apophenic-ocelles:

memecucker:

memecucker:

i feel like the role colonialism plays in “deindustrialization” of colonized areas (eg; India went from 25% of global  industrial output in 1750 to only 2% in 1900 ) is an important concept and one that contradicts myths that you see not only in colonial apologia but even some kinds of misguided anti-colonialism set up on myths of idealized pasts

Lotsa people asking for references so I’ll just put that stuff here

This passage from the textbook “The Process of Economic Development" by James Cypher is good at giving a very basic rundown of how this worked in places like colonial India. Here is another paper that gets much more detailed about the general process. In the specific example of India you have a region going from being the single largest textile manufacturer in the 18th century to essentially having its textile industry killed off by the end of the 19th. Indian textiles had a heavy presence in European markets initially and while the decline was certainly related to the advent of machine factories it was not caused by it and predates it by some years

By the end of the 17th century, Indian calicos were a major force in European markets (Landes,
1998, p. 154). For example, the share of Indian textiles in total English trade with southern Europe was more than 20 percent in the 1720s,
but this share fell to about 6 percent in the 1780s and less than 4 percent in the 1840s (Inikori, 2002, p. 517). India was losing its world
market share in textiles during the 18th century, long before the industrial revolution.

Economic policies by the British helped with this process. High tariffs were put in place in the UK on Indian textile goods while within India the importation of British goods was done without any tariffs thus making British manufactured goods cheaper in India while Indian manufactured goods were made more expensive in Britain. This was occurring even when the textile industry in both areas was still largely “cottage” (ie without machine factories) and the rise in industrial machinery in the UK was partially (not solely) caused by the specific desire to make the balance of trade favor the economy of the imperial center over that of colonies

Peripherally related but:

I once saw some folks in the R*tional*st corner of tumblr having a conversation about how to end the disputes over land in North America between Settlers and Natives.

It was a mess and a trainwreck at best, as you’d expect when a buncha settlers sit down and discuss between themselves how they can finally shed the pretense of colonial guilt. Their idea was to pay back the monetary value of the land in its entirety, as reparations to every living descendent. (I’m not sure they had an unfucked conception of who would be entitled under this scheme.)

ONLY the land, not incluing not factoring in any “improvements” or anything that had been built since. Because, they insisted, that’s all that was unjustly taken that could ever be paid back with money. There are so many issues with that line of reasoning and I’m not even gonna begin to unpack all of them – the relevant thing for this discussion was the presumption that there were no pre-existing infrastructures, or large-scale deliberate alterations to the landscape. That there were no houses, cities, or farms. No mining of economically-important minerals, no alterations to the landscape to make it more productive, in short no civilization or anything that might’ve improved the use-value or the property value of the land.

And like, we know that’s not true. I could get into the way that history and archaeology put the lie to that assumption, with new discoveries coming in all the time to bolster or illuminate a number of different cases – but instead, I’m just going to show you a picture:

This is Wyam, AKA Celilo Falls. Until 1957, it straddled the Columbia River that seperates Oregon from Washington. It’s nearly impossible to overstate how important it was, not just because of the rich fishing grounds (so rich that seals and sea lions would swim hundreds of miles inland just to get at the salmon runs), nor for the fishing platforms that enabled fishermen to get so many of them – but also, for the many villages nearby, which had been continuously occupied for over 15,000 years, and were a trading hub for people bringing goods from as far away as Alaska, the desert Southwest, and the Great Plains. The rocks there were covered in art, some of it dating back to its earliest habitation. Lewis and Clark showed up in 1805 and were astounded at the population density. Even after disease, conquest, genocide and settlement, it was an important population center for many of the Chinookan and Sahaptin-speaking societies that lived there.

Try to picture 15,000 years of continuous history. Try to picture art from the first human beings to live there, side-by-side with that made by their descendents 15,000 years later. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago. It was only 7000 years ago that people speaking Proto-Indo European showed up in the places we think of as Europe today.

For over twice that span of time, Wyam was a major destination for people from thousands of miles away, and until 1957, their descendents were still living there. It is, in fact, the oldest continuously-inhabited place on the entire continent.

Until 1957, when the Army Corps of Engineers finished working on the Dalles Dam, and flooded the entire area.

Ten years earlier, the United States government decided that building the dam and flooding the site wouldn’t contravene their treaties with the Native nations there. They subsequently had a Supreme Court case that ended with a $26.8 million dollar settlement, divided among the tribal governments.

Fat lot of good that money’s done. Poverty, suicide, and food insecurity rates are still incredibly high on the reservations nearby.

My point is: destroying native infrastructure – whether for settlement or extraction of resources – is a vital component of how colonialism operates.