1
Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma:
Strategic Civil Disobedience and
Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India
1
I. Introduction:
“Force cannot, like opinion, endure for long unless the tyrant extends his empire far enough afield
to hide from the people, whom he divides and rules, the secret that real power lies not with the oppressors
but with the oppressed.” ─ Marquis de Condorcet
2
(1745-1794).
wentieth-Century India lived under the kind of colonial administration that
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had rejected
3
— the kind that would
have made John Adams angry
4
. And it did anger a great many Indians
5
. To the British,
the Indian economy existed for the enrichment of Great Britain. Industry was for the
profit of the English Midlands. Indian salt was to be managed for the benefit of Cheshire.
India was an extractive state under British colonial rule that was not able to invest more
in physical and human capital and use these factors efficiently to achieve a greater level
of income. (e.g., Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson,
2002; Banerjee and Iyer, 2002; Engerman and Sokoloff, 1997; 2000; 2002). History is
nothing but an artificial extension of social memory
6
. In the view of that memory based
model of bounded rationality (e.g. Mullainathan, 2002) and the new institutionalist view
of history (e.g. North, 1990), history is crucial because history shapes institutions and
institutions shape the economy. This proposition is further fortified by La Porta et al
1
The political geography of “India” in this paper implies pre-partitioned India prior to her independence in
1947, which includes present day nation-states of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
2
Condorcet, J.A (1795) Sketch for a History for the Progress of the Human Mind. Connecticut: Hyperion
Press, 1979.
3
Bernard Bailyn (1967) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
4
Gordon S. Wood (1992) The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
5
Getz, Marshall J. (2002) Subhas Chandra Bose: A Biography. North Carolina: McFarland & Company.
6
Becker, Carl (1931) Annual address of the president of the American Historical Association, delivered at
Minneapolis. December 29, 1931. Reprinted in the American Historical Review, Volume 37(2), p. 221-236
T
Page 1 of 34 
Convention