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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Bloody History of British Colonisation For centuries, a small island nation cast a shadow across the world. The British Empire's methods of expansion were often brutal, usually devastating. From Amritsar to Zululand, from the Opium Wars in China to the deliberate infection of Native Americans with smallpox and the cold-blooded treatment of the starving during the Irish Famine, Des Ekin lays bare the atrocities committed in the name of colonisation. With many nations worldwide still grappling with the legacy of British rule, Ekin explores the justifications used to dehumanise other people and rationalise their abuse, exploitation and slaughter. In this rigorously researched and eminently readable book, Des Ekin lifts the veil on the harrowing realities of colonial rule.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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5For Michael O’Brien
Contents
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True Brit: the cover of a 1610 book anticipates that Britannia will one day rule the waves.
Prologue
October 1865. It is a stiflingly hot morning in the sleepy town of Bath, southeast Jamaica. British colonist troops have been despatched to crush an uprising among starving plantation workers at nearby Morant Bay, and the entire area is under martial law.
Cecilia Livingstone and her husband Jasper have been sheltering at home with their family, but they’ve no food left, and Cecilia, four months pregnant, is worried about her unborn baby. They know that gangs of soldiers are rampaging through the countryside, hanging and flogging civilians and even murdering a blind man as he sat in his doorway. But the couple decide, despite all the risks, to go into town to pick up supplies.
The store is closed. They wander around to the side gate to see if the owner will let them in. Their timing could not be worse. At that precise moment, a military patrol appears on the street. The soldiers seize the couple on a trumped-up charge of burglary. Jasper is hauled off and flogged, then summarily executed.
The soldiers turn their attention to Cecilia. She cries out that she’s an expectant mother. The patrolmen don’t care: at that stage their aim is to instil terror throughout the community, and how better to do that than to flog a pregnant woman with a special whip of knotted piano wire?
Cecilia screams as the vile lash rises and falls, but she takes hope when a superior officer storms up to admonish his men. ‘This won’t do to flog the 10women,’ he snaps, pulling the wire whip away. And then, coolly and calmly, he orders the punishment to resume … using a regular naval cat-o’-nine-tails to administer the full twenty-six lashes.
The same decade, on the other side of the world. Settlers in Queensland, Australia, find one of their cows killed by an aborigine’s spear. A white officer leads a force in retaliation. When they find an indigenous community living in caves on a mountaintop, the troopers flush them out and herd them towards a precipice, where many of them are forced to leap to their deaths. Among them is a young mother carrying her little daughter, aged two or three, in her arms. The mother dies in the cliff plunge, but her child somehow escapes death, becoming the only survivor of the massacre at a spot that is still known as ‘The Leap’.
Same decade. North Island, New Zealand. British colonist forces have illegally invaded Māori lands in contravention of a treaty. Rather than engage a waiting force of Māori warriors, they sneak past in the dead of night and instead target Rangiaowhia, an undefended town that has been set aside as a safe haven for Māori wives and children. The troops gallop into town at dawn, carbines blazing, and slaughter anywhere between a dozen and a hundred villagers.
Unless you are a history buff, you will probably never have heard of the Bath atrocities, or the horror at the clifftop at Mount Mandurana. You may be familiar with the massacres of civilians at Wounded Knee or My Lai, but it’s a fair bet that you have never heard of the massacre at Rangiaowhia. I certainly hadn’t known much about these episodes before I began researching this book.
Yet, shocking as they are, these three events – all occurring within thirty-eight months of each other – were nothing special in the history of the British Empire, the most powerful empire the world has ever known. They were just background noise, part of the continuous pattern of colonial brutality that kept the engine of Empire running smoothly for hundreds of years. 11
And the 1860s were not unusual or exceptional. We could have zoned in instead on the previous decade, when British colonists in India sewed Muslim citizens into pig carcasses, and forced pork into their mouths, before hanging them. Hindus were strapped to cannons and blown into fragments to ensure they could never receive a ritual funeral.
Or we could have focused on the 1840s, and the First Opium War in China. In one of the most shameful chapters of Empire history, British colonist forces bombarded cities into submission and then swept through villages, sacking, looting and raping womenfolk, in a conflict sparked off by China’s refusal to accept British opium. And, amazingly, the Opium War wasn’t even the worst thing that happened in the British Empire that decade: it was also the beginning of Ireland’s Great Hunger, when a million people died, and at least a million others were forced to emigrate.
Empire was not just a world of epic conquests, grand battles and famous generals. It was also a world in which innocent civilians, male and female, young and old, would be targeted at random for whippings, beatings or humiliations, simply because some half-crazed regional governor wished to make a point; where children could be pulled out on a whim from their school classrooms and flogged until their backs rose with bloody welts, simply as a means of intimidating their parents into obedience; where enslaved workers could be placed in a barrel driven through with sharp nails and rolled downhill. All of these things were designed to enforce the unquestioned supremacy of British colonist rule.
‘Frightfulness’ is a word we rarely use today. It sounds like a term that some overwrought interior designer might use to criticise a rival’s décor scheme. But at the peak of Empire, it had a different, and much more sinister, meaning.
‘What I mean by frightfulness,’ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1920, ‘is the inflicting of slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising … the whole district or 12the whole country.’ Having said that, he assured the House that ‘frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia … the august and venerable structure of the British Empire … does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.’
But, as the astute Churchill probably knew all too well, frightfulness (or state terrorism as we might call it today) was very much part of the British colonial way of doing things. It was the unwritten page-one in the user’s guide to Empire.
The philosophy was summed up by Reginald Dyer, the general responsible for one of the Empire’s most notorious massacres – in Amritsar, India, in 1919. After ordering his troops to open fire into a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing anywhere up to a thousand of them, he explained at an inquiry that he was trying to achieve ‘a moral effect’.
