The Debate about the British Empire: History Wars, Colonialism and Denialism
Alan Lester (ed.) The Truth About Empire. Real Histories of British Colonialism, Hurst, 2024, £25.
Reviewed by Corinne Fowler
The Truth about Empire is a collection of essays by experts in the field. The sheer range of essays in the volume shows a broad array of research interests on the topic of British colonialism. Twelve essays cover transatlantic slavery, colonialism in Tasmania, South-East Asia, India and South Africa as well as exploring the mid-nineteenth century Opium Wars fought between China, Britain and France. The book also scrutinises the influential work of Nigel Biggar, a theologian from Oxford University, whose book Colonialism: A Reckoning attempts to defend the British Empire’s reputation.
Like many of the contributors to this volume, I give regular talks about British colonial history. During audience discussions, certain questions arise with predictable regularity. These include: “Why don’t you mention that the British were the first to abolish slavery?” (they weren’t), “Why won’t you talk about the fact that Britain ended sati” (a nuanced response to that question appears in this book) and “Why don’t you talk about the benefits of colonialism?” (this “balance sheet approach” is considered as unhistorical by most historians of empire and it is largely pushed by defenders of the colonial past).
Such questions are founded on sanitised colonial accounts of empire, embedded in the British psyche by a longstanding conservative tradition of defending empire’s reputation. However, as this book clearly demonstrates, members of groups like Policy Exchange and History Reclaimed are triggered by a new academic generation’s rejection of the unquestioning pro-colonial bias of previous scholarship.
History Wars and Sanitising Empire
Written in the context of history wars, The Truth About Empire is the perfect companion for just about anyone with skin in the game. The collection was written in an atmosphere of historical denial, attacks on historians of empire, misleading claims about current academic approaches to empire and blatant attempts to present historians as ideologically motivated.
I myself came under heavy fire after co-authoring the 2020 National Trust report on its properties’ colonial connections, a document which simply audited peer-reviewed publications by subject experts, but which became the focus of intense political and press hostility. I was pleased to see that this book tackles one of the biggest criticisms of the report, a repeatedly asserted claim that there was no historical justification for including slavery history alongside colonial history (as the report does) because the two, it was claimed, were entirely separate.
I came to the conclusion that this objection was more political than historical, since slavery is often presented as “bad” and colonialism (especially of India) as more benevolent. Yet, as Lester points out, British plantations worked by enslaved people were created on colonized land: slavery’s ‘plantation regime was shored up by a colonial state.’ (p.21) In an atmosphere of such hostility, such details matter. My recent book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain was severely criticised in the Telegraph and the Spectator before it had even been published; it certainly hadn’t been read by either columnist, evident from their demonstrably and blatantly inaccurate statements about the book’s contents. Lester’s edited book details many more such examples of ideologically motivated attempts to discredit work. In this context, The Truth About Empire provides a welcome antidote to bad faith mischaracterisations of serious academic research.
The book’s foreword is written by Sathnam Sanghera, author of the bestselling book Empireland and his more recent follow-up Empireworld. He is eminently suited to introducing the book because he himself has found himself continually confronted with opposition from History Reclaimed – a group of columnists and academics from various fields – who supposedly aim to rescue colonial history from ideologues like him. Sanghera’s foreword sets the scene, detailing personal attacks, political interference and media misrepresentation in the face of routine academic work by experts in British colonial history.
His foreword, together with the editor’s introduction, sets out the rationale for this edited book, which expertly addresses popular new writing about empire, a new body of work which demonstrates scant knowledge of the field while fashioning itself as uniquely objective. Commentaries and essays by members of History Reclaimed and their allies shows little understanding of the partiality of sources, tending to take colonial figures at their word while also cherry-picking from, or misrepresenting, sources which do not corroborate their defence of empire. Lester also effectively rubbishes false claims that experts in colonial history have neglected British anti-slavery history or the period during which the West African Squadron patrolled the seas to suppress the Atlantic slave-trade.
Challenging the New Apologists of Empire
Margot Finn’s excoriating essay scrutinises the methodological weaknesses of a popular history book called Colonialism: A Reckoning by Nigel Biggar. Her essay – and the volume as a whole – demonstrates why specialist research expertise is infinitely preferable to polemic that poses as impartiality. Lester sets the scene for Finn’s essay, situating Biggar’s work within an ideological tradition which seeks to defend empire’s reputation rather than to provide a nuanced and historically varied view of how colonialism worked in practice across Britain’s four colonial centuries.
Forensically, Finn’s essay exposes the flaws in Biggar’s approach to historical methodology, showing very precisely how he distorts the historical record. In fact, Finn considers Colonialism: A Reckoning to reveal ‘a backward-looking historiographical vision’. This former Royal Historical Society president reaches the scathing verdict that Biggar’s lamentably influential book ‘bears…the characteristic hallmarks of hasty undergraduate composition: primary search poached from other secondary sources and quoted out of context, reliance on a small cluster of familiar authors (and topical journalism) to the detriment of consideration of more robust, wide-ranging and recent peer-reviewed literature, and lack of sophisticated conceptual or methodological engagement.’ (p.295).
