Racist defenses of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits, often economic, on their conquered peoples even as they pauperize or enslave them. Examples from the last two centuries include the benefits of “free trade,” globalization, the rule of (foreign) law, investor protection, “liberation” from other imperial powers or homegrown dictators, or “democracy.” In supporting Bush’s attack on Iraq, the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier notes approvingly, “Empires function by virtue of the prestige they radiate as well as by might, and indeed collapse if they rely on force alone. Artistic styles, the language of the rulers, and consumer preferences flow outward along with power and investment capital—sometimes diffused consciously by cultural diplomacy and student exchanges, sometimes just by popular tastes for the intriguing products of the metropole, whether Coca-Cola or Big Macs. As supporters of the imperial power rightly maintain, empires provide public goods that masses of people outside their borders really want to enjoy, including an end to endemic warfare and murderous ethnic or religious conflicts.”65
Finally, in retrospect, there has been simple amnesia: the systematic omission of subjects that are impossible to square with the idea of “liberal imperialism.” For example, both Ferguson and the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire skip lightly over the fact that the empire operated the world’s largest and most successful drug cartel. During the nineteenth century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium. The opium grown in India and shipped to China first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and Southeast Asia. The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, “without the drug, there probably would have been no British empire.”66
Other intellectual strategies have been concocted to avoid facing the reality of imperialist depredations. For example, the philosopher John Locke came up with the brilliant idea that the land in North America British colonists were stealing from the indigenous people was actually terra nullius, or “nobody’s land.” But let me expand briefly on just two of the rationalizations for imperialism: racism and economic benefits bestowed.
Racism has been the master imperialist rationale of modern times, one with which British imperialists are completely familiar. “Imperialism,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.”67 But what, exactly, needed to be explained by racism? Initially, it was the growing dominance by small groups of well-armed, ruthless Europeans over societies in South and East Asia that in the eighteenth century were infinitely richer and more sophisticated than anything then known in Europe. As the historian Mike Davis observes, “When the sans culottes stormed the Bastille [in 1789], the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta [in China] and Bengal [in India], with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind.”68 In the early eighteenth century, India was a “vast and economically advanced subcontinent,” producing close to a quarter of total planetary output of everything, compared with Britain’s measly 3 percent.69 As the British set about looting their captured subcontinent this reality proved an inconvenient one. It became indispensable for them to be able to describe the conquered populations as inferior in every way: incapable of self-government, lacking in the ability to reason, hopelessly caught up in “static” Oriental beliefs, overly fecund, and, in short, not members of the “fittest” races. In other words, their subjugation was not only their own fault but inevitable.
Joseph Conrad’s closest friend and correspondent was the Scottish aristocrat and socialist R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who looked on his country’s imperialism with a jaundiced eye. It seems likely that Graham’s letters and published works inspired Conrad to write the most important book in English on imperialism—his 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. In 1897, in a story entitled “Bloody Niggers,” Graham summed up the English imperial view of the world in the following fashion: “Far back in history, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians lived and thought, but God was aiming all the time at something different and better. He let Greeks and Romans appear out of the darkness of barbarity to prepare the way for the race that from the start was chosen to rule over mankind—namely, the British race.”70
At its heart, British imperialist ideology revolved around the belief that history and human evolution—either divinely guided or as a result of natural selection—had led inexorably to the British Empire of the nineteenth century. As a result, the British extermination of the Tasmanians (“living fossils”); the slaughter of at least ten thousand Sudanese in a single battle at Omdurman on September 2, 1898; General Reginald “Rex” Dyer’s use of Gurkha troops on April 13, 1919, at Amritsar to kill as many Punjabis as he could until his soldiers ran out of ammunition; the sanctioned use of explosive dumdum bullets (meant for big-game hunting) in colonial wars but prohibiting them in conflicts among “civilized” nations; and many similar events down to the sanguine, sadistic suppression of the Kikuyu people in Kenya in the 1950s were not morally indefensible crimes of imperialism but the workings of a preordained narrative of civilization.
