this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.
I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)
A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.
Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.
For those curious, even the Wikipedia page for “perverse incentive” has a picture of a cobra and that story. It’s something most Econ professors and textbooks will use as the classic example. It’s not the same as the Bengal famine. I just mentioned it as something we learned about India besides “Gandhi was like their MLK” or whatever.