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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

This has been posted before. And no it wont end poverty, it is essentially a plan to sell licenses for private dictatorships.

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Why not? GB's empire seems like mostly the same thing, and it arguably [1] resulted in a reduction of poverty.

[1] I'm not making a claim of fact here, just saying that there's an intelligent debate about the issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact

I don't agree. There will always be debate, as there will always be some historian out protecting British Imperialism but I think and honest examination does not show that GB improved the lot of their imperial subjects except in some very specific and limited circumstances.

"The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France.* Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese." http://www.slate.com/id/2151852

In essence, it doesn't matter who colonized you. The states that were colonized the longest did the worst, in direct proportion to how long they were colonies.

any examples that prove this?

and doesn't all this depend on how what you consider a country? hasn't Wales been colonized by the English for a long time or does some geographic separation have to exist?

And is colonization of Korea during ww2 less destructive than the British colonization of Hong Kong? Or does the colonizer matter?

From the article you seem to be replying to: "Feyrer and Sacedote's key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births." and then goes on to discuss other alternate hypothesis and explain why they don't make sense.

Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?

(I don't feel much like I have a horse in the "colonization is evil" fight, since I think anyone still personally offended by events from over, say, 150 years ago already has problems I can't solve. But the question of why cultures succeed and fail is one of the most pressing questions the human race faces and having it muddied up by stupid political games is costing lives.)

Not really arguing with you. But for a lot of countries, the colonial experience is a lot more recent than that. More to the order of 50-60 years than 150. This does mean that a generation of people who lived under colonial rule are still alive in these countries.

That is probably true, but I think saying one country is a better colonizer than another country is not saying that much, especially if that other country is spain.

A reduction of poverty is not the same thing as the elimination of poverty (and the debate re: the British Raj specifically seems to be more about whether it was disastrous or merely more or less a continuation of the Mughal era status quo, hardly an endorsement). India is much, much better off today than they would have been had colonialism continued. One of India's biggest and most successful economic transformations was in ending the Zamindars (landlords that were effectively feudal lords), that almost certainly wouldn't have happened under the Raj. Not to mention the severe down sides to exporting massive amounts of money overseas due to taxation and the innumerable issues related to being a second class citizen in your own homeland.

India is much, much better off today than they would have been had colonialism continued.

How do you know what the condition of India would have been under British rule?

Was there a sharp upward trend in India's gdp/growth rates/etc after Britain left? Or did the 10 post-british years have higher growth rates than the last 10 british years? I'm genuinely curious.

From a Buddhist perspective economic growth is an evil. I suspect that Hindus (Ghandi definitely) would speak similarly. Certainly if it increases meat consumption it would be an evil to many Hindus.

Using our societal mores to judge the benefit of our occupation is precisely the sort of paternalistic jingoism that makes colonialism such an unmistakable evil.

Certainly Brahmins would say that. Who is threatened more by the rise of an independently wealthy merchant/middle class than those who owe their position to an accident of birth?

Ghandi did more to defeat the caste system than the British Empire ever did. The British Empire was quite content to be the Brahmins to the Brahmins.

On the contrary, Ghandi was an advocate of the "varna" system, which was about fewer, even more rigid castes. He strongly believed that one's caste should be determined by birth, and he opposed marriage between members of different castes.

To Western eyes Indians are one race, but what Ghandi stood for was apartheid * 10.

As for what the British did in India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)#British_and_oth...

I said he did more. His views are irrelevant. Obviously in principle the British paid lip service to a caste-free society, but in practice they were the authors of apartheid.

Also when you look at his views closely, especially after 1925 or so, he moves into a position very similar to that which you will see of modern Christian theology, where you hear much talk of the importance of personal choice. So people should follow a caste and so on, but that's not the place of the government to enforce. That's a much more moderate and workable position than abolition, and much easier to implement. Absolutes do little good when aiming for radical societal reinvention.

Even Sati was pushed out bit by bit, by various reformers. But again, from a vegetarian Hindu perspective large-scale livestock slaughter is a similar if not worse evil than Sati, and unless you can provide a proof that animals don't have souls, your rationalism has no place in that discussion. You might as well commend the Communist party for bringing about gender equality as a counter argument to someone railing against the gulags. All it shows is that we always have some places where we cannot accept cultural relativism.

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