I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by colonizing them.
And because of that, today, India is a major software player for outsourcing, all thanks to the British for colonizing them, and bringing them English.
I sat there thinking to myself, this is unbelievable. I didn't want to talk politics in a business setting, so I ignored it.
The British destroyed a civilization. Enslaved a generation. And enriched themselves in the process. But all that is swept under the rug, because they brought English to their colonies.
The attitude is empirically far less prevalent in India than it is in modern-day England, so it's not as simple as a matter of education.
You mean in those parts of recorded history when everyone was dirt-poor, only Bengal had more people? I've read my Maddison, India was no better than anyone else at the time.
EDIT: I'm trying to highlight the fact that preindustrial productivity is a function of population size and therefore per capita GDP is not really a good measure in that context.
To add to this, it's not just the British. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (among others) colonized parts of India long before the British did, and the Portuguese and French also kept their colonies in India much longer. When people talk about India's independence in 1947, that's just referring to the independence of British India. The French stayed until 1962, and the Portuguese held their colonies until 1975.
Amusingly, most Portuguese and French people I've talked to under the age of forty[0] or so are genuinely shocked to learn this.
On the other hand, most British people are apparently proud of their colonial plundering[1], so I guess everyone has a long way to go still.
(P.S. If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years, please save us all the trouble and don't. These are typical revisionist talking points that are easily debunked as ahistorical with some basic research, and they're put forth to distract from the sheer volume of wealth that was stolen, the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed by colonial regimes, the genocides and other war crimes that were committed by the colonizing countries, and so on. For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2] - and every discussion that attempts to rationalize that loss after colonization without recognizing the value that was destroyed, stolen, or outright murdered ultimately into revisionist white supremacist history, which is not what HN is for.)
I know I'll get eventually downvoted for this, because talking about the brutality and legacy of European colonialism is always unpopular on HN for obvious reasons, but it's important enough that it needs to be said.
[0] ie, young enough that this wasn't in their lifetimes
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people...
[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYU...