If Oxfam is right about Empire, then where is my $1 million?

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If Oxfam is right about Empire, then where is my $1 million?

Why would Oxfam, a once-respected charity, publish a careless and ill thought-out piece of propaganda

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, Takers not Makers: The Unjust Poverty and Unearned Wealth of Colonialism?

Has it not in recent years done enough damage to its own reputation? What was started by Quakers and dons as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief is now a faceless multinational confederation of NGOs.

Does it still have intellectual standards, or has it been captured by self-indulgent virtue-signallers? Takers not Makers suggests the latter.

It starts out as a critique of economic inequality in today’s world, with power and wealth concentrated in a few hands, in multinational corporations, and in organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Such a critique, though hardly original, might be thought a proper activity for an anti-poverty charity if done honestly and seriously.

But it discredits its own case by its transparently biased and nonsensical arguments. Inequality in the world, it claims, is explained by colonialism, presented as if humanity’s original sin.

Its most-eye catching assertion is that between 1765 and 1900, the “richest 10 per cent” in the United Kingdom extracted wealth from India equal to $33.8 trillion (£27 trillion) – enough money, it says rather excitedly, to carpet the whole of London four times over with £50 notes.

Moreover, suggests the report, the British also have $33 trillion (£26.4 trillion) in ill-gotten wealth from slavery. This total loot, by simple arithmetic, would amount to about $1 million for every man, woman and child in Britain. Can I have my share please?

I described the report as careless – a serious charge. Here is one case. It claims that Oxfam “calculated” the sum

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. When one looks for elucidation, the footnote refers to a separate document of “Methodology Notes”.

If you can track that down, it contains no notes on methodology, but merely names two Indian Marxist historians whose allegations have been amply discredited. So Oxfam did not calculate anything: it copied out some dodgy statistics which it cannot explain.

What was the reality about the Indian economy under British administration? A common “decolonising” argument is to take India’s estimated share of the world economy in say, 1600 (when China and India, as the most populous countries, had the largest economies) and compare its share in 1900, which was much lower. The real reason is that industrialisation had multiplied productivity in advanced countries and transformed the world economy. Nevertheless, by 1914, under the British Raj, India’s regular famines had been eliminated by railway transport – it had the world’s fourth largest network, 35 times that of China. It had the world’s fourth largest cotton industry, well in advance of Japan.

By the time of independence, it had Asia’s most advanced industrial economy. And British colonial exploitation? British India had lower taxes than independent states, and vital access to cheap capital and technology. Indian workers and businesses were major economic actors throughout the Empire.

What is most deplorable in this document is how it provides excuses for corrupt and tyrannical governments around the globe today. Their misgovernment is somehow blamed on colonialists centuries ago.

The report cannot entirely overlook the huge and ever-growing inequalities of wealth in South America, the Middle East and Asia. It admits that the number of billionaires in India has increased by 21 per cent since 2023. It does not disclose that 24 ministers in India’s 2021 government were facing serious criminal charges.

How convenient to shift the blame to 18th-century colonisers. Who is

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keen to please? It seems only too obvious.

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#Oxfam #Empire #million

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