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JFK: An American President Who Refused to Look Away
In the annals of American foreign policy, few moments shine with moral clarity. One of them came not from a diplomat or peace envoy, but from a sitting U.S. President who had witnessed, with his own eyes, the engineered tragedy unfolding in Palestine, John F. Kennedy.
Long before he occupied the Oval Office, a young Jack Kennedy travelled to British-mandate Palestine in 1939, a critical moment in the region's transformation. He was just 21 years old, a Harvard student already deeply curious about world affairs. What he witnessed there, the systematic dispossession of Palestinians and the cynical manoeuvring of both British colonial authorities and Zionist settlers, left an indelible mark on his understanding of justice and moral leadership.
In a remarkably perceptive letter to his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the young Kennedy exposed the duplicity at the heart of the Palestine question. He noted how Britain had made conflicting claims about the eventual disposition of the land to both the Arabs and the Jews: one through the Balfour declaration, favouring the latter, and one through the McMahon letters, favouring the former. He called both agreements vague and indefinite.
But Kennedy's most penetrating observation went to the heart of the moral question:
The country has been Arabic for the last few hundred years, and they naturally feel sympathetic. After all, Palestine was hardly Britain's to give away.
These words, written by a 21-year-old American, captured what diplomats and politicians spent decades obscuring, that Palestine belonged to the Palestinians, and no imperial power had the right to dispose of it.
Kennedy's 1939 visit provided him with firsthand knowledge of Zionist tactics that would later inform his presidential decisions. He observed how Jewish terror groups conducted false flag operations, setting off 13 bombs in the Jewish quarter in a single night, then frantically phoned the British to come and fix them up the next day. More significantly, Kennedy recognised the underlying dynamic: On the Jewish side there is the desire for complete domination, with Jerusalem as the capital of their new land of milk and honey. He noted that local sympathy lay with the Arabs, largely because the Zionists came across as arrogant and uncompromising.
This early exposure to Zionist duplicity would prove crucial when Kennedy later encountered it as president, this time in the nuclear realm.
As president, Kennedy did something unprecedented: he took on the Israeli lobby directly. In November 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy launched an effort to make the American Zionist Council (AZC) register as an agent of a foreign government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Senate hearings led by William Fulbright in May and August 1963 discovered that money allegedly sent for humanitarian aid to Israel was being channelled back to the United States for lobbying and propaganda activities. When the Justice Department demanded compliance, the AZC stalled for time whilst secretly creating a new organisation, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known today as AIPAC.
On 16 August 1963, a Justice Department attorney concluded: Department should insist on the immediate registration of the American Zionist Council under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The AZC's desperate plea, that registration would damage their cause, revealed their consciousness of guilt.
Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 meant this case was never pursued to completion.
Kennedy's most significant confrontation with Israeli duplicity concerned the Dimona nuclear facility. As the most committed anti-proliferation president in American history, Kennedy was determined to prevent Israel from joining the nuclear club. In December 1962, Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir assured Kennedy there would be no difficulty between us on the Israeli nuclear reactor. This was a brazen lie. Declassified documents reveal a government-wide Israeli conspiracy to deceive Kennedy about Dimona's true purpose, involving Meir, David Ben-Gurion, and Abba Eban in systematic deception.
When Kennedy realised everyone was lying to him, he took unprecedented action. On 10 May 1963, he sent Ben-Gurion a letter noting that no other Middle Eastern country was even close to producing weapons-grade uranium, then delivered an ultimatum: if full American inspections of Dimona were not allowed, he would cut funding to Israel. Understanding the gravity of Kennedy's threat, Ben-Gurion called an emergency cabinet meeting. His initial response compared Nasser to Hitler and requested a bilateral defence treaty with America. When Kennedy repeated his demand on 15 June, accompanied by Secretary of State Dean Rusk's insistence that inspections begin before the reactor reached criticality, Ben-Gurion resigned the very next day,ending a 14-year tenure as prime minister.
Kennedy issued the same ultimatum to Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol, on 4 July. At the time of Kennedy's assassination, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was still negotiating the terms of biannual inspections.
