On the other hand, it did contain the implicit suggestion that the sun would never set on such an empire. As we have seen, from the outset, this has been a delusion of all great empires. What might be called the Ozymandias syndrome has persisted in the modern era: one of the few reliable lessons of history, its traces can be seen in Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ as well as the notion of a permanent ‘American hegemony’.
31 Oversupply of gold led to inflation and devaluation. Philip II chose to build up an army, borrowing against further gold. When the value and inflow of gold declined – owing to oversupply, piracy and corruption – Philip was forced to default on his debts no less than four times during the second half of the sixteenth century. This severely limited Spain’s ability to borrow, maintain its army, or even properly run its colonies. The expulsion of the Jews in 1492, with all their financial expertise, had hardly helped matters.
Similar national catastrophes have continued to recur through the ensuing centuries, especially following the sudden discovery of an easily exploitable commodity such as oil. Large quantities of guaranteed income flow directly to various senior government officials, who take their cut on this income. The guaranteed income also helps to keep taxes low, which increases government popularity. However, little money is used, as in direct taxation, for the specific purposes for which it was raised, such as infrastructure maintenance, building up new industries and so forth. Corruption becomes endemic, the economy stagnates, and huge fortunes accrue to the ruling elite.
32 Ironically, the Byzantine Empire, which was considered secondary in every sense to the original Roman Empire, lasted twice as long as its illustrious predecessor.
33 According to the early Greek geographer, Strabo, this name derives from it once having been the home of the legendary female warriors known as the Amazons.
34 The ancient name, derived from the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, continued to be used. As to a certain extent did the city’s even more ancient name Byzantium. Only gradually over the years would the present name Istanbul come into use. There are two conflicting derivations of this name. One claims that Istanbul is a corruption of the Greek phrase ‘eis sten polin’ (meaning ‘in the city’). However, according to Turkish sources, the name derives from ‘Islam bol’ (Turkish for ‘plenty of Islam’).
35 In fact, there is evidence that this practice may have been widespread in other parts of Asia, as well as Africa. As early as 1716, the New England puritan minister, Cotton Mather, observed his slave Onesimus administering this procedure. The minister would later put it to good use during an outbreak of smallpox in Boston. Ironically this pioneer scientist was the same Cotton Mather who had previously played a leading role in the Salem witch trials.
36 Arguably the aim of Columbus was to find a new trade route to Cathay. Similarly, the early conquistadores had been inspired by the myth of El Dorado (The Land of Gold) as much as conquest.
8
The British Empire
It used to be said that if any power had to dominate the globe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it might as well have been the British. Other candidates were all lacking in that British sense of fair play and reasonableness. Ironically, it seemed the more ‘decent’ among the nations in Europe, the more disgraceful were their treatment of their colonies, viz. the barbaric rule of the Dutch in the East Indies, and genocide by the Belgians in the Congo.37
However, the more one examines this claim mitigating British colonial power, the less clear-cut it becomes. As all were prepared to concede, there had, of course, been a number of blots on British imperial rule. Take the case of India, the so-called ‘Jewel in the Crown’.38 The early nineteenth-century Opium Wars, when the British forced the Chinese to purchase opium grown in India, was hardly ‘fair play’. (Consequently 40,000 mainly coastal Chinese became addicts, and China’s GDP was halved.)
And then there was the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, sanctioned by the Governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, when British soldiers were ordered to open fire on a religious gathering of Sikhs. Official reports were forced to admit up to two hundred deaths. Later investigation revealed that more than 1,000 died and 1,500 were wounded. This single act was said to have been the crystallising moment for the independence movement. Twenty years later, Udam Singh, who had witnessed the massacre, would single-handedly and single-mindedly travel all the way to London, where he would shoot Governor O’Dwyer. After being tried, he would be hanged by the British; to this day his picture is revered in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the spiritual heart of the Sikh religion.
By this time, the independence movement was being led by Mahatma Gandhi, who would pursue a policy of passive resistance, encouraging his followers to lay down on railway tracks to prevent the passage of trains. With some justification, it has been claimed that such a tactic could only have worked against the British, who threw buckets of sewage over the demonstrators, rather than simply driving the trains over them.
Furthermore, it was the British who had built the railway tracks in the first place, introducing a modern transport system that reached the length and breadth of the subcontinent. This connected cities whose civic buildings were at least the equal of many in Europe, in which British and Indian civil servants ran an administration attempting to ‘modernise’ a population of hundreds of millions. This involved pursuing a policy of divide and rule, incentives, indigenous military recruitment and selective threat of force. To give an idea of the magnitude of this task: in 1900,165,000 British (administrators and army) ruled over around 330 million Indians.
The British administration (often aided by the army) would introduce modern irrigation, forestry, a new legal system (and new prisons), as well as widespread education (in English). They would look on in bemusement as the Indians founded their own steel industry, which saw the rise of Tata Steel, now one of the world’s largest companies. Yet at the same time, for over 150 years, India’s GDP would remain stagnant – some even claim that it halved. Meanwhile the GDP of Great Britain increased by nearly 700 per cent during this same period, much of this due to British imports from India, such as jute, cotton, spices and even rice (despite famines).