Was this an example of ‘frightfulness’? he was asked.
He countered: ‘It was a merciful act, though a horrible act, and they ought to be thankful to me for doing it … I thought it would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise they were not to be wicked.’
* * *
As a child growing up in County Down, I had never thought much about the British Empire. It was something that loomed large in the background, like the Mourne Mountains, but it was rarely discussed.
Aged eight or so, I discovered a children’s history book that had been published at the height of Empire in the early 1900s. It was called Our Island Story, and it was a rollicking, action-packed account of British imperial history. I drank in all the thrilling stories of heroic battles and derring-do, of scheming tribal leaders conquered by red-coated heroes, of beleaguered forces saved from starvation by bagpipe-playing reinforcements. I emerged from the 13experience with the impression that Britain’s conquest of a fourth part of the world had been something almost inevitable, like the weather. It was certainly not a history to be questioned.
The first globalisation: an early-1900s booklet boasts of the Empire’s scope and displays the crests of every major colony.
In my early teens, the first shadows of doubt began to cross my mind. In a memoir by Brendan Behan, I encountered the unfamiliar placename ‘Amritsar’. Curious, I looked it up and read for the first time the horrifying story of Dyer’s massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in India.
I was a voracious reader, and the more I read, the more I felt the ground shift under my feet as the narrative of the benign, heroic, civilising British Empire began to subside, undermined by uncomfortable truth. Of course, I’d known about the Great Hunger in Ireland, but I had never realised the full extent of the then British government’s culpability. It had not only (in the later words of Tony Blair) ‘stood by while a crop failure turned into a massive 14human tragedy’. Victorian politicians had actually welcomed the catastrophe as an opportunity to apply their lunatic theories of social engineering. Even the claim that Britain had been the first country to end the transatlantic slave trade turned out to be untrue.
By the time I reached adulthood, I was a full-blown sceptic. A permanent move to Dublin in the Irish Republic immersed me in an atmosphere that was, understandably, much more Empire-critical. With good reason, people had learned about the excesses of British imperialism at their mothers’ knee. The Plantations, the Penal Laws, the Famine, Bloody Sunday in Croke Park – these were topics that would naturally crop up in almost every bar conversation, alongside the sports results and last night’s telly.
If ever a nation had a right to complain about colonisation, it was this one. Yet, while I agreed with the main points, I found that many of the stories that were presented as fact were not factual at all. I found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to debunk some of the popular myths about Empire: no, Queen Victoria did not give the same niggardly fiver to Famine relief as she gave to a dogs’ home in Battersea; no, the Penal Laws (horrifically repressive as they were) did not make it illegal to celebrate parochial Mass in Ireland in the 1700s; and, no, the British were not the first to invent concentration camps.
By late adulthood, I had been well exposed to both sides of the Empire narrative – pro and anti – and had read quite a bit about this divisive subject. But I was not an academic historian, and I was certainly no expert, so it came as a surprise a couple of years ago when I received the phone call that was to give birth to this book.
* * *
15‘How much do you know about the British Empire?’
As soon as I answered the phone, I recognised the voice of my long-time publisher and friend Michael O’Brien. The co-founder of The O’Brien Press, Michael was one of those people who always seemed fuelled-up with good-humoured energy. His irrepressible positivity, and his infectious, youthful curiosity, belied the fact that he was in his eighties. I always enjoyed our conversations – they inevitably challenged my thinking and animated me.
‘A bit,’ I said guardedly. ‘Why?’
With Michael, you never knew whether he was pitching an idea for a new book, seeking information or just making casual conversation.
He said he’d just had a chat with an acquaintance from South Africa, and the conversation had crept around to the topic of the British concentration camps during the Boer War. He’d been aware of that outrageous strategy, of course, but he had never appreciated the sheer enormity of it all. ‘Are you familiar with the subject?’
‘I’ve read a bit about it over the years,’ I said. ‘The British Empire was finding it hard to defeat the Boer commandos, so they targeted their families instead. They burned out their homes, and then put the women and children into huge compounds, which they openly called concentration camps. The conditions were appalling, and wives of active commandos were threatened that they’d be moved to even worse camps if they didn’t persuade their husbands to surrender. If I remember correctly, nearly 28,000 Boer people died from disease and malnutrition, and 22,000 of them were children.’
Michael fell silent, deep in thought. ‘I don’t think enough people know about the atrocities that were perpetrated by the British Empire, all over the world,’ he said at last.
We talked about massacres in Africa. We touched on the Opium Wars, which Britain launched after China tried to block the import of narcotics produced in British India. I threw in a couple of items he was less familiar 16with: the near-annihilation of the indigenous Palawa people of Tasmania – which many describe as genocide – and the slaughter of Tibetan monks by machine-gun as they tried to walk away from a confrontation during a farcical British invasion that achieved nothing. And of course, behind it all, was the giant obscenity of the transatlantic slave trade – not a side issue, but the central motive force that helped finance the Industrial Revolution, brought unimaginable prosperity to British cities and allowed this small island to conquer almost a quarter of the world.
We agreed that, while people in Ireland knew all about the dark deeds of English and British colonists on their own island, they were often less aware of the dozens of parallel events in places like Australia, New Zealand and India.
‘We all know about the Irish Famine,’ I mused, ‘but few of us know about the horrors of the Bengal Famine in 1770, where around a million and a quarter people died while the ruling British East India Company hoarded grain to boost their profits. Most people know that British troops opened fire into a crowd in Croke Park in 1920, but not nearly as many people realise that this was just a follow-up to the similar episode at Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab a year beforehand.’
There was little awareness of how much the Native Americans had suffered in the early stages of British colonial rule. ‘For instance,’ I said, ‘how the colonists served poisoned wine to a delegation of Native Americans during peace talks, or how there was a serious attempt in Pennsylvania to wipe out an entire tribe with smallpox by deliberately giving them infected blankets from a hospital.’