What changed over time was the idea that a divine hand lay behind such work. As Lindqvist comments, “During the nineteenth century, religious explanations were replaced by biological ones. The exterminated peoples were colored, the exterminators white. It seemed obvious that some racial natural law was at work and that the extermination of non-Europeans was simply a stage in the natural development of the world. The fact that natives died proved that they belonged to a lower race. Let them die as the laws of progress demand.”71 On this, Ferguson concurs: “Influenced by, but distorting beyond recognition, the work of Darwin, nineteenth-century pseudo-scientists divided humanity into races’ on the basis of external physical features, ranking them according to inherited differences not just in physique but also in character. Anglo-Saxons were self-evidently at the top, Africans at the bottom.”72 In this scheme of things, welfare measures and ameliorative reforms of harsh colonial practices should not be allowed to interfere with natural selection since this would only allow inferiors to survive and “propagate their unfitness.”73 These ideas were much admired by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, where he wrote approvingly of Britain’s “effective oppression of an inferior race,” the Indians.74
Racist attitudes spread throughout the British Empire and retained a tenacious hold on English thought well into the twentieth century. As P. J. Marshall, editor of the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, observes, “The roots of South African apartheid, the most inflexible of all systems of racial segregation, can clearly be found in the period when Britain still had ultimate responsibility. The British were never inclined to condone racially mixed marriages, which were common in some other empires, and they rarely treated people of mixed race as in any way the equal of whites.”75 Niall Ferguson deserves credit for noting the sexual hysteria of the Victorians that contributed to these racist policies.76 That theme, for instance, infuses several of the great novels of Indian life— E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1966), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). It is ironic, then, that Edwina, Lady Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy in India, had a passionate love affair with independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.77
“The overt racism of the British in India, which affected the institutions of government, contributed powerfully to the growth of nationalist sentiment,” recalls Tapan Raychaudhuri, an emeritus fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. “All Indians, whatever their status, shared the experience of being treated as racial inferiors.... The life stories of Indian cele
brities are full of episodes of racial insults.”78 For all its alleged liberalism and the capitalist institutions it forced on its captive peoples, the British Empire bred, inculcated, and propagated racism as its ultimate justification. Even though it was history’s largest empire, its rulers seemed incapable of functioning without thoroughly deceiving themselves about why, for a relatively short period of time, they dominated the world. For this reason alone, the British Empire should not be held up as an institution deserving emulation, least of all by the first nation that broke free of it, the United States of America.
Racists though they may have been, Britons have long claimed that they bequeathed to the world the most advanced and effective economic institutions ever devised. “For many British people,” as P. J. Marshall puts it, “it is axiomatic that their record in the establishment of colonies of settlement overseas and as rulers of non-European peoples was very much superior to that of any other power.”79 The popular Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus, an admiring if condescending book on America’s emerging empire, is primarily an economic historian, and his influential glosses on the British Empire stress, above all, its contributions to what later came to be called “globalization.” He is on the same wavelength with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, bestselling author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization and The World Is Flat, who also thinks that the integration of capital markets and investor protection contribute mightily to the well-being of peoples under the sway of either the British or the American empires. Though the idea does not survive close scrutiny, it has proved a powerful ideological justification of imperialism.
It is not news that somewhere around 1 billion people today subsist on almost nothing. With rare exceptions, the countries that the various imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exploited and colonized remain poor, disease- and crime-ridden, and at the mercy of a rigged international trading system that Anglo-American propagandists assure us is rapidly “globalizing” to everyone’s advantage. But, as the New York Times pointed out, “The very same representatives of the club of rich countries who go around the world hectoring the poor to open up their markets to free trade put up roadblocks when those countries ask the rich to dismantle their own barriers to free trade in agricultural products.”80 According to World Bank data, 390 million of India’s 1.1 billion people— almost a third of them—live on less than one dollar a day.81 Typically, the former U.S. colony of the Philippines, a resource-rich country with a large Sino-Malay population, remains the poorest nation in East Asia, the world’s fastest-growing economic region—a direct result of U.S. imperialism. Similarly, impoverished Latin America still struggles to throw off the legacies of American “backyard” neocolonialism.82 All this is among the best-known economic information in the world.