The full scope of Israeli deception becomes clear when examining how they obtained the uranium for their weapons programme. Beginning in 1959, hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium went missing from a peculiar nuclear plant outside Pittsburgh called Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC). The people running NUMEC were members of the American Zionist Council. Later FBI investigations under President Carter discovered that NUMEC workers had witnessed shipments of highly enriched uranium being loaded with destination addresses in Israel. The CIA's former technical expert on atomic weapons concluded that Dimona was jumpstarted by a theft from NUMEC.
Thus, Israel not only lied to Kennedy about their nuclear programme, they built it with stolen American uranium.
Kennedy's vision for the Middle East differed fundamentally from the Israeli-Saudi axis that dominates today. He forged a relationship with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he saw as a charismatic leader committed to secularism, socialism, and Pan-Arabism, values that offered hope for genuine progress in the region. When Saudi Arabia and their fundamentalist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood (originally founded by the British to protect oil interests) tried to undermine Nasser through the Yemen conflict, Kennedy stood by the Egyptian leader despite British and Israeli criticism.
Kennedy understood that the choice was between Nasser's vision of secular, socialist Pan-Arabism and the Saudi-Israeli preference for reactionary monarchies and religious extremism. He chose the former a choice that died with him in Dallas.
Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 marked the end of American resistance to Israeli ambitions. Within months of Lyndon Johnson assuming office, all of Kennedy's Middle East initiatives were reversed:
- The case against the Israeli lobby was dropped
- Nuclear inspections of Dimona became perfunctory
- Support for Arab nationalism evaporated
- The path was cleared for the 1967 Six-Day War that transformed the region
By 1967, Israel had achieved nuclear capability using stolen American uranium, precisely what Kennedy had fought to prevent.
In an age when American presidents routinely echo Israeli talking points whilst remaining silent about Palestinian suffering, Kennedy's legacy stands as a reproach. He saw through the lies about Palestine in 1939 and refused to be deceived about Israeli nuclear ambitions in the 1960s.
He recognised that Palestine belonged to the Palestinians, that the Zionist movement relied on deception and violence, and that American interests lay in supporting secular Arab nationalism rather than religious extremism and apartheid colonialism. Most importantly, Kennedy understood that American power should serve justice, not enable the dispossession of indigenous peoples. His assassination ensured that this understanding died with him, leaving Palestine to face its darkest hour without its most powerful potential ally.
The young man who wrote Palestine was hardly Britain's to give away became the president who nearly prevented Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. His death guaranteed that both Palestine and the principle of non-proliferation would be sacrificed on the altar of Israeli ambition.
This is the true tragedy of 22 November 1963, the loss of America's conscience in the Middle East. Kennedy lies dead, assassinated, conveniently silenced before he could complete his confrontation with Israeli nuclear ambitions or his restructuring of Middle East policy. The historical record we rely upon, documents declassified decades later, often curated and released by the very intelligence agencies that may have had reason to obscure Kennedy's true intentions, must be read with this context in mind. How much of the "official" narrative has been shaped to minimise the depth of Kennedy's opposition to Israeli policy? What documents remain classified, and what stories died with the witnesses?
The powerful do not simply kill presidents, they write the history books.
References
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Archives - Palestine correspondence, 1939
National Security Archive, George Washington University - "The Battle of the Letters, 1963: Kennedy, Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, and U.S. Inspections of Dimona"
DiEugenio, James Anthony. The Debacle of the Middle East, Pt. 3. Substack, 2024
Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. Columbia University Press, 1998
McCarthy, Ken and Rick Sterling. JFK and RFK's Secret Battle Against Zionist Extremism
Mattson, Roger. Stealing the Atom Bomb
U.S. State Department declassified cables, Foreign Relations of the United States series
FBI files on Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) investigation 0 reply
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A Farcaster Exclusive
Two Monsters at War: Churchill and Hitler’s Shared Legacy of Mass Death
The greatest tragedy of the Second World War may not be that evil triumphed, but that evil fought evil, and we have spent the last eight decades pretending only one side was monstrous. History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors, and no victor has been more successfully sanitised than Winston Churchill, the racist architect of genocide who happened to be on the winning side against Adolf Hitler. Yet when we examine the documented evidence with intellectual honesty, a clear truth surfaces: both men were architects of mass death who held supremacist ideologies and implemented policies that deliberately starved millions to death. The difference between them was geographical and political.