The Irish perspective was important. Ireland had been England’s first colony, and tactics the colonists had road-tested on the island had then been put to devastating use, firstly in the American colonies and then in India and Africa. The tactics used to police Ireland in the 1800s – with the emphasis on coercion and repression, rather than the English model of policing by public 17consent – was adopted all over the world, from New Zealand to South Africa and Canada. As one writer put it, Ireland is well known for exporting people to the ends of the earth, ‘but arguably of equal or even greater significance, it exported knowledge on how to control people’.
On the military side, Ireland’s young men fought for Empire in their thousands, even if, in many cases, they joined simply to avoid starvation at home. In the mid-1800s, for instance, four out of ten British Army recruits were Irish.
A war eagle swoops down on a grimly determined Britannia in this political allegory from the late 1800s.
Many of the people who directed operations for the Empire were either Irish-born, Irish-educated or from Irish family backgrounds. Herbert Kitchener, for instance: the Kerry-born general had not only presided over the concentration camps in South Africa, but had also shocked a young Winston Churchill with his ruthless slaughter of his defeated enemies at Omdurman in the Sudan region. There was also Hugh Gough from Limerick, the iron fist in the Opium War against China; Reginald Dyer, raised and educated 18in County Cork, who carried out the Amritsar massacre; Michael O’Dwyer from Tipperary, notorious for his dreadful reprisals against civilians in the Punjab in the aftermath of those killings; and Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the Baron of the City of Waterford, with his ruthless scorched-earth policies in South Africa. Then there was the astonishing story of the psychopathic John Nicholson from Dublin, a sadistic ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ general who became a demi-god for a sect of worshippers in India.
‘You don’t have to shoehorn these Irish connections into the Empire narrative to make a point,’ I said. ‘It’s the other way around – they crop up so often and so naturally that it’s impossible to avoid them.’
There was a long pause.
‘Want to do a book for me?’ Michael asked.
* * *
We talked it over, and I agreed to write a book about the darkest deeds of English and British colonialism (English before 1707, British thereafter), embracing the entire world but written from an Irish perspective. It would not purport to be a general history of the British Empire – that had been done many times before, sometimes in multiple volumes, by such giants as Jan Morris, Lawrence James, Niall Ferguson and others. This book would be aimed at the casual, non-academic reader, who knew little about the subject but was keen to find out more.
I felt it should be an accessible book that invited the reader to dip in and dip out again, at any point, with each episode complete and self-contained. You could choose a chapter at random from any part of the book and finish it during a train commute or while drinking a cup of coffee. And if this ‘taster’ approach prompted the reader to dive deeper into this fascinating subject, so much the better. 19
I began by compiling a highly subjective list of what I believed to be the most outrageous episodes in English and British colonial history. On a whim, I sorted them into an A-to-Z structure, a common journalistic device. I was amazed at how easily and naturally they fitted in to the format. From ‘Amritsar’ to ‘Zulu’, they all had a legitimate place – even the dreaded ‘X’, which is here deservedly represented by the longest-running wars for independence in Africa, the century-long Xhosa Wars.
Faced with a vast surfeit of material, I decided to curtail the timeframe, beginning in the Elizabethan era and ending with the Empire’s loss of India in 1947. This meant leaving out such major subjects as the crises at Suez and Aden, the mass detention camps in Kenya, the modern conflicts in the Middle East and, of course, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This leaves big, big holes in any history of Empire, but choices had to be made. Even within my chosen timeframe, there was still no space for dozens of important subjects. So, if you feel that I’ve left a certain topic out, I apologise, but rest assured that for every omission that you can name, I could name a dozen more. That’s writing. Come to think of it, that’s life.
* * *
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
I thought I was so familiar with the iniquities of colonialism that I would find no major surprises. But as I dived deeper into my researches and discovered the grim, little-known netherworld that supported the civilised surface of Empire, I was left stunned – not only by the savagery of the colonists’ conduct, but also by the smooth, effortless way in which supposedly enlightened politicians, scientists and writers of the era were able to justify the unjustifiable. The sheer cold-bloodedness of the logic that rationalised the mass slaughter of innocents for the greater good of the Empire. The 20calm assurances from intellectuals that so-called lesser races needed to suffer for the benefit of humanity and civilisation. The logical explanation from academics that Xhosas or Māori or Tasmanian Palawa should sacrifice their skulls to a science bent on ‘proving’ that their cranial shapes made them inferior to Europeans. And most unbearably of all, the Victorian generals’ sense of smirking, flippant entitlement, soundly based on the knowledge that whatever they did, they would never face any serious consequences.
It came as a devastating blow to find my literary hero, the great Charles Dickens, advocating the extermination of the population of India and arguing that ‘Hottentots’ should not have the same rights as ‘men with clean shirts at Camberwell’; and to find the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, lucidly explaining away the deaths of children in the South African concentration camps. And the graphic accounts of tortures and humiliations – these were images I didn’t want in my head. But you cannot un-know things. There was no going back. I soldiered on, wading ever deeper into the toxic malarial swamps of Empire, researching how private armies used Maxim machine-guns to mow down spear-carrying warriors in order to improve the share price of the British South Africa Company; and how a flaky colonist commander named Francis Younghusband invaded peaceful Tibet and killed around 600 people on the flimsy pretext that some yaks had been stolen along the frontier.
I imagine that most people who read this book will be shocked at the scenes depicted here. Rest assured that you will be sharing the same shock that I experienced a year or so beforehand. And so, the horror and disquiet you will feel – or at least, that I trust you will feel – is simply an echo of my own feelings as I discovered the true heart of darkness that lay at the core of the British Empire. 21
* * *
Let’s lighten the mood a bit. In my view, the people who have done the pithiest summaries of the British Empire have not been lofty academic historians … but comedians.
