I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was 'not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind'; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that 'the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen'; nor, as General Smuts claimed, that it was 'the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history'. The Empire was never so altruistic. In the eighteenth century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practised forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged - in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 - the British response was brutal. When famine struck (in Ireland in the 1840S, in India in the 1870S) their response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable. Even when they took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.
Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world. To characterize all this as 'gentlemanly capitalism' risks underselling the scale - and modernity - of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the 'ornamental' (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkably non-venal administrations. It was not just my family that benefited from these things.
The difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire...
Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British...
When the British governed a country - even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles -- there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run:
- The English language
- English forms of land tenure
- Scottish and English banking
- The Common Law
- Protestantism
- Team sports
- The limited or 'night watchman' state
- Representative assemblies
- The idea of liberty
The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire, the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals: some were very far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the Empire is that when- ever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves...
Clearly, before they earned their liberty the Indians would have to go on paying for the privilege of being ruled by the British.
Was it a privilege worth paying for? The British took it for granted that it was. But even Curzon himself once admitted that British rule 'may be good for us; but it is neither equally, nor altogether, good for them'. Indian nationalists agreed wholeheartedly, complaining that the wealth of India was being drained into the pockets of foreigners. In fact, we now know that this drain - the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony - amounted to little more than 1 per cent of Indian net domestic product a year between 1868 and 1930. That was a lot less than the Dutch 'drained' from their East Indies empire, which amounted to between 7 and 10 per cent of Indonesian net domestic product in the same period.
And on the other side of the balance sheet were the immense British investments in Indian infrastructure, irrigation and industry. By the 1880s the British had invested £270 million in India, not much less than one-fifth of their entire investment overseas. By 1914 the figure had reached £400 million. The British increased the area of irrigated land by a factor of eight, so that by the end of the Raj a quarter of all land was irrigated, compared with just 5 per cent of it under the Mughals. They created an Indian coal industry from scratch which by 1914 produced nearly 16 million tons a year. They increased the number of jute spindles by a factor of ten. There were also marked improvements in public health, which increased Indian average life expectancy by eleven years. It was the British who introduced quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic, carried out public programmes of vaccination against smallpox - often in the face of local resistance - and laboured to improve the urban water supplies that were so often the bearers of cholera and other diseases. And, although it is simply impossible to quantify, it is hard to believe that there were not some advantages in being governed by as incorruptible a bureaucracy as the Indian Civil Service. After independence, that idiosyncratic Anglophile Chaudhuri was sacked from All India Radio for dedicating his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to 'the memory of the British Empire in India ... because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British Empire'. That was wilful overstatement. But it had a grain of truth, which was of course why it so outraged Chaudhuri's nationalist critics.
True, the average Indian had not got much richer under British rule. Between 1757 and 1947 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent. A substantial share of the profits which accrued as the Indian economy industrialized went to British managing agencies, banks or shareholders; this despite the fact that there was no shortage of capable Indian investors and entrepreneurs. The free trade imposed on India in the nineteenth century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition at a time when the independent United States of America sheltered its infant industries behind high tariff walls. In 1896 Indian mills supplied just 8 per cent of Indian cloth consumption. It should also be remembered that Indian indentured labourers supplied much of the cheap labour on which the later British imperial economy depended. Between the 1820S and the 1920s, close to 1.6 million Indians left India to work in a variety of Caribbean, African, Indian Ocean and Pacific colonies, ranging from the rubber plantations of Malaya to the sugar mills of Fiji. The conditions in which they travelled and worked were often little better than those that had been inflicted on African slaves in the century before. Nor could the best efforts of civil servants like Machonochie avert terrible famines in 1876-8 and 1899-1900. Indeed, in the former the British predilection for laissez-faire economics actually made matters worse. But would Indians have been better off under the Mughals? Or, for that matter, under the Dutch - or the Russians?
It might seem self-evident that they would have been better off under Indian rulers. That was certainly true from the point of view of the ruling elites the British had overthrown and whose share of national income, something like 5 per cent, they then appropriated for their own consumption. But for the majority of Indians it was far less clear that their lot would improve under independence. Under British rule, the village economy's share of total after-tax income actually rose from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. Since that sector represented around three-quarters of the entire population, there can therefore be little doubt that British rule reduced inequality in India. And even if the British did not greatly increase Indian incomes, things might conceivably have been worse under a restored Mughal regime had the Mutiny succeeded. China did not prosper under Chinese rulers.
