Not sure if the colonial occupation of India is quite comparable to the carnage China saw in the first half of the 20th century. The boxer Rebellion, three revolutions, the warlord era and Japanese genocide during WWII and then the violence of the civil war afterwards.
India had repeated famines sure, but I don’t really think you can argue they were worse off than China at the time of independence.
The chaos of 19th and early 20th century China was utterly horrific, but there’s a difference between wild chaos that destroys, co opts, or forces capital and labour to lie fallow, and the systematic, planned, comprehensive dismatling of that capability over an entire nation for more than a century.
Which the British did in India, they deliberately reduced a nation with an early industrial revolution economy back to pre industry and further, to pure agrarianism.
To openly be a skilled textile worker in 1850s India was about as safe as being a Cathar in medieval France.
Not sure if the colonial occupation of India is quite comparable to the carnage China saw in the first half of the 20th century. The boxer Rebellion, three revolutions, the warlord era and Japanese genocide during WWII and then the violence of the civil war afterwards.
India had repeated famines sure, but I don’t really think you can argue they were worse off than China at the time of independence.
The chaos of 19th and early 20th century China was utterly horrific, but there’s a difference between wild chaos that destroys, co opts, or forces capital and labour to lie fallow, and the systematic, planned, comprehensive dismatling of that capability over an entire nation for more than a century.
Which the British did in India, they deliberately reduced a nation with an early industrial revolution economy back to pre industry and further, to pure agrarianism.
To openly be a skilled textile worker in 1850s India was about as safe as being a Cathar in medieval France.