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The British Empire

Introduction China Diego Garcia India Iraq Ireland Kenya South Africa Sri Lanka

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Introduction

Britain's empire was built on vast ethnic cleansing, enslavement, enforced racial hierarchy, land theft and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: "We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress – the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings."

– Barbarity is the inevitable consequence of foreign rule by Seumas Milne, 27 January 2005.

China

Britain's East India Company would wage three wars on the people of China in order to secure the right to sell opium there. These wars for imperialist plunder and to open up new markets determined the fate of Hong Kong. They were the world's first drug wars. Their sole purpose was to secure the importation of an addictive substance that provided a bountiful flow of profits. Opium sales had risen gradually from 2,330 chests in 1788 to 4,968 chests in 1810. But once the British got a monopoly, they forced it up to 17,257 chests in 1835, worth millions of British pounds. Britain's governor-general of India wrote in 1830, "We are taking measures for extending the cultivation of the poppy, with a view to a large increase in the supply of opium."

The Opium War of 1839-42 started when the Chinese imperial government confronted foreign merchant ships and demanded they surrender their illegal cargo. Capt. Elliot, superintendent of the British fleet, asked the governor-general of India for as many ships as he could spare. He sent them to Hong Kong, where they protected the opium-carrying merchant vessels. Chinese junks sent by the emperor didn't stand a chance against the British warships. Rowntree wrote that the British were "in a great hurry to make money out of the East, and the gunboats were found to clear the way quickly. All vestiges of compassion for mankind had been swept away by the silver stream of rupees which poured into the Calcutta Exchequer." The wars waged on the Chinese people caused untold deaths and casualties. The British destroyed, plundered, looted and raped their way along the coast of China.

'NOTHING LEFT TO TAKE OR DESTROY'

The India Gazette, a British publication, wrote about the sack of Chusan in 1840: "A more complete pillage could not be conceived than took place. Every house was broken open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of all sorts – the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received from our merciless guns. … The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy." Negotiations led to the "Treaty of the Bogue." But the pact failed when the Chinese refused to pay the British for opium lost in the war. The British then seized Amoy, Tinghai, Chunhai and Ningpo.

After the deaths of thousands of Chinese, the first Opium War ended on Aug. 29, 1842, with the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty forced the Chinese government to pay $15 million to the British merchants. Furthermore, it opened up five ports to English trade. Finally, it ceded Hong Kong to the British. This was the bloody origin of Hong Kong's 155 years as a British colony.

– Opium War: Britain Stole Hong Kong From China by Kristianna Tho'Mas, 10 July 1997.

Diego Garcia

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitise" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

– Paradise cleansed – Our deportation of the people of Diego Garcia is a crime that cannot stand by John Pilger, 02 October 2004.

India

The central government [in British India] under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham [the governor of Madras] and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif [summer crop such as rice, dependent on the monsoon] crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As The Times's special correspondent described it, "The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction true ... nothing was too rich, nothing too costly." "Lytton put on a spectacle," adds a biographer of Lord Salisbury (the secretary of state for India), "which achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set him six months earlier, of being 'gaudy enough to impress the orientals' ... and furthermore a pageant which hid 'the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.'" Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular durbar. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero.
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Over the next year, the gathering horror of the drought-famine spread from the Madras Presidency through Mysore, the Bombay Deccan and eventually into the North Western Provinces. The crop losses in many districts of the Deccan plateau and Tamilnad plains were nothing short of catastrophic. Ryots [Indian peasants] in district after district sold their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the terrible first year of the drought. Without essential means of production, however, they were unable to take advantage of the little rain that fell in April-May 1877 to sow emergency crops of rape and cumboo [pearl millet]. As a result they died in their myriads in August and September.

Millions more had reached the stage of acute malnutrition, characterized by hunger edema and anemia, that modern health workers call skeletonization.
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The lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Sir Richard Temple, was sent south as plenipotentiary Famine Delegate by Lytton to clamp down on the "out of control" expenditures that threatened the financing of the planned invasion of Afghanistan. … In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects. … In a self-proclaimed Benthamite "experiment" that eerily prefigured later Nazi research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to "a school full of refractory children," down to one pound of rice per diem despite medical testimony that the ryots – once "strapping fine fellows" – were now "little more than animated skeletons ... utterly unfit for any work." … The "Temple wage," as it became known, provided less sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.

– Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, 2001.

"Had a stranger at this time [in 1782] gone into the Kingdom of Oude [Oudh], ignorant of what had happened since the death of Sujah Dowla, that man, who with a savage heart had still great lines of character, and who, with all his ferocity in war, had with a cultivating hand preserved to his country the riches which it derived from benignant skies, and a prolific soil – if this stranger, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval and observing the wide and general devastation and all the horrors of the scene – vegetation burnt up and extinguished; villages depopulated and in ruin; temples unroofed and perishing; reservoirs broken down and dry – he would naturally inquire:

What war has thus laid waste the fertile fields of this once beautiful and opulent country? What civil dissensions have happened, thus to tear asunder and separate the happy societies that once possessed those villages? What disputed succession? What religious rage has with unholy violence demolished those temples and disturbed fervent but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties? What merciless enemy has thus spread the horrors of fire and sword? What severe visitation of Providence has thus dried up the fountains, and taken every vestige of green from the earth?

Or rather, what monsters have stalked over the country, tainting and poisoning with pestiferous breath what the voracious appetite could not devour?

