by Amy Chua
Meanwhile, stunning the world, Britain had by the 1830s abolished its slave trade while it was still extremely lucrative. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy policed the world's oceans, crusading against other nations’ slave trading from Africa to the Americas. Britain's abolitionist campaign gave it the moral high ground over not just its main rival, France, but also, even more satisfyingly, over its former colony the United States. At a cost of millions of pounds, and in precisely the same era that it achieved global dominance, Great Britain became known as the “most moral” power in the world. As the historian Linda Colley puts it, “Successful abolitionism became one of the vital underpinnings of British supremacy in the Victorian era, offering—as it seemed to do—irrefutable proof that British power was founded on religion, on freedom and on moral calibre, not just on a superior stock of armaments and capital.”21
There was, however, a hitch. British identity from the beginning was forged on a bedrock of Protestantism, in opposition to Catholic Spain and France.22 This core religious component of British identity planted a seed of intolerance that the empire never quite overcame. Indeed, British Protestantism created a fateful problem for the empire in the very heart of the United Kingdom: the problem of Catholic Ireland.
THE CATHOLIC PROBLEM AND THE
LIMITS OF “BRITISH” TOLERANCE
The Irish never received the same treatment in Great Britain as did the Scots or the Welsh. The principal reason was religion. By 1700, the Scots, the Welsh, and the English were all predominantly Protestant, whereas the Irish remained stubbornly Catholic. Great Britain's loss of Ireland is in many ways a story of too little tolerance, too late.
It would be hard to overstate the persistence and intensity of mutual hatred between Catholics and Protestants in British history. Endless religious wars left a legacy of enmity and anger. Like witches in previous eras, Catholics in England were often scape-goated, physically assaulted, or plunged in water until near drowning. Even Locke, in his famous 1689 Letter on Toleration, excluded Catholics, whose opinions were “absolutely destructive of all governments except the Pope's.” Catholicism was depicted as not only blasphemous but also primitive and superstitious. As one English newspaper put it in 1716: “A Papist is an Idolator, who worships Images, Pictures, Stocks and Stones, the Works of Mens Hands; calls upon the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels to pray for them; adores Reliques,” “eats his God by the cunning Trick of Transub-stantiation,” and “swears the Pope is infallible.”23
At the same time, many in England suspected that Catholic “traitors” and “conspirators” were plotting to overthrow the Protestant monarchy. These fears were not entirely unfounded. In 1601, an invasion force of more than three thousand Spanish soldiers, invited by Ireland's Catholic chieftains, landed on the southern Irish coast (where they were defeated by the English on Christmas Eve at the Battle of Kinsale). Repeatedly, Irish nobility allied themselves with Catholic Spain and France in attempts to oust their English overlords. Closer to home, in 1708, 1715, and 1745, European military forces landed in Scotland with the intention of marching on London and restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne.
Anti-Catholic riots were frequent all over eighteenth-century Britain, from Glasgow to Birmingham to Bath. The most horrific of these were the Gordon Riots of 1780. Initially demanding repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics new rights of participation, an enraged London mob of 60,000 quickly turned violent. “The conflagration was horrible beyond description,” reported one eyewitness. “Sleep and rest were things not thought of; the streets were swarming with people, and uproar, confusion, and terror reigned in every part.” The Gordon Riots lasted a full week. In the end, at least a hundred Catholic churches and private homes were torched and looted. Nearly three hundred people were killed—many burned alive.24
Could Englishmen and Scots bring themselves to accept the Irish as fellow Britons? Could Protestant Britain extend religious freedom and political rights to the “ignorant,” “indolent,” and “despotic” papists? After the Gordon Riots, Britain took significant strides in that direction. In 1800 a new Act of Union incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom. In 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act granted Catholics the right to vote and to hold parliamentary office—although, like Jews, they were still excluded from the oldest universities and the highest offices. By 1831, there were some 580,000 Irish in England and Scotland, which represented approximately 5 percent of the labor force and a twelvefold increase since 1780. When the Houses of Parliament burned in 1834, one of the principal architects of the new Palace of Westminster, destined to be one of Great Britain's iconic symbols of imperial power, was a devout Roman Catholic.
Nevertheless, in Ireland, the on-the-ground reality for Catholics remained one of unrelenting subjugation and degradation. The Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not only barred Catholics from public office, restricted their education, and denied them the vote, but effectively stripped them of their property. This, together with successive waves of “plantation”— the colonization of Ireland by government-sponsored Protestant settlers—had created a British ruling class throughout the country. By the time they were “emancipated” in 1829, the vast majority of Catholics lived in poverty, subsisting on potatoes and buttermilk and paying rent to a handful of English nobles who owned over 90 percent of Ireland's profitable land. Irish culture, and the Irish language in particular, was demeaned and increasingly marginalized. In the 1840s, Ireland was struck by a devastating potato blight. Although referred to as a “famine,” the truth was that significant supplies of life-saving food continued to be produced. Unfortunately, Ireland's British landowners continued to ship this produce abroad at considerable profit, leaving a million (almost exclusively Catholic) Irish to die of starvation.