When protesters recently defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, writing “was a racist” beneath his name, they were not engaging in historical revisionism but historical honesty.
Why do we we memorialise one genocidal racist while condemning another, and to ask whether the victor’s crimes should be absolved simply because he fought on the “right” side.
Churchill’s racial ideology was every bit as explicit and systematic as Hitler’s. Hitler spoke of Aryan superiority, Churchill championed what he called “Anglo-Saxon superiority,” asking “Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior?” He described Arabs as a lower manifestation than Jews, whom he viewed as a higher grade race compared to the great hordes of Islam. Palestinians were dismissed as barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung. Most damning of all were his views on Indians, whom he described as a beastly people with a beastly religion, later adding that the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
These remarks formed the ideological foundation for policies that would kill millions. Just as Hitler’s antisemitism drove the machinery of the Holocaust, Churchill’s racism drove the machinery of imperial exploitation and deliberate starvation. When we strip away the mythology of the “good war,” we find that both men implemented their supremacist worldviews through state policy, with devastating consequences.
The parallels in their methods are particularly striking when we examine how both leaders wielded starvation as a weapon of war. Hitler’s systematic starvation of Jews, Slavs, and other groups in concentration camps and ghettos is well-documented and universally condemned. Less known, but no less systematic, was Churchill’s use of starvation against colonial subjects, most catastrophically during the Bengal Famine of 1943. This was an engineered catastrophe, as confirmed by a 2019 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL081477) which concluded that British policies under Winston Churchill significantly contributed to the famine, making it unique as it did not primarily result from drought, unlike previous famines in India.
The study’s findings demolish decades of British apologetics that blamed nature for what was clearly a man-made disaster. The famine-affected region actually received above-normal precipitation between June and September of 1943, yet three million Indians starved to death while Churchill ordered the diversion of grains and essential supplies from Bengal to military stockpiles supporting already well-supplied British troops. His cabinet was warned repeatedly that such diversions could cause famine, yet the exports continued. When British officials informed Churchill about the mounting death toll, with rotting corpses lining the streets of Calcutta, his response was to ask why Mahatma Gandhi was still alive if the situation was truly so dire.
This callousness in the face of mass death mirrors Hitler’s own indifference to suffering. Both men viewed their victims not as fellow human beings but as obstacles to their imperial visions, as subhuman burdens on resources better used elsewhere. When the Delhi government telegraphed Churchill about the horrible devastation and briefed him on the death toll, his response, “Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?” reveals the same cold calculation that Hitler brought to the Final Solution. In both cases, the deaths were wartime policy with desirable outcomes.
The scale of Churchill’s crimes rivals Hitler’s most notorious atrocities. The Bengal Famine killed approximately three million Indians in less than a year, wiping out one-third of Bengal’s population. This death toll exceeds that of many individual Nazi extermination camps and represents one of the largest civilian casualties of the Second World War, yet it receives virtually no attention in Western historical memory. Unlike the Holocaust, which is commemorated in museums, memorials, and educational curricula worldwide, the Bengal Famine has been relegated to historical footnotes. As scholars have noted, not a single memorial, museum, or even a plaque anywhere in the world commemorates the millions who perished under Churchill’s policies.
This selective memory shows the fundamental hypocrisy in how we assess historical guilt. We know about Hitler’s crimes because he lost the war, allowing his ideology to be defeated, his regime destroyed, and his crimes documented at Nuremberg. Churchill’s crimes remain obscured because he won, allowing his ideology to claim victory, his regime to be celebrated, and his genocide to be buried beneath the mythology of liberation. The uncomfortable truth is that the Second World War was not a battle between good and evil but a conflict between competing imperial powers, both willing to commit genocide to achieve their aims.
