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

Chowdhury Irad Siddiky

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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.

Keywords: confiscatory taxation; multi-person assurance game; strategic civil disobedience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-05-02, Revised 2005-09-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cwa and nep-his
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Published in Public Choice Society Annual Conference, Papers and Proceedings 2006 Public Choice Society Annual Conference, Papers and Proceedings 2006.Public(2006): pp. 15-50

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