Elsewhere in the book, Lester provides an authoritative overview of violent colonial episodes. This includes the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in the 1880s, and covers the recent apology of the Canadian authorities, in 2008, for separating 150,000 children from their families, having established a residential system in which 4,000 children died. For understandable reasons, Lester’s overview of colonial exploitation errs on the side of caution and even underplays the extent to which empire was a globally extractive entity fighting territorial and trade wars across the globe. He drops in the interesting detail that the Royal Statistical Society reported the staggering figure of £89 million having been brought from India to Britain in 1884, an indication of massive wealth transfer if ever there was one (p.33).
The Truth about Empire shows the variety of scholarly interests in the field, including an essay on Tasmania by Lyndall Ryan, about the arrival of 1,500 retirees (with their families) from the Napoleon War who took up free land grants to create sheep pasture, producing wool destined for Northern English textile mills. By 1827, the Aboriginal population in this ‘settled district’ had fallen from 8,000 to 100. Ryan’s essay also navigates history wars over the retelling of these events, demonstrating how, and to what end, sources have been misused by figures past and present, including by Biggar.
All the essays are very conscious of history wars. The chapter about sati, written by Andrea Major, begins by discussing the topic’s political significance, since sati ‘functions as a symbol of supposed British imperial benevolence’ for many modern commentators (p.94). Major points out, however, that the English East India Company tolerated sati for 65 years, a period which represents two-thirds of its territorial and political control of the region. In 1805, Company officials began ‘seriously debating’ the issue when the friends of a twelve-year old widow and a local policeman rescued her from immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre. However, as Major points out, ‘no further action was taken…until 1812.’ (p.107).
Detailed official records show that regulation subsequently took place, from 1813, but during the ensuing 16 years, British officials recorded these immolations far more often than they prevented them. During this time, some officials argued that preventing sati would curb religious freedoms (p.108). Major concludes that ‘[f]ar from acting decisively to prevent sati, the East India Company prevaricated on the issue for nearly a quarter century’ while, in the interim, Indian progressives took up the cause and disagreement was between Indian and British progressives, on the one hand, and non-interventionist Indian and British administrators on the other (p.109-110).
Another original contribution to this book is ‘Empire and Fascism in Black Political Thought’ by Liam Liburd, who examines the writing and activism of British-based anti-colonial thinkers and campaigners of African and Asian descent. The essay details how, in the 1930s, many of these activists viewed fascism through the lens of colonialism, seeing parallels between the two. As Liburd points out, they argued that ‘imperialism could never decisively defeat fascism because it contained the germ of fascism within it.’ (p.232).
It is impossible to detail all the essays in this volume but each one is an education and the book as a whole offers some timely insights into both the British empire and into historiography past and present. Above all, The Truth about Empire advocates for the vital principle of academic rigour and, my goodness, we need it.
All very impressive but other than redressing centuries of revisionist history written by those whose friends & families made a packet out of empire/the colonial endeavour & accept without question the white saviour largely anglo saxon protestant mindset, what are we gona do about it, I mean, sitting around reading alternative takes or more realistic accounts is all very well but in the meantime the authorities continue pretty much unchallenged, uninterested & unhinged.
Any suggestions, Mark?
If I ruled the world, I’d reset the exploitative power relationships between colonisers and colonised that have persisted into what we laughingly call the ‘post-colonial’ period.
These continuing power relations are economic, political, and cultural. So, towards this great reset:
1. I’d compel the [former] colonial powers to compensate the survivors of their exploitation by returning with interest the wealth they stole and continue to extract in the form of land, labour, and capital.
2. I’d compel the [former] colonial powers to reconstitute our current international structures to ensure that the survivors of colonisation have parity in international decision-making.
3. I’d ‘decolonise’ our cultural institutions to break the global hegemony that the European Enlightenment still exercises over the minds of the survivors or colonisation (which is what the essays in collections like The Truth about Empire are largely about).
But, of course, I don’t rule the world; so I can do none of these things. What would you do?
Reparations? You are having a laugh.
No; the damage done can’t be repaired.
@Captain Manwhoring, why, have you one of those embarrassing laughs? Do you lose control of your bodily functions? Are you on a super-secret stealth mission/all of the above and are likely to jeopardise your plucky band of brothers as you infiltrate some wicked Cuban organic farm should your braying mirth alert the sleepy guards?
Of course, you may just be still smarting from the odd war guilt cause, but real reparations can and should occur, particularly for environmental and landcare outcomes. For example, German soldiers apparently cleared landmines from Danish beaches in an act of reparation which unfortunately punished the lowliest recruits. Other agreements have been broader:
https://theconversation.com/wars-cause-widespread-pollution-and-environmental-damage-heres-how-to-address-it-in-peace-accords-214624
The Chinese labour corps reportedly repaired much of French agricultural land after WW1, although they were employed by the victorious Allies, the principle and practice is clearly established.
