by Ahmed Keeler
When it was found that the long staple cotton from North America worked better with the machines than the short staple cotton from India, cultivation of the crop was switched to the slave plantations in the Americas. Bengal was the first of many craft societies to be destroyed in order to make way for industrialisation. When the British arrived in Bengal it was famed for its wealth. Dacca was a thriving city of several hundred thousand people and, as well as textiles, Bengal was a major exporter of rice. When the British left, Bengal was a symbol of poverty, stalked by famine. A system in balance, that was locally based, self-sufficient, highly productive, stable, and working with nature, whose products were prized and sought after throughout the world, was replaced by a centrally controlled monoculture that was unstable, exploitative and worked against nature. The machines required raw materials to feed them and markets for their finished products. The British were the first to transform their trading empire to fulfil this requirement. Following the conquest of Bengal, the rest of India was brought under British control.
A large population with many cities and a country replete with natural resources became the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. All those crafts that could compete with British products were eliminated, including ship building, for which India had long been famous. With the introduction of the railways, the raw materials of India were linked up to the ports where they were shipped to Great Britain on British vessels, which returned with the finished products that supplied the world’s largest captive market.
Whilst the 19th century belonged to the British, it also saw other European nations industrialising. To support this development, these nations either adapted their existing empires or claimed new ones. The French had lost most of their empire to the British in the 18th century and had to rebuild. Paul Doumer, French statesman and President of the Republic, stated the situation without ambiguity:
Southeast Asia is the ideal colony, it has no end of raw materials and would serve as the perfect outlet for our factories’ finished products.
And then came the moral justification:
Just as Rome civilised the barbarians beyond its borders, we too have a duty to extend French culture and religion to the backward peoples of the world.
The conquest of what became French Indo-China (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) took decades. The French colonisation was always resented and resisted by a high civilisation with a deep history, which the French were unable to recognise. Just as happened in Indonesia with the Dutch, the French attempted to reclaim their colony after World War II when the Japanese had been evicted by the Americans. A ferocious war of independence followed and the French finally withdrew, only to be replaced by the Americans in their crusade against communism. The other areas of French activity were in North and West Africa, where the tragedies of Algeria and Senegal unfolded.
Russia, which had already absorbed the vast lands of Siberia, now moved south to conquer the sultanates of Central Asia and the sultanates on the northern shores of the Black Sea under Ottoman suzerainty. They now had everything they needed in one land to transform their world into an industrial giant. Italy and Germany only became nation states in the middle of the 19th century. By this time there was very little left with which to build their empires.
At the end of the century, what is known as the ‘scramble for Africa’ took place. Up until then, apart from North Africa, only enclaves along the vast coast-line had been occupied. Now explorers and missionaries revealed the immense wealth in the interior waiting to be exploited. The Europeans decided not to fight over this, but to divide the continent up between them in a ‘civilised’ manner. In 1892 Bismarck, the German Chancellor, chaired a conference in Berlin to ‘divide the cake’, as Leopold II, King of Belgium, described the exercise. Lines were drawn on maps and the continent was cut up into countries which bore little or no relation to the tribal and historic boundaries that existed. With the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italians in 1936, only Liberia, set up by the Americans for returning slaves, remained free of European colonisation. With extreme brutality, Africa was turned into a world of mines and plantations, producing cash crops for Western markets. Once again self-sufficient societies, with their own rich cultures and living in harmony with nature, were destroyed and replaced to support the industrial system.
In the East, one nation rose up and was able to match the Europeans. Japan had closed its country to the Europeans since 1642 when the Portuguese were expelled. In 1853, Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo harbour aboard the United States’ frigate Susquehanna and gave the Japanese an ultimatum: either trade or else. The Japanese realised that they had to industrialise or be destroyed. They took the West as their model and selected from the different nations what they considered to be their best attributes. However, Japan had few natural resources, so it turned itself into a military/industrial nation of awesome power and acquired its own empire along European lines. By the outbreak of World War II, it was occupying Korea, a large part of China and much of South East Asia under a yoke of unspeakable cruelty and exploitation.
After World War II and its terrible nuclear end, the Japanese made what was seen to be a miraculous recovery; they became a global leader in the manufacture of many of the products that were becoming essential to the ever-changing modern way of life. However, the transformation of Japanese society brought this lament from Kenzaburo Oe, their 1994 Nobel Laureate:
My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation, since the opening of the country, present day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state was cataclysmic.
In other words, the Japanese have become culturally schizophrenic, living in two contradictory worlds.
