by Jason Hickel
These changes were traumatic in their own right. But it wasn’t until 1876, when El Niño visited the region with a crushing three-year drought, that the true horror of this new system became apparent. El Niño droughts were not uncommon across the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century and farmers had learned to weather them remarkably well. In lean years they could always rely on their grain reserves to see them through, and the commons, too, were a vital lifeline. But this time they were left without any of these security systems – and the consequences were disastrous. With the forests fenced off, farmers couldn’t acquire the fodder they needed to feed their cattle. Cows died en masse, and without their manure agricultural yields deteriorated. And with water sources enclosed, people were unable to use the irrigation systems they normally relied on when the rains failed. All of this made the drought much more deadly than it otherwise would have been.
The human toll was staggering: 10 million Indians died of starvation. As Florence Nightingale observed in 1877, during the second year of the drought: ‘The more one hears about this famine, the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before.’ And it kept getting worse. Twenty years later, between 1896 and 1902, El Niño struck again – and this time the death toll was even higher. Nineteen million Indians died of starvation, bringing the total body count to 29 million. Almost 30 million is a difficult number to imagine. Laid head to foot, the dead would stretch the length of England eighty-five times over.
Just as in Ireland, mass starvation in India was completely avoidable. Even in the absence of the traditional support systems that should have protected peasants, the railroads and bridges that the British had built could have been used to feed the population as a last resort by transporting grains from areas of surplus to drought-stricken ones. After all, even during the height of the drought the country had a net surplus of food – there was more than enough to feed the entire population, it just needed to be moved to the right areas. But instead the rail system, obedient to market logic, was used by merchants to ship grain from the hinterlands into central depots where it could be guarded from the hungry and shipped to Europe. Financial speculation on the London Stock Exchange was driving food prices to eye-watering heights, and grain merchants were eager to take advantage of this. In 1877 and 1878, during the worst years of the first drought, they shipped a record 6.4 million tons of Indian wheat to Europe rather than relieve starvation in India. During the period from 1875 to 1900, Indian grain exports increased from 3 million to 10 million tons per year.
The Indian famines of the late 19th century were not a natural disaster, as the British insisted at the time. They were the predictable consequence of imposing a foreign market logic that saw fit to eliminate basic human food security and sacrifice tens of millions of people in the service of profit. The famines had nothing to do with endogenous economic problems; rather, they were caused by India’s incorporation into the emerging capitalist world system. As the historian Mike Davis puts it:
We are not dealing, in other words, with ‘lands of famine’ becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870–1914) when its labour and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy. Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system’, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism.
Of course, there was nothing ‘free’ about the free-market system that the British imposed. It was brought in by force, and the rules of trade were rigged by London. The peasants who switched to cash cropping did so under the duress of debt and taxes – including taxes on local irrigation systems and even on the construction of new wells. Just as in England, the creation of a market society required significant violence and social dislocation, and the destruction of centuries-old systems of mutual aid. And, just as in England, people who were dispossessed of their land ended up in the labour market, working for British mills and factories.
How Britain Underdeveloped Asia
The process of colonial enclosure offered development for some and de-development for many others. This effect of colonialism played out not only in the arena of land and farming, but also – and perhaps even more clearly – in industry. In addition to transforming the colonies into exporters of grain and other land-based goods, European powers wanted to turn them into consumers of Europe’s growing output of manufactured goods.
From the perspective of the British, the problem with India was that it had relatively strong industries of its own. India’s textile industries, for instance, produced some of the finest cloth in the world, making it difficult for Britain to gain dominance in the global textile market. To deal with this obstacle, the British Colonial Office did everything in its power to hinder and even dismantle India’s autonomous industrial development, and sought to ensure that Indian manufacturers would not be able to compete with their British counterparts. They prevented Indians from becoming skilled artisans and they gave British firms preferential treatment in government procurement. In one famous episode, the British set out to destroy India’s textile industry by crushing the fingers of the weavers and destroying their looms. But their most potent tool was the use of one-way tariffs, which protected Britain’s markets from India’s exports while ensuring easy access for Britain’s goods into India. It worked: India, once self-sufficient and famous for its exports, was remade into ‘the greatest captive market in world history’.
The economic transformation was dramatic. Before the British arrived, India commanded 27 per cent of the world economy, according to economist Angus Maddison. By the time they left, India’s share had shrunk to just 3 per cent.
