But it is not just the direct results of colonialism that remain relevant: there are the indirect ones as well. The intellectual history of colonialism is littered with many a wilful cause of more recent conflict. One is, quite simply, careless anthropology: the Belgian classification of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, which solidified a distinction that had not existed before, continues to haunt the region of the African Great Lakes. A related problem is that of motivated sociology: how much bloodshed do we owe, for instance, to the British invention of ‘martial races’ in India, which skewed recruitment into the armed forces and saddled some communities with the onerous burden of militarism? And one can never overlook the old colonial administrative habit of ‘divide and rule’, exemplified, again, by British policy in the subcontinent after 1857, systematically promoting political divisions between Hindus and Muslims, which led almost inexorably to the tragedy of Partition.
An ironic corollary to both the ‘martial races’ theory and the politics of divide et impera was the resultant militarization of Pakistan. At Partition, Pakistan received, thanks to the lopsided application of the ‘martial races’ theory by the British, a larger share of undivided India’s military than of either its population or territory. With 21 per cent of India’s population and 17 per cent of its revenue, Pakistan got 30 per cent of the Indian Army, 40 per cent of the Indian Navy and 20 per cent of the Indian Air Force, obliging its Government to devote 75 per cent of the country’s first budget to cover the costs of maintaining this outsize force. The disproportionately large military establishment had a vested interest in its own perpetuation, since it needed to invent a military threat in order to justify its continuance. Therein lay the prosaic roots of Pakistan’s obdurate hostility to India. Sadly, instead of cutting back on its commitments to the military, Pakistan kept feeding the monster till it devoured the country itself. Even when Pakistan lost half its territory in the disastrous Bangladesh War of 1971, the army continued to expand.
Such colonial-era distinctions as ‘martial races’ and religious divisions were not just pernicious; they were often accompanied by an unequal distribution of the resources of the state within the colonial society. Belgian colonialists favoured Tutsis, leading to Hutu rejection of them as alien interlopers; Sinhalese resentment of privileges enjoyed by the Tamils in the colonial era in Sri Lanka prompted the discriminatory policies after Independence that in turn fuelled the Tamil revolt. India still lives with the domestic legacy of divide and rule, with a Muslim population almost as large as Pakistan’s, conscious of itself as a minority striving to find its place in the Indian sun.
A ‘mixed’ colonial history within one modern state is also a potential source of danger. When a state has more than one colonial past, its future is vulnerable. Secessionism, after all, can be prompted by a variety of factors, historical, geographical and cultural as well as ‘ethnic’. Ethnicity or language hardly seem to be a factor in the secessions (one recognized, the other not) of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the ‘Republic of Somaliland’ from Somalia. Rather, it was different colonial experiences (Italian rule in Eritrea and British rule in Somaliland) that set them off, at least in their own self-perceptions, from the rest of their ethnic compatriots. A similar case can be made in respect of the former Yugoslavia, where parts of the country that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 800 years had been joined to parts that spent almost as long under Ottoman suzerainty. The war that erupted in 1991 was in no small measure a war that pitted those parts of Yugoslavia that had been ruled by German-speaking empires against those that had not (or had resisted such colonization).
Boundaries drawn in colonial times, even if unchanged after independence, still create enormous problems of national unity. We have been reminded of this in Iraq, whose creation from the ruins of the Ottoman empire welded various incompatibilities into a single state. But the issue is much more evident in Africa, where civil conflict along ethnic or regional lines can arise when the challenge of nation building within colonially drawn boundaries becomes insurmountable. Where colonial constructions force disparate peoples together by the arbitrariness of a colonial mapmaker’s pen, nationhood becomes an elusive notion. Older ethnic and clan loyalties in Africa were mangled by the boundaries drawn, in such distant cities as Berlin, for colonially created states whose post-independence leaders had to invent new traditions and national identities out of whole cloth. The result was the manufacture of unconvincing political myths, as artificial as the countries they mythologize, which all too often cannot command genuine patriotic allegiance from the citizenry they aim to unite. Civil war is made that much easier for local leaders challenging a ‘national’ leader whose nationalism fails to resonate across his country. Rebellion against such a leader is, after all, merely the reassertion of history over ‘his’ story.
State failure in the wake of colonialism is another evident source of conflict, as the by-product of an unprepared newly independent state’s inability to govern. The crisis of governance in many African countries is a real and abiding cause for concern in world affairs today. The collapse of effective central governments—as manifest in Darfur, South Sudan and eastern Congo today, and in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia yesterday (and who knows where tomorrow?)—could unleash a torrent of alarming possibilities: a number of ‘weak states’, particularly in Africa, seem vulnerable to collapsing in a welter of conflict.
