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So friendlyjordies has fallen for the $45 trillion "britain deindustrialized india" meme. Do I need to explain the error she made calculating compound interest?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZJLZnCyf3s&t=4m27s

What are /his/'s thoughts? India didn't even have Euclidean geometry when the British arrived, the Muslims had introduced them to it, but India never adopted it. India apparently had a thriving cotton industry, but it was all done by hand, they lacked innovations like the treadle loom that had existed in Europe since the middle ages, the abundance of cotton being more a feature of their environment and huge population than some fledgling industrial revolution. Meanwhile Britain had the steam engine since 1698 and innovations like the spinning jenny and packard loom which increased the productivity of a worker by orders of magnitude.

One might ask why the British didn't bring these machines to India closer to the cotton, well they did, there were many attempts to do so. Even Indians like Jamsetji Tata built successful businesses (actually Parsi not native Indian, like most of the Indian intelligentsia). If the British wanted to stop India industrializing, why didn't they just blow him apart with a cannon? Or turn him into a "jamboy"?

There is no significant evidence Britain made any attempt to deindustrialize or even prevent the industrialization of India. Entrepreneurs like Tata possessed the first few incubated industries and would have expanded across the country if there was profit in doing so, there just wasn't. Russia and Italy struggled to industrialize despite having more advantages than India, so why would India become an economic superpower overnight?

Of course actual economics and rational analysis takes the back seat to a billion Indians online who want to believe that their poverty, almost 80 years after independence, is someone else's fault, not the result of their own corrupt politicians or other reasons /pol/ can inform you of.