To such questions what must be the answers? No wars have ravaged these lands, and depopulated these villages; no civil discords have been felt; no disputed succession; no religious rage; no merciless enemy; no affliction of Providence, which, while it scourged for the moment, cut off the sources of resuscitation; no voracious and poisoning monsters; no – all this has been accomplished by the friendship, generosity, and kindness of the English nation. They have embraced us with their protecting arms, and lo, these are the fruits of their alliance."

– A speech on the ravages in India under the government of Warren Hastings, the first British Governor General of India by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1788.

While few educated South Asians would deny that British Colonial rule was detrimental to the interests of the common people of the sub-continent, several harbor an illusion that the British weren't all bad. Didn't they, perhaps, educate us, build us modern cities, build us irrigation canals, protect our ancient monuments, etc. etc. And then, there are some who might even say that their record was actually superior to that of independent India's! Perhaps, it is time that the colonial record be retrieved from the archives and re-examined, so that those of us who weren't alive during the freedom movement can learn to distinguish between the myths and the reality.

– The Colonial Legacy – Myths and Popular Beliefs from the South Asian History project, 17 September 2002.

Iraq

The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.

Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start.

The British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the flying dogs of war to "police" them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations' mandate. The mandate ended in 1932; the semi-colonial monarchy in 1958. But during the period of direct British rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal states.
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Winston Churchill [the secretary of state for war and air at the time] was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… [to] spread a lively terror…" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job.

– Our last occupation by Jonathan Glancey, 19 April 2003.

Ireland

Any historian who has studied the subject further than former Vice-President Dan Quayle, knows that potatoes (or the lack thereof) did not cause the Irish famine and genocide 150 years ago. The potato blight which struck the harvest in autumn 1845, had begun in North Carolina, and spread to destroy potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years; it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere except in Ireland. Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish – 75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of British landlords, fanatical preachers of "free trade" – were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock. The historian Arthur Young had written, like many others, that the Irish tenant farmers were slaves in effect:

"A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse … He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense."

Free trade exported or sold all the corn, wheat, barley, and oats Irish farmers grew, in order that they should pay their rents. All crops became cash crops – and there was nothing left for the farmer and his family to eat. British free trade tolerated no change in this situation while a million Irish starved to death, heavily deploying troops to protect the export ships. Free trade evicted instantly all farmers who stopped paying their rents, and the large landlords, led by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, evicted their tenants more rapidly than before as they were starving in the 1840s, even evicting many who were still paying rent.

– How British Free Trade Starved Millions During Ireland's Potato Famine by Paul Gallagher, May 1995.

Kenya

Three recent books show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise – some of them violently – against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder – more than a million – were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

– The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities by George Monbiot, 27 December 2005.

South Africa

The Second War of Independence was fought from 1899 to 1902 when England laid her hands on the mineral riches of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal) under the false pretence of protecting the rights of the foreigners who swarmed to the Transvaal gold fields. On the battlefield England failed to get the better of the Boers, and decided to stoop to a full-scale war against the Boer women and children, employing a holocaust to force the burghers to surrender.

Under the command of Kitchener, Milner and Roberts, homesteads and farms belonging to Boer people were plundered and burned down. Animals belonging to the Boers were killed in the cruelest ways possible while the women, whose men were on the battlefield, had to watch helplessly. The motive behind this action was the destruction of the farms in order to prevent the fighting burghers from obtaining food, and to demoralise the Boers by leaving their women and children homeless on the open veld. However, England misjudged the steel of the Boer people. Despite their desperate circumstances, the women and children managed to survive fairly well in the open and their men continued their fight against the invader. More severe measures had to be taken. The English herded the Boer women and children into open cattle trucks or drove them on foot to concentration camps.

By October 1900 there were already 58 883 people in concentration camps in Transvaal and 45 306 in the Free State. The amenities in the camps were clearly planned to kill as many of the women and children as possible. They were accommodated in tattered reject tents which offered no protection against the elements. According to a British journalist, WT Stead, the concentration camps were nothing more than a cruel torture machine. He writes: "Every one of these children who died as a result of the halving of their rations, thereby exerting pressure on to their family still on the battle-field, was purposefully murdered. The system of half rations stands exposed and stark and unshamefully as a cold-blooded deed of state policy employed with the purpose of ensuring the surrender of people whom we were not able to defeat on the battlefield." The detainees received no fruit or vegetables; not even milk for the babies.

The meat and flour issued were crawling with maggots. Emily Hobhouse writes: "I have in my possession coffee and sugar which were described as follows by a London analyst: In the case of the first, 66% imitation, and in the case of the second, sweepings from a warehouse."

In total 27 000 women and children made the highest sacrifice in the British hell camps during the struggle for the freedom of the Boerevolk. Mrs Helen Harris, who paid a visit to the Potchefstroom concentration camp, stated: "Imagine a one year old baby who receives no milk; who has to drink water or coffee – there is no doubt that this is the cause of the poor health of the children." Should one take note of the fact that it were the English who killed the Boers' cattle with bayonets, thereby depriving the children of their food sources, then the high fatality rate does not seem to be incidental. Despite shocking fatality figures in the concentration camps, the English did nothing to improve the situation, and the English public remained deaf to the lamentations in the concentration camps as thousands of people, especially children, were carried to their graves.

– The Concentration Camps 1899 – 1902 by Hennie Barnard.

Sri Lanka

This terror and wanton manslaughter visited every nook and corner of the Kandyan kingdom with monotonous regularity. Wherever any sign of hostility was reported, troops were let loose on measures of repression; houses were burnt, stores looted, women and children seized, any men captured were executed. "There was seldom a day passed but we had parties out scouting the country for a distance around burning all they came across and shooting those they could not take prisoners" wrote sergeant Calladine.

– The Madulla massacre by the British by Durand Appuhamy, 1998.