[PEN-L:36030] Re: An Empire in denial

["Carl Remick" <carlremick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2003
>
> America: an Empire in Denial
> By NIALL FERGUSON
>
> ... Was the British empire a good or bad thing? It is nowadays quite 
> conventional to think that, on balance, it was a bad thing. ...

[Score one for conventional wisdom.  Here are a few points for 
deeply-in-denial Ferguson to reflect on:]

Heart of smugness:
Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties of 
its empire

Maria Misra
Tuesday July 23, 2002
The Guardian

So the Belgians are to return to the Heart of Darkness in an attempt finally 
to exorcise their imperial demons. Stung by another book cataloguing the 
violence and misery inflicted by King Leopold's empire on the Congo in the 
late 19th and early 20th century, the state-funded Royal Museum for Central 
Africa in Brussels has commissioned a group of historians to pass 
authoritative judgment on accusations of genocide: forced labour, systematic 
rape, torture and murder of the Congolese, around 10 million of whom are 
thought to have died as a consequence.

This is not the first time that the Belgian empire has been singled out for 
censure. Back in the Edwardian era, British humanitarians spilled much ink 
over its excesses and Conrad's novella was corralled into service to show 
Leopold's Congo as a sort of horrific "other" to Britain's more uplifting 
colonialism.

Complacency about Britain's imperial record lingers on. In the 
post-September 11 orgy of self-congratulation about the west's superiority, 
Blair's former foreign policy guru, Robert Cooper, and a host of 
journalistic flag-wavers were urging us not to be ashamed of empire. Cooper 
insisted empire was "as necessary now as it had been in the 19th century". 
The British empire was, we were assured, a generally well-intentioned 
attempt to inculcate notions of good government, civilised behaviour and 
market rationality into less well-favoured societies.

Is such a rosy view of British imperialism justified? Many argue that it is. 
After all, surely the British have less blood on their hands than the French 
and the Belgians? Wasn't the British addiction to the free market a 
prophylactic against the horrors of forced labour? And didn't those peculiar 
class obsessions make them less racist than the rest - silly snobs, but not 
vicious yobs? And isn't India not only a democracy, but, thanks to the 
British, one with great railways? Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in some 
of this, but there's also much wilful smugness. While the complex 
consequences of colonial economic policy require extended analysis, it is 
possible to dispel more swiftly the myth that the British Empire, unlike 
King Leopold's, was innocent of atrocities.

It has become a modern orthodoxy that Europe's 20th century was the 
bloodiest in history and that atrocities must be recorded and remembered by 
society as a whole. But while a Black Book of Communism has been compiled 
and everybody is aware of the horrors of nazism, popular historians have 
been surprisingly uninterested in the dark side of the British Empire. There 
are exceptions, such as Mike Davis's powerful Late Victorian Holocausts, but 
much else still lies buried in the academic literature. Davis and others 
have estimated that there were between 12 and 33 million avoidable deaths by 
famine in India between 1876 and 1908, produced by a deadly combination of 
official callousness and free-market ideology. But these were far from being 
a purely Victorian phenomenon. As late as 1943 around 4 million died in the 
Bengal famine, largely because of official policy.

No one has even attempted to quantify the casualties caused by state-backed 
forced labour on British-owned mines and plantations in India, Africa and 
Malaya. But we do know that tens of thousands of often conscripted Africans, 
Indians and Malays - men, women and children - were either killed or maimed 
constructing Britain's imperial railways. Also unquantified are the numbers 
of civilian deaths caused by British aerial bombing and gassing of villages 
in Sudan, Iraq and Palestine in the 1920 and 1930s.

Nor was the supposedly peaceful decolonisation of the British Empire without 
its gory cruelties. The hurried partition of the Indian subcontinent brought 
about a million deaths in the ensuing uncontrolled panic and violence. The 
brutal suppression of the Mau Mau and the detention of thousands of Kenyan 
peasants in concentration camps are still dimly remembered, as are the Aden 
killings of the 1960s. But the massacre of communist insurgents by the Scots 
Guard in Malaya in the 1950s, the decapitation of so-called bandits by the 
Royal Marine Commandos in Perak and the secret bombing of Malayan villages 
during the Emergency remain uninvestigated.

One might argue that these were simply the unfortunate consequences of the 
arrival of economic and political modernity. But does change have to come so 
brutally? There are plenty of examples of wanton British cruelty to chill 
the blood even of a hardened Belgian. Who, after all, invented the 
concentration camp but the British? The scandalous conditions in British 
camps during the Boer war, where thousands of women and children died of 
disease and malnutrition, are relatively well known. Who now remembers the 
Indian famine-relief-cum-work camps, where gentlemanly British officials 
conducted experiments to determine how few calories an Indian coolie could 
be fed and still perform hard labour? The rations in these camps amounted to 
less than those at Buchenwald.

There is Churchill's assiduous promotion of schemes to cut the costs of 
imperial defence in India and the Middle East by using aerial bombing, 
machine gunning and gassing for the control of rebellion, political protest, 
labour disputes and non-payment of taxes. There is the denial of free food 
to starving south Asians on the grounds that it would simply hasten a 
population explosion among India's "feckless poor". There is the 
extraordinary British justification for bombing Sudanese villages after the 
first world war: Nuer women were, officials claimed, of less value to their 
community than cattle or rifles.

These facts and figures are not easily culled from textbooks on empire. We 
don't have a dedicated museum of empire, but our nearest equivalent, the new 
Imperial War Museum North, would leave the impression that Britain's 
colonial subjects had been enthusiastic participants in its wartime crusades 
to rid the world of want and evil.

Does it matter that the British are smug about their imperial past, that 
British atrocities have been airbrushed from history? One can't help 
thinking that Jack Straw's pious missions to India to broker solutions to 
the Kashmir crisis might have more credibility if the British had the good 
grace to apologise for such imperial crimes as the Amritsar massacre. But a 
more worrying symptom of this rosy glossing of the imperial past is the 
re-emergence of a sort of sanitised advocacy of imperialism as a viable 
option in contemporary international relations.

The point of cataloguing Britain's imperial crimes is not to trash our 
forebears, but to remind our rulers that even the best-run empires are cruel 
and violent, not just the Belgian Congo. Overwhelming power, combined with a 
sense of boundless superiority, will produce atrocities - even among the 
well intentioned. Let's not forget that Leopold's central African empire was 
originally called the International Association for Philanthropy in the 
Congo.

· Maria Misra is lecturer in modern history at Keble College, Oxford. Her 
history of modern India will be published by Penguin next year.

[end]

Carl

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