The East needs to be wary of Colonialism 2.0
August 25 2009
Can colonialism make a comeback? Think it’s a far-fetched notion? Then think again. In the 18th and 19th centuries when the world was being colonised by the likes of Spain, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and the Dutch, India and China were the two richest countries in the world, together accounting for over 50 per cent of world GDP. And yet the two giant Asian nations were colonised.
If you think colonisation happened when the east was decadent and the west was rising or that India and China neglected their militaries and ignored the foreign threats lurking at their shores, you couldn’t be more wrong. Take the Maratha navy led by the legendary Admiral of the Fleet, Kanhoji Angre. For 33 years until his death in 1729, Angre's fleet remained undefeated, routing the British, Dutch and Portuguese navies on the high seas.
Down south, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore was the first kingdom in modern history to use rockets in war, and he used it to deadly effect against the British in 1780 in the Battle of Guntur. In fact, most Indian rulers of that age had a keen sense of geopolitics. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, for instance, had an ambassador at the Persian court, and every act and word of the Shah was reported back to Delhi.
The Mughals, and later the Marathas who replaced them, also kept a close watch on European activities. When Thomas Roe, the British monarch's emissary, landed in Surat in 1616, he was made to wait a year before Jahangir granted him an audience. Three years later, Roe returned without a trade treaty because Jahangir saw no point in trading with a country that had nothing to offer India. However, one weak emperor dropped the ball.
A hundred years after Roe’s exit, an English embassy had a stroke of luck when one of its members, William Hamilton, a physician of questionable medical skills, managed to relieve the emperor Farrukh Siyar of severe pain in his groin. Farrukh Siyar gratefully signed a decree giving the British inland trading rights, customs duty exemptions, and the right to keep a garrison. The rest as they say is history.
According to professor Rajesh Kochhar, emeritus scientist at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Chandigarh, “These exemptions gave the English traders commercial advantages not only over other European companies but also over Indian traders. More importantly, the various official orders granting trade concessions gave the British a cause to defend, with military strength if needed.”
Today, the east is rising once again. Economists are stunned by the unprecedented flow of manufacturing, finance and wealth to the east. Magid Igbaria, former professor of management information systems at Tel Aviv University, writes in The Virtual Workplace: "For all but the last 500 years of human history, the world's wealth measured in human capital and in goods was concentrated in Asia. During the past five centuries, the world's wealth has been concentrated in the west. This era is coming to an end. Today, the great concentrations of human capital, financial power, manufacturing power, and informated power are once again accumulating in the East."
Indeed, in 30 years India is predicted to overtake the US, even though it is only one-fourteenth the size of the US economy now. That is an incredible rate of wealth accretion.
The question is will the US and Europe simply watch the world go past? On the contrary, there is a concerted effort by a US-led coalition to stop this trend.
Base instincts: Today the US-led coalition has over 750 military bases across the globe.
Despite the huge costs, this extension of military power is essential to American hegemony. A slew of European nationalities has followed the American military in its misadventures around the world.
Divide and rule: The Americans are playing up India as a major “regional” power allied with the west. This scares the hell out of the Chinese, forcing the communists to come out with kneejerk statements calling for India’s breakup, which in turn makes the Indians consider China a natural enemy. Amazingly, since the dawn of history China and India never saw the other as a threat, until the British arrived on the scene and planted the seeds of border problems.
Emissions: After polluting the environment for more than a century, the west now wants India and China to cut down emissions. It’s a thinly disguised attempt to slow these rapidly growing economies.
The dollar gambit: How powerful (and rich) would you feel if you could print dollars in your garage? While the rest of the world has to earn a living the hard way, the Americans just print dollars to pay their bills. Need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war in Iraq? Need Venezuelan oil? Russian titanium? No problem. The Federal Reserve cranks the lever and the mint starts rolling. Yes, it’s as simple as that and the Americans have been doing it for the past 50 years.
WTO: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called it "archaic, undemocratic and inflexible" and dominated by a small group of developed countries which indulge in protectionism. One of its aims is to pry open the agricultural markets of Asia – at a time when India has the highest number of farmer suicides. The modern Farrukh Siyars are throwing open strategic areas like nuclear power to the west.