Not all damage comes from wars, slavery and colonialism; much comes from neocolonialism, such as the nuclear tests inflicted on Pacific islanders and Australian first peoples. Their waters and lands have been irradiated and poisoned. Even NATO pretends to care about such things.
And because European or European-descended settlers stole so much land, and their descendants hung on to so much of it, such criminal and unequal land ownership can be repaired by redistribution. Land and loot that was used to gain political power (a common route in the British Empire) was often passed down through generations, which has led to some individual and family attempts at reparations. When reparations *were* paid out by the British imperial authorities, it was often to these people, as in the vast slave-compensation packages. The long shadow of injustices can be addressed, and possibly relations between nations can be repaired, as they have been in Europe after conflicts.
Plus, of course, those defending the British Empire on the ‘balance-sheet’ basis are effectively arguing that reparations have *already* been paid, essentially agreeing the principle. Though you can buy railways and hire people to run them (the Dutch didn’t have to invade Scotland to run our railways). And perhaps the British used a lot of forced labour to lay track and build stations. And used them for military suppression.
Some, like Shashi Tharoor, apparently see reparations as more atonement for colonialists, and would prefer specific returns coupled with sincere apologies.
And the British imperials were quick to demand their (unfair) share of reparations, such as when Alexandrian rioters damaged property in their own city (this principle somehow did not get applied when the British shelled their city (all in 1882).
Some reparations claims have been undermined (as when the South Korean dictatorship was pressured by the USA to drop claims against the USA), for reasons which may have something to do with victors’ justice.
And German reparations helped build the Israeli state.
Just because some crimes were committed centuries past does not mean there is a break in criminality: British imperials continued and compounded these crimes in denial, secrecy, censorship, persecution, misrepresentation and profiting from the proceeds of crime. Why should there be a statue of limitations for colonial crimes, given their severity, widespread impact, poisonous legacy? If they’d only paid compensation to the enslaved and apologised at the time, instead of glorifying British abolitionism and enriching the real criminals ever since. See mathematical models proving the Matthew Effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
But if you ruled the world wouldn’t you be a ‘colonialist’?
I can’t think of a single country bar perhaps Iceland that has either been ‘colonised’ or “colonised” other countries.
Before the arrival of the British, African societies were more than happy to conquer and colonise other African societies as well as enslaving their populations.The Mughals colonised India before the Brits arrived and the Aztecs and Incas had colonised most of Central and South America long before the Spanish showed up.
The movement of people’s and the ‘colonisation’ of people’s by other people is as old as human history. The ‘West’ however defined is just the the most recent example to attract the ire of academics, but fashions change especially in academia.
What did the Romans ever do for us!!
And in every instance such colonisation is wrong.
Very good point, and it has to be said that young people have these aggressive sometimes violent urges that pretty much seem inherent to the human condition until one reaches the age where thru necessity i.e., just not being fit to handle such aggression or so sick & tired of it ye can’t be bothered, one pretty much bides oot the road as much as possible, how we point these youths full of energy in a more positive direction than might be the case if they’re simply recruited into the employ of the British military is something we might like to think about.
I think the first thing I would do is ban the manufacture and sale of arms that murder huge numbers of people and cause unnecessary destruction that takes years if not decades or even centuries to recover from. I don’t know that reparations necessarily are the answer because what you would in effect be doing is robbing peter to pay paul so that it wouldn’t be all that long before you were having to rob paul to give peter half a chance of a half decent standard of living. If we’re all going to be connected as seems to be the consequence of globalisation then we need to take our responsibilities to others more seriously is what I would say. Pressure must be kept on the suits & those eligible to vote must tell them either you endeavour to do good or you get fk all votes from us.
The trouble is, though, that the vast majority voters, all of whom elect representatives to ‘do good’, don’t share your (our?) opinion as what that would entail.
BTW. Your prejudices are showing.
So, my recent take was:
“My impression is that the British Empire is increasingly only defended publicly by lightweights, cranks, psychopaths, racists, zealots, charlatans of various stripes… The trick of many British Unionists is to pretend that the Empire is over (it isn’t), because of quite familiar reasons.”
British colonial history is ongoing. Who is academically covering this? Are there European trends? New indigenous histories (if that’s the right term)? I see there is a growing area of Atlantic history these days, which covers imperial rivalry, transatlantic slavery, indigenous resistance, Christian missionary activity etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_history
Oh, and I appreciate the efforts academics of empire make to engage with the wider public in MOOCs, blogs and so forth. I think this activity makes it much more likely that omissions, misrepresentations and outright fabrications are going to be challenged in popular culture. Even militarists are having to reckon with colonial troops and other colonised people more these days, it seems. Although there’s an unhealthy militarist trend in Scotland celebrating regimental honours for what were historically massacres (perhaps out of step with some of our European neighbours? Amitav Ghosh writes about the Dutch reaction against colonialist PJ Coen).
