A People’s History of the British Empire: The Blood has never dried. Compensation for Colonialism-$58 Trillion

The Aftermath of Colonialism is evident in 3rd world misery 

Forgotten claims? Forgotten heroes? Forgotten atrocities?

A People’s History of the British Empire:

A rebuttal to Furgusan, Boot, Kaplan  & other Colonial apologists. 

“A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.“ George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was right. Those who were able to expunge the cancer of Colonialism (India, Pakistan, Nigeria) are weak and had to overcome their hemorrhage. Those who were unable to overcome the occupation (the Native Americans, the Mayas, Incas, the Aborigines of Australia, the original people of the Caribbean etc.) are in a coma unable to remove the parasites.

 

The British were responsible for the death and destruction of millions of people in South Asia. London was a shanty-town in the 15^thcentury, where Benaras, Calcutta and Delhi were the epitome of cosmopolitan and tolerance, industrialization, art, music and culture. The British destroyed the local industries. ”The What Man’s Burden” was to civilize the populations and “Christianize” them. Asian and African nations were called “tribes’ and European tribes were called “nations”.

 

The infrastructure of Britain, the roads, railways, sewer lines, water works, subway stations, electrical grids were built on the looted gold, spices, opium, sugar cane, and oil from the colonies. Entire civilizations were reduced to slavery which destroyed the peaceful village culture of Africa and Asia. Uprooted populations were sent to the cities with improper sanitation and facilities. This led to disasters which we are living with today.

 

With the destruction of the village culture, the population was at the mercy of the Centralized colonialists. The aim was to create chaos and turmoil. The result was pestilence, disease, and death.

 

Huge political issues have been left behind involving mass movement of populations from Europe to the colonies in Palestine, Azania (South Africa),  Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, Americas, South America. Intractable disputes were created which left the indigenous peoples to having to deal with the new realities in Palestine, Kashmir, China and many parts of Africa and Asia. Neocolonialism now takes advantage of these disputes.    

 

The term “democracy” (which does not appear in the US constitution–See my articles on this site on how Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Socrates wrote reams against this invention) was coined to disenfranchise the former rulers and upset the political systems of the indigenous populations. The colonies will never forget. The invoices have been prepared and ready to be mailed. There is some glacial progress in the United Nations and other international agencies.

 

Barely half a century later, the colonies are mocked, goaded and made fun of because of their penury. It is like a home invasion robber taking over your house stealing everything in it, raping your daughter, stealing your bank account and your lands, and leaving the street gang in charge of the ruins and a few days later driving by in your Mercedes making fun of your poverty.

 

THE EFFECTS OF COLONIALISM 

Ayman El Amir syas the following:

 “There was a trend during the colonial era among dominated peoples to pretend, by way of desperate resignation, that their colonial rulers were more benign than others. They thanked their lucky stars that the British administration, for example, was less brutal than the French who, in turn, were more merciful than the Portuguese. As four centuries of imperialism and colonialism have proven, the atrocities and consequences of the colonial era have belied the claim of “the white man’s burden” of extending the benefits of Western civilisation to the “primitive savages” they conquered.

The fact is that colonial powers plundered the wealth of future nation- states, displaced tribal populations, carved up territories, sowed the seeds of future inter-state and tribal conflicts, reduced the indigenous population to a sub-human status and enslaved them.

When the conquerors finally departed, they left virtually nothing in place to help colonised peoples develop independent governance or a meaningful political community. The legendary statesman Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, eloquently put it this way:

“It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.”

Historically, the colonial experience leaves no doubt that all its protagonists sought to create a subject race of colonised peoples. Together with suppressive military power, the cultivation of this sense of inferiority facilitated the plundering of the colonial territories’ resources and the subjugation of their peoples. In Egypt, for example, the racist undertone of colonial rule was reflected in Lord Cromer’s memoirs, Modern Egypt.

As the British proconsul in Egypt from 1882 to 1907, Cromer denigrated Egypt’s centuries-old civilisation and multicultural tradition as “barbarous”, “coarse”, “cruel” and “lacking in harmony”. His prescription for the Egyptians was to abandon their crude cultural heritage, Pharaonic, Christian and Arab, and try to aspire to the superior ways of the civilised European colonialist. Brutal force and racist subjugation were the hallmark of colonial occupation and administration wherever invading imperial armies set foot.”

….British colonialism had its share of acts of genocide too, whether in the suppression of the Kikuyu tribes revolt in Kenya in the 1950s, the starvation of millions in India, or the Opium Wars against China in the mid-19th century, to name but a few.