According to the apologists for the British Empire, however, such bad economic news cannot be true, because these problems were solved over 150 years ago. Ferguson maintains that “the nineteenth-century [British] empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labor.”83 After the Irish famine (1846-1850) and the Indian Mutiny (1857), the British “recast their empire as an economically liberal project, concerned as much with the integration of global markets as with the security of the British Isles, predicated on the idea that British rule was conferring genuine benefits in the form of free trade, the rule of law, the safeguarding of private property rights and non-corrupt administration, as well as government-guaranteed investments in infrastructure, public health, and (some) education.”84
Unfortunately, this argument is an offshoot of the old nineteenth-century Marxist conception that politics are mere superstructural reflections of underlying economic relations, and that a single worldwide economic system is emerging that will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and peace for all. As the economic theorist John Gray observes, “It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the Cold War. Neoliberals, such as Friedman [and Ferguson], have reproduced the weakest features of Marx’s thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history.”85
The idea that the British Empire conferred economic benefits on any groups other than British capitalists is pure ideology, as impervious to challenge by empirical data as former Soviet prime minister Leonid Brezhnev’s Marxism-Leninism or George Bush’s belief that free markets mean the same thing as freedom. At the apex of those who profited from British-style “free trade” at the end of the nineteenth century was the Rothschild Bank, then by far the world’s largest financial institution with total assets of around forty-one million pounds sterling. It profited enormously from the wars—some seventy-two of them—during Queen Victoria’s reign, and financed such exploiters of Africa as Cecil Rhodes.
Ferguson, who wrote a history of the House of Rothschild, knows these things and does not deny them when he turns from imperial panegyrics to history. “In the age before steam power,” he writes, “India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The British had first raised tariffs against their products; then demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected.”86 The result was poverty and dependence for India. As Oxford historian Tapan Raychaudhuri puts it, “Early in the nineteenth century India lost its export trade in manufactures and became a net importer of manufactured goods and a supplier of mainly agricultural products to Britain for the first time in its history. ... In India the favorable terms granted to British exporters and the doctrine of laissez-faire meant that Indian industries received no protection and hardly any encouragement until the mid-1920s, and then only in response to persistent Indian pressure.”87 Precisely at the time that the British were preparing India for its poverty-stricken modern fate, two other nations were laying the foundations for their own contemporary status as the world’s first and second most productive nations—the United States, protected from its inception to about 1940 by tariffs on manufactured imports that averaged 44 percent; and Japan, which kept itself free of imperialist domination and copied the economic practices of Britain, the United States, and Germany rather than paying much attention to their economic treatises on free markets.88
What we are talking about here is, in Mike Davis’s phrase, “the making of the third world,” the poverty-stricken southern hemisphere that is still very much with us today. “The looms of India and China,” Davis writes, “were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.”89 In a well-known formulation, the social theorist Karl Polanyi wrote in his seminal work The Great Transformation (1944): “The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society.... Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.”90
Ferguson agrees; it is just that he, like Marx, sees all this chaos as “creative destruction,” the birth pangs of a new world order, Lenin’s famous willingness to break eggs in order to make an omelet. (“But how many eggs must you break,” one wag famously asked, “to make a two-egg omelet?”) “No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism,” Ferguson argues, “but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British empire enforced it
.”91
Thomas Friedman similarly acknowledges that contemporary American-sponsored globalization is not a naturally occurring process. American imperialism enforces it: “The most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investments is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for this era of globalization, just as the British navy did for the era of globalization in the nineteenth century.”92 If Mexican corn farmers are driven out of business by heavily subsidized American growers and then the price of corn makes tortillas unaffordable, that is just the global market at work. But if poor and unemployed Mexicans then try to enter the United States to support their families, that is to be resisted by armed force.
After all their arguments have been deployed, how do analysts like Ferguson and Friedman explain the nineteenth-century poverty of India and China, the several dozen Holocaust-sized famines in both countries while food sat on the docks waiting to be exported, and their current status as “late developers”? Students of communism will not be surprised by the answer. In India, Ferguson argues, the British did not go far enough in enforcing their ideas. “If one leaves aside their fundamentally different resource endowments, the explanation for India’s underperformance compared with, say, Canada lies not in British exploitation but rather in the insufficient scale of British interference in the Indian economy.”93
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