“Wikipedia has a vangaurd, dissention is not allowed.”
I agree.
Wikipedia is garbage, any body can get on and “edit”. And there is going to be someone who has the artical on their watch list, so if you fix it, you’ll just end up in an edit war. That will end with an arbitrarily decision by an admin.
“Wikipedia is garbage, any body can get on and “edit”. And there is going to be someone who has the artical on their watch list, so if you fix it, you’ll just end up in an edit war. That will end with an arbitrarily decision by an admin.”
As said, get your facts straight, write them up, be nice, hope for the best. It is still possible to put in dissenting views, one needs persistence and on occasion luck. The world’s largest encyclopedia is not all garbage.
So for a while I wanted to look further into this and now I finally have.
Damn! A rather brutal account.
One quibble:
stands somewhat against
“a colony where malnutrition was chronic” and
“in the years just before the war India had been a net importer of food”
…could it be that India had its share of poverty and famines before the British arrived? Wouldn’t excuse them one bit, but it needs to be said.
Accounts of Bengal before the British arrive describe it as a land of plenty. Famine was probably not totally unknown since there existed a state sponsored system of famine relief, which wouldn’t make sense for there to be without an ocasional crisis. However there was nothing on the scale of horrendous Victorian famines. In fact the first famine in Bengal after the subjugation took people by surprise as they wondered how there could be starvation in a place renowned for its riches. But by mid 19th century starvation in India no longer aroused any shock.
India actually continued to grow a surplus of food through most of the colonial era, however, so much of that food was being exported that despite that there was chronic malnutrition. That is to say not just the surplus, even some non-surplus food was being sold on the world market, because at the time it was the only way to meet the “Home Charge”, seeing that there was little manufacturing the British having obstructed its rise (prohibition on import of machinery early on, and high tariffs later on).
However shortly before the war, a decade or two at most, India no longer grew a surplus of food and was now an importer of it, albeit it never actually imported enough to meet its total need for food, because it needed to spend the money earned by exports on paying off the British instead.
Hell, let me upload the scans I had for notes that are about some of this specifically:
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/04e5a
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/1d86e
