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History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.
When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.
That is what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologized on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to land in Vancouver, thereby sending many of them to their deaths.
the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.
The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.
The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company [the British East India Company] utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and ‘legal’ plunder which has now [1930] gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years.
‘The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.’ The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.
Yorkshire-born American Unitarian minister, J. T. Sunderland: Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world—nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty—had long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or any other in Asia. Her textile goods—the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silk—were famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewellery and her precious stones cut in every lovely form; so were her
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is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home, they had stolen so much from India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.
Clive was soon able to transfer the princely sum of £2.5 million (£250 million pounds in today’s money, the entire contents of the nawab’s treasury) to the Company’s coffers in England as the spoils of conquest.
‘What honour is left to us?’, the historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’ But
the Company’s own stalwart administrator Lord William Bentinck wrote that ‘the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India’.
Apologists for Empire suggest that Indian textiles were wiped out by the machines of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, in the same way that traditional handmade textiles disappeared in Europe and the rest of the world, rather than by deliberate British policy: in this reading, if they hadn’t collapsed to British power, the weavers would have been replaced within fifty years by Indian textile mills using modern machinery. India’s weavers were, thus, merely the victims of technological obsolescence. It is plausible that, in due course, handlooms would have found it difficult to compete with
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And at the end of British rule, modern industry employed only 2.5 million people out of India’s population of 350 million.
The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.
rotten boroughs’
Indian palace in the heart of the Cotswolds, complete with a green onion-shaped dome, umbrella-
As an essay in The Gentleman’s Magazine reported in 1786, ‘the Company providentially brings us home every year a sufficient number of a new sort of gentlemen, with new customs, manners, and principles, who fill the offices of the old country gentlemen [sic].’
‘Today the Commons of Great Britain prosecutes the delinquents of India. Tomorrow these delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain.’
The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations ‘combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate… Thus it was [that] they united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre with the little traffic of a merchant’s counting-house, wielding a truncheon with the one hand, and picking a pocket with the other’.
‘As India is to be bled, the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested… [rather than] to those which are already feeble for the want of it.’ The ‘blood’, of course, was money, and its ‘congestion’ offered greater sources of revenue than the ‘feeble areas’. (Salisbury went on to become prime minister.)
By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.
‘drain theory’
Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.
Ferdinand Mount—a descendant of a famous Company general himself—recently explained, it was all the simple logic of capitalism: ‘The British empire in India was the creation of merchants and it was still at heart a commercial enterprise, which had to operate at profit and respond to the ups and downs of the market. Behind the epaulettes and the jingle of harness, the levees and the balls at Government House, lay the hard calculus of the City of London.’
Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Dadabhai Naoroji—who
The annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India has amounted in thirty years, at compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,900,000. So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe then must be its effects on India when the wage of a labourer is from two pence to three pence a day.…
Mill’s History of India (Vol. VI, p. 671; ‘India Reform Tract’ II, p. 3) says:
‘It is an exhausting drain upon the resources of the country, the issue of which is replaced by no reflex; it is an extraction of the life blood from the veins of national industry which no subsequent introduction of nourishment is furnished to restore.’
William Digby was to observe, the Mistress of the Seas of the Western world had killed the Mistress of the Seas of the East.
Even Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest could not fail to take note, instructing her impressionable ward Cecily to ‘read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’
(Tata Steel’s subsequent decision to pull out of Britain, and the British government’s frantic scurrying to salvage the detritus of its steel industry, might also prompt a soupçon of schadenfreude in some Indians.)
As Eck explains: ‘Considering its long history, India has had but a few hours of political and administrative unity. Its unity as a nation, however, has been firmly constituted by the sacred geography it has held in common and revered: its mountains, forests, rivers, hilltop shrines…linked with the tracks of pilgrimage.’