You might like to read a couple of other reviews:
https://unherd.com/2024/01/the-empireland-delusion/
https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/when-everything-is-empire/);
You know how unwise it is to just rely on on review, especially when the Author’s prejudices coincide with yours.
But neither of the articles you linked is a review of Alan Lester’s book.
You appear to be on the back foot, Steve.
Unherd, more correctly Unread.
Interesting review. The connection it points to between colonialism and slavery struck a chord. In the argument over Melville monument in Edinburgh, the focus always seems to be on whether Dundas’ delaying the abolition of the slave trade demonstrates a pro-slavery stance. And yet his grievous role as colonial supremo in the Caribbean is not open to any question – whether it’s his backing of Balcarres’ persecution of the Maroons in Jamaica or his attempt to overthrow the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and reintroduce slavery there. His utter failure in this latter respect is something we should celebrate.
I’ve never seen the point of such token celebrations and protests, other than as virtue-signalling. We should be working to dismantle the unequal power relations that continue to beset the world order instead of just advertising what fine fellows we are.
The lead taken by black researchers academics and campaigners is part of a process of decolonisation that should be applauded and supported imho. The resistance from relatives of Dundas suggests it is anything from performative but strikes a chord, as does the research which specifically names the beneficiaries of the profits from the slave trade.
The tokenism, to which Paddy alludes in his reference to the stairheid rammie over the Melville Monument in St Andrew’s Square, is all very ‘worthy’, but where’s the beef? How does it effect real outcomes for the survivors of colonialism?
I do agree, however, that the work of historians and historiographers to decolonise the academy is productive in this respect.
It’s only tokenistic if it involves nothing else. No one is suggesting that it’s enough.
@Paddy Farrington, there’s a strong connection between slavery and the militarism of the British Empire too, and not just the temporary enslavement of naval impressment or time-served purchase. Some apparently fought against Maroons.
https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/west-india-regiments
I saw a reference to the British enslavement of Africans with documentary evidence in one of the colonial engagements after slavery was officially outlawed there (and even used as a pretext for invasion); adult males from a coastal people were forced to choose between civil or martial slavery; the military recruits were then used as cannon fodder against inland peoples.
Africans were still reportedly abducted and pressed into military slavery for the British in the world wars of the last century, although their recruitment was supposedly voluntary (recruiters got commissions), and sent to places like Burma. And of course German PoWs were used as temporary slaves to pay war reparations for years after conflict ended, against the laws of war pertaining at the time.
The topic of British military enslavement is perhaps ripe for further study.
I host a Ukrainian family. The mother was educated via the SovU system but is now old enough to have formed her own views on “The British Empire”. ……….Murderous from start to finish. Killed more people than any other including Stalin.
I’d hazard a guess that she is not the only one holding that view. Bolt in the USA (which the Brtis were responsible for) and I would not be surprised if the body count was not circa 500 million. The various genocides committed by the British makes the Nazis (or indeed the israeli jews) look like rank amateurs. I class those defending the British Empire alongside those claiming that the Nazis did not murder millions via gas chambers.
@Mike Parr, it’s a curious thing, but I’ve just listened to the second of forensic psychologist Gwen Adshead’s Reith Lectures on violence, and the only institutional form of violence I think she mentioned was from Nazi Germany. Religion has only been really treated as a moral framework, possible deterrence and comfort, so far.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1dh6Wd9vmhyPW9khW45Wpmd/five-things-ive-learned-from-working-with-violent-perpetrators
What is she thinking about? I understand her speciality is domestic violence, but surely those conditioned to commit extreme violence on behalf of the British Empire will also tend to be violent out of uniform or office hours. She talks about normalisation of violence without mentioning the most enormous elephant in the room. Well, there’s two more episodes.
What would the British Empire say from the psychiatrist’s couch?
There is no end to it. If you don’t want to be euro-cenric, the Zulu colonised southern Africa with extreme violence and nearly exterminated the San (etc).
Presumably people in Britain should accept responsibility for British imperialism and colonialism rather than that of other nations and peoples?
they should call an amnesty across the globe, should’ve happened during covid to be honest, then all nations should have got everything back to a base subsistence level where all people were housed, fed, watered and basically more or less OK or being looked after, except them that were dead obviously, we have learnt absolutely zilch since the covid years, in fact given the amount of warfare going on at the moment we as a species have proved ourselves worse than most of us probably ever imagined possible
There will and should be no end to it until:
1. All [former] colonial powers compensate the survivors of their exploitation by returning with interest the wealth they stole and continue to extract in the form of land, labour, and capital.
2. World government reconstitutes its current international structures to ensure that the survivors of colonisation have parity with all [former] colonial power in international decision-making.