Such assessments are not the products of postcolonial revisionism but of rigorous historical investigation freed from the constraints of imperial mythology. They represent a growing recognition that moral judgment must be applied consistently, regardless of which side a leader fought on or whether their victims were European or Asian, white or brown. The principle established at Nuremberg, that “following orders” provides no defence for crimes against humanity, must be extended to include the principle that “winning wars” provides no defence for genocide.
The implications of this moral reckoning extend far beyond historical debate into contemporary discussions about memory, monuments, and national identity. As statues of Churchill face calls for removal and his image on banknotes is questioned, we confront fundamental questions about whom we choose to honour and why. A recent petition to “Remove image of racist and white supremacist Winston Churchill from British banknotes” argues that British society remains in denial about institutional racism precisely because it continues to celebrate the legacies of genocidal leaders. The petition calls for Churchill’s removal as a first symbolic step towards dealing with the deep-rooted racism in British society.
Such calls for accountability are not attacks on historical memory but attempts to restore it. They seek to rescue the three million Bengali victims of Churchill’s policies from historical oblivion and to ensure that their deaths carry the same moral weight as the six million Jewish victims of Hitler’s genocide. They insist that the colour of victims’ skin should not determine the weight of historical judgment, and that Western lives should not matter more to Western historians simply because they are Western.
The resistance to this moral reckoning shows how deeply embedded imperial mythology remains in Western consciousness. Churchill continues to be celebrated as democracy’s greatest champion precisely because his crimes targeted those whom the West has traditionally viewed as less than fully human. His genocide was committed against Indians, not Germans; his victims were brown, not white; his methods were economic rather than industrial. These distinctions matter greatly to those who wish to preserve the fiction of Western moral superiority, but they are irrelevant to the millions who died and to any honest assessment of historical responsibility.
Justice demands that we judge Churchill and Hitler by the same moral standards. Both held explicit racist ideologies that informed their governance. Both implemented policies that caused mass civilian deaths on an industrial scale. Both showed callous indifference to suffering when it served their imperial purposes. Both pursued territorial expansion through the subjugation of peoples they deemed inferior. Both used starvation as a deliberate weapon of war. The fact that Churchill’s victims were subjects of the British Empire rather than citizens of the German Reich, or that his methods relied on administrative neglect rather than industrial killing, does not diminish his moral culpability.
This is not to minimise Hitler’s crimes or excuse Nazi ideology, but to insist that genocide is genocide regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality or ultimate success in war. The moral equivalence between Churchill and Hitler lies in their shared willingness to treat human beings as expendable resources in service of racial supremacist ideologies. Both men left legacies built on mountains of corpses, and both deserve the same historical condemnation.
Churchill and Hitler were both monsters, and the fact that they fought each other does not make either of them less monstrous. History may be written by the victors, but it must ultimately be judged by moral consistency. By that standard, both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler stand condemned as architects of genocide whose legacies are built on the systematic dehumanisation and destruction of those they deemed inferior. The time has come to remember all their victims with equal honour and to judge all their crimes with equal severity. 1 reply
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Calcutta, August 1943.
The vultures had grown too fat to fly
I write these words not as distant historical observation, but as documented fact from one of the most obscene chapters in British colonial rule. During the Bengal Famine of 1943, when three million Indians starved to death under Churchill’s wartime administration, the disposal of human remains became a logistical nightmare that revealed the complete breakdown of civilisation itself.
Disposal of corpses soon became a problem for the government and the public, as numbers overwhelmed cremation houses, burial grounds, and those collecting and disposing of the dead. The sheer scale of mortality had rendered traditional burial and cremation practices completely impossible.
Corpses lay scattered throughout the pavements and streets of Calcutta. In only two days of August 1943, at least 120 were removed from public thoroughfares. But this was just the capital, in the countryside, the horror was amplified greatly.
In the countryside bodies were often disposed of in rivers and water supplies. The Ganges, sacred to millions of Hindus, became a dumping ground for the dead. What had been a holy river transformed into a flowing cemetery.
The survivors, weakened by starvation themselves, lacked the strength for dignified disposal. As one survivor explained, “We couldn’t bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch.” Families who had lost everything, including the physical capacity to lift a shovel, were forced to dispose of their loved ones like refuse.