On the other hand, enlightened policies led to the growth of a thriving Indian middle class, a few even educated at prestigious English public schools. It was intellectuals from this emergent class who would one day form the backbone of the independence movement.39 Once again we come up against the perennial double-edged question, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Which also begs the question: ‘What have the Romans done to us?’
In keeping with the new European empires, the British Empire began as exploration with a view to trade. As early as 1497, the Venetian Zuan Cabotto (anglicised to John Cabot) was financed by a group of Bristol merchants to sail west across the Atlantic, in the wake of Columbus. Ironically, Cabot made landfall near where the Vikings had established their brief Vinland colony some 500 years earlier, a place which Cabot named ‘New Found Launde’. Cabot was under the misapprehension that he had landed in China, and decided against founding a colony.
Almost a century later, in 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh established a colony at Roanoke island in Virginia, which was then the English name for the entire coast north of the Spanish-claimed territory of Florida. It was from Virginia that Raleigh first brought potatoes and tobacco back to England. But when a British ship arrived at Roanoke in 1590, it was found that all the inhabitants had mysteriously vanished. In 1607, the British would establish the first permanent settlement in the Americas at Jamestown, some 100 miles north of ‘The Lost Colony’ of Roanoke.
Just half a century earlier, the English sailor John Hawkins had hijacked a Portugese ship sailing from Africa to the Caribbean carrying 301 black slaves, which he sold at Santo Domingo. Finding this to be a lucrative business, he then embarked upon the ‘triangular’ slave trade, which was already being operated by several European nations. This involved a ship sailing from Europe
with a cargo of textiles, various tools, weapons and rum. On arrival in West Africa, these cheap European manufactured goods would be sold to local chieftains in return for slaves.
The ship then embarked upon the second leg of the triangle, the notorious ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic, for the Caribbean. The cargo of chained black slaves were laid out below decks in closely packed rows, where they endured stifling heat and appalling conditions. Many died, though it was in the interests of the captain, as well as the profit of his backers, to ensure that as many as possible amongst this precious cargo remained alive.
Ships carrying 250 slaves (sometimes even 600) would transport their human cargo in this fashion to the West Indies, where they were sold to the owners of sugar plantations. The slaves were then set to the backbreaking task of hacking down sugar canes in the sub-tropical heat. Some slaves were sold as far north as the British plantations in Virginia.
The first Africans arrived in the British colony of Jamestown as early as 1619. These were said to be ‘indentured labour’, rather than ‘permanent’ slaves. That is, they were bound to work for their masters as slaves for a fixed period, whereupon they were released, and sometimes given a plot of land. By 1619, there were also a number of English indentured labourers serving at Jamestown. These were men (and women) who had been found guilty of crimes in their homeland and sentenced to a period of indentured labour in the overseas ‘plantations’.
Jamestown was thus not only a plantation colony, producing cotton, tobacco, and wood for export, but also a penal colony using convicts as a form of quasi-slave labour. In 1640, one black and two white indentured labourers escaped from Jamestown and fled north towards Maryland. All three were soon recaptured, and brought before the Virginia Governor’s Council. The two white fugitives were sentenced to serve out longer indentures, while the black fugitive, named John Punch, was sentenced to permanent (i.e. lifelong) indenture. In the words of Radney Coates of Miami University, this made John Punch ‘the first official slave in the English colonies’.40
The slave trade was carried out by almost all European maritime nations, even Sweden and Russia. It is reliably estimated to have transported up to 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic, with some 10.7 million surviving the Middle Passage, before slavery was abolished. The British campaigner, William Wilberforce, finally managed to get an act through parliament abolishing the trafficking of slaves in 1807, with the United States following suit in 1808. Consequently, a British naval squadron was tasked with intercepting slave ships leaving west Africa.
Even so, slavery would continue until 1833 in the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean, after which the sugar plantation owners forced to free their slaves received ‘compensation for loss of property’ of around £20 million in total.41 This sum represented no less than 40 per cent of the British government’s annual expenditure (navy, army, civil administration and authority throughout the land, and so on). In present terms, this payout would be worth around £16.5 billion.
Despite the efforts of Wilberforce and the British navy, the slave trade represents more than a mere blot on the reputation of the British Empire. It has been argued in mitigation that all the other major powers were involved, and the British were the first to abolish it altogether. (The United States did not abolish internal slavery until 1865, while in Brazil it persisted until 1888.) Indeed, all previous empires we have discussed relied heavily upon slavery. From their everyday life to their great monuments: from the pyramids to the graceful columns of the Parthenon, from the immense cavern dug out to house Emperor Huang’s terracotta army, and the stones hewed and hauled to construct the great mosques of Istanbul . . . all were only made possible using massive quantities of slave labour. But this was the distant past.
