Is history too politicised? | HistoryExtra
"‘Is your take that there were very few bad aspects of the British Empire or that the negative aspects are being overplayed?’
‘Well I think it's important to recognize that all Empires across several millennia have had their pros and cons and achieved some things and also committed atrocities of some kind. The British Empire I would argue is is the least culpable in terms of having committed atrocities. It is I would argue the most benevolent of all the empires we've had so far. And as I say I'm going back millennia and comparing Empires across millennia. So I think the, all empires in a sense have been a default mode of governance for expansionist states which have acquired power over other neighbors and other colonial groups.
But the British Empire more than any other has used that power in the interests of the people it was governing. So it, there was always a concern for the Indian masses, for Indian subjects, for the underdogs in Indian society who were being oppressed by upper castes etc, so that ran quite deep right through the British Empire... The British empire grew out of the East India Company which started as a trading company but actually developed very much into a form of governance as well in order to protect its trade. And it always had benevolent aspects to its rule. It believed in the rule of law, in rights of property, protection of trade, encouragement of trade. The sort of attributes one might expect from a healthy economy today. So that was very much the goal of the East India Company and it achieved some of it and in other respects fell short...
There was also a great deal of legitimate rule making and law making which actually led India's own merchant class to vote with their feet and move to the company cities, the great port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, where you know business was protected and encouraged...
Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India and she issued a proclamation very much instructing her, the governors in India not to persecute people who'd been involved in the mutiny, to be generous, to be kind. Uh, not to introduce any forms of racial discrimination, equal treatment for all her subjects. So that was a goal pretty early on in the Empire...
If one looks at the East India Company, from the moment that it actually took political power… one of the first things it did within a few years of taking power was to establish the Asiatic society which was formed with the goal of rediscovering India's Classical Heritage, translating works from Sanskrit and Arabic, making learning available to as many people as possible. It was presided over by Warren Hastings who was the first Governor General and Sir William Jones who was the chairman of the Asiatic Society was an eminent Sanskrit Eastern orientalist who did an enormous amount to Rediscover in their own lost heritage. So I don't think I think you find very few companies in the history of the world which took on those sorts of cultural tasks which you didn't need to at all’
‘I mean I suppose one example that people might point to in terms of the ruthlessness is the 1770 Bengal famine. What's your take on on that and to the extent to which the East India company was culpable for the course of that?’
‘Well, it certainly wasn't the first Bengal famine. Famines being pretty cyclical in Bengal and in Southern India for centuries before the East India Company took over. I think what you had in 1770 was a coincidence of monsoon failure, poor harvest coinciding with a period of major political transition, in which the company took over from the native Moghul state, which would have been decadent and crumbling for at least a century before. So there was very little effective governance in Bengal. There was no famine relief. There had been no famine relief projects under the Moghul regime, which the company could take over. The company had not had time to set up its own famine relief organizations. So it was a period in which there was quite a lot of havoc and a lot of deaths as a result. But I don't think it can be blamed simply on the East India Company...
I think the 43 famine was very much the exception that proves the rule. The rule being that under the British Raj from 1900 onwards, there was no significant famine. Because the famine codes that had been established in the 1880s were very effective in redistributing supplies from one part of the country to the other. The railways played a big role in that too. So what happened in 1943 was firstly a poor monsoon in the previous year but no major decline in food supplies.
But secondly the fact that there was a Japanese invasion going on, which meant the Japanese had occupied Burma which was an area which used to supply Bengal with food grains, with rice. The Japanese were also in control of the Bay of Bengal with their submarines, so shipping was at great risk from the Japanese. And the Japanese were actually invading India via the sort of border areas with Burma. Calcutta was not very far away and was subject to air raids. So there was a huge dislocation of distribution networks in Bengal. Plus of course the priority was given to the armed forces...
There was a huge amount of speculation by the food traders who mainly Hindu merchants who did not get get on very well with what was then an elected provincial government because Bengal like our Indian provinces had elected provincial governments from 1937 onwards. And it was a Muslim dominated provincial government because Bengal was a Muslim majority province and the traders were mainly Hindu and pro-Congress so there was this kind of political communal divide…
It's a complete sort of demonization of Churchill on the basis of no evidence. I have studied the war cabinet minutes and the government of India minutes for that period 1943-44. What is very clear firstly is that the war cabinet from August 1943 took the famine very seriously... Churchill is blamed for having not diverted some Australian shipping to Calcutta in preference to having it in Europe. In fact the war cabinet arranged for over a million tons of Australian, Iraqi and Canadian food grains to be shipped to Bengal between 1943 and 44 and it was that supply of a million tons of food grains that actually ended the famine...
Colour prejudice was a pretty universal phenomenon. And yes I think Churchill regarded the white European, especially British race as superior to everyone else. He would have felt the same about the French and the Germans and regarded the British as superior to them... he definitely had a preference for the, for Muslim society because Islam was closer to Christianity. The sort of monotheistic values of Christianity. He was appalled by the caste system...
A lot of what is attributed to Churchill is taken out of context. You know there are various quotes which are taken and strung together as though he said them all at one time. Indians are a beastly people with a beastly religion and remarks of that sort which he made, partly to shock and irritate his old childhood friend Leopold Amery who is Secretary of State for India and rather humorless, pompous figure whom Churchill used to enjoy teasing. So he would make these remarks quite often, not to be taken seriously, but Amery would write them down in his Diary… not just about India. He would have said very similar things about the French, the Germans, the Russians. You know Churchill didn't like foreigners, let's put it that way…
Some of them were jocular, some of them were meant to shock. Most of them were not meant to be taken seriously. And against that you know people need to look at quotes from him where he came out with the enormous praise for the Indian army during World War II, for the contribution that Indian soldiers both Hindu and Muslim made. What fine fighting men they were. You know so there are several quotes of that kind. Him saying to an Indian member of his war cabinet: we must all be equal after the war, there should be no racial intolerance of any kind, we're all equal. So he said, you know different things at different times and I think one has to see them in context...
I don't think the British Empire enslaved people. On the contrary it abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. Slavery was widely practiced in India till 1835 when the British outlawed it. It still exists in some forms in India, in Africa, in China. Although the British Empire through its navy did an enormous amount to eradicate it across the world, apart from the Transatlantic slave trade which ended, you know, in, at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. There was the a huge sort of slave trade in the Arab and Middle Eastern and Turkish world which carried on, and which the British did their best to stamp out. They stamped it out in Brazil in the 1830s by threatening to invade Brazil... the British Empire had no role in slavery. The British Empire very much arose when slavery was being abolished...
When prime minister Manmohan Singh came a decade ago he gave a speech at Oxford listing all the benefits India had had from the British Raj as well as some of the disadvantages. So it was a very balanced kind of view...
In terms of denigrating present-day Britain, let's take Brexit. Now I voted Remain and I suppose I'd describe myself as a soft remainer. However I find it very odd that so many you know there's this slur cast on Brexiteers that they are living in an imperial past, they are nostalgic for Empire. I don't see any signs of this among the Brexiteers I know. They're very much looking forward, they're not looking back to what Britain was, you know a century ago. And so I think this is a way in which history is again misused to deal with something that is present day… if people aren't open-minded about the research they're doing, and they go into an archive looking for evidence that's going to hang someone, or glorify them, they're not performing the job of a historian and historians I think are there to record things as they were, or at least as close as we can get to the way they were. And even if there are inconvenient facts that don't fit a particular theory we have, we should at least state them and let other people decide ,you know whether they accept our view or or a different view on it’"
