How do you put a value on that?
Also, many Indians were killed resisting the colonial invasion, and their descendants are not living today as a result, but would have if the course of history hadn't changed.
How do you put a value on that?
You can twist yourself silly arguing these things back and forth, because there are no physical limits. There are no principles to fall back on, there's only human imagination, you're free to dream up whatever pricetag you want on them.
And that is why colonial reparations are ridiculous.
India's share of the world economy went from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India's GDP (PPP) per capita was stagnant during the Mughal Empire and began to decline prior to the onset of British rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...
> infrastructure
Infrastructure that was paid for, and built by the people of India.
> medicine
Then why did life expectancy in British India go down during the colonial period? And why were millions of people dying in famines, all the while British India was a net exporter of food, to the rest of the empire?
> industry
How did countries that did not get colonised ever manage to industrialize?
> language
What, did Indians communicate with eachother through chest-thumping, and grunts, before someone had the bright idea of teaching them how to speak English? Christ on crutches... This reads a bit like satire.
Where do you go from there, exactly?
We are, it's called the global economy, and it has performed a wealth transfer of unprecedented scale these last decades.
> we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.
Colonial reparations are complete crock, because they are based on counterfactual history speculations, and there are absolutely no concrete limits on those.
The Roman empire obviously plundered the British isles for inflation-adjusted astronomical amounts during its colonial history, should modern-day Italians pay reparations to England?
It's absurd.