Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  [It was] the practice of the miserable tyrants whom we found in India, […] when they dreaded the capacity and the spirit of some distinguished subject…to administer to him daily [a] dose of…a preparation of opium, the effect of which was in a few months to destroy all the bodily and the mental powers of the wretch who was drugged with it, and turn him into a helpless idiot. That detestable artifice, more horrible than assassination itself, was worthy of those who employed it… It is no model for the English nation. We shall never consent to administer [opium] to a whole community, to stupefy and paralyze a great people.

  Little did he realize that, for more than a century after he spoke, his own British government would give the lie to his words, for what he inveighed against is exactly what it did.

  The British government’s refusal to halt the sale of opium was of a piece, of course, with its official disinclination to take any steps to reform Indian society, even while its policies transformed and distorted it beyond measure. It justified this as being out of respect for native customs and traditions, but its main consideration was, of course, that reform would cost money and stir up trouble, which in turn would require the expenditure of money and time to redress. As a result British rule witnessed the entrenching of the caste system, the domination of the Muslim community by preachers and conservative religious figures, the persistence of child marriage and untouchability, and a host of other social evils within India which the British preferred to keep at arm’s length rather than risk disturbing. The British interfered with social customs only when it suited them. The gap between liberal principles of universalism and the actual colonial practice of justice and governance was vast.

  Such reform as did occur was strongly impelled by Indian social reformers whom the British acceded to, rather than initiated by the British themselves (with the exception of the suppression of Thuggee, which the British undertook to solve a law-and-order problem rather than a religious one). The call for the abolition of sati (widow immolation) was initiated by Raja Rammohan Roy and enacted by Bentinck, knowing he had the support of right-thinking Indians, rather than being the product of the British conscience imposing its will on the barbarous native. The modest increase in the age of marriage (to fourteen for women and eighteen for men) that took place under the British Raj was voted by the Indians in the legislature against the opposition, but later acquiescence, of the British authorities. And the persecution of widows, the worst practices of untouchability, and social evils like ritual sacrifice, were first raised and campaigned against by Indian reformists like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj; these evils were all continuing unhampered under the indifferent gaze of the British. Three impressive women presided over the Indian National Congress during an era in which not a single governor, secretary or other British high official was female and the very notion of a female authority figure, let alone a female viceroy, would have been a fantasy. The British, as the government of the day, had the right to permit changes to be enacted and implemented, but very rarely did they initiate them themselves.

  Lawrence James brags, ‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire was always an open society.’ The comparator is amusing for a stalwart defender of the Raj, but we shall let that pass. For whom was the British empire an open society? Not for non-whites, as we have seen; not for women of any race; not, indeed, for Indians.

  For, as I have pointed out repeatedly, behind everything lay one inescapable fact: unlike every previous conqueror of India (not counting transient raiders like Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Nadir Shah), unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land. The French ruled foreign territories and made them French, assimilating them in a narrative of Frenchness; the Portuguese settled in their colonies and intermarried with the locals; but the British always stayed apart and aloof, a foreign presence, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties.

  The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation.

  Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land.

  The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

  The question never honestly confronted by the apologists of Empire is the classic ‘cui bono’—who benefited from British imperial rule? The answer is evidently Britain itself.15 Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little. A fascinating comparative chart of countries’ share of global GDP throughout history is instructive. In 1 CE, as Christianity lay literally in swaddling clothes, India accounted for 33 per cent of global GDP, while the UK, France and Germany combined scored barely 3 per cent. By 1700, the equivalent figures were 25 per cent and 11 per cent; by 1870, at Empire’s peak, 12.5 per cent for India and 22 per cent for the three European countries; in 1913, with India’s further impoverishment, 9 per cent versus 22.5 per cent. In 1950, just after the British left, India stood at 4 per cent; in 2008, this figure was above 7 per cent and climbing. The UK, France and Germany, having dropped to 16 per cent in 1950, are hovering at 9 per cent today. As of 2014 Britain accounted for 2.4 per cent of global GDP, down from 6 per cent twenty-five years ago. History administers its own correctives.

  [15 Just as this book was going to press, a new work has emerged that makes much the same case: Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London: Simon & Schuster, 2016.]