‘We stole countries!’ Eddie Izzard once ranted. ‘We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world, stick a flag in … and they’re going, “You can’t claim us, we live here, 500 million of us,” [and we reply] “Do you have a flag? ... no flag, no country … that’s the rule that I’ve just made up.”’
Samuel L Jackson – underrated as a comic actor and renowned for his sharp sense of humour – once upbraided a British interviewer for claiming Irishman Colin Farrell as ‘one of our own’. Jackson immediately shot back: ‘You see, that’s your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don’t belong to you.’
But I especially liked the episodes in which the First World War officer Edmund Blackadder, played by actor Rowan Atkinson, reminisced about the glory days of the Empire in Africa.
‘If you saw someone in a skirt, you shot him and nicked his country,’ he mused nostalgically. ‘… The prerequisite for a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns. Even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass.’ He fondly recalls fighting ‘ten thousand Watusi warriors armed to the teeth with kiwi fruit and guava halves’.
When I first heard that description, I thought it was a surreal comic exaggeration in the trademark style of scriptwriters Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. Now, having researched the real-life history of the Empire, I’m not so sure. There were, indeed, many instances in which African warriors in loincloths had run courageously into the murderous firepower of machine-guns. And it was true that these warriors had simply been defending their homeland against aggressors who were trying to ‘nick their country’. 22
As Blackadder hints, battles were often ridiculously unequal. Death ratios such as 1000 Africans to ten British (at Ulundi, during the Zulu wars) or 10,000 to forty-three (at Omdurman in the Sudan) were not uncommon, the latter figure boosted by the unsporting habit on the British side of bayoneting their wounded enemies to death as they lay on the ground.
As for the defenders defending themselves with ‘kiwi fruit and guava halves’, even that weird image was not too far off the mark. In researching this book, I found a case in which a band of Māori warriors, heroically resisting the flagrantly unlawful British incursion into their lands, exhausted all their ammunition and quite literally fired peach stones back at their enemies.
And that was not even the most bizarre response to British military might. I discovered another episode during the Opium Wars in which the Chinese, helpless in the face of Congreve rockets from Britain’s ironclad warships, responded by floating out rafts of chamber-pots filled with women’s urine, in the hope that this ‘negative energy’ would counter the magic of the British guns. Even Baldrick, Captain Blackadder’s scatological sidekick, could not have dreamed up that cunning plan.
* * *
I want to stress that this is a book about the past, about times that are dead and gone. It should not be taken as a criticism of the vibrant, multicultural nation that is today’s Britain, or still less of today’s Britons. In other words, if you’re alive, it’s not about you1.
None of us today, whether in Britain, Ireland or elsewhere, has anything in common with the crazies who ran the old Empire. They represented a world that has, thankfully, passed into oblivion. Virtually nobody in modern Britain believes, as the colonists firmly did, that racial and religious elitism 23makes it okay for white people to enslave millions of fellow humans and work them to death in order to give the ‘superior’ race a better lifestyle. Yet that was the philosophy that helped fund the entire Empire. Virtually nobody in today’s UK regards it as Britain’s religious duty to subjugate other nations. No scientist is going to measure your cranium to establish where you rank in the hierarchy of races and judge whether you have a right to have children. To make this distinction clear, I will usually employ the term ‘the British colonists’ rather than the more generic term ‘the British’.
Having made that point, it must be stressed that the toxic legacy of the British Empire is certainly not over and done with. The great imperial rock festival may have packed up and gone, but we are left with vast fields of psychological litter, along with a crippling hangover in the form of institutional racism, inequality and xenophobia.
On a national level, the UK remains staggeringly rich for such a small country: with a net worth of nearly twelve trillion pounds and rising, it is also the sixth-largest economy by GDP. A fair whack of the twelve trillion, which is based on all assets including land, deposits and buildings, has been passed down from the Empire era. Obviously not all of the money was historically earned from trading in slaves, from using free African labour to produce lucrative products and from ruthlessly stealing other countries’ resources, but those inputs certainly played a major part in the foundation of Britain’s economy.
By way of contrast, take a country like India: it was the world’s largest economy before the East India Company began exploiting its resources, or ‘shaking the Pagoda tree’ as they liked to put it. By the early 1900s, it had become one of the world’s poorest regions. Modern India is only now emerging from centuries of abuse to take its rightful place among the top tier of wealthy nations. Economists may argue forever over how much money was earned and/or lost in the Empire project, but according to one estimate, Britain milked India of around forty-five trillion US dollars in today’s money. To give another example of how 24much of Britain’s wealth was ill-gotten, it has been calculated that Jamaica alone would need to be paid nearly ten trillion dollars in reparations for slavery.
Meanwhile, an ‘empire state of mind’ continues to permeate politics in the twenty-first century. Even worse, there is a cohort of influential people who not only deny the evil of imperialism, but actually celebrate the British Empire and express nostalgia for its return.
The purpose of this book is not to point the finger of accusation, but to encourage more openness about the past. Only by ripping open the curtains can we let the sunlight in, and expose the preposterousness of Miss Havisham’s demented dining table of denial. If you don’t know your history, you lack true self-awareness and insight, and this can create all sorts of problems. Only an awareness of history can prevent the same mistakes being made in the future.
For instance, the British Foreign Office was criticised in 2022 for its tone-deaf approach to a visit to Jamaica by Prince William and his wife, then Duchess of Cambridge. Photos showing the Prince in full military uniform standing on the back of an open Land Rover did not go down well – this community has long memories of British military reprisals in the Morant Bay area in the 1860s, when soldiers were given free rein by their superiors to rampage through villages, flogging and hanging innocents. Meanwhile, the couple was pictured in Trench Town, trying to shake the outstretched hands of children through a robust wire fence. It hardly needs explaining why this image had unfortunate resonances on an island with a long history of slavery. It was a PR disaster. Yet, to some diplomats and to elements of the British press, the backlash seemed to come as a surprise. It shouldn’t have.
