‘Engels once wrote of how “the conquest of India” pursued in search of “imports” – the material form of tribute, that is to say – helped to transform the metropolitan country, creating within it the need for “exports” and the development of large-scale industry. He seems to set 1800 as the dividing line between the “import” and “export” phases of British colonialism (135). This was clearly in line with Marx’s own perceptions. Marx put the change after 1813: “After the opening of the trade in 1813 (by the Charter Art) the commerce with India more than trebled in a very short time. But this was not all. The whole character of the trade was changed. Till 1813 India had been chiefly an exporting country, while it now became an importing one…” (136). Marx, in defining exports and imports was clearly giving consideration to industrial goods alone: “India, the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world, since immemorial times, became now inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs” (137). He gave precise quantitative data for the expansion of the British exports of cotton manufactures to India: “From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5.200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1.000.000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64.000.000 yards” (138). The importance of the trade for Britain rose in proportion to the expansion of British exports to India: In 1850, Marx tells us, Great Britain’s exports to India amounted to 1/8 of its entire exports, and cotton exports to 1/4 of “the foreign cotton trade”. After reminding the reader that cotton manufactures employed 1/8 of the population of Great Britain, he continues: “At the same rate at which the cotton manufactures became of vital interest for the whole social frame of Great Britain, East India became of vital interest for the British cotton manufacture” (139). If such was the importance for England of its textile exports to India, what about their impact on India? Marx regarded these as the source of an immense transformation of social and economic conditions: “English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only ‘social’ revolution ever heard of in Asia” (140)” [Irfan Habib, Marx’s perceptions of India] [(in ) Fritjof Thichelman Irfan Habib, Marx on Indonesia and India. Marx and Indonesia. Preliminary notes (Tichelman) – Marx’s perceptions of India (Habib), 1983] [(135) Engels, letter to Conrad Schmidt (27 october, 1890), Selected Correspondence, p. 502; (136) ‘Tribune’, art. date-lined 24 June, 1853: ‘On Colonialism’, p. 47; (137) ‘Tribune’ art., op. cit.: ‘On Colonialism’, pp. 47-48; (138) ‘Tribune’, art. date-lined 10 June, 1853: ‘On Colonialism’, p. 34;: (139) ‘Tribune’, art. date-lined 24 June, 1853: ‘On Colonialism’, p. 48; (140) ‘Tribune’, art. date-lined 10 June, 1853: ‘On Colonialism’, p. 36]
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- Articolo pubblicato:25 Aprile 2014