  This is the reality that Raj apologists seek to put lipstick on. As one reviewer of Ferguson’s pro-imperialist screed put it: ‘Ferguson’s “history” is a fairy tale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.’

  When Kipling wrote his racist poem, The White Man’s Burden, as I have noted, a contemporary, Henry Labouchère, published an immediate rejoinder, The Brown Man’s Burden, that encapsulated much of what was wrong with imperialism—British, or anybody
else’s (the Americans were just launching into their conquest of the Philippines). It is worth reproducing extensively, though not quite in full:

  Pile on the brown man’s burden

  To gratify your greed;

  Go, clear away the ‘niggers’

  Who progress would impede;

  Be very stern, for truly

  ‘Tis useless to be mild

  With new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

  Pile on the brown man’s burden;

  And, if ye rouse his hate,

  Meet his old-fashioned reasons

  With Maxims up to date.

  With shells and dumdum bullets

  A hundred times made plain

  The brown man’s loss must ever

  Imply the white man’s gain.

  Pile on the brown man’s burden,

  compel him to be free;

  Let all your manifestoes

  Reek with philanthropy.

  And if with heathen folly

  He dares your will dispute,

  Then, in the name of freedom,

  Don’t hesitate to shoot.

  Pile on the brown man’s burden,

  Nor do not deem it hard

  If you should earn the rancour

  Of those ye yearn to guard.

  The screaming of your

  Eagle Will drown the victim’s sob—

  Go on through fire and slaughter.

  There’s dollars in the job.

  Pile on the brown man’s burden,

  And through the world proclaim

  That ye are Freedom’s agent—

  There’s no more paying game!

  And, should your own past history

  Straight in your teeth be thrown,

  Retort that independence

  Is good for whites alone.

  Pile on the brown man’s burden,

  With equity have done;

  Weak, antiquated scruples

  Their squeamish course have run,

  And, though ‘tis freedom’s banner

  You’re waving in the van,

  Reserve for home consumption

  The sacred ‘rights of man’!

  And if by chance ye falter,

  Or lag along the course,

  If, as the blood flows freely,

  Ye feel some slight remorse,

  Hie ye to Rudyard Kipling,

  Imperialism’s prop,

  And bid him, for your comfort,

  Turn on his jingo stop.

  The fact that, despite all these wrongs and injustices, Indians readily forgave the British when they left, retaining with them a ‘special connection’ that often manifests itself in warmth and affection, says more about India than it does about any supposed benefits of the British Raj.

  There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had cumulatively spent 3,262 days (nearly ten years of his life) in eight terms of imprisonment between 1922 and 1945 in British jails, being asked by the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill how it was that he felt so little rancour for his jailers and tormentors. ‘I was taught by a great man,’ Nehru was said to have replied, in a reference to the recently assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, ‘never to hate—and never to fear.’

  8

  THE MESSY AFTERLIFE OF COLONIALISM

  I shall say one last time that, in laying out this case against British colonialism in India, I do not seek to blame the British for everything that is wrong in my country today, nor to justify some of the failures and deficiencies that undoubtedly still assail India. There is a statute of limitations on colonial wrongdoings, but none on human memory, especially living memory, for as I have pointed out there are still millions of Indians alive today who remember the iniquities of the British empire in India. History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.

  Imperial Amnesia

  It is, thankfully, no longer fashionable in most of the developing world to decry the evils of colonialism in assigning blame for every national misfortune. Internationally, the subject of colonialism is even more passé, since the need for decolonization is no longer much debated, and colonialism itself no longer generates much conflict. (There are, after all, no empires left whose maintenance or withdrawal might trigger extensive warfare.) Still, it is striking how quickly amnesia has set in among citizens of the great imperial power itself. A 1997 Gallup Poll in Britain revealed the following: 65 per cent did not know which country Robert Clive or James Wolfe was associated with, 77 per cent did not know who Cecil Rhodes was, 79 per cent could not identify a famous poem Rudyard Kipling had written, and 47 per cent thought Australia was still a colony. Over 50 per cent did not know that the United States of America had once been part of the British empire.

