by Suketu Mehta
In 2015, Shashi Tharoor, the former UN undersecretary-general for communications and public information, gave a compelling Oxford Union speech that made the case for (symbolic) reparations owed by Britain to India. “India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores [at the beginning of the eighteenth century] was 23 percent. By the time the British left [in 1947], it was down to below 4 percent. Why?” he asked. “Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Meanwhile, just over the Himalayas, the British sent in gunboats to open up China for its traders during the Opium Wars. China was flooded with foreign goods, and its share of the world GDP gradually sank from a high of 33 percent in 1820 to a low of 5 percent in 1978.
* * *
No museums in the U.K. are devoted to Britain’s colonial past. The British would rather celebrate their achievements in the two world wars. If the empire resurfaces at all on British TV or movies, it’s cloaked in sepia-hazed nostalgia. Let’s look at its real colors.
In 1770, the British East India Company—the world’s first multinational corporation—increased the taxes it forcibly collected on crops, and 10 million people, a third of Bengal, starved to death. Another 29 million Indians under British rule died of famines in the nineteenth century, partly because India was forced to export 10 million tons of food a year. It’s a global period that the writer Mike Davis calls “the late Victorian holocaust.” Then, in 1942, the British, fearing a Japanese invasion of East India, stopped the importation of rice from Burma. They also destroyed existing stocks of rice under a policy called “denial of rice.” Australian ships carrying grain were diverted to the Balkans, to prepare for a future invasion of Greece. The next year, more than 2 million people starved; many others were lost to the diseases that followed. Altogether, between 3 million and 5 million people died in that British-made famine.
My father, who was a boy growing up in Calcutta at that time, remembers the mothers with babies sucking at their withered teats in the street below our house; the soundscape in Calcutta was a continuous chant, “Mother, some rice gruel?” The British had reduced them to begging, not for rice, but for the leftover water from boiling the rice.
A revisionist view of the British Empire is making the rounds these days. According to the Stanford historian Niall Ferguson, “No organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire … And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.” Bruce Gilley at Portland State University published a paper, in the leftist journal Third World Quarterly, of all places, titled “The Case for Colonialism.”
For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found … Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.
After an outcry, Third World Quarterly withdrew Gilley’s paper, but he soon found a defender in Nigel Biggar at Oxford. Biggar called Gilley’s paper a “balanced reappraisal of the colonial past” and called for “us British to moderate our post-imperial guilt.” Biggar also announced that he would be starting an academic project at Oxford called Ethics and Empire, to question the notion that “imperialism is wicked; and empire is therefore unethical.” It would also develop “a Christian ethic of empire.”
It’s no wonder that even though the empire isn’t the first thing that today’s Brits associate with their country’s past, 59 percent of Britons surveyed in 2014 thought the British Empire is “something to be proud of.” A third of those surveyed would like it if Britain still had an empire.
Winston Churchill loathed Nazis and Indians, and tried to kill as many of both as possible. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” Churchill said. The Indians deserved the 1943 famine, he said, because they were “breeding like rabbits.” As the Cambridge historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper note, “The prime minister believed that Indians were the next worst people in the world after the Germans. Their treachery had been plain in the Quit India movement. The Germans he was prepared to bomb into the ground. The Indians he would starve to death as a result of their own folly and viciousness.”
In another region ruled by the British, Churchill had advocated for using chemical weapons against rebellious Iraqis. “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” he declared. Along with the earlier Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916—a secret agreement between France and the U.K. to carve up southwestern Asia among themselves—Churchill bears much of the responsibility for creating the modern Middle East, amalgamating people at war with each other and forcing them to live behind arbitrary borders. According to the Churchill scholar Warren Dockter, “He is largely responsible for how Jordan and Iraq were divided up.” When he was colonial secretary, he also had a principal role in creating the most enduring border issue of the modern era. “Churchill literally created the kingdom of Jordan, for example, and the original Palestinian mandate,” notes Dockter.
In all, 40 percent of all the national borders in the entire world today were made by just two countries: Britain and France. The case of Africa was even worse than South Asia and the Middle East. After shipping off slaves, after plundering its resources, the colonizers left, drawing up borders that had almost no relevance to the tribal nations that the continent was composed of. Just look at a map of Africa now. It abounds in straight lines. These lines vivisected the motherland of hundreds of tribes. The authors of a 2015 study in the American Economic Review identified 357 groups that were split by these colonial boundaries. “In the majority of cases, Europeans did not consider ethnic features and local geography in the design of colonial borders,” the authors note. As a result, many of the tribes have been in constant conflict with each other in their desire to regather into a single nation; incidents of political violence were 57 percent higher in the partitioned homelands than in the intact ones, the study found. These conflicts are fueled with arms sold to them by the former colonizers. And by the multinational corporations that replaced the governments.
