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Articles
Abstract: Judging the British Empire by its Aims and Intentions
- By ZAREER MASANI
- | March 22, 2023
- Category: Resources
Dr. Masani makes a case for judging the British Empire by its stated goals, rather than on its mixed historical and ethical results. He considers the Empire neither with nostalgia, since it is gone for good, nor with rote condemnation. This abstract is published by kind permission of the author and Open magazine. The complete text can be found here.
Did the Empire have ethics?
In 2017 Professor Emeritus of Ethics Nigel Biggar of Oxford launched an “Ethics and Empire” project. Its aim was to study the moral nature of empire, and the British Empire in particular. Immediately he became the target of academic “decolonisers.” The very idea that an empire might have ethics was anathema.
Fortunately, both Oxford and Biggar stood their ground. His project has held several annual colloquia over the years, bringing together academics from different disciplines and of very different political persuasions from around the world. One of its byproducts is his remarkably encyclopedic book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. This addresses the ethical nature of empires from regions as diverse as North America to Africa and Australasia and my own Indian subcontinent.
Empire and slavery
Biggar makes no attempt to minimize the brutality and horrors of slavery, but he does put the transatlantic trade, and Britain’s role in it, in historical and moral context. Slavery was, of course, a global phenomenon since ancient times, driven by the enslavement of peoples conquered in war. Trading in slaves began long before its transatlantic form in the markets of the Middle East. Britons themselves were among the casualties, with many thousands captured from the coastal villages of Devon by North African pirates and sold into the white slave trade.
The transatlantic trade was fueled as much by supply from the West African kingdoms which thrived on it as from demand in the white-owned plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean. Britain’s own role accounted for a relatively small percentage of the trade, dwarfed by that of the Portuguese, and provided its economy mostly with sugar from the Caribbean. Based on an impressive array of economic indicators, this book argues that the actual economic benefits of the trade to Britain were relatively meagre, accounting for less than 1% of all investment at its peak in 1790.
Owning and selling slaves had been a normal part of most societies until challenged by Britain’s homegrown abolitionist movement. The movement was based on the universalist, egalitarian principles to which many evangelical Christian Protestants subscribed.
Compensation for abolition cost the British taxpayer an eye-watering sum of £10 million (almost £1 billion today). Even more astronomical were the subsequent costs incurred by the British navy in policing abolition. Across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Britain compelled repeat offenders like Brazil to stop trading. The total costs amounted to well over the profits Britain ever received from the trade itself.
Rhodes and racism
Closely related to the evils of slavery was the racism that made much of it so widely acceptable. British Empire rulers could be patronising and autocratic towards subject peoples, but Biggar denies that this was institutionally racist. For example, he rescues Cecil Rhodes from charges ranging from racism to anticipating Hitler with concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer Wars. (The latter was an issue that disturbed Winston Churchill.)
Rhodes often declared support for the liberal franchise of the British-run Cape Colony, which allowed a small but growing black middle class to vote on the same basis as whites. That was indeed one of the causes of the two wars between the British Empire and the Boer republics, who were viscerally opposed to electoral rights for blacks. Rhodes had no personal responsibility for either of these wars, or the poor treatment of Boers and their African servants in prisoner-of-war camps.
Like most Victorians, Rhodes regarded Africans as backward and primitive. At the same time he saw them every bit as human as whites and capable of being educated into equal rights. He allowed no apartheid in his own diamond mines or in the white-ruled colony of Rhodesia that he founded. Despite his wars with the local Ndebele tribe, they revered him as an honourable adversary and gathered in their thousands to pay their respects at his funeral. Though he died before awarding the first of his famous Rhodes scholarships, he stipulated that they must be colour-blind. Many Indian and African scholars have benefited from that provision, including some who now lead campaigns against his statues.
Indian Empire
The other major anti-colonial trope this book demolishes is that the British Empire systematically exploited colonial economies and drained their wealth for the profit of the mother country. Free trade reigned unchallenged as the economic orthodoxy for much of the 19th century. Inevitably, it created both winners and losers. India is the classic case, with imports of cheap, factory-produced yarn squeezing indigenous spinners, while helping weavers, and much expanding Indian per capita consumption of cloth.
