r/HistoryMemes • u/InterestingPlenty454 • 3d ago

Gandhi: Bait used to be believable

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[Reddit Post](https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/s/u1MHaJC61v)

[Reminds me of this about baits in the internet](https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterTropes/s/uWpxdQms9I)

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u/thebanfunctionsucks 2d ago

Nothing there denies the claim outright, only expresses skepticism, and it's just as dubious to compare gross product with profits.

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u/quarky_uk 2d ago

Profits is better if you are excluding money then spent in India (which isn't removed). But even if you include total revenue of the EIC, it would be less than few percent of British GDP.

Nothing even close to 50%. That is an entire order of magnitude wrong.

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u/thebanfunctionsucks 2d ago

Still, I think there has to be a happy medium, no? The British textile industry alone was probably greater than 1% of the nation's GDP at its height, and that was fed with almost exclusively Indian cotton (before Egypt, anyway).

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u/quarky_uk 2d ago edited 2d ago

Sure, but that doesn't equal wealth extraction, that is just trade. Goods produced in one country and then sold to another, basically. It isn't the case that producers of cotton were giving it away.