Bande Mataram

Boycott and British Capital

21-February-1908

We published yesterday a communicated article on the economic danger of excepting from the Boycott British manufactures produced on Indian soil. The note of warning which the writer strikes is one which was long ago raised by Srijut Bipin Chandra Pal on similar grounds. The danger of an invasion of our market by British capital on a gigantic scale, the transference of Manchester to the banks of the Hughly is not a danger of the immediate moment. But in the future, if the pressure of a spreading Boycott and the growth of Indian industry on English trade with India becomes a strangling pressure, the first economic result would inevitably be the migration of English capital to this country to compete under more favourable circumstances. This however presupposes that the conditions in favour of British capital as against Indian remain as good as they have been in

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the past. There are, however, strong considerations on the other side. There is first the natural reluctance of capital to leave its own nest where it is safest unless it is sure of compensating gains. There is the fact that a wholesale migration of a great manufacture to a distant country is conceivable in theory, but hardly practicable and certainly unprecedented. Most powerful obstacle of all is the comparative insecurity of Indian soil to British capital. The possibility that England's rule in India may some day cease either by invasion from outside, convulsion from within or a peaceful departure, must always be present to the eye of so timid an entity as capital, and so long as the present unrest and the exploitation of it by enterprising journalists continues, we need not fear wholesale industrial invasion; but the unrest is likely to last so long as the bureaucracy maintain their present uncompromising attitude and Indian democracy does not come by its own. On economic grounds, we fancy the danger from Anglo-Indian manufactures is not pressing. Boycott on political grounds is a different matter. So far at least the sentiment of the country has been for condoning the advantage to British capital for the sake of the advantage to Indian labour.