Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
9 hours ago
Aren't all empires extractive? How is that supposed to be distinctive to Britain?
If you compare Thailand (never colonized) with India pre-independence, they look about neck-and-neck in terms of development. At a glance, it seems Britain "looted" India to about the same degree that the Thai monarchy "looted" Thailand.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/augmented-human-developme...
IIRC India's GDP was approx. 25% of the world's in 1700s compared to Thai 1% around the same time. In case of India it came down to 3 to 4% in 1947. So India faced quite a drop.
I don't think comparing an already declined India to Thai is a fair comparison.