Thus, Ireland's Catholics were not overwhelmed by Britain's newfound “tolerance” in the nineteenth century. The Act of Union of 1801 was perceived—probably correctly—by most Irishmen not as an inclusive embrace but rather as a political ploy to abolish their parliament. Even the rights achieved in 1829 rang hollow to many Irish Catholics, who continued in reality to be subservient to and wholly dependent on their Protestant overlords. In Easter of 1916, while Britain was preoccupied with war, armed Catholic rebels rose up in Dublin, seizing buildings and declaring independence. The rebels were put down, but in the 1920s the British agreed to the creation of the Irish Free State (while retaining Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom), which in 1949 became the Republic of Ireland.25
From the Irish point of view, independence was an achievement long sought and hard won—a source of pride and (putting aside the Northern Ireland problem) a cause for celebration. From the empire's point of view, the loss of Ireland was politically devastating. The British loss of the American colonies was in many ways easier to accept. It was one thing for the British to have been unable in 1776 to maintain control over a large population of increasingly unruly frontier colonists three thousand miles away, separated from them by an ocean. It was quite another to lose a piece of the United Kingdom itself, hardly more than a stone's throw away from the rest of Great Britain.
To be sure, linguistic, cultural, national, and political cleavages always separated the British from the Irish. Yet none of this can explain Britain's loss of Ireland. The English made Britons out of conquered Welshmen. They made London a magnet for long-despised Jews. They embraced and assimilated 50,000 foreign-born, French-speaking Huguenots. They induced formerly scorned and feared Scots to become Britain's most aggressive and effective empire builders. In every one of these cases, the English overcame their prejudices, shrewdly winning the allegiance and profiting from the talents of all these groups.
The contrast with Ireland is stark and tragic. In a sense, Great Britain's loss of Ireland is a story of failed tolerance. Nineteenth-century Britain took real steps toward Catholic equality—although even to this day Catholics are barred from the British throne— but
it was too little, too late. Over centuries of warfare and exploitation, British Protestants had reduced Irish Catholics to an impoverished underclass, debasing their culture and religion, expropriating their land, almost extinguishing their language, and, through at best callous indifference, contributing to the death and flight of millions. It is not surprising that the majority of Irish never came to see themselves as British.
Conceivably, things could have been different, although it takes a stretch of the imagination. Had the British treated the Irish with even the same strategic tolerance they had shown the Scots, Ireland today, with its booming economy, might still be part of the United Kingdom. But Britain did not, and probably could not, open itself to Irish Catholics in the same way.
Interestingly, a parallel story unfolded in Britain's nonwhite imperial possessions. As Protestantism became less central to nineteenth-century British identity, and as the empire expanded all over the globe, the British increasingly defined themselves as “white” and “civilized” in contrast to the colonial populations they conquered. This racial and ethnic arrogance created the same limits on British tolerance in its Asian and African dominions that anti-Catholic prejudice had in Ireland. Nowhere was this more apparent than in India, the “jewel of the empire.”
ENLIGHTENMENT AND EMPIRE:
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RAJ
In 1858, when Great Britain was near the zenith of its power, Queen Victoria issued a famous proclamation renouncing Britain's right and desire “to impose [its] convictions on any of [its] subjects” and promising “a perfect equality…between Europeans and Natives.” The queen's rosy assurances were motivated by some not-so-rosy circumstances. Just the year before, mutinous Muslims and Hindus in northwest India slaughtered hundreds of British women and children. In revenge, British soldiers strapped Indians to cannons, blowing them to pieces, and indiscriminately hanged and shot thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of others.
Queen Victoria's proclamation of “perfect equality” proved sadly empty. Britain continued to rule India absolutely, affording the queen's Indian subjects no political representation whatsoever. Not only in India but in all of its nonwhite domains, the British could not live up to the ideals of Enlightenment tolerance it professed. On the other hand, when it came to strategic tolerance— recruiting, rewarding, and utilizing individuals of diverse ethnicities and religions in the furtherance of empire—the British were masters.