  Yet those who follow world affairs would not be entirely wise to consign colonialism to the proverbial dustbin of history. Curiously enough, it remains a relevant factor in understanding the problems and the dangers of the world in which we live. The British empire, and its European counterparts, were ‘wholly unprecedented in creating a global hierarchy of economic, physical and cultural power’; that is why their impact endures to a great extent. After all, as one commentator argues, ‘the memory of European imperialism remains a live political factor everywhere from Casablanca to Jakarta, and whether one is talking nuclear power with Tehran or the future of the renminbi with the Chinese, contemporary diplomacy will fail if it does not take this into account.’

  This, of course, is what Niall Ferguson does do. As we have seen, he sees in Empire cause for much that is good in the world, in particular the free movement of goods, capital and labour and the imposition of Western norms of law, order and governance. Without the spread of British rule around the planet, he argues, the success of liberal capitalism in so many economies today would not have been possible.

  Even if this were arguably a defensible proposition, however, it is not necessarily, as Ferguson would put it, a Good Thing. The continuity of today’s world with the world of the British empire, which he so celebrates, is most strikingly evident in the economic dependence of much of the postcolonial world on the former imperial states, a contemporary reality that hardly redounds to the credit of the colonizers. Empire might have gone, but it endures in the imitative elites it left behind in the developing world, the ‘mimic men’, in Naipaul’s phrase, trying hard to be what the imperial power had not allowed them to be, while subjecting themselves and their societies to the persistent domination of corporations based mainly in the metropole. The East India Company has collapsed, but globalization has ensured that its modern-day successors in the former imperial states remain the predominant instruments of capitalism.

  India is, to some degree, an exception, thanks to its decades of economic autarky; but, as Pankaj Mishra suggests, the liberal-capitalist ‘rise of Asia’ of which India is a contemporary epitome is also ‘the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of western modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous’. To Mishra and other left-leaning critics, it marks the triumph of materialist capitalism rather than Asian spiritualism; the Indian devil wears Prada too. The Left-wing British journalist Richard Gott was unsparing in his denunciation of his country’s imperialism: ‘[T]he British empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a grand scale, involving military conquest and dictatorship, extermination and genocide, martial law and “special courts”, slavery and forced labour, and, of course, concentration camps and the transoceanic migration of peoples.’ Though he was not wrong, perhaps a more complicated assessment is due. To look at the legacy of the Raj is also to examine the impact of the imperial enterprise on the societies it fractured and transformed, and the human beings it changed, exiled, made, destroyed and made anew; the rich intercourse o
f commerce and miscegenation, as British capitalists sought profit where they might; the inter-penetration of peoples, with the shattering of age-old barriers and the erection of new ones within India and, through the migration of Indians, elsewhere; the resultant mongrelization of language and culture; the tug of conflicting loyalties to family, caste, religion, country and Empire; and, above all, the irresistible lure of lucre, the most profound animating spirit of the colonial project. That is a vast project, one well beyond the scope of this book.

  There was, of course, a somewhat more unfortunate agenda behind Ferguson’s book: to use the history of the British empire to set the stage for the new American imperium he hoped was dawning. Ferguson argued in 2003, just as the US was embarking on its ultimately ill-fated Iraqi adventure with the intention of reshaping the Middle East, that ‘the ultimate, if reluctant, heir of Britain’s global power was not one of the evil empires of the East, but Britain’s most successful former colony.’ Ferguson saw America’s imperial future in Britain’s imperial past, and he sought quite explicitly to use his history of Empire to justify the proposition that just as Pax Britannica inaugurated an unprecedented period of global peace and prosperity, so too would Pax Americana revive the world of the twenty-first century. History is ill-served by such meretricious reasoning, and the years of chaos, anarchy, death and deinstitutionalization that have followed in Iraq (as well as in Libya and Syria) since the publication of Empire seem to have given short shrift to Ferguson’s arguments.

  In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated European notions of humanity to predominance in the world, posited the white male as the apotheosis of the ideal of the Enlightenment, and did so by fiat and military power. In the process imperial historians wrote the ‘history’ of their subject peoples in tendentious terms to explain and justify their own imperium. Ferguson merely continues a long-established colonial tradition of the writing of world history with his own people and their interests as the fixed, first and final point of reference.16 It is best to see his work as a reflection of the spasm of imperial hubris that briefly jerked into life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, rather than as a definitive statement of the nature and implications of the experience of Empire for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.