The current method of colonialism is covert, invisible. You don't have to physically conquer countries if the global economic system can be subverted to ensure your prosperity at the expense of others.
The eastern nations invest their dollar earnings in US treasury bonds to the tune of trillions of dollars; these dollars are used by the Americans to maintain their global military supremacy, build increasingly modern weapons, and reward their allies with cash, weapons, and security umbrellas.
For countries like India and China it’s a nightmarish scenario. Their dollar holdings erode in value as the American economy tanks and the greenback weakens. The west is militarily prepared to defend its interests. When Iraq was about to tell its customers it no longer wanted US dollars for its oil…you know what happened next. Iran is the next target because it wants to be paid in a basket of currencies. The only way this state of affairs can end is if India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa and other self-respecting countries start accepting each other’s currencies.
And importantly, stop accepting US dollars that are not backed by gold. That will bring down the American hegemony faster than the Road Runner on a greased highway. In the first era of colonialism, the then dominant eastern nations opened up their economies and territories to western interests over a span of several decades, finally ending up as their colonies. Uncannily, Colonialism 2.0 is happening in much the same way.
---
Rakesh Krishnan is a Features Writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
If you think colonisation happened when the east was decadent and the west was rising or that India and China neglected their militaries and ignored the foreign threats lurking at their shores, you couldn’t be more wrong. Take the Maratha navy led by the legendary Admiral of the Fleet, Kanhoji Angre. For 33 years until his death in 1729, Angre's fleet remained undefeated, routing the British, Dutch and Portuguese navies on the high seas.
Down south, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore was the first kingdom in modern history to use rockets in war, and he used it to deadly effect against the British in 1780 in the Battle of Guntur. In fact, most Indian rulers of that age had a keen sense of geopolitics. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, for instance, had an ambassador at the Persian court, and every act and word of the Shah was reported back to Delhi.
The Mughals, and later the Marathas who replaced them, also kept a close watch on European activities. When Thomas Roe, the British monarch's emissary, landed in Surat in 1616, he was made to wait a year before Jahangir granted him an audience. Three years later, Roe returned without a trade treaty because Jahangir saw no point in trading with a country that had nothing to offer India. However, one weak emperor dropped the ball.
A hundred years after Roe’s exit, an English embassy had a stroke of luck when one of its members, William Hamilton, a physician of questionable medical skills, managed to relieve the emperor Farrukh Siyar of severe pain in his groin. Farrukh Siyar gratefully signed a decree giving the British inland trading rights, customs duty exemptions, and the right to keep a garrison. The rest as they say is history.
According to professor Rajesh Kochhar, emeritus scientist at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Chandigarh, “These exemptions gave the English traders commercial advantages not only over other European companies but also over Indian traders. More importantly, the various official orders granting trade concessions gave the British a cause to defend, with military strength if needed.”
Today, the east is rising once again. Economists are stunned by the unprecedented flow of manufacturing, finance and wealth to the east. Magid Igbaria, former professor of management information systems at Tel Aviv University, writes in The Virtual Workplace: "For all but the last 500 years of human history, the world's wealth measured in human capital and in goods was concentrated in Asia. During the past five centuries, the world's wealth has been concentrated in the west. This era is coming to an end. Today, the great concentrations of human capital, financial power, manufacturing power, and informated power are once again accumulating in the East."
Indeed, in 30 years India is predicted to overtake the US, even though it is only one-fourteenth the size of the US economy now. That is an incredible rate of wealth accretion.
The question is will the US and Europe simply watch the world go past? On the contrary, there is a concerted effort by a US-led coalition to stop this trend.
Base instincts: Today the US-led coalition has over 750 military bases across the globe.
Despite the huge costs, this extension of military power is essential to American hegemony. A slew of European nationalities has followed the American military in its misadventures around the world.
Divide and rule: The Americans are playing up India as a major “regional” power allied with the west. This scares the hell out of the Chinese, forcing the communists to come out with kneejerk statements calling for India’s breakup, which in turn makes the Indians consider China a natural enemy. Amazingly, since the dawn of history China and India never saw the other as a threat, until the British arrived on the scene and planted the seeds of border problems.