The 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was a watershed landmark ending the centuries-old colonial era.

Soon afterwards the US was involved in the Vietnam War that ended more than a decade later, leaving behind tens of thousands of American casualties and millions of Vietnamese dead, maimed or terminally ill by chemical defoliants. Like France, Britain and other colonial powers, the US never offered an apology to the Vietnamese people nor was it condemned for war crimes.Colonialism in all its abominable forms, whether direct military conquest or settler colonialism, has crept into the 21st century. Its cruelties are daily played out in Iraq and Palestine for the world to see and despair over.http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/854/op6.htm

THE BEGINNING OF COLONIALISM IN THE SUBCONTINENT: The effects still remain in Bengal

Sankar Ray says the following about the beginning of Colonialism in the Subcontinent:

“Two hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 June 1757, the last sovereign nawab of Bengal (which included present-day Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Bangladesh) was defeated on the banks of the Ganga by an army under the command of the British East India Company’s Colonel Robert Clive. The battle came to be known as the Battle of Plassey, after the mango orchard of Palashi, near Murshidabad, on which it was fought. Clive’s victory and the subsequent annexation of Bengal allowed the East India Company to strengthen its military might across India, paving the way for it to make massive economic gains – some would say plunder. “

In spite of the importance of this turning point in the region’s history, however, media pundits and historians throughout the Subcontinent showed little interest this past June in remembering the death of Nawab Mirza Muhammad Sirajuddaula (see pic), of his commanders Mir Madan and Mohanlal, or of the hundreds of soldiers who lost their lives on the day that British colonialism established its first territorial foothold on Southasian soil. Even as academics queued up in hope of publishing their essays on the mutinous events of 1857, which took place a full 100 years after the battle, the memorial in Plassey remained largely neglected. No government official deigned to lay a wreath here. 

A child of the royal family of Murshidabad, then the capital of Bengal, Sirajuddaula was groomed by his maternal grandfather, Nawab Alivardi Khan, as his successor. To acquaint the 13-year-old boy with the arts of governance and martial affairs, Alivardi took him to battle against the Marathas in 1746. In May 1752, the septuagenarian nawab named Sirajuddaula his heir, splitting Bengal’s gentry along complicated lines of loyalty. With the death of Alivardi in April 1756, things took a difficult turn. The defeat of the army of the 24-year-old nawab, enthroned only 14 months earlier, was no feat of military brilliance, but rather a tale of colonial cunning.

Though discontentment within certain palace factions following Sirajuddaula’s ascension were a shot in the arm for the British, the plot for the young nawab’s overthrow had in fact been in place long beforehand. According to Robert Orme, an official historian of the East India Company, the British had prepared a blueprint for the conquest of Bengal soon after Alivardi named his successor. British private trade had been experiencing severe cash-flow problems since the late 1740s, and financial crisis had also engulfed the Mughal regime.

Bengal, in the meantime, was incredibly rich. According to official colonial records, Shaista Khan, governor of Bengal from 1664 to 1688, had amassed 640 million rupees, excluding gold and jewellery; during the early 1680s, he had even been able to give a bribe of 20 million rupees to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for an extension of his governorship.

In 1756, Sirajuddaula seized Calcutta. Months before Clive’s local co-conspirators were brought on board, the Council of Fort St George, the proto-colonial administration in Madras, had instructed officers of the East India Company not only to ensure the “mere retaking of Calcutta” and the payment of “ample reparations”, but “to effect a junction with any powers in the province of Bengal that might be dissatisfied with the violence of the Nawab’s government or that might have pretensions to the Nawabship.”

The rest is history.

Clive moved towards Murshidabad for a head-on clash with Sirajuddaula’s troops at the orchards of Palashi. Sirajuddaula’s commander-in-chief Mir Jafar Ali Khan, in league with the British, defected, causing the collapse of the nawab’s army. The fateful battle went on for eight hours, after which the defeated Sirajuddaula tried to flee towards Rajmahal, in present-day Jharkhand. He was captured, and eventually killed on 2 July 1757.

After Sirajuddaula’s death, Mir Jafar was installed as Nawab of Bengal. Clive, however, made it difficult for him to rule effectively, extracting a massive yearly tax from him, in addition to compensation for losses and military expenditures. The annual revenue extorted by the colonial regime from Bengal ranged between GBP 2-4 million – enough to ensure that the East India Company would be able to maintain its armed forces, and to keep the newly acquired territories under its control. Clive went on to attain knighthood, and to reward some of his other co-conspirators handsomely.