Corpses were also left to rot and putrefy in open spaces. The bodies were picked over by vultures and dragged away by jackals. Sometimes this happened while the victim was still living.
Please take a pause, breathe slowly, and think with an open mind that how did humanity let this happen? People were literally being eaten alive by scavenging animals because they lacked the strength to defend themselves.
The sight of corpses beside canals, ravaged by dogs and jackals, was common; during a seven-mile boat ride in Midnapore in November 1943, a journalist counted at least five hundred such sets of skeletal remains.
Bodies began piling up on roadsides and in ponds, rivers and ditches. Vultures got too fat to take flight, and jackals feasted on still-living bodies in broad daylight.
In Calcutta, the empire’s second city, the macabre spectacle played out on the streets where British officials conducted their daily business. Dead bodies line the streets of Calcutta shortly after the Bengal famine. On the rooftops overhead, vultures swoop in.
There was no place you could go where you didn’t see dead bodies and vultures, it was revolting, actually. Because the vultures used to come down and eat these dead bodies. This is from a contemporary British witness, recalling how normalised the sight of corpse-eating vultures had become.
There were dead people all over Calcutta. And when they died, they seemed to stay there. It was dreadful, dreadful.
When authorities finally attempted organised body collection, the scale remained overwhelming. At the end of August, two private groups, the Hindu Satkar Samiti and the Anjuman Mofidul Islam, were selected to dispose of deceased remains associated with religious affiliation. Hindu remains were intended to be brought to the burning ghats, whereas Muslim bodies were supposed to be transferred to the burial sites. These distinctions were even considered in light of the deplorable state of the corpses after death.
But this bureaucratic response came far too late. By then, ARP truck sweepers disposing corpses and carrying them to one of Calcutta’s burning ghats had become a daily sight, like refuse collection, landfills, etc.
Contemporary photographers documented this horror, though authorities attempted to suppress the images. Jackals and vultures eating corpses during the Bengal famine of 1943-44. The photographer Kalyani Bhattacharjee (link: https://picryl.com/amp/topics/1943+bengal+famine) sent images to England with this chilling disclaimer: Out of 300 photos that were at our disposal we have selected only 50 that were somewhat presentable to the public eyes. To make them look less gruesome, we have got them decorated with relief drawings in pleasant light colours.
This macabre disposal of millions of bodies was the direct result of British wartime policies that prioritised feeding the imperial war machine over feeding colonial subjects. Who went to every Bengal village to count the corpses lying on the fields,streets and everywhere else? Who counted the bones that came out of the bodies of the corpses. Who could bear the sight of the devoured remainings of the bodies? (The whole Bengal famine was a great feast for the vultures,the dogs,the cats and other predators.)
Churchill’s war policies and utter ignorance killed around 3.5 million Bengalis in 1943 and thus devastated a whole region of India while he simultaneously declared that he hated Indians and blamed them for breeding like rabbits.
Perhaps most damning of all is what happened next: nothing. Incredibly, however, not a single memorial, museum, or even a plaque, anywhere in the world, commemorates the millions who perished.
Three million corpses, thrown into rivers, devoured by scavengers, dragged to ditches by weakened survivors, and the world chose to forget. No monuments mark where children starved while Churchill’s armies fed. No plaques record the horror of humans being eaten alive by jackals in broad daylight.
The disposal of these millions of bodies tells us everything we need to know about the value placed on Indian lives under British rule. When people die in such numbers that vultures grow too fat to fly, when rivers run thick with corpses, when jackals feast on the living, this-is-genocide.
The dead of Bengal deserved better than being thrown into ditches like refuse. They deserved dignity in death, even if they were denied it in life. Instead, they became food for scavengers while their colonial masters counted profits and planned military campaigns.
The spectacle of famine also erupted on the streets of Calcutta, and vaulted into international news. Japan and Germany both made hay of starvation in the Second City of Empire. Even Britain’s enemies recognised the horror for what it was, a condemnation of everything the empire claimed to represent.