This technique of forcing open the markets of foreign countries had been honed earlier in the century during Britain’s engagements with China. In 1793, Britain sent its first official mission to the Chinese empire. Britain was hungry for tea and other exotic goods like porcelain and silk, but could no longer afford to finance them. The Chinese accepted payment only in silver. They didn’t need the products that the British offered to trade, and in any case wanted to protect their own industries from the threat of outside competition. British traders were allowed only token access to Chinese markets, their activities restricted to a small trading post in Canton. But Britain’s silver was running dry, and British traders had piles of industrial products they were desperate to sell. They needed access to China’s markets.
The meeting between the British ambassador and Emperor Qianlong did not go well. The emperor regarded the British as barbarians from an uncivilised land, and was not impressed by the gadgets they brought along as gifts. To clarify his position, he sent a letter to King George III – perhaps one of the most famous letters ever written.
As your Ambassador can see for himself, we have not use for your country’s manufactures . . . Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But as the tea, silk, and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favour, that foreign merchants should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence . . . I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea . . .
Defeated on the diplomatic front, Britain turned to drugs. Desperate to finance their growing trade deficit, they started selling opium – grown in colonial India – on China’s black market. And when Chinese authorities clamped down on this illicit trade, as any sovereign country has the right to do, the British retaliated with a military invasion.
Thus began the Opium Wars, fought by the British between 1839 and 1842, and by an Anglo-French
alliance from 1856 to 1860. China, unprepared for naval combat, was brutally defeated. But Britain and France refused to relent until China agreed to abolish restrictions on European access and hand large chunks of territory over to European control. The treaties that followed granted sweeping trade privileges to Europe but conceded nothing to China in return. According to these ‘unequal treaties’, as they came to be called, Europeans could sell their manufactured goods on China’s markets while protecting their own markets against Chinese competitors. The consequences were devastating. China’s share of the world economy dwindled from 35 per cent before the Opium Wars to an all-time low of just 7 per cent. What is more, China’s loss of control over its grain markets led in part to the famines that China suffered during the same droughts that hit India. And, as in India, 30 million people in China perished needlessly of starvation during the late 19th century, after having been integrated into the London-centred world economy.
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Today, British apologists defend colonialism in India and intervention in China on the basis that it brought ‘development’ to these regions. But the evidence we have suggests exactly the opposite story. It was the colonial period of forced market integration that inaugurated the ‘development gap’ between Britain and Asia. In the middle of the 18th century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than in Asia. Even as late as 1800, per capita income in China was ahead of Western Europe, and per capita income for Asia as a whole was better than that of Europe as a whole. Literacy rates in China were higher than in European countries, including among women, and birth rates were lower. In the south of India – and in other Indian regions – workers enjoyed higher incomes than their British counterparts in the 18th century, and lived much more secure lives. Indian artisans enjoyed a better diet than the average European, and their unemployment rates tended to be lower because they had more robust rights.
During the colonial period in India, there was no increase in per capita income from the time the East India Company took power in 1757 to the time of national independence in 1947. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India declined by more than 50 per cent. And it was not just incomes that collapsed. From 1872 to 1921, the average life expectancy of Indians fell by 20 per cent. In other words, the subcontinent was effectively de-developed.
While India and China watched their share of global GDP diminish, Europeans increased their own share from 20 to 60 per cent during the colonial period. Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.
Africa: Europe’s Pressure Valve
As European countries industrialised, they began to compete with each other for the raw materials they needed for their factories and also for new markets in which to sell their products. This generated immense pressure to expand into still uncolonised parts of the world. And when a financial crisis sunk Europe into a prolonged depression during the last decades of the 19th century, this pressure intensified: with their economies contracting, European states desperately needed profitable new outlets where they could invest their surplus capital.
