The Man Who Counted What Others Ignored
Dadabhai Naoroji did not arrive at his drain theory through anger. He arrived through arithmetic. In the 1860s and 1870s, when most Indian intellectuals were debating colonial policy in broad strokes, Naoroji was filling ledgers, tallying exports against imports, salaries paid to British officers against what stayed in Indian hands, money that left and never returned. His 1901 book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was, at its core, a set of accounts. The argument was only as strong as the numbers behind it.