Emissions: After polluting the environment for more than a century, the west now wants India and China to cut down emissions. It’s a thinly disguised attempt to slow these rapidly growing economies.
The dollar gambit: How powerful (and rich) would you feel if you could print dollars in your garage? While the rest of the world has to earn a living the hard way, the Americans just print dollars to pay their bills. Need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war in Iraq? Need Venezuelan oil? Russian titanium? No problem. The Federal Reserve cranks the lever and the mint starts rolling. Yes, it’s as simple as that and the Americans have been doing it for the past 50 years.
WTO: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called it "archaic, undemocratic and inflexible" and dominated by a small group of developed countries which indulge in protectionism. One of its aims is to pry open the agricultural markets of Asia – at a time when India has the highest number of farmer suicides. The modern Farrukh Siyars are throwing open strategic areas like nuclear power to the west.
The current method of colonialism is covert, invisible. You don't have to physically conquer countries if the global economic system can be subverted to ensure your prosperity at the expense of others.
The eastern nations invest their dollar earnings in US treasury bonds to the tune of trillions of dollars; these dollars are used by the Americans to maintain their global military supremacy, build increasingly modern weapons, and reward their allies with cash, weapons, and security umbrellas.
For countries like India and China it’s a nightmarish scenario. Their dollar holdings erode in value as the American economy tanks and the greenback weakens. The west is militarily prepared to defend its interests. When Iraq was about to tell its customers it no longer wanted US dollars for its oil…you know what happened next. Iran is the next target because it wants to be paid in a basket of currencies. The only way this state of affairs can end is if India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa and other self-respecting countries start accepting each other’s currencies.
And importantly, stop accepting US dollars that are not backed by gold. That will bring down the American hegemony faster than the Road Runner on a greased highway. In the first era of colonialism, the then dominant eastern nations opened up their economies and territories to western interests over a span of several decades, finally ending up as their colonies. Uncannily, Colonialism 2.0 is happening in much the same way.
---
Rakesh Krishnan is a Features Writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
Can colonialism make a comeback? Think it’s a far-fetched notion? Then think again. In the 18th and 19th centuries when the world was being colonised by the likes of Spain, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and the Dutch, India and China were the two richest countries in the world, together...
Can colonialism make a comeback? Think it’s a far-fetched notion? Then think again. In the 18th and 19th centuries when the world was being colonised by the likes of Spain, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and the Dutch, India and China were the two richest countries in the world, together accounting for over 50 per cent of world GDP. And yet the two giant Asian nations were colonised.
If you think colonisation happened when the east was decadent and the west was rising or that India and China neglected their militaries and ignored the foreign threats lurking at their shores, you couldn’t be more wrong. Take the Maratha navy led by the legendary Admiral of the Fleet, Kanhoji Angre. For 33 years until his death in 1729, Angre's fleet remained undefeated, routing the British, Dutch and Portuguese navies on the high seas.
Down south, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore was the first kingdom in modern history to use rockets in war, and he used it to deadly effect against the British in 1780 in the Battle of Guntur. In fact, most Indian rulers of that age had a keen sense of geopolitics. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, for instance, had an ambassador at the Persian court, and every act and word of the Shah was reported back to Delhi.
The Mughals, and later the Marathas who replaced them, also kept a close watch on European activities. When Thomas Roe, the British monarch's emissary, landed in Surat in 1616, he was made to wait a year before Jahangir granted him an audience. Three years later, Roe returned without a trade treaty because Jahangir saw no point in trading with a country that had nothing to offer India. However, one weak emperor dropped the ball.
A hundred years after Roe’s exit, an English embassy had a stroke of luck when one of its members, William Hamilton, a physician of questionable medical skills, managed to relieve the emperor Farrukh Siyar of severe pain in his groin. Farrukh Siyar gratefully signed a decree giving the British inland trading rights, customs duty exemptions, and the right to keep a garrison. The rest as they say is history.
According to professor Rajesh Kochhar, emeritus scientist at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Chandigarh, “These exemptions gave the English traders commercial advantages not only over other European companies but also over Indian traders. More importantly, the various official orders granting trade concessions gave the British a cause to defend, with military strength if needed.”