In country after country, the British committed mass atrocities, which are now minimized by revisionist historians like Ferguson and Gilley. But there is another history: the one remembered by the people who were its victims. During the Mau Mau guerrilla movement for Kenyan independence, my grandfather was dragooned into working as a cook for a concentration camp where the British held the rebels. One day he happened upon a large pit lined with black bodies. “They threw them in, like dogs,” he remembered. The British imprisoned and tortured 150,000 Kenyans in these camps.
He also remembered the Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, which had a sign during World War II: “No dogs or Indians allowed.” One day a Sikh officer in the British army strode in. He was in Africa to fight for the king. But he was Indian, and so the white officers demanded that he be ejected. The guards advanced upon the Sikh. He drew his pistol. “I die, you die,” he said. The empire that he was ready to sacrifice his life for on the battlefield wouldn’t allow him into its clubs because of the color of his skin. “I die, you die,” he said, and the color bar was lifted for him, out of fear of what it would do for morale on the part of the Indian troops.
My grandfather related this story to me with pride. The Sikh was risking his life, but he would no longer take the everyday humiliations that my grandfather had to endure all the time that he was working as a salesman for a Scottish trading company in Kenya. Later, when he was living in London, he took pride in sending me lists of the richest Indians in the U.K., some of them richer even than the Queen.
* * *
Toward the end of the Age of
Empire, European countries began importing huge numbers of migrants from the former colonies to work in their factories and at low-wage jobs that their own people didn’t want to do. The French recruited more than 200,000 laborers from North Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar during World War I to work behind the lines. But still there weren’t enough, so European countries looked beyond the states they’d colonized. Britain recruited 100,000 Chinese contract laborers and France 40,000 to dig trenches and collect the bodies of dead soldiers. After three years, they were expected to go back to China. But 3,000 of them couldn’t, because they had been killed. Thousands more died of flu and dysentery. It wasn’t even their war.
The recruiting really stepped up in the postwar era, because so many men of working age had been killed. In 1951, there were around 157,000 immigrants (only 20,000 of them nonwhite) from Britain’s former colonies in the country. In ten years, there were over four times as many, the vast majority of them nonwhite.
Not many people outside France realize that most of the North Africans living in France today are children or grandchildren of French citizens. France conquered Algeria in 1848 and made all Algerians French citizens in 1947. It turned Morocco and Tunisia into “protectorates.” In 1962, after an incredibly bloody war, in which it’s been estimated that more than a million Algerians died, France finally left, leaving the newly independent country to pick up the pieces. More than a million Algerians, white and Arab, moved to France in the years after because the Algerian economy was in tatters.
But there was a problem. Citizens though the North Africans may have been, France had badly neglected to educate them. When France left Algeria in 1962, 85 percent of the population was illiterate. When they moved, they carried their illiteracy with them: 35 percent of the male migrants and 45 percent of the females had never attended school. There were no jobs for them, and they were shunted into the banlieues outside French cities. North Africans are now blamed for everything from shoplifting to terrorism in today’s France.
The French have never really gotten used to the presence of Arabs among them. I once spent a summer in Tours and became friends with a genial university student from Morocco named Mustafa. He was fond of reading Derrida and liked to cook; he was the friendliest man in Tours. One day he was waiting at a bus stop next to a mother and a small boy playing with a football. The boy kicked the ball over to Mustafa, who moved the ball this way and that with his feet, and kicked it back to him. Then he watched as the mother slapped her son across the face, shouting at him, “Don’t play with a dirty Arab!” She gathered up the ball and dragged her son away, leaving Mustafa standing alone at the bus stop.
* * *
The impact of the French colonial project extended well beyond Africa. France and the rest of Europe were shocked when Toussaint Louverture led the first successful slave rebellion in the Americas, in 1791 in Haiti. In return for accepting its former colony as a sovereign nation in 1825, France demanded, with gunboats aimed at the island, 150 million gold francs (later magnanimously reduced to 90 million, around $40 billion today). The country paid, to American and French banks, and paid, through earthquakes and hurricanes, until 1947.
The extortionate payments wrecked Haiti’s economic progress and were instrumental in reducing it to the poorest country in the Americas. As a result, millions of Haitians have had to migrate in search of work to the Dominican Republic, where they are systematically discriminated against and, periodically, violently purged. A million Haitians have migrated to the United States, and sizable numbers have gone to other countries such as Canada, France, and Chile. In 2003, the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide asked France for $21 billion in reparations. The French shrugged.
What about America? “The United States was not a colonizer,” people claim. “Unless you count the Philippines. We were a colony ourselves.”
