Britain's 10% Richest Extracted Half Of Wealth From India During Colonial Time.

Rights group Oxfam International’s global inequity report this year, released on Monday, has revealed that the UK has extracted USD 64.82 trillion from India over a century of colonialism between 1765 and 1900. The report  highlighted that around ten percent of this grabbed wealth went to the 10% richest Britishers—namely, around a whopping USD 33.8 trillion.

Titled as ‘takers, not makers,’ the report cited studies and research papers that claimed that the legacy of inequality and pathologies of plunder, pioneered during the time of historical colonialism, continue to shape modern lives, adding that the modern multinational corporation is a creation of colonialism only.

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Stating that the colonialism created an unequal world torn apart by division based on racism, the Oxfam stated that the world institutions continue to systematically extract wealth from the Global South to primarily benefit the richest people in the Global North.

Based on various studies, the report concluded that between 1765 and 1900, the richest 10 percent in the UK extracted wealth from India alone worth USD 33.8 trillion in today’s money, adding that this money would be enough to carpet the surface area of London in British pound 50 notes almost four times over.

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Stating that the major beneficiaries of British colonialism were the newly emerging middle class, the report claimed that over 32 percent of income came from the richest 10 percent from the extracted wealth. Noting that the Indian subcontinent accounted for approximately 25 percent of global industrial output in 1750, Oxfam emphasized that by 1900, the figure was reduced to a mere 2 percent, attributing the staggering cut to Britain’s implementation of stringent protectionist policies against Asian textiles, undermining India’s industrial growth potential.

The report noted that colonialism was often led by private multinationals, who were often granted monopolies and made enormous profits from overseas expansion.

The study further claimed that in modern times, the global north continues to exploit workers in the global south through multinational corporations occupying monopoly or near-monopoly positions, while highlighting that the global supply chains and export processing industries represent modern colonial systems of south–north wealth extraction.

The report underlined the poor working conditions, lack of collective bargaining rights, and minimal social protection under the present supply chain system, adding that the wages in the Global South are between 87 percent and 95 percent lower than wages in the Global North for work of equal skill.

Oxfam also underscored that the big multinational corporations dominate global supply chains, benefitting from cheap labor and the continued extraction of resources from the Global South. Through multinational corporations, these big players perpetuate dependence while amassing huge profits, it added.

“The inequality that these countries experience today is significantly of colonial making,” Oxfam opines, adding that multiple other divisions were expanded and exploited, concretized and compounded during the historical colonial period, including caste, religion, gender, sexuality, language and geography.

The report noted that the grain import restrictions during World War Two, underpinned by racist thinking, appear to have significantly contributed to or caused the Bengal famine of 1943, resulting in death of an estimated three million lives across Indian and present Bangladesh. In addition, an estimated 59 million excess deaths occurred under British rule between 1891 and 1920 in India.

Oxfam argued that Global North continues to dominate even when each nation has equal status in formal terms at some global bodies, underlining that the World Bank and many European development finance institutes, in partnership with private capital and investment funds in the Global North, are promoting this privatization and financialization of public services in the Global South.