Today, the east is rising once again. Economists are stunned by the unprecedented flow of manufacturing, finance and wealth to the east. Magid Igbaria, former professor of management information systems at Tel Aviv University, writes in The Virtual Workplace: "For all but the last 500 years of human history, the world's wealth measured in human capital and in goods was concentrated in Asia. During the past five centuries, the world's wealth has been concentrated in the west. This era is coming to an end. Today, the great concentrations of human capital, financial power, manufacturing power, and informated power are once again accumulating in the East."
Indeed, in 30 years India is predicted to overtake the US, even though it is only one-fourteenth the size of the US economy now. That is an incredible rate of wealth accretion.
The question is will the US and Europe simply watch the world go past? On the contrary, there is a concerted effort by a US-led coalition to stop this trend.
Base instincts: Today the US-led coalition has over 750 military bases across the globe.
Despite the huge costs, this extension of military power is essential to American hegemony. A slew of European nationalities has followed the American military in its misadventures around the world.
Divide and rule: The Americans are playing up India as a major “regional” power allied with the west. This scares the hell out of the Chinese, forcing the communists to come out with kneejerk statements calling for India’s breakup, which in turn makes the Indians consider China a natural enemy. Amazingly, since the dawn of history China and India never saw the other as a threat, until the British arrived on the scene and planted the seeds of border problems.
Emissions: After polluting the environment for more than a century, the west now wants India and China to cut down emissions. It’s a thinly disguised attempt to slow these rapidly growing economies.
The dollar gambit: How powerful (and rich) would you feel if you could print dollars in your garage? While the rest of the world has to earn a living the hard way, the Americans just print dollars to pay their bills. Need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war in Iraq? Need Venezuelan oil? Russian titanium? No problem. The Federal Reserve cranks the lever and the mint starts rolling. Yes, it’s as simple as that and the Americans have been doing it for the past 50 years.
WTO: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called it "archaic, undemocratic and inflexible" and dominated by a small group of developed countries which indulge in protectionism. One of its aims is to pry open the agricultural markets of Asia – at a time when India has the highest number of farmer suicides. The modern Farrukh Siyars are throwing open strategic areas like nuclear power to the west.
The current method of colonialism is covert, invisible. You don't have to physically conquer countries if the global economic system can be subverted to ensure your prosperity at the expense of others.
The eastern nations invest their dollar earnings in US treasury bonds to the tune of trillions of dollars; these dollars are used by the Americans to maintain their global military supremacy, build increasingly modern weapons, and reward their allies with cash, weapons, and security umbrellas.
For countries like India and China it’s a nightmarish scenario. Their dollar holdings erode in value as the American economy tanks and the greenback weakens. The west is militarily prepared to defend its interests. When Iraq was about to tell its customers it no longer wanted US dollars for its oil…you know what happened next. Iran is the next target because it wants to be paid in a basket of currencies. The only way this state of affairs can end is if India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa and other self-respecting countries start accepting each other’s currencies.
And importantly, stop accepting US dollars that are not backed by gold. That will bring down the American hegemony faster than the Road Runner on a greased highway. In the first era of colonialism, the then dominant eastern nations opened up their economies and territories to western interests over a span of several decades, finally ending up as their colonies. Uncannily, Colonialism 2.0 is happening in much the same way.
---
Rakesh Krishnan is a Features Writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
If you think colonisation happened when the east was decadent and the west was rising or that India and China neglected their militaries and ignored the foreign threats lurking at their shores, you couldn’t be more wrong. Take the Maratha navy led by the legendary Admiral of the Fleet, Kanhoji Angre. For 33 years until his death in 1729, Angre's fleet remained undefeated, routing the British, Dutch and Portuguese navies on the high seas.
Down south, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore was the first kingdom in modern history to use rockets in war, and he used it to deadly effect against the British in 1780 in the Battle of Guntur. In fact, most Indian rulers of that age had a keen sense of geopolitics. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, for instance, had an ambassador at the Persian court, and every act and word of the Shah was reported back to Delhi.