In 2018, leading Conservative politician Priti Patel unwittingly blundered into an historical quagmire when she suggested that Ireland’s trading vulnerabilities with Britain should be ‘pressed home’ in Brussels to secure a better Brexit deal for the UK. Since this trade included some £10 billion worth of foodstuffs every year, it gave scope for her critics to accuse her 25of weaponising food for political purposes. Overheated comparisons were drawn with Britain’s conduct during the Irish Famine. Ms Patel protested that she hadn’t even mentioned food supplies, and had no such ill intent, but one can’t help thinking that a greater awareness of the historical sensitivities would have steered her clear of such an obvious miscalculation.
We could give more examples. For instance, when visiting Myanmar (formerly Burma) in 2017, the then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cheerfully trotted out a line from Rudyard Kipling: ‘The temple bells they say, “Come you back, you English soldier.”’ A horrified British official quietly muttered, ‘Not appropriate,’ which was putting it mildly. Kipling was famous as the man who wrote ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and who had enthusiastically supported Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar.
And two years later, in 2019, the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg sparked more controversy when he said that, while he deplored the British policy of putting Boer families into concentration camps, the families had been put there ‘for their protection’; they were ‘interned for their safety’; and the death rate in the camps was no worse than the mortality rate in Glasgow at the time. (In reality, the death rate in the camps in 1901 was more than ten times greater than Glasgow’s.)
So, yes, history does matter in the real world today. It may be a cliché, but nonetheless true, that those who cannot remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. To quote Churchill once more: ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.’
* * *
To forestall inevitable criticisms of any book that dares to criticise the British Empire:
Why don’t I write about the empires of the French or the Germans or the Belgians or the Portuguese? Because this is a book about the British Empire. 26
Have I got a political agenda? No. I am not out to ‘bash the Brits’ or score points for any political movement. As an author, I have always tried to be an honest broker and remain politically neutral. This has led to all sorts of interesting criticisms: over the years, I’ve been accused of being both a woke ultra-leftist and a right-winger; of both producing British propaganda and of producing anti-Brit nationalist propaganda. On the positive side, one of my favourite reviews came from a historian who said that, try as they might, they could not work out from my book whether I was Protestant, Catholic or agnostic, or where my political sympathies lay.
Why don’t I have chapters of ‘balance’, explaining how wonderful the British Empire was in other ways? This is a difficult one, and I talked it over at length with Michael O’Brien. To suggest that providing railways, education and the language of Shakespeare somehow cancels out the enormous injustices of slavery, violent conquest and mass slaughter seems to me incredibly offensive to the descendants of those who have suffered. Throughout the history of Empire, no-one in India has ever said, ‘They’ve just massacred hundreds of our citizens in the city square, and they sewed your granddad into a pig carcass before hanging him, but, hey, at least we get to read Hamlet and the trains are running on time.’
Besides, many of these supposed benefits of Empire turn out to be myths. The railway system in India was not a generous gift from benevolent colonisers – it was financially backed by Indian taxpayers and built by the sweat of Indian workers, who in many cases were treated with appalling cruelty. You will read, for instance, how railway labourers in Bengal in 1877 were issued with starvation rations (less food per day, in fact, than the Nazis were later to give the inmates at Buchenwald), in a deliberate scientific experiment to ascertain just how little their colonist bosses could get away with feeding them. The chilling experiment ended only when the workers literally starved to death and resolved the question. 27
By the mid-1800s, steamships had made the world smaller and connected the Empire.
Another claim is that Britain brought the English common law to the nations it ruled. But try telling that to people like the campaigner George William Gordon (see ‘Jamaica’) and thousands of others who were executed without due process, on the principle of presumption of guilt.
Then there is the myth of the Pax Britannica: the notion that the Empire gave the olive branch of peace to the peoples it subjugated. It’s often pointed out that during Queen Victoria’s lengthy reign, Britain took part in only one conflict against a European power – the Crimean War. But elsewhere in the Empire, war was almost continuous. ‘The age of Pax Britannica, it turns out, was not very peaceful after all,’ writes one historian. ‘At least 196 “little wars” helped quadruple the size of the empire between 1837 and 1901.’ Another writer has calculated that during Victoria’s sixty-three-year reign, there were only four years when her troops were not fighting in some campaign. According to Victoria 28herself, this was not happenstance – it was deliberately factored into the business model of Empire. ‘If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate power,’ the Queen wrote in 1879, ‘… we must be prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY.’ (Her use of capitals.)
In the final analysis, the proponents of Empire have had hundreds of years, and acres of print in books and newspapers, to put their case. Rarely has there been a clearer instance of history having been written by the victors. Or, as the ever-quotable Churchill once put it, in a different context, ‘Leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.’
In summary: books like this don’t need more ‘balance’. They are the balance.
* * *
This was not an easy book to write: for a long time, the horrific atrocities and the gruesome accounts from witnesses dominated my consciousness and even fuelled my nightmares. Despite it all, I’m glad I wrote it. The subject matter is important, not only in order to understand our past, but also to free ourselves from misconceptions about it and to live our best present and future. My only regret is that Michael O’Brien, who passed away in 2022, did not live to see his idea reach fruition. I hope the result does justice to his vision.
1 Unless, of course, you think that slavery and world domination are okay, in which case you are hereby banned from reading this book.
