
Legalized plunder: The British Raj siphoned off over $ 100 trillion from India!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Two of India’s most celebrated diplomats—Dr. S. Jaishankar, and Dr. Shashi Tharoor—and eminent economist Utsa Patnaik underestimated the extent of the British Raj plundering India during the colonial era—nearly USD 45 trillion. For, human rights group Oxfam International has now revealed that the British actually siphoned off more than USD 100 trillion from the country they colonized.
An Oxfam report also talked about the British state as a ‘colonial drug pusher’.
In 1750, the Indian subcontinent accounted for approximately 25 percent of global industrial output. However, by 1900 this figure had precipitously declined to a mere 2 percent.
In a report, Oxfam—an abbreviation for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, a confederation of NGOs that work to reduce global poverty—has emphasized the enduring impact of colonialism on contemporary society and economics, illustrating how historical injustices continue to shape modern labor markets and socio-economic structures, the media reported on Monday.
According to it, the United Kingdom extracted USD 64.82 trillion from India between 1765 and 1900, and USD 33.8 trillion of this went to the richest 10 percent—enough money to carpet London in notes of 50 British pounds almost four times over.
This forms part of Oxfam International’s latest flagship global inequity report released every year on the first day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, which is being held this year at Davos, Switzerland, from January 20 to 25, 2025.
The report, titled “Takers, not Makers” released here on Monday, hours before the start of the annual meeting of the rich and powerful across the globe, cited several studies and research papers to claim that the modern multinational corporation is a creation of colonialism only.
“Legacies of inequality and pathologies of plunder, pioneered during the time of historical colonialism, continue to shape modern lives.
“This has created a deeply unequal world, a world torn apart by division based on racism, a world that continues to systematically extract wealth from the Global South to primarily benefit the richest people in the Global North,” Oxfam said.
Using various studies and research papers as its basis, Oxfam calculated that between 1765 and 1900, the richest 10 percent in the UK extracted wealth from India alone worth USD 33.8 trillion in today’s money.
“This would be enough to carpet the surface area of London in British pounds 50 notes almost four times over,” it said.
In the UK, a significant number of the richest people today can trace their family wealth back to slavery and colonialism, specifically the compensation paid to rich enslavers when slavery was abolished, it added.
On the modern multinational corporation being a creation of colonialism, Oxfam said it was pioneered by such corporations as the East India Company, which became a law unto itself and was responsible for many colonial crimes.
“In the modern day, multinational corporations, often occupying monopoly or near-monopoly positions, continue to exploit workers in the Global South, particularly women workers, on behalf of rich shareholders primarily based in the Global North,” it said.
Global supply chains and export processing industries represent modern colonial systems of south-north wealth extraction.
Workers in these supply chains frequently experience poor working conditions, a lack of collective bargaining rights, and minimal social protection, the report said.
Oxfam said that wages in the Global South are between 87 percent and 95 percent lower than wages in the Global North for work of equal skill.
Large multinational corporations dominate global supply chains, benefitting from cheap labor and the continued extraction of resources from the Global South; they capture the vast majority of profits and perpetuate dependence, exploitation, and control through economic means, Oxfam said.
On money extracted from India by the UK during more than 100 years of colonialism, between 1765 and 1900, Oxfam said that beyond the richest, the main beneficiaries of colonialism were the newly emergent middle class.
After the richest 10 percent, who received 52 percent of this income, the new middle class received a further 32 percent of income.
The dramatic reduction of global industrial output between 1750 and 1900 can be attributed to Britain’s implementation of stringent protectionist policies against Asian textiles, which systematically undermined India’s industrial growth potential, Oxfam said.
Paradoxically, it took a global conflict to temporarily alleviate this industrial suppression and during the First World War (1914–18), the disruption of colonial trade patterns inadvertently catalyzed industrial growth in the colonies.
Regions with significant decreases in British imports during the war demonstrated enhanced industrial employment growth – a pattern that is still visible today.
Oxfam said that colonialism was often led by private multinationals, who were often granted monopolies and made enormous profits from overseas expansion.
The concept of private multinational corporations, bankrolled by rich shareholders, was a product of the colonial era and many colonial corporations employed their own armies to ruthlessly crush rebellions, it said.
The East India Company’s army in India totaled 260,000 soldiers — twice the size of the British peacetime army.
