialism and The Raj |
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but the follow on pages have some interesting stuff...)
For about 400 years, between 1540 and 1940 massive amounts of treasure moved to Western Europe from Western European colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa. This transfer required implementation initially by armed force and later, in today's language, by appropriate "command and control" systems. Blanchette and Roberts and their descendants in India were at the lower end of the command and control system which implemented, expanded and maintained The Raj in India, the largest and most important of these colonies. In this section I have attempted to place the efforts of these two men and their offspring in the colonial context while giving a bird's eye view of 500 years of colonial history. " Ernest Mandel (1968: 119-120) estimated the European colonial booty between 1500 and 1800 at 1,000 million gold pounds sterling, of which 100 to 150 million reached Britain from India alone between 1750 and 1800, while it invested in the new industrial "revolution," especially in steam engines and textile technology. Yet by 1800 the capital invested in steam-operated industry in all of Europe was still less than what its colonial profits had been. The most scrupulous student of the British economy for that period, Phyllis Deane (1965) detailed "six main ways in which foreign trade can have helped to precipitate the first industrial revolution (quoted in detail in Frank 1978a:227). ....."
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| There are numerous colonial
histories available on the web. One of the better and more detailed accounts
by date and event is in the Encyclopedia of World History at
www.bartleby.com.
First page is on my site here The other major articles I have found useful and which are referenced in other pages are : (When this was printed, I had not completed this section) On to Colonialism 15th-18th Centuries
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