First … A Micro-History of the British Empire
On a summer day in 1902, an eager crowd assembled in London’s Albert Hall to hear a performance by the famed contralto singer Clara Butt. Then aged thirty, and standing an impressive six feet two inches, the amazonian performer from Brighton had a powerful voice that could carry for many hundreds of yards outside a venue. The highlight of the show was a brand-new version of a rousing song based on the music of composer Edward Elgar.
Elgar had written the music – the ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1’ – as a simple ceremonial procession, but King Edward VII had requested that words be put to it for his coronation. The first lyric had been restrained and dignified, as befits a solemn coronation, but Clara Butt realised its potential as a blood-stirring popular anthem and asked Elgar to write a song along the same lines for her. ‘You shall have that one, my dear,’ he promised, and passed the request on to his friend, the poet and university lecturer Arthur Benson.
Benson may have been an academic, but he enjoyed writing ghost stories and knew how to conjure up phrases that would tap into the public zeitgeist of triumphalism and jingoism. This was not an era for subtlety or dog-whistle messaging. His new lyric was a full-on, foot-stomping, table-thumping, 30fist-jabbing crowd-pleaser. Whenever Clara Butt belted out the climactic chorus at the top of her powerful lungs, conductor Thomas Beecham joked that she could be heard clear across the English Channel in Calais. Referring to the British Empire, the song reached a crescendo with these famous words:
Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.
The last line was repeated, just in case you missed the point.
The song, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, was an instant hit and made Clara into a superstar. Although the name ‘C Butt’ might sound to us today like one of Bart Simpson’s prank calls to Moe’s Tavern, Clara Butt was an icon of her era, often bellowing out the words in full Britannia dress. The song was elevated to the status of a second National Anthem.
However, there is a lot to unpack in those dozen-and-a-half words I have quoted. Firstly, they presume that the British Empire’s supremacy and right to conquer had been ordained and approved by God Himself, no less: it was He who had ‘made thee mighty’. He had chosen the British, as opposed to the French or the Germans or the Belgians or – perish the thought – those johnny-come-latelys, the Americans. This meant that British-controlled territory should keep expanding, ‘wider still and wider’. And the chorus ends with the extraordinary request for more and more power – the confident plea that Britain would become ‘mightier yet’.
The sheer arrogance and hubris of the words are breathtaking. And yet, amid all the roaring and cheering, one disturbing fact stands out in frightening clarity. Despite already ruling the most expansive empire the world has ever known, the British of the new Edwardian era were not satisfied. They still wanted more. 31
* * *
An 1888 map shows British dependencies, thirty years before the Empire reached its zenith.
How or when did this amazing Empire begin? There are many different theories. Was it the voyage of John Cabot to North America in 1497? The first plantations of English settlers in Ireland in the late 1500s? The defeat of the Spanish Armada? The early fishing settlements in Newfoundland? The establishment of the first permanent English colony in Virginia?
I like to think that it all began in a small way, like the famous tale of the butterfly’s wing-flutter that led to a hurricane. It began with a subtle interchange of pheromones between a libidinous English king and a woman he fancied. These chemical messages, back and forth, made subtle changes in the brain of King Henry VIII, prompting him to decide that he should ditch his wife and marry Anne Boleyn.
We all know what happens next: the Pope won’t grant Henry an annulment, so Henry blocks His Holiness from his contact list, forms his own church, and marries Anne anyway.
Consequences of this break from Rome: Henry is free to declare himself 32King of Ireland (an island that England had previously ruled under licence from the Pope), and the sixteenth-century English now feel they can explore and settle the New World without any fear of annoying the Vatican. And the dominos keep falling. Elizabeth I carries on her dad’s work, launching a series of ‘plantations’ of Protestant settlers in Ireland. She’s motivated not only by notions of English superiority, but also by fears that the Catholic population will obey instructions from the Pope to rebel against her authority and that Ireland will become a back door for foreign invaders. These early plantations are not a huge success, although the later ones under James I will achieve their objective. The colonisers learn valuable lessons about subduing a majority population through divide-and-rule, terror tactics and deception – black arts that they will later use against the indigenous peoples of North America in a subsequent wave of colonisation.
Gaelic lords in the north of Ireland revolt, and when they and their Spanish allies are finally defeated at Kinsale in 1601, it is the beginning of the end for the Gaelic order. In reprisals, the victors raze the insurgents’ homeland in Ulster. ‘We have killed above 100 people,’ the colonist general Arthur Chichester writes after one hard day at the office. ‘… We spare none of what quality or sex soever.’ In the famine that inevitably follows, the diarist Fynes Moryson witnesses ‘multitudes of these poor people dead, with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles’.
Meanwhile, out in the wild Atlantic, Elizabeth encourages English privateers and pirates to attack Spain’s shipping and relieve them of their cargoes of silver and gold. They score some substantial prizes. With their audacious hit-and-run tactics and their epic voyages, the English establish a piratical reputation, build up their seafaring skills and create a formidable presence on the Atlantic.
But the way forward is uncertain. Spain has its vast riches from the New World, and Portugal has the money-spinning spice trade in Asia. But no matter 33how much Walter Raleigh and other explorers try to locate their own Eldorado, they can’t seem to hit paydirt. What openings are there for little England?
They decide the future lies in Irish-style plantations of settlers in North America – some are purely commercial enterprises, while others are religiously motivated. As a result of Henry’s break with Rome, English Protestants now believe they have not only a right, but a sacred duty, to colonise the New World. Elizabeth’s initial American settlements don’t survive, but the first permanent colony established in Virginia in 1607, under James I, eventually thrives.
The aim is to find a secret sauce, a product that will be as lucrative as spice is to the Portuguese. Using their experiences in Ireland as a template, they establish themselves on the eastern seaboard and, after a decidedly dodgy start, find the magic product they were looking for: tobacco. Europe can’t get enough of it, and it’s easy to grow in Virginia.
