Open Thread August 31 - September 6

Elo

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

I suspect we should not use "fact of the matter" to describe counterfactual claims.

Well, there are two competing claims here: EIC was a light touch government, or the EIC was a heavy-handed disaster. Now you can argue that the EIC was in fact a light touch government, and all the disasters in India that resulted in EIC terminating its existence were just due to confounders of the time and place. Maybe that's true! But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?

One example... where the British government continued to use similar policy for 90 years?

I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn't really evidence for this.

I mean that they recruited from the highest caste of the natives and respected their superstitions

I define 'light touch' operationally -- did it work as intended?

It seems highly likely that the Dutch sought out the lands where they expected their approach to work best, and likewise for the British.

The Dutch were late to the game, and got what they could. They did not have a luxury of choosing. Even the British, who essentially were the premier power in a multipolar world, had to worry about other powers sniffing around.

But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?

Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it's likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use nativ... (read more)