Perhaps our main concern with slavery in the British Empire (as well as in the Americas and other European empires) is that the proceeds from this unspeakable trade laid the foundations of the modern world we inhabit today. The vast influx of money from the sugar plantations built great fortunes in Britain. Nick Draper of UCL, who has made a revealing study of the compensation received by British slave owners, estimates ‘as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy’.
In fact, by 1833 there were over 46,000 British owners of slaves. This was how the ancestors of George Orwell, Graham Greene, ex-PM David Cameron, and a host of others made their fortunes; even the Bishop of Exeter received over £4,000 (presently worth around half a million pounds). And perhaps more surprisingly, half of the beneficiaries of the 1833 compensation were women, who had for the most part received ownership of their slaves through family inheritance.
This was the wealth that would create banks, country mansions and vast estates. It would also fund the age of steam, of canals, of railways and the world’s greatest navy. This was the money that financed the Industrial Revolution, which made Britain and its empire into the greatest power in the world. An Industrial Revolution that spread and transformed Europe. An Industrial Revolution that spread modernity across the globe. In other words, the world as we know it is built on this money. As Balzac observed: ‘Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.’
Passing to the other side of the world and the eastern origins of the British Empire, one of its earliest and most significant territories was a tiny island less than two miles long and half a mile wide, in what is now Indonesia. This was the island of Run, in the Banda Islands, which lie amidst the various scattered archipelago that occupy the 800 miles of sea between what are now known as Borneo and Papua New Guinea. The Banda Islands had originally been ‘discovered’ by the Portuguese in 1511. Then in 1609, the Dutch East India company muscled in. But in 1611, the British captain, Nathaniel Courthorpe, took possession of the island of Run.
The attraction of this obscure archipelago was that these islands were at the time the world’s sole source of nutmeg and mace, two spices which were so highly prized in Europe that they were worth more than their weight in gold. Besides being highly prized as a condiment, nutmeg was also valued for its alleged medicinal properties – believed to be capable of curing everything from the ‘bloody flux’ to the plague. Ten pounds of nutmeg could be purchased in Run for just one English penny (old style). Back in London, this could be sold for the equivalent of £2.50; some goods had a mark-up of as much as 68,000 per cent.
After the British laid claim to Run, the Dutch sporadically laid siege to the island. The British maintained a tenuous hold on the island until a few years before 1677, when a peace treaty was signed with the Dutch at Breda, in Holland. Under the terms of this treaty, Britain agreed to relinquish all claim to Run in exchange for a slightly larger island held by the Dutch in the Americas, namely Manhattan Island. Whereupon, the local settlement of New Amsterdam (population 2,500) was renamed New York.
According to historian Giles Milton, the trade in oriental spices such as nutmeg, pepper, ginger and cinnamon, would bring about ‘a new age of revolutionary economics based on credit, the rise of a rudimentary banking system and ultimately free enterprise.’ Here was the beginning of modern capitalism. The epitome of this revolution can be seen in the rise of the joint stock company – most notably the English East India Company. This was granted a royal charter in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, giving the company a monopoly on English trade with the East for fifteen years.
This allowed a group of London merchants to buy ‘shares’ in the company, which would then be run by a board of directors. The capital accumulated from the sale of these shares allowed the directors to purchase a ship, man it and load it with cargo; giving the captain instructions to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and trade its cargo for valuable spices in the East Indies (at the time a vague appellation covering the whole of India, south-east Asia and even China). When (or if) the ship successfully returned to England, its cargo of spices would be sold, with the shareholders benefitting from the profits according to their ‘share’ of the to
tal initial investment.
Financial innovation, involving credit, free enterprise and ‘rudimentary’ banking were very much in the air during this period. The Dutch led the way with the largest stock exchange in Europe at Amsterdam. Even so, it would not be until 1602 that the Dutch founded their own Dutch East India Company, which would seek to monopolise the spice trade in what became known as the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). Other Europeans, such as the Portuguese and even the Danes, were already running similar schemes, but the English and Dutch East India Companies would soon emerge as the major players, with what would become the British East India Company virtually taking over the whole of India within two hundred years.
The profits accruing to the British East India Company were soon greater than those of the West Indies sugar plantations. Competition with the Dutch and French companies quickly led to armed skirmishes. By 1800, the British East India Company was a state within a state. It appointed its own governors of India. It had its own navy, consisting of both merchant and armed vessels. Its armed navy was even able to conduct its own wars, such as the Opium Wars against China. The company also ran its own army of 260,000 men, with British officers commanding locally recruited soldiers. This was twice the size of the entire British Army (official version), and was used for conducting campaigns against independent maharajahs. The defeat in 1799 of the fearsome Tippu Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, saw Arthur Wellesley (later to become Duke of Wellington) notch up his first victory.
Then in 1857 came the Indian Mutiny, which began in Delhi and soon spread throughout central India. Although this was eventually put down, with much savagery on both sides, the British government back in London had had enough. The British Empire was no place for an entire sub-continent to be ruled by an independent commercial enterprise, and the government nationalised the East India Company. India was placed under British colonial rule and a few years later Queen Victoria would be declared Empress of India.
Empire Page 15