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	Rising inequality is a wake-up call for human rights by Ignacio Saiz Center for Economic & Social Rights   The challenges that economic inequality poses for human rights are not the death knell for the movement but a wake-up call for a more holistic approach.   In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, provocatively titled “How the Human Rights Movement Failed”, Yale professor Samuel Moyn slams the human rights movement for failing to address rising economic inequality and other socioeconomic grievances, which have contributed to the rise of populist authoritarianism. This criticism is not without merit, as much of the human rights movement has indeed been late to the game on these issues, and continues to relegate economic and social rights to the marginalized status of “phantom rights.”   As with other recent laments about the “end of human rights,” Moyn’s article has generated a lot of attention and knowing nods. Yet his argument is based on a very narrow, partial and selective view of the extraordinary range, diversity and ambition of the global human rights movement. In particular, Moyn’s account overlooks the significant efforts of economic and social rights activists worldwide to challenge socioeconomic injustices, including the current escalation in economic inequality.   Questions of “distributional fairness” may not be high on the agenda of international NGOs focusing primarily on civil and political rights, but they have been central to the work of organizations such as the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) that are using human rights strategies to tackle extreme economic inequality and the policy trends that fuel it.   Whether exposing the inequitable impacts of austerity measures across the globe or taking tax havens to task at the UN, CESR and its partners have leveraged human rights norms and oversight bodies to press for governmental accountability in areas of policy that have traditionally been rights-free zones, but are critical for the reduction of inequality.   Others in the global movement for economic and social rights, from grassroots groups to international coalitions, are fighting unjust trade policies, corporate impunity, the financialization of public goods and many other factors driving the inequality crisis.   Although efforts to deploy the tools of human rights in the fight against economic inequality may seem nascent, it is important to remember the role played by the human rights movement in achieving earlier safeguards against income inequality, such as worker’s rights to collective bargaining, the right to primary education, or the right to social security.   Likewise, without laws against gender and racial discrimination brought about thanks to the women’s rights and civil rights movements, wealth and income inequalities would be even more gaping. But many of these historic advances are now taken for granted.   Nevertheless, as we argued earlier in this OpenGlobalRights series on economic inequality and human rights, there are many challenges the human rights community urgently needs to address if it is to be a relevant actor in the field. These challenges are conceptual, normative, strategic and methodological.   The increasing concentration of wealth needs to be understood not just as an incidental human rights concern, but as an inherent injustice and the product of a web of regressive policies that systematically flout governments’ economic and social rights obligations. How the full panoply of human rights norms can be applied more effectively to constrain the current drivers of economic inequality needs much further exploration.   The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the treaties that flow from it may be silent on the gap between the rich and the poor, but they have a great deal to say about the policies that perpetuate this disparity. At their core is a concern for substantive equality in all areas of human well-being.   Thanks in part to growing civil society advocacy, human rights oversight mechanisms—from constitutional courts to UN treaty bodies—have become more assertive in applying these norms to challenge or reverse inequality-inducing measures, from the imposition of regressive sales taxes in Colombia to the discriminatory denial of health care to migrants in Spain. But a key strategic challenge is how to take human rights arguments into other arenas with more direct influence over economic policy setting, such as the IMF, or forums for accountability in development, particularly in light of the new global sustainable development goal to reduce inequality.   It is telling that, while parts of the human rights movement fret over the declining influence of human rights, many development advocates including Oxfam have embraced human rights discourse and tools in their campaigning around extreme inequality.   Such relationships with actors beyond the traditional human rights movement are crucial in building broader alliances to fight inequality. Economic and social rights groups such as CESR have joined forces with development organizations, tax justice campaigners, trade unions, and environmental groups, to leverage human rights around the fairer distribution of resources, and to propose alternative models and paradigms.   Collaboration across sectors can help the human rights movement develop more effective interdisciplinary tools of research and advocacy, as traditional methods of “naming and shaming” and events-based analysis are ill-equipped to deal with chronic socioeconomic deprivation.   It is valid to ask what impact current human rights strategies can have in confronting the systemic injustices underpinning widening inequalities—an inquiry in which CESR and its allies worldwide are engaged with increased urgency since the turning tide of 2016. But the starting point of any constructive critique should be a nuanced assessment of the current state of the field.   The blanket assertion that the human rights movement has “made itself at home in a plutocratic world” and is “drawing the wrong lessons” from the current context loses credibility by leaving out the rich experiences of economic and social rights activists across the globe, as well as the reflective responses to the threat of populism which have emerged from some of the movement’s thought leaders.   The most erroneous lesson of all would be to give up on human rights as a counter-power to the ravages of neoliberalism based on such a selective and distorted reading of the challenges in the field.   In the compelling book that his NYT piece promotes, Moyn acknowledges the rise of social rights activism over the last twenty-five years, but claims that these rights “generally concern a threshold above indigence, not how far the rich tower over the rest.” Their “individualist and anti-statist basis,” he argues, doom the human rights movement to offer no meaningful response to rising material inequality.   Yet these limitations are not inherent to the human rights framework, which is constantly evolving. Beyond the movement’s mainstream—particularly on the frontiers of socioeconomic rights advocacy and allied struggles for distributive justice—a more transformative human rights agenda is being honed.   New alliances are emerging to tackle economic inequality as an intrinsic human rights concern, and to fulfil the egalitarian aspiration of the UDHR through new approaches to rights claiming.   Viewed from this perspective, there is evidence for hope that human rights—understood holistically—can be an effective bulwark against the deprivations and disparities driven by market fundamentalism. This is no time to abandon the challenges this entails. Instead, we must learn from and build on the initiatives worldwide which have successfully invoked the power of human rights to tackle the injustice of extreme inequality. Visit the related web page
	How Britain stole $45 trillion from India by Dr Jason Hickel, Shashi Tharoor University of London, agencies   There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long - the story goes - was a gesture of Britain''s benevolence.   New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.   It''s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.   How did this come about? It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way - mostly with silver - as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.   Here''s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.   It was a scam - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.   Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain''s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.   On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they "bought" them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.   After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company''s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.   How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills - a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers.   When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were "paid" in rupees out of tax revenues - money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.   Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.   This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India''s exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.   Some point to this fictional "deficit" as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg.   Meanwhile, the "deficit" meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.   Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence - funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars.   As Patnaik points out, "the cost of all Britain''s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues."   And that''s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.   Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present.   Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.   These are enormous sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development - as Japan did - there''s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.   All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped "develop" India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.   This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.   Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century - the heyday of British intervention - income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.   Britain didn''t develop India. Quite the contrary - as Patnaik''s work makes clear - India developed Britain.   What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps - although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain''s industrial rise didn''t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.   * Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.   Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. (2017)   ''The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700).   By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty line.   The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercialising society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, pre-colonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.   The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British''.
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