There’s one problem: it’s labour-intensive, and they can’t get enough workers. That problem disappears with the first shipment of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619. Free labour producing a product that gets customers addicted? What’s not to like?
The experience is repeated in the Caribbean, this time with sugar – a product that’s only slightly less addictive to the eager English consumer. Demand soars. They need more workers. Oliver Cromwell, already notorious for massacring thousands of people at Drogheda and Wexford, has the bright idea of shipping in Irish indentured labourers, thereby also solving his Irish problem, but that doesn’t work out. Instead, they import huge numbers of enslaved Africans.
There’s one thing the colonist businessmen don’t like, however – spending money. If they want to avoid all the hassle of trekking into the jungle and capturing people themselves, they actually have to pay slave-traders on the west African coast. What if they could find some other way to get these workers for free? 34
No problem! Africa needs metal goods like pots, tools and guns. English merchants, rolling in cash from the New World products, invest their money into manufacturing metalware. They sell this in Africa, use the cash to buy human beings, and ship them to the Americas to produce sugar, which sells for a fortune back in England. It’s a triangular trade with eye-watering profits at each of the three points.
At around this same time, English traders have been striking east to Asia in search of spice from the Spice Islands. That project doesn’t go well, so they retreat to India, where they build up a brisk trade in cotton and manufactured clothing. Business booms. The private security forces they use to protect their trading centres gradually morph into armies. Advances in weapons technology and more sophisticated fighting methods give these troops a huge advantage over the locals. After the mighty Moghul Empire implodes, vast territories are up for grabs, and the private corporation known as the East India Company is well-placed to grab them. Battles such as Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) form the tipping point, as Britain ousts its rival France to become the dominant force in India.
It’s the same story in North America, where our heroes push the French and the Dutch aside to become top dog in the region. What can go wrong? Plenty. A row over taxation and representation is hopelessly mishandled by the rulers, and it puts the colonist settlers of America on a collision course with London. The resulting American War of Independence (1775–83) ends with the Thirteen Colonies breaking away from Britain.
This is a huge blow to the colonists, and a pivotal moment in history. The first iteration of the British Empire – dubbed by historians ‘Empire 1.0’ – is fading away. Britain retains colonies in present-day Canada and the Caribbean, but increasingly turns its attention to Asia, Australia and Africa. It’s the right call. After defeating Napoleon in the early 1800s, Britannia becomes the acknowledged ruler of the waves. Britain’s sea power is unmatchable and, 35taking advantage of a long period of relative domestic calm within England, the nation begins to flex its imperial muscles.
As the East India Company continues to expand in India, Britain takes on the mighty Chinese Empire in the Opium Wars of 1839–60, and its fearsome ironclad ships give it an easy victory. The British never actually colonise China, but they rake in loads of money, gain the right to trade hard drugs and take over Hong Kong.
Australia, earlier claimed by Captain James Cook on the flimsiest pretext, is used by Britain as a dumping ground for social undesirables, but it develops into an antipodean paradise for farmers and other settlers. London decides to treat ‘white settlements’ like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa differently to the other regions it rules. Eventually these favoured countries are given ‘dominion status’.
In the 1830s, Britain gets rid of slavery, inspired by an abolition movement at home and a bit unnerved by a mass uprising among enslaved workers in French Haiti in the late 1700s. More than three quarters of a million people are freed, at a cost of £20 million in compensation to plantation owners. The enslaved people themselves get nothing.
Let’s not forget England’s first colony, Ireland, where a series of insurgencies have failed to shake off British rule, and where Catholics are still denied basic rights. By 1801, the island becomes an integral part of the United Kingdom under the Act of Union, and a generation later, Catholics are finally allowed to take their seats in Parliament. However, in the 1840s, a natural blight affecting the potato crop becomes a catastrophe through London’s obduracy and rigid ideology. A million die in the Great Hunger, and another one to two million are forced to emigrate. Feelings are understandably bitter, and the independence movement becomes increasingly hardline.
The British also take their eye off the ball in India, where their cloth-eared mismanagement of a dispute over the religious acceptability of a new type of 36cartridge somehow blows up into a full-scale revolt by Indian troops in 1857. Hindus and Muslims unite against British rule – a development that spooks the rulers no end. After crushing the rebellion, the colonists launch a campaign of vicious reprisals that succeeds only in alienating even those Indians who were well-disposed towards them. When the dust settles, London pulls the plug on the shambolic rule of the East India Company, names Queen Victoria Empress of India and takes direct control, in the ‘British Raj’ that will last until Independence in 1947.
Britain wants to expand in Africa – it has taken over the Cape Colony and a few other spots, but it sees great opportunities. However, other nations have similar ideas. Britain joins the ‘Scramble for Africa’, especially enthused by the discovery of diamonds in South Africa in 1871 (gold is discovered shortly afterwards). It takes over control of the Suez Canal. The European powers meet in Berlin in 1884 and divvy out the Dark Continent between them, deciding arbitrarily that moving in to any particular area and flying a flag constitutes ‘effective occupation’. The British Empire needs no further invitation – ruthlessly machine-gunning indigenous peoples into submission, it grabs vast territories and paints them blood-red on the map.
The Zulus don’t take this lying down. They give back as good as they get, with their spear-wielding warriors defeating the British at Isandlwana in 1879 before getting the full machine-gun treatment at Ulundi and finally conceding defeat. The Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, also prove a hard nut to crack, but the British colonist troops manage it by targeting their women and children. The Empire juggernaut crushes all opposition, and soon Britain has emerged as the winner in Africa, ruling nearly a third of the continent’s population and controlling lands stretching from South Africa to Egypt.
During the First World War, the British secretly carve up the Middle East between themselves and the French (in what Lenin describes as ‘an agreement of colonial thieves’). At the same time, they lead Arabs to believe they will 37get their own independent nation in return for support in the War, and also assure the Jewish diaspora that they will get ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.