As the English East India Company ascended in India, the Mughal Empire began its rapid decline, disintegrating from its own metastasizing intolerance. The directors of the East India Company saw the power vacuum opened up by the Mughal collapse— and they filled it. In essence, the company recapitulated the strategy of the Persian and Tang emperors. They identified the warrior classes among their subject populace—such as the Rajputs from the north, who had long-standing military traditions—and aggressively recruited them, using them to conquer and rule a territory and population far vaster than the British could otherwise have controlled. At its peak, the company's army numbered roughly 320,000 soldiers, of whom only 40,000 were European. By the mid-nineteenth century, the East India Company was the greatest power on the subcontinent, presiding over the largest civil service, wielding the largest army, and governing a population of approximately two hundred million. As the historian T. A. Heath-cote put it, “The East India Company succeeded the Mughals as the next Indian empire.”26
Unlike the ultraorthodox Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the Company ruled with a tolerant hand—not out of idealism but expedience—following Wellington's principle that interfering with India's “ancient laws, customs and religion” was politically dangerous. Britain's Indian army included Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, as well as a number of Africans and Arabs. All were permitted to worship as they chose. British officers, acting under Company orders, joined in native religious ceremonies. Troops and cannons were made available for local festivals. Indeed, as successors to the kings and princes whom they had replaced, the Company's directors maintained Hindu temples and collected taxes for the benefit of religious pilgrims.27
The same precepts of calculated tolerance underlay the Company's commercial and governmental dealings in India. From the beginning, the Company profited enormously from alliances with indigenous entrepreneurial minorities, most of whom had previously worked in the service of the Mughal emperors. It was only through partnerships with these native capitalists—Jain moneylenders, Gujarati banking families, Hindu and Parsi merchants, dubashes in Madras, banians in Bengal—that the Company could penetrate India's interior. The Company's British merchants allowed their Indian counterparts to make great fortunes, in the process turning them into “uneasy collaborators in the creation of colonial India.” At the same time, the Company employed more and more Indians as petty bureaucrats to administer its expanding territories. Here the strategy was a modern variation on Genghis Khan's. The Company coopted and trained a pro-English cadre of Indian functionaries and elites who handled day-to-day administration under British supervision.28
Interestingly, the Company's men showed a similar openness to native “abilities” when it came to their sexual lives. During the period of Company governance in India (roughly between 1757 and 1858), marriage between British men and Indian women was common. And there was considerably more miscegenation than there was intermarriage. “I now commenced a regular course of f—ing with native women,” wrote one Englishman, recalling his early days in India as a sixteen-year-old Company cadet. Another Company employee waxed more philosophical: “[T]hose who have lived with a native woman for any length of time never marry a European … so amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please [are they], that a person after being accustomed to their society shrinks from the idea of encountering the whims or yielding to the fancies of an Englishwoman.”
The Company's promiscuity, both sexual and religious, outraged English evangelicals back in London. The evangelicals did not mince words about Christianity's superiority over the “abominable and degrading superstitions” prevailing in India. “Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent,” declared William Wilber-force to the House of Commons in 1813. “Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.” Wilberforce demanded that Parliament undo the barriers erected by the Company against Christian proselytizing in India. As time went on, the evangelical movement gained increasing influence over British imperial policy.
To deal with the problem of native mistresses, the Company was induced to start shipping young British women to India. The arrival of this “fishing fleet” became a signal event in nineteenth-century Calcutta's social calendar. At great parties thrown by Calcutta's leading British socialites, the hopeful bachelorettes would “sit up” for three nights in a row, while eligible soldiers and officers of all ages passed through. After a year, those who failed to land a husband were shipped back to England.
More fatefully, in 1829, the missionaries helped push through a ban on sati, the traditional Hindu practice of immolating widows upon their husband's funeral pyres. This ban represented the first explicit British interference with an important Indian religious practice and, as Company officials had feared, provoked broad resentment among the Hindu majority. In 1833 missionaries won the right to proselytize and set up schools in India without Company approval. In 1850, in direct violation of Hindu law, the British passed legislation allowing converts to Christianity to inherit property. In 1856, the British legalized second marriages by Hindu widows. Particularly obnoxious to India's Muslims were the missionaries’ extension of education to women and their adoption and conversion of abandoned orphans.29
The evangelicals were not the only Britons interested in anglicizing and “civilizing” Indians. There were also the modern-izers, such as the Scottish governor-general James Dalhousie, who brought railroads, the telegraph, and ingenious new inventions to India. Ironically, it was one of these inventions that set off the worst conflagration in the history of the Raj.
Intr
oduced in 1857, the new muzzle-loading Enfield rifle was a technological triumph. Before using the rifle, a soldier had to bite off both ends of the new Enfield cartridges. Unfortunately, rumors—very possibly true—soon spread that the Enfield cartridges were greased with a mixture of pig and cow fat. For Indian soldiers (sepoys), touching their lips to these cartridges therefore risked defilement—pork being repugnant to Muslims and cows sacred to Hindus. Indeed, the Indians were convinced that the Enfield rifle was part of “an insidious missionary plot to defile them” and impose Christianity on India. On top of all this, the British had just forcibly annexed the rich province of Oudh, ignominiously deposing its king—an act of utmost hubris given that 75,000 sepoys in the army that invaded Oudh hailed from that very province.
Company after company of Indian soldiers refused to load the new Enfield rifles. In each case, the insubordinate sepoys were summarily discharged and stripped of their uniforms, weapons, and pensions. On May 9, 1857, eighty-five men from the Third Native Cavalry in Meerut were shackled and imprisoned for this act of disobedience. The next day, while their British officers were at church, the entire native brigade revolted, storming the prison and freeing their comrades. In the words of one contemporary English private:
There was a sudden rising … a rush to the horses, a swift saddling, a gallop to the gaol… a breaking open of the gates, and a setting free, not only of the mutineers who had been court-martialled, but also of more than a thousand cutthroats and scoundrels of every sort. Simultaneously, the native infantry fell upon and massacred their British officers, and butchered the women and children in a way that you cannot describe.
The rampaging soldiers, joined by civilian mobs, then headed for Delhi, “burning bungalows and murdering every European man, woman and child they encountered.” By the end of May, what the British would call “the Mutiny” had spread across India.
