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‘I won’t give a dumri,’ which in turn led to the popular expression ‘I don’t give a dam[n].’
India pale ale had originally been developed elsewhere, when the long sea voyage to India was found to greatly improve the taste of ‘stock’ beer – four to five months of being gently rocked by the ship and the gradual introduction of heat as the ship neared India resulting in great depth of flavour – but Bass marketed it brilliantly to the shopkeeper-and-clerk class, and in the process helped to transform the brewing industry and put Burton at its centre.
turning violent looting into an act of peaceful benevolence.
Liverpool, a city which Karl Marx famously claimed ‘waxed fat on the slave trade’, has its imperial legacy reflected not just in its size, growing as it did from a handful of streets in 1207 to a vigorous eighteenth-century city,
Wolverhampton was once a leading producer of iron goods such as manacles, chains, fetters and locks (but also a reminder that the region supplied shackles to pin down slaves), in the statue of Prince Albert in the middle of the city (which stands as an inadvertent reminder of the fact that the Consort became a staunch supporter of abolition, and was President of the African Civilization Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade)
Empire explains the feeling that we are exceptional and can go it alone when it comes to everything from Brexit to dealing with global pandemics.
Empire explains our particular brand of racism, it explains our distrust of cleverness, our propensity for jingoism.
The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre is one of the key events of the twentieth century, arguably marking the moment the Raj lost its grip on the largest empire in human history, and after which the momentum for Indian independence became unstoppable.
ritualized racial humiliation.
in 1818, the British were responsible for the deaths of 10,000 people in the course of battling the Kandyan kingdom of Ceylon, how the 1838 Myall Creek massacre saw up to fifty Indigenous Australians, including women, children and the aged, being brutally murdered by a group of colonist cattle ranchers, or how the Hola Camp for Mau Mau rehabilitation in Kenya was so brutal that eleven prisoners were beaten to death by guards under the watch of a British prison official).
The first British empire, which ran from the seventeenth century to the 1780s, was founded on the development of sugar plantations in the West Indies and involved large numbers of settlers to the American colonies and the Caribbean.
This phase ended with the American War of Independence. The second British empire was a more concerted power grab of India and Africa, at first dominated by the East India Company, which had the authority to print its own cash, set its own taxes, embark on wars on its own, on behalf of the national interest.
By the 1860s, the use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe Indians became commonplace.
You can’t apply modern ethics to the past. To read history as a series of events that instil pride and shame, or a balance of rights and wrongs, is as inane as listing the events in your own life as good and bad.
The desire to hold on to things even when you don’t value them enough to show them is surely an attitude that goes back to empire.
Britain has long struggled to accept the imperial explanation for its racial diversity. The idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality is the defining political narrative of my lifetime.
In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.’
India was ‘bled anything between 5 to 10 percent of her GDP annually for close to two centuries’
the triangular slave trade between England, Africa and the Caribbean peaked at 6 per cent of GDP, with total output dependent on slavery being double that and accounting for about the same proportion of GDP that professional and support services account for nowadays.
in August 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission suggested $777 trillion as a suitable sum for reparations paid as compensation for lives lost during the African slave trade and the gold, diamonds and other resources stolen from the continent during colonization.
Charles Dickens wrote: ‘I wish I were a commander-in-chief in India … I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the state of the late cruelties rested.’
racism was the consequence of slavery’
‘The emergence of a scientific approach to human taxonomy coincided with the growth of European empires … While it is true that some of the pioneers of anthropology had scientific principles at heart, the othering of people in potential or actual colonies has the effect of permitting subjugation.
how imperialism shapes the psychology of the colonized, and the children of the colonized,
‘a vigorous kind of brainwashing was in full swing’ conducted by national newspapers, the government and pressure groups, and observing that the British continued to ‘believe in the power of their prestige’ even when empire had expired and become a ‘deception’.
British belief that true heroism requires disaster is so entrenched in our psyche that we sometimes even reimagine parts of our history as disasters when they were not, such as the retreat at Dunkirk,
the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.’
‘Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s “island story”,
What he demonstrates is not amnesia in a precise sense but the denial, or cognitive dissonance, which surely leads to amnesia.
In Britain, in contrast, we act like we were never involved in slavery, let alone acknowledge that there were actual black slaves in Britain.
Freudian psychoanalysts believe that if you deny or repress a traumatic experience, you risk acting out versions of the original trauma in ways that can be self-defeating. If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we want to be.
The way we fail to acknowledge we are a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire makes our national conversations about race tragic and absurd.