Clara Butt and Arthur Benson get their wish: the Empire continues to expand in the twentieth century, reaching its peak two decades after that triumphalist concert in 1902. At that stage, Britain (population then around 45 million) rules more than 400 million people, and its famously sunset-free territory covers a quarter of the Earth’s surface. One in every four human beings on the planet is living in the shadow of a fluttering Union Jack, and it is possible for English globetrotters to travel to New Zealand taking in stops as diverse as Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, India, Ceylon, Burma, Singapore and Sydney, knowing that in each of these places they will find a British administrator sitting under a portrait of the King. However, after that heady moment in history, the Empire goes into slow decline. Like the Titanic of the same era, it sinks agonisingly slowly, but also inevitably and irremediably.
Britain loses most of Ireland in 1922, with all but six counties gaining independence. By the late 1940s, Britain is financially exhausted from two world wars and can no longer afford to retain the jewel in its crown, India. The grand British rulers of the Raj make an unseemly dash for the exit, hastily tossing over their shoulders a botched-up plan for partition and leaving their former subjects to fight over the finer details. A bloodbath follows.
The new British Commonwealth is founded as a sort of benign Empire 3.0, but the traditional Empire continues to wither. Sudan gains independence in 1956, the same year as Britain loses Suez. Ghana follows in 1957, and with the passing decades, other African and Caribbean colonies opt to go it alone. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, with its bleak images of the then Prince Charles standing dismally in the pouring rain at the handover ceremony, was for many the last chapter in the story of the Empire that once dominated the world.
Amritsar – The Massacre that Shocked the World
It is a sweltering April afternoon in India’s Punjab. A harvest festival is taking place in the city of Amritsar, and thousands of people – men, women, youngsters and elderly folk – have thronged into an urban square to relax and socialise.
Vendors hawk street food. Young boys chase each other around the tall figures of the adults, laughing and squealing with delight. Men sit on blankets, playing cards or eating snacks that have been prepared by their wives. Old men smoke, play chess and talk about how much better life was in the old days. In one area, a large but peaceful political meeting is under way.
Most of the people in the Jallianwala Bagh square are unaware that their British rulers have recently banned public assemblies. Many are outsiders who have trekked from their rural homes to visit the nearby Sikh shrine of the Golden Temple. Others are illiterate and can’t read the warning posters. Crucially, there are no posters at the square itself.
The atmosphere of celebration abruptly chills as a voice warns: ‘They have come!’
Everyone looks towards the narrow alleyway that forms the square’s main 39entrance. Through it, a file of armed British Army soldiers is entering at a determined trot.
The crowd falls silent as the troops form two lines on a strip of high ground. The soldiers in the front line kneel. Those behind remain standing. At a command, they raise their .303 Lee Enfield rifles to a firing position.
People mill around in agitation, waiting for the official warning to the crowd to disperse – a warning that will surely come.
But there is no warning.
Within thirty seconds, without attempting to clear the square and with absolutely no provocation, the British general orders his riflemen to fire directly into the crowd. His words are calmly repeated down the line.
A region in turmoil: the Punjab, with Amritsar in the centre.
40The gunfire thunders and echoes around the brick walls of the houses that surround the square – walls that now trap the crowd as though they are sheep in an abattoir pen.
Some soldiers cannot believe the order, and deliberately fire high. An English officer points a revolver at them and demands ‘in filthy language’ that they fire at chest height. Once they obey, every bullet is guaranteed to hit human flesh and, at this close range, will often pass right through one person to kill another behind.
The crowd erupts in panic. People run for cover to either side, in two massive waves, but there is no shelter to be had, and the rifle barrels swing around to follow them. Some throw themselves into a deep well, only to drown or be crushed under other falling bodies. Fugitives squeeze into the only other exits, narrow spaces between buildings, only to be trampled underfoot. Soon the heap of corpses is ten feet high.
And still they keep firing. The commanding officer, General Reginald Dyer, is unfazed by the carnage. He calmly walks up and down the ranks, pointing out the easiest targets to his troops. Look – they should target those people trying to scale a wall. Over there – aim at that man hiding behind a shrine. After that, they should just ‘fire where the crowd is thickest’.
The inexorable slaughter becomes a slow-motion nightmare, continuing for ten full minutes. And ten minutes of unrelenting terror can be a long, long time.
After what seems an eternity of carnage, the gunfire finally stops – but only because the soldiers have exhausted their ammunition. They have fired 1,650 rounds.
Satisfied with his day’s work, Dyer does a snappy about-turn and walks away from the bloodbath, not once looking back at the festival site that he has turned into a charnel house.
For the dying and wounded, the nightmare continues. Dyer makes no attempt to get help to the injured whose lives are bleeding out into the dust. 41He does not even relax his night-time curfew to allow relatives to provide succour. All through the hot night, the cries for help, the whimpers for such basic mercies as a drink of water, go unanswered.
How many have died that day? No-one will ever know for sure, because many relatives are too terrified to come forward. The British administration first estimates a figure of 200 to 300, and later raises it to 379. Official Indian sources reckon the figure much higher, at a thousand dead, with another thousand wounded. The figure is certainly upward of 500.
One record that can’t be fudged or erased is the deadly pattern of bullet holes on the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh square – marks that have been allowed to remain as an eternal indictment of the British Empire’s darkest day of shame.
* * *
By 1919, Britain had ruled most of India for around 150 years, first through a private corporation and later directly. But there had been a convulsive national rebellion in 1857, and every British administrator was living in dread of another rising.
The Irish-born Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer (54), had long decided that the only way to prevent such a revolt was to strangle it at birth. He was convinced that the next rebellion would happen on his patch, and believed in getting his retaliation in first.
