Skip to main content

India and the United Kingdom

One-time imperial power and the one-time jewel in that old crown.  It is good to see amity between the United Kingdom and India. They have a new trading accord. 


This may be a matter of considerable significance for the ongoing transformation of world trade. Not only are these two powerhouse economies, but this deal may be part of a pattern.

Negotiations had been on a back burner for years,  But, when the President of the US started talking about how we need only two out of every 30 imported dolls -- or whatever -- the rest of the world had to think about work-arounds.  "Who can we sell to when the US stops buying from us?  Who will we buy from while we are holding up our end of a trade war with them?"

Accordingly, the Brit/Indian deal went to the front burner in recent months. 

This one may have some special resonance for those fascinated by the history of the US, because we know that in 1861 Lincoln told the Brits they could no longer import cotton from the states of the US that were in rebellion.  The British, heavily dependent on the textile industry at the time, turned to India for their cotton.  They even got to work on a canal at Suez, because that voyage all around Africa is a bee-yatch. 

The canal is still there, conveniently.  And this time the US may be cutting itself off in a more comprehensive way. Go to your work-arounds, world. 

 https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-uk-conclude-talks-over-free-trade-pact-pm-modi-says-2025-05-06/

Indeed, the sequence of events is this: (a) UK-India talks languished; (b) US announced insane trade war against rest of world, (c) UK and India negotiators announce an agreement, and almost immediately thereafter, (d) President Trump claims that the insane trade war has produced an agreement between the US and the UK. 

The claim involved in item (d) is a stretch of such words as "agreement". From first indications, it is a promise to continue to discuss certain matters with certain ideas in mind, little more. But it is also the kind of thing Trump would have thought it necessary to produce immediately after (c). 

At any rate, the UK/India development, seen from the US, should remind us that there is a cost to making trade policy in 90 day increments, constantly changing according to nothing more than monarchical whims. Whatever the latest whims are, the uncertainty that such a non-system creates is enough to induce other nations around the world to make and stick to such work-arounds.

And the US shall be the lesser for it all.  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
21 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
2 comments
Read more