the Company then sold in China.
India had substantial industry in the 1700s, before the British
crushed it. As late as the 1820s, the British w ere going to India to
learn how to make steel. Bombay made locomotives that competed
w ith those made in England.
India’s steel industry might have developed—it just w asn’t
allow ed to. Very heavy protectionism enabled England to develop
w hile India w as basically ruralized. T here w as virtually no grow th in
India under British rule.
India grew its ow n cotton, but Indian fabric w as virtually barred
from the British market because it undercut British textiles. T he
justification w as, Asian wages are so cheap we can’t compete—we
have to protect our markets.
Adam Smith questioned that, and a recent dissertation in
economic history at Harvard suggests he may have been right.
According to this research, real w ages may have been higher in
India than in England, and Indian w orkers may also have had better
benefits and more control over their w ork.
Fortunately for the U S, things w ere different here. During the
railroad boom of the 1800s, w e w ere able to develop a steel industry
because w e imposed very high protectionist barriers to keep out
British steel, w hich w as better and cheaper. We did the same thing
in order to develop our textile industry fifty years before.
Adam Smith pointed out that British merchants and
manufacturers used state pow er to make sure that their interests
w ere “most peculiarly attended to,” how ever grievous the impact
on others—including not only people in the T hird World, but also in
England. T he “principal architects of policy” got very rich, but the
guys w orking in the satanic mills and in the British Navy surely did
not.
Smith’s analysis is truisms, but it’s now considered extreme un-
American radicalism, or something like that. T he same pattern
show s up today, w hen the U S farms out export industries to El
Salvador and Indonesia. A few people get richer and a lot of people
don’t—they may even get poorer—and our military pow er helps
things stay that w ay.
In his book Representations of the Intellectual, Edw ard Said w rites,
“One of the shabbiest of all intellectual gambits is to pontificate
about abuses in someone else’s society and to excuse exactly the