Underdevelopment in postcolonial societies is itself a cause of conflict. The uneven development of infrastructure in a poor country, as a result of priorities skewed for the benefit of the colonialists, can lead to resources being distributed unevenly, which in turn leads to increasing fissures in a society between those from ‘neglected regions’ and those who are better served by roads, railways, power stations, telecommunications, bridges and canals. Advancing underdevelopment in many countries of the South, which are faring poorly in their desperate struggle to remain players in the game of global capitalism, has created conditions of desperate poverty, ecological collapse and rootless, unemployed populations beyond the control of atrophying state systems—a portrait vividly painted by Robert Kaplan in his book The Coming Anarchy, which suggests the real danger of perpetual violence on the peripheries of our global village.
As we embark upon the twenty-first century, it seems ironically clear that tomorrow’s anarchy might still be due, in no small part, to yesterday’s colonial attempts at order. I have no wish to give those politicians in postcolonial countries whose leadership has been found wanting in the present, any reason to find excuses for their failures in the past. But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
PREFACE
the attempt by one Indian commentator…to compute what a fair sum of reparations would amount to: Minhaz Merchant, ‘Why Shashi Tharoor is right on Britain’s colonial debt to India’, www.dailyo.in, 23 July 2015. www.dailyo.in/politics/minhaz-merchant-shashi-tharoor-oxford-union-address-congress-britain-colonialism-monsoon-session-parliament/ story/1/5168.html.
Tharoor might have won the debate—but moral victory: Shikha Dalmia,‘Perhaps India Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Reparations’, Time, 3 August 2015.
One blogger added, for good measure: Sifar AKS, ‘Dear Shashi, Your Accent Could Not Mask the Holes in Your Speech’, www.akkarbakkar.com. www.akkarbakkar.com/dear-shashi-tharoor-your-accent-could-not-mask-the-holes-in-your-speech.
Commentator Jonathan Foreman put it most bluntly: Jonathan Foreman, ‘Reparations for the Raj? You must be joking!’, www.politico.eu, 3 August 2015. www.politico.eu/article/british-reparations-for-india-for-the-raj-oxford.
One Indian commentator argued that the claim for reparation: Gouri Dange, ‘For a few claps more…’, Pune Mirror, 29 July 2015.
Historian John Keay put it best: John Keay, ‘Tell it to the Dreaming Spires’, Outlook, 15 August 2015.
According to a recent UN Population Division report: ‘World Population Ageing 1950–2050’ report, United Nations, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/pdf/90chapteriv.pdf.
to start teaching unromanticized colonial history: Steven Swinford and Christopher Hope, ‘Children should be taught about suffering under the British Empire, Jeremy Corbyn says’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2015.
what the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English: Ian Buruma, Playing The Game, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991, p. 258.
Buruma was, of course, echoing: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 1984, reproduced in Imaginary Homelands, New Delhi: Viking, 1993.
The Indian columnist Aakar Patel suggested: Aakar Patel, ‘Dear Shashi, the fault was not in the Raj, but in ourselves’, Times of India, 26 July 2015.
‘[W]hen we kill people,’ a British sea-captain says: Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, p. 242.
CHAPTER 1: THE LOOTING OF INDIA
The British conquest of India: Will Durant, The Case for India, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930, p. 7.
‘The little court disappears’: John Sullivan, A Plea for the Princes of India, London: E. Wilson, 1853, p. 67.
‘Nearly every kind of manufacture or product’: Jabez T. Sunderland, India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom and a Place Among the Great Nations, New York: Lewis Copeland, 1929, p. 367.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison: Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006.
‘What honour is left to us?’: William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders’, The Guardian, 4 March 2015.
Bengal’s textiles were still being exported: Most of these details are from K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 and Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000.
The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms: William Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs: Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, London: J. Almon, P. Elmsly, and Brotherton and Sewell, 1772, p. vi.
India had enjoyed a 25 per cent share of the global trade in textiles: P. Bairoch and M. Levy-Leboyer, (eds), from ‘The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution’ in Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, New York: Macmillan, 1981.
British exports of textiles to India, of course, soared: Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London: Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 321.
India’s weavers were, thus, merely the victims of technological obsolescence: This argument is made by B. R. Tomlinson in The Economy of Modern India, 1870–1970, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol 3, 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 15.
In 1936, 62 per cent of the cloth sold in India: Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
at the end of British rule, modern industry employed only 2.5 million people: Ibid, p. 63.