The 20th century belonged to the United States of America. Born out of a colony of the British, the United States became the masters of the Americas and the most powerful nation state ever. The land from the east to the west coasts had been cleared of its inhabitants and connected by the railways, and the Mexicans had been driven out of their lands to the south. The United States now constituted a vast landmass, full of natural resources waiting to be exploited. Rapid industrialisation took place and a gulf began to emerge between the United States and Latin America.
Latin America was perfectly placed to become a United States colony in all but name, with its abundance of cash crops and raw materials and a growing market for its factory-made products. The despotic rule that had been established by the Spanish and Portuguese was perpetuated by the ruling elites that retained power in the wake of their departure, and was to continue under the direction of United States governments and corporations. It seemed that the high ideals of liberty and freedom were for home consumption, not for export. The suffering and exploitation of Latin America continued and continues still.
By the end of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was on its last legs. Spain had lost its South and Central American colonies, but still had a number of strategically placed islands in the Atlantic, including Cuba; and in the Pacific, Guam; with one of its prized possessions, the Philippines, perfectly positioned for trade with China. Cuba and the Philippines had been in revolt against the harsh Spanish rule for years. Noli me Tangere is a novel by Jose Rizal which graphically describes the struggle the Filipinos were going through in their attempt to rid themselves of their tormentors. Jose Rizal was a part of the resistance and was captured and executed in 1896. His book is an amazing testament to the decadent nature of the Spanish occupation. The United States, which had been deeply critical of the Europeans and their empires, now joined them in empire building. They went to war with the Spanish and this tipped the balance. The Spanish ceded their colonies and the United States inherited a network of islands which would become, after World War II, bases for their military which would straddle the world. The Filipinos, however, had no desire to replace one master with anothe
r. They resisted and fought valiantly against the superior forces of the invader and were finally vanquished, losing 200,000 lives.
Nothing reveals more clearly how European exceptionalism was fully shared by the Americans than President McKinley’s justification for the war against the Filipinos:
We could not leave them to themselves, they were unfit for self-government and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there, worse than Spain’s was. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them.
With the emergence of Germany as a sovereign state, everything was set for the final showdown of empire that would bring to an end Europe’s five hundred-year hegemony. The late arrival of Germany upset the balance in Europe. Already the Prussians alone had defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, and by the end of the 19th century a united Germany had become a powerhouse of industry, overtaking Great Britain. But there was nowhere for it to expand to support its growth. Fired by an extreme nationalism, which, after defeat in World War I morphed into Hitler’s fascist state, Germany attempted to carve out its empire on European soil, turning the Slavic world into its India.
The horrors of its conquest were little different from what other European nations had committed in creating their empires, but it was done on home ground to white people, and this time the Jews suffered an industrial-scale extermination. In the end the Allies, harnessing the manpower and resources of their empires and with the support of the Americans, ended Germany’s aspirations. By the end of the war Europe lay in ruins. After centuries of bloody conflict, the Europeans finally came together in a union, pledging never again to go to war against each other. But the European empires ended badly. After the war, many of the colonised still had to fight for their independence, with particular savagery meted out by the French and Dutch, whilst the British, through chronic misgovernment, left India deeply divided, which led to the partition of the country and all the horrors this entailed, the repercussions of which still haunt us. The colonisers left behind newly created, malformed nation states with traumatised citizens living in a kind of cultural limbo trying to recover their identities.
The Industrial Revolution was to give birth to a new political configuration which embroiled the world in another round of disruption and violence. The horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of the factory workers did not go unrecorded or without attempts to alleviate their suffering. Charles Dickens brilliantly captured in his novels the atmosphere of exploitation and humiliation of the poor and the cruelty and pride of the rich. With many others in Victorian society he campaigned for reform. In the early 20th century, Charlie Chaplin brought home in his films the humanity of those living in grinding poverty under the dehumanising impact of the machine. He taught us to empathise with them, and he could do it because he himself grew up in dire poverty. There were those who believed that the capitalist system was irredeemable and simply had to be destroyed. These were the nihilists and anarchists who caused havoc for decades, assassinating a Tsar, a prime minister and many ordinary people in their bombing campaigns.
