“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare.”
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About this quote
The warning here is about scale: an economy built on taking more than the land can give works only while a few nations run it, and buckles the moment everyone copies the model. It ties one country's prosperity to what it quietly extracts from others and from the planet.
When to use it
- A town realizes its cheap goods depend on a distant mine poisoning someone else's river.
- A firm's growth only pencils out because it offloads its waste onto communities downstream.
- A shopper traces a bargain product back to labor and farmland stripped bare overseas.