How Much Did British Colonization Cost India?
One historian puts the figure at $45 trillion. Others say focusing on the size of the British Raj’s bill misses the bigger picture.
When Utsa Patnaik, an economic historian, published a paper in 2018 declaring that Britain had taken $45 trillion from India during its colonization, her work went viral in the academic world. Some praised her findings as a testament to the gravity of Britain’s injustice, while others called them ludicrous. Patnaik’s work is novel in that she estimates an exact figure, but she is far from the first to suggest that Britain have siphoned resources from India. Many consider Dadabhai Naoroji, a British Indian Member of Parliament, to be the face of drainage theory. “These Englishmen cannot understand that the wealth they carry away from this country is the whole & sole cause of our misery,” he wrote in the 1840s. And yet, nearly 200 years after the theory’s introduction, Patnaik’s $45 trillion figure struck a chord — and sparked heated debate. To this day, academics and historians cannot agree on the damage. But many argue that this numbers debate misses the most important point.