On the other hand, there were the serious political thinkers who sought an alternative solution to the organisation of industrial society, foremost amongst whom was Karl Marx. His work was the catalyst for a conflict that would engulf humanity at terrible cost, between two materialist ideologies, two sides of the same coin: capitalism and communism. Many of the leaders of the freedom movements were inspired by Marxism and espoused the communist ideal. Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba and his triumph over the Americans was an inspiration for all those nations seeking self-determination, and the downtrodden poor who were looking for liberation from despotic rulers. The United States, having been born in a revolution against a despotic rule, that of the British, mutated into an industrial-military behemoth of unimaginable size and destructive power.
The war between the Soviet Union and the West may have been ‘cold’, but it was very hot elsewhere; Korea, Vietnam, the Horn of Africa, Mozambique, Columbia, Peru and Afghanistan all suffered years of conflict and there were many other flashpoints. The Soviet Union in its process of industrialisation had sacrificed its rural population to crippling episodes of famine, and to match the West had become an industrial military state. The many nations that were locked into the Soviet system were ruled with a rod of iron. The Marxist ideal had, in practice, turned into a tyranny that was brilliantly portrayed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
China, the other great nation that had espoused communism, had not been colonised, but during the 19th century and deep into the 20th century had suffered grievously at the hands of both the West and Japan. From the 16th century, the beauty and sophistication of China’s trade goods had attracted the Europeans. But until the Industrial Revolution, they had to trade as equal partners; China was simply too vast and strong to be colonised. With industrialisation everything changed. Along the south coast of China, the European nations claimed their enclaves, where they terrorised the Chinese into trade agreements which drained the country of its wealth. Foremost in this were the British who fought two wars to impose their trade in opium upon a people who were ravaged by the drug. A high Chinese official lamented:
The great profit taken by the barbarian is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they, in return, use a poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people?
Following in the footsteps of the Europeans was the utterly devastating Japanese occupation, which only ended with Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. This was then followed by civil war between the two Western ideologies of capitalism and communism. The communists were victorious, and Mao Zedong set about completely transforming Chinese society. More efficient in imposing atheism than the Russians, he reversed the traditional hierarchy and its connection to heaven which had for millennia nourished and renewed Chinese civilisation; in his Cultural Revolution he gutted the traditional culture, replacing it with his little Red Book; as in Russia, he sacrificed rural workers in his great leap forward into industrialisation, and as in Russia, terrible famines ensued.
Famine has always been an inevitable consequence of the changes necessary for industrialisation to take place. India had suffered famines before but nothing like the frequency and severity of those during British rule. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis plots their courses. It has been estimated that as many as 60 million Indians may have died in policy-driven famines during the British Raj. Countless millions died in Russia and China, but only a final global count of those who suffered the most terrible of deaths to make way for industrialisation will reveal the full horror of humanity’s descent into the Modern World.
China’s adoption of communism brought it into direct confrontation with the United States. Becoming a nuclear power protected it from invasion, and its support of North Vietnam, with the defeat of the United States, gained China immense global prestige. In the end, the Soviet Union could not match the power of the West and fell apart, the Cold War was over and the West had won. Russia returned as a sovereign nation and the Orthodox Church re-emerged. However, China did not collapse. China’s awesome craft heritage has returned in the new guise of industrial production, and China has once again become the powerhouse that it has been throughout most of history. China has been able to marry a communist regime with a capitalist market economy. Its great expansion is now fuelling global growth and Africa is once again being exploited for its vast natural resources by a new global behemoth.
The war between capitalism and communism sank the world further into the materialist mire, destroying what vestiges of traditional societies remained. The capitalist triumph ensured that it would not take more than a few decades for the modern cult to reach full maturity and become the global standard for all nations to follow.
When listing the benefits that empir
e delivered, those apologists for empire who want to make Britain great again place at the top of the list the rule of law. Yet nothing betrays the European delusion more completely than the idea that the cultures and civilisations that they conquered were bereft of law. Because of their idealisation of the dead worlds of Greece and Rome, they were unable to recognise, respect and relate to living worlds and so destroyed them with the belief that they contained nothing of value. Lord Macaulay expressed the attitude clearly in his Education Memorandum of 1823 when he wrote:
Who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia?
In the same memorandum he spelled out the task that lay ahead:
We must do our best to form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.
The power and absolute self-belief of the British carried everything before them. Once again, Lord Macaulay neatly summed it up:
The English are the greatest and most civilised people that ever the world saw.
Such overweening arrogance allowed the British and the other European powers to impose their version of civilisation across the world. Architects were shipped from Britain to build classical government buildings and Gothic churches in Calcutta, the Malays were taught English history, the Indonesians Dutch history, the Algerians were forced to speak French, and the Brazilians built an opera house in the Amazon rainforest.