In 1848, Mexico was forced to cede half its territory to its northern neighbor, including most of what is now California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah; and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The official name of the agreement was the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic. In March 2017, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a Mexican politician, teamed up with a lawyer named Guillermo Hamdan to draw up legal arguments that would nullify the treaty and charge the United States for the 168 years that it’s ruled over this territory. They have a point. Just look at the names of the territory: Texas. California. Colorado. “Take back your country” is a slogan that could, therefore, equally be adopted by Latinos as well as whites.
As we’ve seen, migration from poor countries to rich ones is often the inevitable result of colonial depredation. But how exactly did the colonizers rob the colonies? First, they looted the treasuries of the native kings. Hence, the Indian Koh-i-noor diamond in the queen’s crown. Second, they imposed extortionate taxes on their subjects. Third, they forced the subjects to grow crops like cotton but prevented them from setting up industries that could turn the cotton into textiles; this was saved for the industries back in the home country. Thus, the mills in Manchester spun Indian cotton into cloth, which was then sold back to Indians at massive markups, markups which Indians had to pay because they were prevented from starting their own textile factories. (This is why Gandhi’s spinning wheel wasn’t just a powerful symbol; it was also a strikingly effective form of economic warfare against the British, because it gave every Indian a little textile factory in their own home.)
Fourth, they forced the colonial armies to fight their wars, both within and without—most famously, the Gurkhas of Nepal, some of whom continue to serve in the British army. Until recently, they were not allowed to settle in the U.K. and their pensions were lower than those of their fellow British soldiers. But there were also North Africans—the “Army of Africa”—that the French had dragooned into fighting in the Crimea, the Franco-Prussian War, the two world wars, its post-WWI occupation of the German Rhineland, and its savage war in Algeria. The Dutch had their Moluccans, whom they marshalled in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, to fight their fellow Indonesians so that the Dutch could keep ruling.
But there’s very little acknowledgment of their service today in the colonizing countries. The film Dunkirk, for example, completely airbrushes out the role of the many Commonwealth soldiers who fought on that beach, including four companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. “Observers said they were particularly cool under fire and well-organized during the retreat,” notes the historian John Broich. “Their appearance in the film would have provided a good reminder of how utterly central the role of the Indian Army was in the war. Their service meant the difference between victory and defeat.” Altogether, 2.5 million Indian soldiers fought for their masters in World War II, and 90,000 of them died in the process, without recognition or thanks.
* * *
Colonialism began with a huge migration, when millions of Europeans moved overseas to invade, settle, and rule other countries. When Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, there were up to 100 million people living on the continent. Within 150 years, there were only 3.5 million. They died of imported diseases or starvation, or were massacred by the colonizers.
The London School of Economics anthropologist Jason Hickel observes that what the Europeans were after was not so much gold but silver. Seventeen thousand six hundred tons of silver were shipped to Europe between 1503 and 1660, three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early 1800s, that total had risen to 110,000 tons. At 5 percent interest, Hickel notes, this would amount to a debt of $165 trillion that Europe owes Latin America today.
After silver came slaves—15 million Africans were kidnapped or purchased from local slavers and shipped across the Atlantic. “In the North American colonies alone,” Hickel writes, “Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s
worth $97 trillion—more than the entire global GDP.”
The rise of Britain was inextricably linked to slavery. It shipped Africans to its American colonies, where they toiled in cotton and sugarcane fields to make money for the empire. In the sugar mills, the slaves worked eighteen hours at a time. “Slave-owning planters, and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce, were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain,” says the historian Robin Blackburn. “Profits from these activities helped to endow All Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library, to build a score of banks, including Barclays, and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first really efficient steam engine.”
The Industrial Revolution in Britain would not have been possible without profits from the slave trade, argues Blackburn. Around 1770, Britain earned £450 million (in today’s terms) a year from slavery; total domestic investments, including the infrastructure needed for industry, came to £500 million.
From 1761 to 1808, the British took 1,428,000 Africans away from their families and shipped them across the world. From this monstrous crime, they amassed £8 billion in today’s money. Britain officially ended slavery in 1833. Its Caribbean slaves were set free, for a price: they would have to work forty-five hours a week for another four to six years for their former masters, as “apprentices,” without pay.
Even after Britain exited the Atlantic slave trade and abolished slavery in its colonies, it continued to benefit from slave labor. “As late as 1860,” writes Blackburn, “six million slaves toiled in the fields of the American South, Cuba and Brazil, producing vast quantities of cotton, sugar and coffee. The thousands of millions of hours of slave toil helped to underpin the global ascendancy of Victorian Britain … Britain got off to a good start at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and Britons today still enjoy a consequent afterglow of prosperity.”