There have been some notable attempts to rescue Sirajuddaula’s reputation. Kali Kinkar Dutta (in his book Sirajuddoula), Akshay Kumar Maitreya (in a similarly titled book in Bengali) and even Rabindranath Tagore considered the nawab a gallant opponent of British colonisation. Luke Scrafton, the director of the East India Company from 1765 to 1768, joined them in their praise.

“The name of Sirajuddaula stands higher in the scale of honour than does the name of Clive,” he wrote. “He was the only one of the principal actors who did not attempt to deceive.” Scrafton added that the young Sirajuddaula had taken an oath on the Koran at Alivardi’s deathbed that he would thenceforth not touch liquor – and that he had kept his promise.

http://tinyurl.com/2ato6s

ECONOMIC ASPHYXIATION OF THE COLONIES: 

Lal Vinay says: ”Some apologists for the British empire, whose numbers have increased rapidly in recent years under aggressive cheerleaders such as Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, and Robert Kaplan, have long argued that British colonial rule was, on balance, something of a gentlemanly affair.“

“The British liked their tea and gin and tonic, cricket and polo, and dealing with the natives was something of a nuisance. Sometime after General Dyer had shot dead at least 379 people at the Jallianwala Bagh, the British initiated an official inquiry and Dyer was brought before the Hunter commission.

In the House of Commons, Churchill thundered forth about how ‘frightfulness’ or terror of the sort in which Dyer engaged was not part of the British pharmacoepia. This is the kind of ‘evidence’ that is usually summoned forth to support the view that the British cared much about what is today called ‘accountability’ and were guided by principles of ‘fair play’. To clinch their argument, the members of the British Empire fan club never fail to mention that had Gandhi faced any foe other than the British, he would certainly have been shot dead long before he had multiple opportunities to create mischief. The apologists invite their readers to countenance the fate of Gandhi before Goebbels’s thugs and Nazi tanks”

“..a history, more precisely, of British repression, of the suffering imposed upon the Empire’s victims, and frequent resistance to colonial rule. Most histories of the British Empire have dwelled on regimes of law and order installed by the British, the bringing of the railways, roads, and telegraph to the natives, the institutionalisation of formal education, the introduction of British political traditions and institutions—not only parliamentary democracy, but law courts, an adversarial judicial system, and so on. Newsinger dispenses with the idea, which is almost like a religion to (especially Anglo) historians of the British empire, that the good must be weighed alongside the (little) evil and that the well-intentioned proconsuls and office-bearers of the Empire have not been done justice.”“What Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, some more familiar than others. The story of the brutal suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, for instance, has been the staple of nationalist Indian narratives and is gen erally encountered in most histories of the British empire.

The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opinion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

“Though India was doubtless Britain’ most important colony, the British were, as Newsinger amply demonstrates, ecumenical in their pursuit of dominance and, when faced with resistance, unflinching retribution. British historians are fond of dwelling on the abolition of slavery in British possessions, but Newsinger alerts us to the less frequently mentioned suppression of slave revolts by the British in their Caribbean possessions. They initiated ferocious antiinsurgency campaigns against the Malays in the 1940s, pioneering methods of ‘forced villigisation’ that would later be adopted by the Americans in Vietnam.

The Mau Mau revolt in Kenya was crushed with complete abandon, and arguably the British abandoned all restraint on the theory that African people were even less deserving than other people of any measure of dignity and respect. Nor does Newsinger at all incline to the relatively benign reading of the devastating Irish Potato famine of the 1840s, which killed a million people, as merely a consequence of ill-informed English administrative decisions and neglect. He sees the famine through the eyes of the Republican John Mitchel, who described ‘how every one of those years, ’46, ’47 and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of 15 million pounds sterling’. Mitchel recognised genocide for what it was.” 

THE ECONOMIES OF THE COLONIES SHRUNK DRAMATICALLY DURING COLONIALISM 

The Subcontinent+China’s economy shrunk from quarter of Global GDP to inconsequential around 1900 was the direct result of Colonialism. According to various studies the economy of the Subcontinent went down from from 12.2% of global GDP in 1870 to 4.2% of global GDP by 1950 with almost anemic growth for forty years starting 1900. “.. Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, some more familiar than others. The story of the brutal suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, for instance, has been the staple of nationalist Indian narratives and is gen erally encountered in most histories of the British empire.

The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opin ion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s”.

Vinay Lal: Publication:TOI_Kolkata; Date:Jan 14, 2007; Page Number:8