3. The world’s cultural institutions are ‘decolonised’, to break the global hegemony that [former] colonial powers still exercise over the minds of the survivors of their colonisation.
Yes but there will inevitably be a cut-off point. The Vikings? The Normans? I think people need to be honest about this. According to research the biggest colonial invader-killer as a percentage of the world population by far was Genghis Khan, yet there is an airport named after him in Mongolia.
Yes; but we’re talking about the present, not the past (granted, for the grudge and grievance brigade, it is still about the past). As far as I know, the colonial powers you mention no longer exist; so they can’t now be called to account for their exploitation of other people and their resources. It would therefore be absurd to require the Mongol Empire/the Norse Empire/the Norman Empire/the Ottoman Empire and the like to compensate the survivors of their exploitation, liberate and empower them in global decision-making, and dismantle the cultural hegemony it continues to exercise over the people it colonised.
No longer exist would be a misunderstanding e.g. arguably the Normans established themselves as the ruling elite of England very early . . . and remain so to this day, heading up the oppressive class system that still directly impoverishes much of the population. What no longer exists is the power they came from but not the power they still exert. So much so that in fact they are seen as a quintessential form of Englishness.
I agree with you in principle but in reality we all know what the focus is here – the British Empire and some other European ones. And I suspect it will remain so with only rare other outliers. I am not crying over it, what comes around goes around but the nature of any recompense is the real question and one not easily answered unless you think the estimated trillion pound ‘costs’ quoted are realistic.
@Niemand
The Normans also established themselves as the ruling elite of Scotland very early too, during Dauíd mac Maíl Choluim’s ‘Davidian’ Revolution, in the second quarter of the 12th century (which along with the Norman conquest of England was itself part of the First European (Carolingian) Revolution of 970–1215 CE.) Indeed, you could argue that the British Empire incorporated-and-surpassed the ‘Norman Empire’ in the British Isles with the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early modern period.
But, yes; the focus in Bella is of course on the British Empire, by which it’s imagined that Scotland has been colonised.
I think we all need to take a deep breath here & remember the ald Ashcroft line ‘you’re a slave to money then you die’ the colonial mindset runs deep in UK society with the hierarchy of the school, workplace & world all round about you whether you stay local or travel out with your locality, how’s about we begin from where we are & see if what we can raise awareness of from our own doorstep outwards has any ability to change the minds of those youngsters out there that maybe are in a similar confused state to that which were once in if we’re at all honest with ourselves
@mark
Yep; the UK has been ‘colonised’ by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class that came to own our commonwealth and our means of producing that wealth from early modern times that subsequently acquired political control over our land and labour and extended its cultural hegemony over our minds. The plight of the proletariat in this country is exactly the same in this respect as that of the so-called ‘wretched of the earth’.
So ‘we” should be compensating the citizens of Singapore, a previous British colony which is now the richest country on the planet?
Or the people of Hong Kong who are now desperate to escape the clutches of the CCP and find sanctuary in the ‘colonialist’ UK?
The unequal treaties and the opium wars still matter in China. Perhaps we should try and understand why.
@Paddy Farrington, and (as I’ve mentioned) all the loot and human remains the British carted off, some of which fills our museum shelves/vaults/to-be-stolen-piles, still matter and are routinely contested. Perhaps the British are the worst in giving it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_(cultural_property)
Often whole islands, sometimes archipelagoes, remain in the hands of the colonial powers.
There is a sense that intellectual property and biological specimens were looted so much as to bring into question why current laws seem skewed to protect the colonial powers. I mean, that is essentially why the UN Convention on Biological Diversity sought redress on this matter.
And much damage can be done by skewed historiography. As mentioned, Europeans owe a lot to the underpaid, ill-treated and exploited Chinese Labour Corps who dug trenches, built and maintained roads, repaired tanks during WW1; and after cleared landmines and restored agricultural land. Yet their contributions were largely written out of history, making it easier for the British authorities to deport Chinese seamen from Britain after WW2 (see Home Office 213/926).
Yes; we should return even to Singaporeans the wealth we extracted from them in the form of land, labour, and capital. It’s rightfully theirs, after all.
