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Britain took $64.82 trillion from India during a century of colonial rule from 1765 to 1900, of which $33.8 trillion went to the richest 10 percent. That's enough to fill London with British £50 notes. This is part of human rights group Oxfam International's latest Global Inequality Index report, released each year on the first day of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting. The report, titled "Takers, Not Makers," was published here just hours before the start of the annual gathering of the world's rich and powerful and is based on several research papers and studies. “The legacy of inequality and the pathology of dispossession unleashed by historical colonialism continues to shape contemporary life, creating a deeply unequal world riven by racial divisions. Oxfam has created a world in which wealth is systematically exploited.” This primarily benefits the richest people in the global north. Based on various research and studies, Oxfam has found that between 1765 and 1900, Britain's richest 10% amassed wealth worth $33.8 trillion today.
“That’s enough to cover almost four times the value of London’s £50 notes,” the paper said. In Britain, a significant number of today's richest people can trace their family fortunes to slavery and colonialism, particularly the compensation paid to wealthy slaves during the abolition of slavery. When talking about modern multinational corporations being a product of colonialism, Oxfam said that they were created by companies like the East India Company, became legal in their own right, and were responsible for many colonial crimes. “In contemporary times, multinational corporations often hold monopolistic or near-monopolistic positions, displacing workers in the Global South in favor of wealthy shareholders located primarily in the Global North,” the report said. And female workers in particular continue to be exploited. “The global supply chain and export processing industries represent a modern colonial system that exploits the wealth of the North and the South. Workers in these supply chains often face poor working conditions, lack of collective bargaining rights and minimum wages,” the report says. You experience social support.
According to Oxfam, wages in the Global South are between 87 and 95 percent lower than wages in the Global North for the same skilled jobs. Large multinational corporations dominate the world's supply chains, benefiting from cheap labor and the constant extraction of resources from the global south. According to Oxfam, they destroy most profits and perpetuate dependence, exploitation and control through economic means. Oxfam argues that the main beneficiaries of colonialism, aside from the wealthiest, were the emerging middle class, which it referred to as a class. The richest 10 percent received 52 percent of this income, followed by the new middle class, who received another 32 percent. Furthermore, in 1750, the Indian subcontinent accounted for about 25% of global industrial production. By 1900, that number had fallen sharply to 2 percent, Oxfam reports.
Oxfam said the dramatic decline could be attributed to Britain's strict protectionist policies towards Asian textiles, which are systematically undermining India's potential for industrial growth. Paradoxically, it took a global conflict to temporarily alleviate this industrial oppression, Oxfam said, and during the First World War (1918-1914), the disruption of colonial trade patterns inadvertently stimulated the growth of industry in the colonies. Areas where British imports fell significantly during the war experienced significant increases in industrial employment, and this pattern is still visible today. Oxfam also stated that colonization was often carried out by private multinational companies, which were often granted monopoly rights and made huge profits by expanding abroad. The concept of private multinational corporations funded by wealthy shareholders was a product of the colonial era, the report said, and many colonial companies used their own armies to brutally suppress rebellions. The East India Company's forces in India numbered 260,000 soldiers, twice as many as the British peacetime army.
“They used land grabs, violence, mergers and acquisitions, drove globalization and helped build the world’s first international financial system,” says Oxfam. Financial markets, particularly those in London, supported these colonial giants, he said. Between the 1830s and 1920s, 3.7 million Indians, Chinese, Africans, Japanese, Melanesians and others worked on colonial farms and mines and were brought into the country as indentured laborers to build infrastructure. The report also notes that in 1875 India's breadwinners were mostly European soldiers and civil servants, but in 1940 they were mostly businessmen, bankers and industrialists. In many countries in the Global South, wealth and political power remain concentrated in the richest post-independence countries, with extreme poverty and great wealth separated by electric fences, golf courses and other barriers. “The inequalities these countries experience today have a strong colonial influence,” Oxfam said.
Oxfam describes the lasting effects of colonialism as “fruits of a poisonous tree” and says only 0.14% of Indian native languages are used as a medium of instruction and 0.35% are taught in schools. Oxfam also said several other categories, including caste, religion, sex, gender, language and geography, were expanded, exploited, modified and integrated during historical colonialism. In British colonial India, the caste system was formalized and its strict boundaries enforced through legal and administrative measures. The report also describes the British government as a “colonial drug trafficker.” As the world grapples with the legacy of corporate greed that contributed to the opioid crisis, it is important to remember that Dutch and British companies in the East Indies used the opium trade to consolidate their power, Oxfam says. Thus, the production of opium on an industrial scale was encouraged in the East Indies, and the British East India Company had a monopoly from 1757 (it was transferred to the king in 1873) and its production was exported to China, which eventually gave rise to the Opium War, and the Opium War began. It is called the “Century of Humiliation.”
By the mid-19th century, opium accounted for more than half of China's total imports and was the British Indian Empire's third largest source of revenue after salt and land taxes. With India's poppy-growing regions came cuts in per capita public health spending, fewer schools and a concentration of police forces in Britain, and to date literacy rates and public finances have deteriorated significantly. According to Oxfam, there is a greater supply there than in neighboring areas. The report goes on to say that countries in the Global South are also victims of “biopiracy,” i.e. the unauthorized and free collection of genetic resources for commercial purposes. As an example, the report cited a 1994 patent by US multinational WR Grace for neem seed extract used in the antifungal spray Neemex. Oxfam claimed the patent was an original invention, but Oxfam said neem extract has been used by farmers in rural India for more than 2,000 years as an insect repellent, soap and contraceptive.
The Technical Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office revoked the patent after ten years of legal proceedings. Oxfam said massive fossil fuel exploitation that began in colonial times continues today, pushing the world to the brink of climate collapse. The story also shows how the overlords divided the Ottoman Empire and India. The report further refers to a study showing that there were 59 million additional deaths in India between 1891 and 1920 during British rule. The report states that grain import restrictions during World War II, supported by racist ideology, contributed significantly to the Bengal famine of 1943 or even killed an estimated three million people in what is now India and Bangladesh. Oxfam believes that the high rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in this population are the result of metabolic adaptation to repeated cycles of starvation during the colonial period. Although countries formally have equal status in some international organizations, the Global North continues to dominate, Oxfam said.
Oxfam says the WTO has historically failed to take into account the interests of the Global South and this does not just apply to the North, as it has been shown that WTO proposals from South Africa and India during the Covid-19 pandemic too companies based there In the global North, more than 100 countries have backed a request for full exemptions from intellectual property restrictions on vaccines, treatments and other life-saving technologies, but rich nations have successfully resisted. He also said that the World Bank and many European development finance institutions are working with private capital and investment funds in the Global North to advance the privatization and financialization of public services in the Global South. Oxfam has claimed that the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) is funding high-quality private hospitals in India's urban centers. 37% of Indians pay catastrophic medical bills in the country's private hospitals, where human rights abuses are rife. Regarding the role of military power in maintaining colonial inequality, Oxfam said that military spending accounted for about 75 percent of the East India Company's spending, while public works projects averaged only 3 percent of spending. It added that authorities had failed to repair irrigation systems, hurting agricultural productivity and exacerbating famine and drought, and that widespread use of violence continued into modern times.