As our foremost economic historian, Tirthankar Roy, much quoted here, is fond of pointing out, average home remittances from India by the British (the alleged drain) amounted to 1% of India’s national income. It averaged a charge of 3%, lower than the global interest rate, on the huge inward investment of scarce capital that India received from British investors. Dr. Roy has been eloquent on the advantages India received from the free movement of goods, capital, skills and personnel across the Empire. These founding pillars of India’s modern economy left us with banks, joint stock companies, the world’s third largest rail network and the largest textile and steel industries in the developing world.
Sadly absent from Biggar’s account is the still more democratic 1935 Government of India Act that was to form the basis of independent India’s 1950 Constitution. The Act created a large electorate of 30 million, including women and all ratepayers and matriculates, about one-sixth of our adult population, not unlike the franchise in mid-19th century Britain itself. The result was full responsible government in all British Indian provinces, six of them led by Congress Party ministries, with the promise of federal dominion status (virtual independence) once the princes, Congress, and Muslims agreed.
Empire and violence: Amritsar
A frequent allegation is that the British Empire was founded on systemic violence. Biggar acknowledges that the Empire, like almost every state formation before or after, had episodes of violence that might have been avoidable. He firmly denies that this contradicts its reliance, for the most part, on consent, often explicit, and indirect rule through partnership with native elites. He takes as his examples six notorious episodes: the Opium Wars against China, reprisals for the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the expedition against the Benin kingdom in West Africa, the Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India, and the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
Jallianwala Bagh, 1919, coincided ironically with liberal reforms. The context was a breakdown of law and order across the Punjab, and especially in Amritsar. Seeing a crowd of 25,000 assembled, contrary to the curfew he had ordered, General Reginald Dyer with his Indian firing squad massively overreacted, failed to issue any warning and opened fire, continuing till the crowd had dispersed as best they could via one narrow exit. Best estimates are of approximately 500 killed and a couple of thousand wounded.
Dyer’s action was roundly condemned by the Viceroy in Delhi, the London Cabinet, and a House of Commons debate led by Winston Churchill. Dyer was discharged from the army, though his action was not deemed worthy of court martial. Biggar joins the condemnation, but judiciously reminds us that Dyer was Indian-born and bred. He was popular with his Indian sepoys and had shown no previous signs of racial prejudice. Indeed, he much preferred the company of Indians to that of upper-class British civilians.
Omissions and admonitions
A work as encyclopedic as this is bound to have some omissions. The main one for me was the absence of Macaulay, the leading historian of Britain’s own domestic democratic evolution and so crucial in defining its liberal imperialism, both in India and across the empire. Most of us will be familiar with Macaulay’s educational and legal reforms in Calcutta. His vision of Western-educated, English-speaking, indigenous elites, who could act as intermediaries with the wider masses was, of course, the template for the indirect rule so characteristic across the Indian Empire.
To those who accuse Dr. Biggar of compiling a simplistic imperial balance sheet of costs and benefits, he points out that neither can be morally commensurate with each other and therefore capable of being compared in those terms. Outcomes of either sort are usually historically and ethically complex.
The best we can do is to make balanced moral judgments of aims and intentions, even if their execution is often flawed or the consequences sometimes unintended. As for the charge of imperial nostalgia, Biggar’s reply is loud and clear. There can be no nostalgia, nor should there be. The British Empire, so long past, never can or will return.
The author
Dr. Masani is an Oxford historian and broadcaster. He is the author of Indira Gandhi: A Biography and Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist. His personal memoir, And All is Said, is an intimate portrait of his parents, the charismatic politician Minoo Masani and his gifted wife Shakuntala.
Related reading from the Churchill Project
Zareer Masani: “Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” 2021
Abhijit Sarkar, “The Effects of Race and Caste on Relief in the Bengal Famine,” 2021
Tirthankar Roy: “Inglorious Empire: Some of the Truth, Part of the Time,” 2020
Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse,” 2017
The Churchill Project: “Did Churchill Exacerbate the Bengal Famine?” 2015