The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. In the age of Macaulay, the British had called into being an English-speaking, English-educated elite of Indians, a class of civil service auxiliaries on whom their system of administration had come to depend. In time, these people naturally aspired to have some share in the government of the country, just as Macaulay had predicted. But in the age of Curzon, they were spurned in favour of decorative but largely defunct Maharajas...
Nowadays, the modern equivalents of the missionary societies campaign earnestly against 'usages' in far-flung countries that they regard as barbaric: child labour or female circumcision. The Victorian non-governmental organizations were not so different. In. particular, three traditional Indian customs aroused the ire of British missionaries and modernizers alike. One was female infanticide, which was common in parts of north-western India. Another was thagi (then usually spelt 'thuggee'), the cult of assassin-priests, who were said to strangle unwary travellers on the Indian roads. The third, the one the Victorians most abhorred, was sati (or 'suttee'): the act of self-immolation when a Hindu widow was burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre.
The British had been aware that certain Indian communities engaged in female infanticide since the late 17805; the principal reason seems to have been the excessive cost to high-caste families of marrying off their daughters. However, it was not until 1836 that James Thomason, then the Magistrate of Azamgarh and later Lieutenant-Governor of the North Western Provinces, took the first active steps to stamp it out. In 1839 the Maharaja of Marwar was persuaded to pass a law prohibiting the practice. This was only the beginning of a sustained campaign. A systematic survey in 1854 found that the practice was endemic in Gorakhpur, Ghazipur and Mirzapur. After further research - including detailed analyses of village census data - a new act was passed in 1870, initially apply- ing only to the North Western Provinces but later extended to the Punjab and Oudh.
The campaign against thagi was pursued with equal zeal, though the extent of the practice was altogether more doubtful...
His dedication to his self-appointed task well illustrates how seriously the British took their mission to modernize Indian culture. By 1838 Sleeman had captured and tried a total of 3,2.66 Thugs; several hundred more were in prison awaiting trial. In all 1,400 were either hanged or transported for life to the Andaman Islands. One of those he interrogated claimed to have murdered 931 people. Appalled, Sleeman asked him whether he ever felt 'remorse for murdering in cold blood, and after the pretence of friendship, those whom you have beguiled into a false sense of security'. 'Certainly not!' replied the accused. 'Are you yourself not a shikari (big-game hunter) and do you not enjoy the thrill of stalking, pitting your cunning against that of an animal, and are you not pleased at seeing it dead at your feet? So with the Thug, who regards the stalking of men as a higher form of sport.' One of the judges who presided over a major trial of alleged Thugs was moved to declare:
"In all my experience in the judicial line for upwards of twenty years I have never heard of such atrocities or presided over such trials, such cold· blooded murder, such heart-rending scenes of distress and misery, such base ingratitude, such total abandonment of every principle which binds man to man, which softens the heart and elevates mankind above the brute creation."
If proof of the degeneracy of traditional Indian culture were needed, here it was.
Above all, there was sari. This certainly was no imaginary con- struct. Between 1813 and 182.5 a total of 7,941 women died this way in Bengal alone. Even more shocking than the statistics were the lurid accounts of particular cases. On 2.7 September 182.3, for example, a widow named Radhabyee fled twice from the burning pyre on which her' husband's corpse lay. According to the evidence given by one of the two officers who were eye-witnesses, the first time she ran out of the fire she was only burned on the legs. Indeed, she would have survived had she not been forced back on to the pyre by three men, who flung wood on top of her in order to keep her there. When she escaped again and plunged into the river, this time with 'almost every inch of skin on her body burnt', the men followed her and held her under the water in order to drown her. Incidents like this were, of course, exceptional and sati was far from ubiquitous. Indeed, a number of eminent Indian authorities - notably the scholars Mrityunjay Vidyalankar and Rammohun Roy - denounced the practice as inconsistent with Hindu law. Yet many Indians persisted in regarding a widow's self-immolation as the supreme act not just of marital fidelity but of female piety. Although traditionally associated with higher caste Hindus, sati increasingly appealed to lower castes, not least because it neatly solved the problem of which family members should look after an impecunious widow.
For years the British authorities had tolerated sati in the belief that a clampdown would be seen as an unwarranted interference in Indian religious customs...
Indians only had to look at the way the Japanese conducted themselves in China, Singapore and Thailand to see how much worse the alternative before them was. Gandhi might dismiss Cripps's offer as 'a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank'. But how could anyone seriously claim that driving out the British would improve life, if the effect would be to open the door to the Japanese? (As Fielding jeers in A Passage to India: 'Who do you want instead of the English? The Japanese?')"
--- Empire: How Britain made the modern world / Niall Ferguson