Re: Europe vs Pacific

"mrbill" <hmcs_kenogami@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

An earlier poster mentioned Curtis Hawk 75s and Lee-Enfield rifles as
significant production items. Coal, iron, & steel are all important
items but they are all primary resource or secondary manufacturing
items.

Your original claim was : "One of the downsides of British colonialism was
that Britain performed most of the manufacturing".

That clearly isn't accurate at all.

How many ships did India produce?

Several thousand.

What weapons other than
those mentioned by the earlier poster did India manufacture?

Machine guns, small arms, high explosives (used as propellants and bursting
charges), ammunition and other munitions including millions of small arms
rounds and mines, etc, a small amount of artillery and other larger calibre
weapons, and lots of trucks, lorries, tractors etc .

If India produced to a similar level, what did they
physically produce?

See above. Canada focused on advanced weapons systems; India on more basic
items, but both were necessary and needed.

The other question that I have is; if India was able to produce at
this level during WWII what happened after? Understandably there was
disruption as the result of partition but, even so, if India had a
level of production on par with Canada's during WWII then India should
have been a G8 country long ago. What happened?

Pre-war, Britain had artificially stimulated industrialisation only in
certain sectors; there was no *general* industrialisation like there had
been in western Europe and the US in the 19th century. With independence and
partition, Western foreign capital on which this industrialisation had
depended dried up and many post-war Indian governments were socialist in
character and stifled enterprise in favour of large national projects,
Soviet-style.

.