Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

Chowdhury Irad Siddiky

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence.[MPRA WP, May 2005]

Keywords: confiscatory taxation; multi-person assurance game; strategic civil disobedience; freedom struggle India; economic independence; political independence; Economics; Political Science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-11
Note: Institutional Papers
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownl ... s&AId=708&fref=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:708

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash ().