#deindustrialisation

In Eastern Europe, for instance, the number of people living in cities declined by almost one-third during the seventeenth century, as the region became an agrarian serf-economy exporting cheap grain and timber to Western Europe. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were transforming the American continents into suppliers of precious metals and agricultural goods, with urban manufacturing suppressed by the state. When the capitalist world-system expanded into Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imports of British cloth and steel destroyed Indigenous textile production and iron smelting, while Africans were instead made to specialize in palm oil, peanuts, and other cheap cash crops produced with enslaved labor. India—once the great manufacturing hub of the world—suffered a similar fate after colonization by Britain in 1757. By 1840, British colonizers boasted that they had “succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” Much the same story unfolded in China after it was forced to open its domestic economy to capitalist trade during the British invasion of 1839–42. According to historians, the influx of European textiles, soap, and other manufactured goods “destroyed rural handicraft industries in the villages, causing unemployment and hardship for the Chinese peasantry.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/middle-america-dying-and-dc-doesnt-care

In 1750, India produced approximately 25 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output. By 1800 India’s share had already dropped to less than a fifth, by 1860 to less than a tenth, and by 1880 to under 3 per cent. It is therefore no stretch of the imagination to claim that Britain’s industrial ascent was to a large degree predicated on India’s forced deindustrialisation. And if so, it is then no mere coincidence that Britain’s colonisation of India preceded the start of Britain’s industrialisation by some 20 years.