At the same time, Europe was facing a crisis of growing social unrest. In Britain, the mass impoverishment created in the early days of the Industrial Revolution threatened to destabilise the country, and social tensions seemed certain to erupt into class war. Britain’s ruling class realised that the colonial project promised a way of temporarily relieving some of these tensions without requiring them to relinquish any of their power. Instead of rolling back enclosure or increasing workers’ wages, they hoped to find a pressure valve somewhere beyond their borders. These words from Cecil Rhodes, Britain’s most famous colonialist, give us a window into the spirit of the times:
I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism . . . My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
Africa became the primary focus of this next wave of imperialism. Except for coastal trading posts, the continent had been largely ignored by Europe. Britain controlled the Cape Colony in the far south and France controlled Algeria in the north, but Africa’s vast interior remained one of the few regions on the planet that had not yet been roped into the Europe-centred world system. Indeed, the interior was almost completely unknown to Europeans at the time. Once explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Stanley began to chart Africa’s great navigable rivers and reveal the extent of the continent’s vast resources, the scramble for new territories was under way.
It wasn’t long before European states were caught up in heated conflict with one another over their putative colonial domains. The Congo Basin became an early flashpoint, with Belgium, Portugal, France and Britain staking rival claims to the same region. To prevent such conflict escalating, European statesmen agreed to adopt a common policy on Africa that would minimise misunderstandings. In 1884 they gathered for a series of meetings known as the Berlin Conference, during which they drew borders across the continent, set guidelines about which powers could lay claim to which regions, and established rules for what counted as effective occupation of a territory.
The Berlin Conference added considerable impetus to the scramble for Africa. In 1870, only 10 per cent of Africa was under the control of Europeans; by 1914 they had extended their reach across 90 per cent of the continent. Britain controlled a huge swathe of land stretching all the way from the Cape to Cairo, plus Nigeria and a few outposts along the north-west coast. France controlled most of West Africa, Madagascar and part of the equatorial region. Germany took Namibia, Tanzania and Cameroon, while the Portuguese laid claim to Angola and Mozambique, and Belgium ended up with the Congo. Once the dust had settled, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.
It would require far too many pages to discuss the history of Africa’s colonisation here. But one can get a sense of the form it took by looking at two key examples: the Congo and South Africa. The Congo is interesting for our purposes because it exemplifies the sheer violence that Europeans inflicted on African communities in their frantic rush to extract resources, while the South African case illustrates the long-term strategies of planned dispossession and enclosure that forced whole populations into the capitalist market as cheap, exploitable labour.
King Leopold II of Belgium was one of the first Europeans to make a serious grab for African resources in the late 19th century. Indeed, it was his early intervention that triggered the rest of Europe to follow suit. His company, the International African Association, equipped with a private military and backed by the Belgian government, established control over a region of the central African Congo that was eighty times larger than Belgium itself. Leopold justified this enormous acquisition to the international community by claiming that he was pursuing humanitarian and philanthropic work – ‘development’ by other names. The Berlin Conference bought his line, and ratified his rule over the region. But behind the smokescreen of development, Leopold transformed the Congo into a source of raw materials – first extracting ivory and then, when automobile production took off in the 1890s, rubber. Rubber extraction was a labour-intensive business, however, and to get enough workers Leopold enslaved much of the native population and forced them to collect rubber. If they failed to reach their quotas, they would have their hands chopped off – the very same tactic that Columbus had used to get gold from the Arawaks. Crucially, the automobile industry – the showpiece of the West’s early
-20th-century industrialism – depended on colonial violence. But it wasn’t just rubber. Leopold also assumed total control over the Congolese economy, decreeing that Africans could only sell their products to the state, while the state in turn controlled all prices and incomes.
Ten million Congolese perished under Leopold’s brutal regime – roughly half the country’s population. Many of them died at the hands of direct Belgian aggression, but others died because colonial rule destroyed local economies and dislocated indigenous communities, causing widespread dispossession and starvation, along with an increase in fatal tropical diseases. As for the wealth from all the ivory and rubber, it was used in Belgium to fund beautiful stately architecture, public works, arches, parks and impressive railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.
Further south, the process unfolded according to a very different logic. As Dutch and British settlers spread throughout South Africa during the 1800s, they faced a continual conundrum: it was impossible to find enough labour to work on their farms and, later, in their gold and diamond mines. The African population was quite content with its subsistence lifestyle: under traditional tenure arrangements, most people had access to land on which to graze their cattle and grow food for their families. They didn’t see why they should leave their homes for back-breaking labour on plantations and in mines. Nobody was offering wages high enough to induce such a dramatic shift. The colonisers quickly learned that the only way to get Africans into the labour market was to force them – by destroying their existing subsistence arrangements. Hunger would leave them no choice.