‘the redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven’: Owen Jones, ‘William Hague is wrong… we must own up to our brutal colonial past’, The Independent, 3 September 2012.
‘There are few kings in Europe’: Letter to the Duke of Choiseul, dt. London, 27 Feb. 1768. A.E./C.P., Angleterre, Vol. 477, 1768; quoted in Sudipta Das, ‘British Reactions to the French Bugbear in India, 1763–83’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1), 1992, pp. 39–65.
‘[tax] defaulters were confined’: Durant, The Case for India.
Nabobs, [Macaulay] wrote: Historical Essays of Macaulay: William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, Samuel Thurber (ed.), Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1894. The five paragraphs that follow draw extensively from Tillman W. Nechtman, ‘A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2007, Vol. 41 (1), pp. 71–86.
‘India is a sure path to [prosperity]’: James Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785, New York: Columbia University Press, 1926, pp. 27–28, quoted in Nechtman, 2007.
‘As your conduct and bravery is become the publick’: Richard Clive to Robert Clive, 15 December 1752; OIOC Mss Eur G37/3 quoted in Nechtman, 2007.
‘Here was Lord Clive’s diamond house’: Walpole to Mann, 9 April 1772, quoted in Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, London: John Murray, 1891, p. 2.
The Cockerell brothers, John and Charles: www.sezincote.co.uk.
‘the Company providentially brings us home’: The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, Part 2, London: A. Dodd and A. Smith, 1786, p 750.
‘Today the Commons of Great Britain’: Dalrymple, ‘East India Company’.
‘combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate’: R. B. Sheridan, ‘Speech on the Begums of Oude, February 7, 1787’, quoted in British Rule in India: Condemned by the British Themselves, issued by the Indian National Party, London, 1915, p. 15.
‘in the former capacity, they engross its trade’: Minute of 18 June 1789, quoted in ‘British Rule in India: Condemned by the British Themselves’, issued by the Indian National Party, London, 1915, p. 17.
Hastings duly informed the Council that he had received a ‘gift’: See the vivid accounts of the trial in Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2006; and Peter J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
He described in colourfully painful detail the violation of Bengali women: Ibid.
‘the scene of exaction, rapacity, and plunder’: William Howitt, The English in India, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839, pp. 42–43.
‘the misgovernment of the English was carried’: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essays: Critical and Miscellaneous, London: Carey and Hart, 1844.
It is instructive to see both the extent to which House of Commons debates: See, for instance, substance of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s speech delivered in the Committee of the House of Commons on the India Budget on Thursday, 10 July 1806 in Bristol Selected Pamphlets, 1806, University of Bristol Library.
The prelate Bishop Heber wrote in 1826: Bishop Heber, writing to Rt. Hon. Charles W. Wynne from the Karnatik, March 1826, quoted in British Rule Condemned by the British, p. 24.
In an extraordinary confession, a British administrator in Bengal, F. J. Shore: Hon. F. J. Shore’s Notes on Indian Affairs, Vol. ii, London, 1837, p. 516, quoted in Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History India Under Early British Rule: From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1920.
Rueful voices had coined the catchphrase, ‘Poor Nizzy pays for all’: See John Zubrzycki, The Last Nizam, New Delhi: Picador India, 2007, p. 34.
The revenue had to be paid to the colonial state everywhere in cash: See Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
‘The ryots in the Districts outside the permanent settlement’: H. M. Hyndman, The Ruin of India by British Rule: Being the Report of the Social Democratic Federation to the Internationalist Congress at Stuttgart, London: Twentieth Century Press, 1907, cited in Histoire de la Ile Internationale, Vol. 16, Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1978, pp. 513–33.
‘the differen
ce was this, that what the Mahomedan rulers claimed’: Chunder Dutt, The Economic History, pp. xi–xii.
A committee of the House of Commons declared: Quoted in Howitt, English in India, p. 103.
Thereby abolishing century-old traditions and ties: Ibid, p 149.
‘As India is to be bled, the lancet should be directed’: British Rule Condemned, pp. 6–7.
Cecil Rhodes openly avowed that imperialism: Quoted in Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 7.
Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote of the English: Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in 19th Century Bengal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 185.
Paul Baran calculated that 8 per cent of India’s GNP: Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York, 1957, p. 148.
India was ‘depleted’, ‘exhausted’ and ‘bled’ by this drain of resources: Dadabhai Naoriji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.
The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby: William Digby, ‘Prosperous’ British India: A Revelation from Official Records, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901.
‘There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow’: Angus Maddison, Class Structure and Economic Growth: India and Pakistan Since the Moghuls, New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 63.
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