The Mughals, and later the Marathas who replaced them, also kept a close watch on European activities. When Thomas Roe, the British monarch's emissary, landed in Surat in 1616, he was made to wait a year before Jahangir granted him an audience. Three years later, Roe returned without a trade treaty because Jahangir saw no point in trading with a country that had nothing to offer India. However, one weak emperor dropped the ball.
A hundred years after Roe’s exit, an English embassy had a stroke of luck when one of its members, William Hamilton, a physician of questionable medical skills, managed to relieve the emperor Farrukh Siyar of severe pain in his groin. Farrukh Siyar gratefully signed a decree giving the British inland trading rights, customs duty exemptions, and the right to keep a garrison. The rest as they say is history.
According to professor Rajesh Kochhar, emeritus scientist at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Chandigarh, “These exemptions gave the English traders commercial advantages not only over other European companies but also over Indian traders. More importantly, the various official orders granting trade concessions gave the British a cause to defend, with military strength if needed.”
Today, the east is rising once again. Economists are stunned by the unprecedented flow of manufacturing, finance and wealth to the east. Magid Igbaria, former professor of management information systems at Tel Aviv University, writes in The Virtual Workplace: "For all but the last 500 years of human history, the world's wealth measured in human capital and in goods was concentrated in Asia. During the past five centuries, the world's wealth has been concentrated in the west. This era is coming to an end. Today, the great concentrations of human capital, financial power, manufacturing power, and informated power are once again accumulating in the East."
Indeed, in 30 years India is predicted to overtake the US, even though it is only one-fourteenth the size of the US economy now. That is an incredible rate of wealth accretion.
The question is will the US and Europe simply watch the world go past? On the contrary, there is a concerted effort by a US-led coalition to stop this trend.
Base instincts: Today the US-led coalition has over 750 military bases across the globe.
Despite the huge costs, this extension of military power is essential to American hegemony. A slew of European nationalities has followed the American military in its misadventures around the world.
Divide and rule: The Americans are playing up India as a major “regional” power allied with the west. This scares the hell out of the Chinese, forcing the communists to come out with kneejerk statements calling for India’s breakup, which in turn makes the Indians consider China a natural enemy. Amazingly, since the dawn of history China and India never saw the other as a threat, until the British arrived on the scene and planted the seeds of border problems.
Emissions: After polluting the environment for more than a century, the west now wants India and China to cut down emissions. It’s a thinly disguised attempt to slow these rapidly growing economies.
The dollar gambit: How powerful (and rich) would you feel if you could print dollars in your garage? While the rest of the world has to earn a living the hard way, the Americans just print dollars to pay their bills. Need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war in Iraq? Need Venezuelan oil? Russian titanium? No problem. The Federal Reserve cranks the lever and the mint starts rolling. Yes, it’s as simple as that and the Americans have been doing it for the past 50 years.
WTO: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called it "archaic, undemocratic and inflexible" and dominated by a small group of developed countries which indulge in protectionism. One of its aims is to pry open the agricultural markets of Asia – at a time when India has the highest number of farmer suicides. The modern Farrukh Siyars are throwing open strategic areas like nuclear power to the west.
The current method of colonialism is covert, invisible. You don't have to physically conquer countries if the global economic system can be subverted to ensure your prosperity at the expense of others.
The eastern nations invest their dollar earnings in US treasury bonds to the tune of trillions of dollars; these dollars are used by the Americans to maintain their global military supremacy, build increasingly modern weapons, and reward their allies with cash, weapons, and security umbrellas.
For countries like India and China it’s a nightmarish scenario. Their dollar holdings erode in value as the American economy tanks and the greenback weakens. The west is militarily prepared to defend its interests. When Iraq was about to tell its customers it no longer wanted US dollars for its oil…you know what happened next. Iran is the next target because it wants to be paid in a basket of currencies. The only way this state of affairs can end is if India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa and other self-respecting countries start accepting each other’s currencies.
And importantly, stop accepting US dollars that are not backed by gold. That will bring down the American hegemony faster than the Road Runner on a greased highway. In the first era of colonialism, the then dominant eastern nations opened up their economies and territories to western interests over a span of several decades, finally ending up as their colonies. Uncannily, Colonialism 2.0 is happening in much the same way.
---
Rakesh Krishnan is a Features Writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
Leave a Comment