DAN’S XMAS MESSAGE #3 (Slighty revised)
Dear Sir/Madam, Thank you for your consideration at this difficult time. I am feeling a little better now although I have noticed the beginnings of a rash around the big toe of my left foot. Would it be overly remiss of me to ask if any provision has been made by the Department for Work & Pensions with regard to the early onset of the highly contagious Nay Toe. I ask only because it was this particular ailment that led to the untimely demise of my aforementioned friend. As I am sure you can appreciate his passing was as great a shock to me as it was to his immediate family, particularly when we consider the expected lifespan of male members of his clan. For example, his father & grandfather lived well into their 70s. I would have thought he would have done likewise & can only conclude that the early onset & debilitating effects of the aforementioned Nay Toe were too much even for a hardy character such as himself. As I am sure you can appreciate the proceedings that have taken place behind closed doors over the past few decades lead one only to the unquestionable conclusion that since at least the 1960s the enemy has had the upper hand & infiltrated all aspects of public life like some sort of malign tumour becoming ever more powerful in its coordinated, ever more concentrated attempts to eradicate the hardworking indigenous male & replace him if not with an android or robot then at least with one of those authoritarian brats so favoured by the British state being as they have been similarly indoctrinated via that thoroughly Germanic system of education which holds in highest regard those long outdated thoroughly Victorian petty bourgeois values which as history has shown us only ever lead to further reinforcement of what has recently been exposed as nothing more nor less than a gateway or surefire access point to that heavily criticised vastly overrated & yet still widespread monolingual & monoglot Anglo-American career orientated orthodoxy which in its white Anglo Saxon Bible thumping so-called purity seeks to recruit our youngsters from the earliest age & train them under the guise of personal growth to ignore, indeed, even despise the advice & teachings of their forebears & to instead act as the very enemy of those forebears in bringing that aforementioned British state’s colonial project one or 2 crucial steps closer towards completion, the consequences of which having been enacted & set into statute shall of course never in our lifetime or indeed in any future lifetime, ever be reversed, Kindest regards, Dan.
Lenin famously described imperialism as the most advanced stage of capitalism… Surely capitalism is the key word here, as Raymond Williams would say?
You can’t compare pre-capitalist conoloinisation projects (the Vikings, the Normans) with capitalist ones…
The means of production are totally different…
So, for example, the British destoyed the highly artistic and rich textile and fabrics culture of India….
British soldiers literally went about smashing up the shops of humble Indian craftsmen and weavers…
They did this so they could export vast amounts of cotton and jute to Manchester and Dundee where it would be used for manufacture before being shipped back to India as a finished product and sold to the Indians…
That’s capitalims, that’s empire, that’s colonialism…
In terms of Scotland, according to Tom Devine, there are reasonable grounds to believe that capitalist lift-off in Scotland comes about unqiuely because of the slave trade… linen becomes Scotland’s biggest export, and most of it goes to the slave plantations in the Carribean and America where is was used to provide basic clothing for the slaves among other things…
This is important because Eric Williams’ landmark book “Capitalism and Slavery” posits the theory that the lift-off for capitalism, the accumulation of capital necessary for the industrial revolution, comes from the Atlantic slave-trade…
English economic historians have largely rebutted this, but in Scotland’s case, at least according to T Devine, it may well be true…
@Douglas, yes, there’s an interesting point in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, where Amitav Ghosh writes about how the Dutch Empire’s VOC (innovative joint stock company) waged an ‘unhinged’ extirpation war on clove and nutmeg trees, after the prices of spices fell (and after they’d massacred or terrorised the original human cultivators). The perceived values of these commodities were far more fetishistic than rational. The picture painted was of conquerors jaded with an ‘exhausted’ earth.
There’s little doubt that the vast fortunes that Scottish merchants made as a result of their gaining access to English plantations after the Union provided the capital that seeded the Industrial Revolution. Capital was one of the factors of production, along with large quantities of raw materials and labour, that capitalism and modernity needed for ‘lift-off’.
There’s also little doubt that you can compare British colonialism with earlier, premodern examples. Colonialism is the practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. Britain did this in modern times only on a much larger scale than have other colonial powers throughout history.
Yes – the Normans literally carved up swathes of land and ‘gifted’ it to their nobles. In many cases, the ‘old money’ that generated is still in the hands of descendent families today. They also replaced just about every Anglo-Saxon bishop with a Norman one.
I am not a scholar of British Empire by any means but I do know that its tenor changed over time. For a long period the colonial thrust was entirely commercial – private traders mercilessly exploiting natives for profit with impunity. This did eventually meet opposition in Britain but the government response was not to attempt to end colonialism, but to kind of nationalise it and then start talking about helping to ‘improve’ the colonised nations with infrastructure projects alongside ‘civilising’ actions and ideas. This arrogance was arguably worse than what went before.
Not just English but most economic historians have rebutted the theory that the “profits’ from the slave trade led to capitalism and the industrial revolution.
If that’s the case why didn’t Spain and Portugal also achieve economic lift off due to their slave trade, why didn’t Arabia and indeed Africa not do likewise as they also engaged in slavery to a vastly greater extent than the British Empire?
As for Lenins theory of ‘excess capital’ been exported to the ’empire’ the vast majority of private British investment went to the USA and Argentina in the C19th.
The empire was funded entirely by the British state at a huge loss to the British taxpayer as critics at the time (not least Adam Smith) pointed out. There was no profit in Empire, it cost a fortune to maintain and police. Put simply from a UK perspective it was a complete waste of time, effort and money and ‘we’ would have been a lot better off just staying at home. Singapore would still be a malarial infested swamp, Hong Kong probably wouldn’t exist, India would still be a collection of perpetually warring kingdoms and sub-saharan africa would still be exporting slaves to Arabia.
