Do a right and a wrong make a right or a wrong?

It can happen to anyone: thinking you’re in one place when you’re in another. 

Yesterday, I walked into a car park ready to drive home, walking purposefully and confidently towards the spot where I’d left the car, only to discover that there was no sign of it, indeed no sign of the spot I remembered, and no sign of the payment machine being even moderately interested in the ticket I presented it with.

“Ah, it’s the car park next door,” the friendly attendant told me, and to demonstrate that he was kind as well as friendly, he took me back up to the street level to show me how to get to the right place.

Now, I’ll admit that Christopher Columbus’s error was more serious than mine. Landing in the Bahamas and thinking you’re in India is a pretty serious navigational inaccuracy. Nearly 15,000 km. Still, in a sense his mistake was essentially like mine. After all, I couldn’t imagine that there’d be two car parks, each with its own entrance, in the same street, just as he had no reason to assume that anyone would have been so careless as to put another continent on his way to Asia.

Poor guy. He was trying to get there because Europe, for ages terribly backward compared to the great Empires in the Far East, India and China, nonetheless had a relatively wealthy elite – much like today – and it liked a bit of luxury to improve its lifestyle and mark its superiority over mere mortals – a lot like today. 

One of the things that your European fatcat found essential for the kind of life to which he felt entitled was a range of spices for his food. The spice of life. And spices had to come from the Far East.

For centuries, that hadn’t really been a problem. They came overland and through that huge commercial centre, Constantinople, or Istanbul as it’s called these days. That took a long time, but it didn’t matter: as long as the supplies came in regularly, it didn’t matter how long they’d been on the road.

But in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. West Europeans decided it would be good to find a different route to the far East, and an independent source of those spices. In 1492, as the rhyme has it, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That’s 39 years later, but communications weren’t good and the logistics weren’t easy.

So off he went and turned up at the wrong place.

Six years later, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama decided to have a go too. He was a nasty piece of work, doing things like capturing ships, cutting off everyone’s hands, noses and ears and sending them to the Emperor of India, to make the point that he wasn’t to be trifled with. 

He went the other way around from Columbus, down the African coast and into the Indian Ocean, and making for India from there.

Curiously, while it was Vasco da Gama’s trip that opened the new source of spices for Europe, Columbus’s exercise in getting globally lost proved vital to its success.

You see, those Asian Empires, India and China, and the various Spice Islands and other exciting places around there – today’s Indonesia, Malaysia and so on – were wealthy. The whole of Western Europe had a GDP in 1500 that has been estimated at about three-quarters of India’s, although its population was only 10% less. 

More to the point, Western Europe had little to offer at the time, and certainly nothing that India wanted to buy. Trade, therefore, was horribly one-sided. Europe had to pay in gold and silver – bullion – for all the spices and, indeed, the superb textiles India produced.

This had been going on for ages. Right back in the days of the early Roman Empire, the historian Pliny the Elder complained that Rome’s bullion was being drained away to India to buy textiles. Rome was running itself ragged financially, he complained, to satisfy the fashion desires of its (wealthy) women.

Nothing had changed by 1500. Europe would need bullion to pay for what it was buying in India. And that’s where Columbus came in. Because, though he hadn’t found India, he had found a way to pay India for what Europe wanted. Spain and Portugal would spend the next couple of centuries draining the Americas of bullion. Historians have calculated that a third of the silver mined in America over that period went to pay India for the trade there.

So Columbus got it wrong, where Vasco da Gama got it right, but then what Columbus got wrong provided a way to put right the thing that Vasco da Gama had forgotten about, and might have gone hopelessly wrong had Columbus not been able to put it right.

Got that?

Of course, that’s not quite the end of the story. Because draining the Americas of their bullion wasn’t a gentle process. A lot of people were enslaved to dig the metals out of the ground. A lot of people died to ensure European control over the product of their forced labour.

Robert Clive accepting the right to collect taxes
in Bengal and Bihar on behalf of the East India Company
The real event was much less grand

And what about the other end? When a British corporation, the East India Company, took control of most of the subcontinent, that was the end of the splendid independent wealth of the country. The booming textile industry that had served the Romans in Pliny’s day came under the control of the British, who learned from India how to manufacture cotton cloths alongside the more traditional wool that had been its stock in trade for centuries. Within a few decades, 50% of the textiles being sold in India were British-made.

Besides, the British had control of taxation. So, like the Spanish in Latin America, they drained India of bullion. Smart trick, right? They needed bullion to pay for what they took from India. So they taxed the Indians to get the bullion to pay them.

Within ten years of establishing British control in Bengal, a famine there killed between 1.2 million and 10 million people.

If in 1500, India had a GDP one-third higher than Western Europe, today Western Europe’s is nearly two and a half times higher than India’s.

So in the end it’s hard not to think that actually what Columbus and Vasco da Gama did wasn’t one of them going wrong, the other going right, and the first then putting right what the second had wrong.

Actually, what they opened the door to, was one of the great abuses of history. They laid the groundwork for reducing huge numbers of people across America, as well as India, then one of the world’s great economies, to misery.

Proof that a right and a wrong, in this case, certainly didn’t make a right.