E-Paper
UK's richest 10% took half of colonial India's extracted wealth, ‘enough to carpet London’s surface 4 times'
Oxfam's new report said billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion last year, or roughly $5.7 billion a day, three-times faster than in 2023.
Rights group Oxfam's latest report released on Monday said that the UK extracted $64.82 trillion from colonial India between 1765 and 1900, and the richest 10 per cent of Britons earned $33.8 trillion of this.
"This would be enough to carpet the surface area of London in British pound 50 notes almost four times over," it said.
Oxfam in its report “Takers, not Makers” said a significant number of the richest Britons can trace their wealth to compensation paid by the government to the richest enslavers while abolishing the racist system.
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The group said that the newly emergent middle class in the UK is the second biggest beneficiary of money extracted from colonial India for over 100 years.
“After the richest 10 per cent, who received 52 per cent of this income, the new middle class received a further 32 per cent of income,” Oxfam said.
Textiles and Drugs
The group also blamed colonialism for destroying India's industrial output by implementing stringent protectionist policies against Asian textiles.
“Besides, in 1750, the Indian subcontinent accounted for approximately 25 per cent of global industrial output. However, by 1900 this figure had precipitously declined to a mere 2 per cent,” it noted.
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Oxfam also alleged that the Dutch and British colonial states were “drug pushers” who used opium trade to consolidate their rule over colonies. It accused the British of “industrial scale” poppy cultivation in poorer areas of eastern India and exporting it to China, eventually triggering the Opium War and China’s so-called ‘century of humiliation’.
‘Modern corporations resemble East India Company’
The report cited several studies and research papers to claim that modern multinational corporations are the creation of colonialism only.
Oxfam said the structure has created a “deeply unequal world torn apart by division based on racism” and “continues to extract wealth from the Global South to primarily benefit the richest people in the Global North”.
The group cited the example of the English East India Company, which it accused of “many colonial crimes” and became a “law unto itself” as a pioneer of exploitative practices followed by modern multinational corporations.
“Legacies of inequality and pathologies of plunder, pioneered during the time of historical colonialism, continue to shape modern lives,” the report said, claiming that wages in the Global South are 87 to 95% lower than wages paid to work of equal skill in the Global North.