What did the British ever do for us?
I rather doubt that Tom Devine would agree with your contention that the Empire was but a drain on Britain, given his detailed assessment of the role of the trade in tobacco, sugar, and cotton from British colonies on the development of Scotland’s capitalist economy.
No doubt Tom Devine would. But like all ‘Marxist’ historians he was wrong. Sorry
1. So, where did the investment for large-scale industrial and infrastructure development in Britain from the 1750s come if not from the vast fortunes of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar magnates? A magic money tree?
2. There a many reasons why the Industrial Revolution began in the UK rather than in Spain and Portugal. One of the factors was that the wealth that the Spanish Crown extracted in the form of silver from mining in the New World wasn’t transformed into capital (put to work in manufacturing to make more wealth) in the same way that profits extracted from the cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations by their private owners in Britain were.
3. Lenin’s theory of excess capital is the idea that the accumulation of capital leads industrially advanced countries leads to the export of surplus capital to less developed countries. Both the US and the Argentine were much less industrially developed than Britain was during the period we’re talking about. Large-scale industrial development didn’t take off in the US until the second quarter of the 19th century.
4. The British Empire wasn’t funded by the state until it was ‘nationalised’ in the 1870s, when the Crown adopted the role of global hegemon and global policeman. Until then, it had been operated, administered, and defended by private interests. Private joint-stock companies, like East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, owned both the assets and liabilities of the Empire.
5. It was certainly worth the investment: by 1870, a quarter of global trade was in the hands of British companies and represented a third of Britain’s total GDP, which was by far the largest in the world.
Sorry for my late response but had an emergency boiler repair to sort out in Galashiels…anyway
1. Where did the money come from?
It was borrowed/mortgaged. Both London and Amsterdam at the time were the only 2 cities that had developed international finance . The slave colonies of the Caribbean were bankrupt by the end of the C18th and when the slave owners were bailed out by the British
state in circa 1830 the vast majority of the money went to pay off their debtors.
2. Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK?
2 main reasons, the invention of the steam engine (human genius which Marxists completely discount) and the UK’s massive coal and iron ore reserves.
3. Lenins theory of excess capital was supposed to explain why ‘imperliasm’
was the ‘last stage of capitalism’. Neither the USA nor Argentina were UK Colonies and according to Lenin excess capital was meant to sustain colonies.
4. Both the East India company and the Hudson bay company were essentially bankrupt by the late C18th but the British state took over their funding until fully nationalising them in 1870, what is Capitalist about the state bailing out failed companies?
5. By 1870 a quarter of global trade was controlled by the British. Indeed it was but they didn’t make any profit from it as all those battleships and cruisers cost an awful lot of money.
Put simply the British Empire was a mercantilist not capitalist empire and had to erect huge tariff barriers and as a result probably stymied economic development in both the colonies and the UK.
As I say it would probably have been better if the British had just traded with the rest of the world rather than conquer it, but that’s a ‘what if’ of history so who knows?
1. And from where did the finance that the entrepreneurs borrowed come from? Who made up the 18th century ‘international financial markets’ if not the magnates who had amassed stupendous fortunes from the trade in cotton, sugar, tobacco, and slaves?
2. By the beginning of the 19th century, the profits to be made from the trade in the aforementioned commodities had indeed declined; but, by that time, the smart money had moved into mining and manufacture, which were the new growth sectors in the British economy.
3. The industrial revolution began in the UK because (as I said before) it was in Britain that the three factors of production (land, labour, and capital – including the intellectual capital of innovators like Arkwright and Watt) first came together in sufficient measures to achieve ‘lift-off’ in terms of economic growth.
4. Lenin’s theory of imperialism is the idea that the concentration of capital in more developed countries leads to the exploitation of less developed countries. This is because the exponential growth of capital in more developed countries leads to overproduction, which puts a brake on that growth. To release the pressure of overproduction, capitalists export its surplus to less developed countries (including but not restricted to colonies), where land and labour is cheaper. Thus, Lenin believed, capitalism creates world markets to head off its own collapse, creating an international proletariat whose growing impoverishment will eventually spark world revolution.
5. The East India Company failed largely because, to encourage free trade, the British parliament abolished its trade monopoly with India in 1813 and with China in 1833. The British Crown ‘nationalised’ the company 1858, taking over its Indian and Chinese possessions, its government powers and machinery, and its armed forces in the aftermath of the Indian rebellion of the previous year. Though what any of this has to do with how the Union of 1707 enabled Scottish entrepreneurs to amass the vast fortunes, from which the capital required to spark the industrial revolution were drawn, is beyond me.
6. Building those battleships and cruisers, etc., was a highly profitable enterprise. As Lenin pointed out, militarism generally is also a good way to export surplus capital.
7. The British Empire was a primarily commercial empire rather than a conquistadorial one; it had more to do (again, as Lenin argued) with exploiting markets rather than with conquering, subjugating, or subduing weaker powers.