The rivers of Bengal ran red with more than just the monsoon rains in 1943. They ran with the blood of an empire’s abandoned subjects, whose only crime was being born Indian under British rule. 2 replies
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A Verse That Mourned a Civilisation
In the wake of Delhi’s fall in 1857, when the city was torn apart by British retribution and centuries of Indo-Islamic culture were buried under the rubble of rebellion, one man gave voice to the unspeakable. Mirza Ghalib, the poet of refined despair, did not raise arms, he raised language.
Among the many verses penned in his later years, one couplet stands apart for its sheer resignation:
ہو چکی غالب بلائیں سب تمام
ایک مرگِ ناگہانی اور ہے
“All calamities, Ghalib, have already come to pass
And now there remains but one sudden death to endure”
This is a historical obituary. Ghalib’s Delhi was a living museum of cultural sophistication, music, poetry, etiquette, architecture, and philosophy. After the mutiny, that world was erased overnight. Friends disappeared. Patronage vanished. The Mughal court, once the axis of Urdu literary life, was reduced to silence and blood.
Ghalib’s verse does not rage; it does not plead. It accepts, because what is left to resist when your language, city, and people have already died? His poetry became the mourning cloth of a defeated civilisation, one stitched with irony, sorrow, and unbearable beauty.
Today, as cities are rebuilt over erasures and histories are revised to suit new powers, Ghalib’s lament remains a reminder: colonial conquest is not just territorial, it is cultural, spiritual, and poetic. And some losses are never recovered, only remembered. 1 reply
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Part 3 of 5
Industrialisation, Deindustrialisation, and the Systematic Destruction of Indian Manufacturing (1800-1857)
Overview
This paper examines the period from 1800 to 1857, during which the East India Company systematically destroyed Indian manufacturing capacity whilst simultaneously facilitating British industrial development. Through analysis of trade statistics, industrial policies, and contemporary accounts, this study demonstrates how the Company’s policies generated deliberate deindustrialisation in India to eliminate competition with British manufacturers. The paper argues that the Company’s economic policies during this period represented a systematic assault on Indian productive capacity designed to transform the subcontinent from a manufacturing centre into a source of raw materials and market for British goods. This transformation facilitated British industrial supremacy whilst generating unemployment, poverty, and economic dependency in India.
Introduction
The period from 1800 to 1857 witnessed the systematic destruction of Indian manufacturing capacity through deliberate Company policies designed to eliminate competition with British industry. This deindustrialisation process transformed India from one of the world’s leading manufacturing centres into a supplier of raw materials and consumer of British manufactured goods.
This paper examines how the Company’s trade policies, taxation systems, and industrial regulations generated deliberate deindustrialisation in India whilst simultaneously facilitating British industrial development. The analysis demonstrates that this transformation was not a natural economic development but a systematic assault on Indian productive capacity designed to serve British commercial interests.
The Industrial Revolution and Colonial Markets
The British Industrial Revolution created new requirements for raw materials and markets that fundamentally altered the Company’s relationship with Indian production. After 1800, textile exports—an important commodity for tribute realization in the 18th century - fell dramatically due to rising protectionism in the British textile industry. This transformation reflected the British industrial sector’s need to eliminate Indian competition.
The Company’s policies during this period were explicitly designed to serve British industrial interests. Simultaneously, after 1813, industrialization levels increased, and the cotton textile industry became the first to adopt new technology. The British government, needing overseas markets to sell cotton textiles, adopted a policy of encouraging cotton textile exports to India. This policy prioritised British manufacturing over Indian production.
The Transformation of Colonial Economic Policy
The Company’s economic policies during this period represented a fundamental shift from revenue extraction to market manipulation designed to serve British industrial interests. The Company’s trade monopoly with India was abolished in the Charter Act 1813. This apparent liberalisation actually intensified exploitation by opening Indian markets to British manufacturers whilst maintaining barriers against Indian exports.
The Company’s policies during this period created artificial competitive advantages for British manufacturers. The British government, needing overseas markets to sell cotton textiles, adopted a policy of encouraging cotton textile exports to India. This policy eliminated Indian competitive advantages through systematically biased trade regulations and taxation systems.