“They engaged in land dispossession, violence, and mergers and acquisitions, driving globalization and contributing to the creation of the world’s first global financial system. Financial markets, especially in London, facilitated these colonial behemoths,” Oxfam said.
From the 1830s to 1920, 3.7 million Indian, Chinese, African, Japanese, Melanesian and other people were transported to work in colonial plantations and mines, and to lay down infrastructure as indentured laborers, it added.
The report noted that in India in 1875 the top earners were mainly European officers of the army and the administration, but by 1940 they were mainly traders, bankers, and industrialists.
Wealth and political power continued to be concentrated among the richest people in many countries in the Global South post-independence, with abject poverty and immense wealth separated by electric fences, golf courses, and other barriers, it added.
“The inequality that these countries experience today is significantly of colonial making,” Oxfam said.
Calling the ongoing impact of colonialism a ‘fruit from the poisoned tree’, Oxfam said that only 0.14 percent of India’s mother tongues are used as a medium of instruction, and 0.35 percent are taught in its schools.
Multiple other divisions were expanded and exploited, concretized, and compounded during the historical colonial period, including caste, religion, gender, sexuality, language, and geography.
In India during the British colonial period, the caste system was formalized through legal and administrative measures, which reinforced its rigid boundaries.
The report also talked about the British state as a ‘colonial drug pusher’.
As the world deals with the legacy of corporate greed that contributed to the opioid crisis, it is critical to remember that both the Dutch and British East India Companies used the opium trade to consolidate their colonial rule, Oxfam said.
Thus, opium production on an industrial scale was promoted in eastern India, where the British East India Company held a monopoly from 1757 (transferred to the crown in 1873), and the produce was exported to China, eventually triggering the Opium War and China’s so-called ‘century of humiliation.’
In the middle of the nineteenth century, opium amounted to more than half of China’s total imports and represented the British Raj’s third-largest revenue stream, after salt and land taxes.
Poppy-growing areas in India were associated with lower per-capita public spending on health and administration by the British, fewer schools, and a greater concentration of police officers, and to this day, these areas continue to have significantly worse literacy rates and public goods provision than neighboring areas, Oxfam said.
The report said that countries in the Global South have also been victims of ‘biopiracy’, the unauthorized and uncompensated collection of genetic resources for commercial purposes.
It cited an example of the US multinational corporation WR Grace’s 1994 patent for a neem tree seed extract used in its antifungal spray, Neemex.
While the company claimed that its patent was the product of a unique invention, neem extracts have been used by rural farmers in India for more than 2,000 years in insect repellents, soaps, and contraceptives, Oxfam said.
The technical board of appeals at the European Patent Office revoked the patent after 10 years of legal proceedings.
Oxfam said the huge exploitation of fossil fuels, which began in the colonial era, also continues today, which in turn, has driven the world to the edge of climate breakdown.
The story also talked about the ways that colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire and India.
It cited studies that 59 million excess deaths occurred under British rule between 1891 and 1920 in India.
Grain import restrictions during the Second World War, underpinned by racist thinking, appear to have significantly contributed to or caused the Bengal famine of 1943, which claimed an estimated three million lives in what is now India and Bangladesh, it said.
It has been suggested that higher rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes among this population are the result of metabolic adaptations to recurrent cycles of starvation during the colonial period, Oxfam said.
The Global North continues to dominate even when each nation has equal status in formal terms at some global bodies.
Alleging that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has historically failed to address the interests of the Global South, Oxfam said this helps not only northern countries but also corporations located in the Global North as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic when the South African and Indian proposal at the WTO for a full waiver of intellectual property restrictions on life-saving vaccines, treatments and other technologies was supported by over 100 countries but successfully opposed by rich nations.
The World Bank and many European development finance institutes, in partnership with private capital and investment funds in the Global North, are promoting this privatization and financialization of public services in the Global South.
Oxfam claimed that the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), has financed high-end private hospitals in urban centers in India, a country where 37 percent of Indians experience catastrophic health expenditures in private hospitals, and human rights abuses are endemic.
On the role of military power in maintaining colonial inequality, Oxfam said that during the period of East India Company rule, military expenditure accounted for nearly 75 percent of expenses while public works constituted only 3 percent on average.
Further, authorities failed to repair irrigation systems, impairing agricultural productivity and intensifying famines and droughts and this use of overwhelming force has continued in the modern day, it added.