“the invention of the steam engine (human genius which Marxists completely discount) “: this rather reveals your lack of or partial understanding of Marxism. Marxists don’t deny the agency of individuals: how else would the means of production evolve other than through a process of invention and discovery? The key point is that such agency is constrained by the economic, political, cultural environment pertaining at any particular time.
The steam engine is a case in point. Like other scientific inventions, it was the product of several great minds, including Denis Papin, Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, while later improvements brought by James Watt transformed the steam engine into one of the drivers of the industrial revolution. But in fact, the basic principle of steam power was understood as far back as Archimedes. However it could only come into its own in a societal context where it could be used and in which there was an incentive for it to be developed, many centuries later.
@Paddy Farrington, or more likely, inventions tend to be more incremental, accidental, and communal than often racist-flavoured GM(OW) historiography suggests.
And you don’t have to be a Marxist to view James Watt as a patent-squatter who held back the development of the steam engine for decades. That’s capitalism for you!
The really successful model is idea communism, which underpinned European imperialism through the fortuitous adoption of Latinised alphabets (perhaps invented originally by itinerant miners on the borders of Egypt) which proved so amenable to movable type and the dissemination of printed works.
But perhaps the more important question is about what counts as development, and what counts as maldevelopment? Wrong turns in technology tend to be more obvious with hindsight, of course. I found James Burke very thought-provoking on these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
Yep; intellectual capital (the knowledge the engineers you mention inherited from their predecessors and to which they added their value) was [only] one of the factors of production whose favourable convergence sparked the industrial revolution in Britain. The investment made by the merchants, who put their vast fortunes to work in new industrial enterprises to make even more money, was another factor that contributed to the ‘lift-of’ of exponential economic growth at that particular time, in that particular place, as were the ready supply of raw materials (e.g. coal, iron ore) and of migrant labour following the land clearances of improving landowners.
That last remark was in response to Paddy’s, BTW.
@John Learmonth, I don’t know where you get your cockeyed view of history from, but you’ve made some elementary mistakes. For a start, British royals invested heavily in slavery, and they sold monopolies in the form of royal charters. You need to understand the imperial relations between the royal family, the Crown, Parliament (filled with slavers), colonial regimes and the nature of state enterprises. Some adventures were arms-length (such as the royal letters of marque carried by privateers, who often harassed, robbed and murdered representatives of rival empires). The British Empire is very much a royal brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company
There was a massive nationalised industry in the form of the Royal Navy, and much was invested in Royal Navy Dockyards with their ancillary trades. If you want an accessible model, I recommend Empire: Total War, although you’ll have to do your historical checking on that game. As Wikipedia puts it: “The Royal Navy played a key part in establishing and defending the British Empire”.
Much of the relevant investment came from people divesting from the slave industries (as first trade in, then ownership of people was restricted), and part of that came in the vast compensation paid to slave owners, who then reinvested in the other businesses of the time.
And much investment from British slavery comes in the form of political capital. Once you’re in Parliament or the Lords, you can rake it in through corrupt practices and favourable legislation. And their descendants are still there today.
British industry was stimulated by imperial law because, as Caricom puts it:
“For 400 years the trade and production policies of Europe could be summed up in the British slogan: ‘not a nail is to be made in the colonies’.”
and British colonies were forced to buy their manufactured goods from the British metropole. Scotland made slave cloth, for example, although the common name Osnaburg may confuse.
And despite your obvious racism, nobody participated in racialised chattel slavery more than the British.
And the National Archives have recently released a tranche of documentation on the RAC:
“We hold the records of the Royal African Company and its successor the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. This collection is incredibly important nationally and internationally, as the Royal African Company transported more enslaved African men, women and children to the Americas than any other single institution in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.”
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-detached-papers-new-records-on-the-transatlantic-slave-trade-on-discovery/
What should the British Empire be but a colossal engine for manufacturing adverse childhood experiences on an ambitious global scale?
Well, paying attention to those alleged Great Men (Occasionally Women) does distract from all those abducted, abused and enslaved children, whether powering the British Empire’s factories or plantations, being raped and tortured, or just murdered by men or machinery along the way. What traumas were carried down through generations? What horrors were instilled by missionaries keen on original (and not so original) sin? What about the child soldiers and sailors, and those impressed by royal warrant?
Anyway, you can pay too much attention to coal power and not enough to that provided by human children and nonhuman animals, enslaved and unfree adults, whose labour was vastly more flexible than crude steam could ever have been.
The British National Archives reproduce a useful guide to Important Raw Materials from the Colonial Empire (during WW2):
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/home-front-1939-1945-part-one/important-raw-materials/
Any contributions from indigenous people of former colonies? Or is this the usual Britain that talks but never listens?
@Roy Rover, among the contributors, “Omeasoo Wahpasiw is a néhiyaw iskwew living in Anishinaabe territory.” Other contributors have presumably been listening as part of their research and activism.