The Destruction of Textile Manufacturing
The Company’s assault on Indian textile manufacturing represented the most systematic example of deliberate deindustrialisation. What was in the 17th century the production capital of the world for textiles was forced to become a market for British-made textiles. This transformation eliminated one of India’s most important industries and created dependency on British manufactured goods.
The Company’s policies specifically targeted Indian textile production through discriminatory taxation and trade regulations. The Company’s economic policies centered on trade and revenue collection, which gradually drained first Bengal and then much of the subcontinent of its wealth. Exploitative mercantile schemes and concessions gradually destroyed Indigenous crafts and industries, such as textile manufacturing, and reduced India to the status of supplier of raw materials and consumer to the imported end product.
The Elimination of Artisan Production
The Company’s policies systematically eliminated traditional artisan production that had provided employment and economic stability for millions of Indians. It proved disastrous to the mulberries and cotton grown in Bengal; as a result, a large proportion of the dead were spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food. The elimination of artisan production created widespread unemployment and economic vulnerability.
The Company’s transformation of Indian economic structures prioritised British commercial interests over Indian livelihoods. As the British transferred the Indian populace to agriculture as a method of making a living, the native artists and their workmanship and the entire industry suffered a significant loss. This forced transition from manufacturing to agriculture reduced economic diversity and increased vulnerability to agricultural disruptions.
The Manipulation of Comparative Advantage
The Company’s trade policies during this period systematically manipulated comparative advantage to favour British manufacturers. The Company’s mainstay businesses were in cotton, silk, opium, indigo dye, saltpetre and tea. These commodities were selected to serve British industrial requirements rather than Indian economic development.
The Company’s trade policies created artificial scarcities and surpluses that served British commercial interests. The Company’s commercial strategy focused on disrupting existing trade networks and establishing dependent relationships with local producers. This manipulation ensured that Indian production served British industrial requirements rather than domestic needs.
The Creation of Export Dependency
The Company’s policies during this period created systematic export dependency that prioritised British consumption over Indian welfare. The drain mechanism operated through forced exports that provided no corresponding benefits to Indian producers. This system transformed Indian production into a source of free goods for British consumption and re-export.
The Company’s export policies deliberately created economic relationships that favoured British commercial interests. The growing import surplus of tropical goods created no payment liability, and reexports of these free goods also bought England goods from other sovereign countries like France, reducing its trade deficit with them. This system enabled Britain to acquire goods from third countries using Indian production.
Mass Unemployment and Economic Disruption
The Company’s deindustrialisation policies generated mass unemployment and economic disruption throughout India. The elimination of traditional manufacturing created widespread unemployment among skilled artisans and industrial workers. This unemployment was not compensated by alternative employment opportunities, creating conditions of extreme hardship.
The Company’s policies systematically eliminated economic opportunities for millions of Indians. The native artists and their workmanship and the entire industry suffered a significant loss. The destruction of traditional industries created unemployment that persisted throughout the colonial period.
The Forced Transition to Agriculture
The Company’s policies forced millions of Indians to transition from manufacturing to agriculture, creating overcrowding in the agricultural sector. As the British transferred the Indian populace to agriculture as a method of making a living, the native artists and their workmanship and the entire industry suffered a significant loss. This forced transition reduced economic diversity and increased vulnerability to agricultural disruptions.
The agricultural transition created conditions of extreme economic vulnerability. As the population became more reliant on agriculture, the reliance on monsoons grew, resulting in widespread poverty, droughts. This increased agricultural dependency reduced economic resilience and created conditions for future famines.
The Intensification of Extractive Taxation
The Company’s revenue policies during this period intensified extractive taxation to compensate for declining trade revenues. The Company’s revenue system remained focused on maximising extraction from Indian productive capacity. This taxation burden fell disproportionately on agricultural producers and rural communities.
The Company’s taxation policies during this period maintained the extractive character established in the previous century. The overwhelming bulk of such taxes were extracted from the very same producers as rent/land revenue and indirect taxes, especially from the salt monopoly. This system enabled continued wealth extraction despite changes in trade patterns. 1 reply
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