The Empire of Good Intentions: Part I

Continuing my notes on the evolution of the British political economy and Britain's foreign policy. Again, I'm drawing on the third volume of Simon Schama's "History of Britain" books, all quotes being Schama unless otherwise stated. Page references are included in the text.

As before, rather than just summarising the chapters in question I'm pulling out and offering my own comments on those parts pertinient to my PhD research, skipping the less relevant bits.

While the following interpretation of events will inevitably be influenced by Schama's writing, it is an attempt to create my own analysis from that.

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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as had ever been the case, British Imperialism was characterised by the chasm between the lofty claims of its advocates and the gruesome depths of its reality.

Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, declared the Empire to be “the greatest force for good the world has ever seen”, later stating that “[t]he message is carved granite, it is hewn in the rock of doom, that our work is righteous and it shall endure” p195,197. Elsewhere, (now quoting Schama), “[p]uffers of empire, like J.R. Seeley, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, talked often and loudly of Britain’s civilising ‘destiny’” p195.

The Indian people’s experience of empire was a little different. “[T]he period [at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] when [the empire’s] triumphalists were boasting most noisily of the material and medical benefits that the British had brought to the subcontinent happened also to be the decades when India experienced the most horrific death toll in its entire modern history”. The medical journal The Lancet estimated that excess deaths (above the norm) from famine and disease had been at least 19 million in the 1890s; equivalent to half the population of Britain. Estimates of the death toll of the 1899-1900 famine in western and central India ranged between 6.5 and 10 million. One quarter were claimed by the bubonic plague in 1991 alone. “An earlier famine in Orissa in 1865-6 had, according to government sources, killed fully a quarter of the population” p198-9. Schama says that the empire’s administrators “had - most of them – only the best of intentions” p194. Yes they saw a profit to be made, but also an altruistic mission to fulfil, namely the eradication of poverty disease and ignorance in its colonies. The vision was not one of imperial subjugation but of “trusteeship”. “India would one day rise and walk again on its own two feet and be judged (by the British) capable once more of governing itself” p199.

What a happy coincidence that the point where India suddenly and mysteriously mislaid its ability to govern itself (after centuries of producing a succession of the world’s leading civilisations) was the very same point in history that Britain appeared on the scene, ready to nurse the patient back to health and, again entirely coincidentally, make an enormous profit in doing so.

“There is no doubt that these ideals were sincerely held....There is equally no doubt that it seldom occurred to the governors of empire (although it certainly did to its adversaries) that their military and economic power had actually caused many, if not most, of the problems they claimed to be in India to correct” p199. Schama also notes that the “ignorance” and “arrogance” of those like Thomas Macaulay who, in the 1830s, declared the “indolent and superstitious” peoples of the Orient in need of a schooling in “European knowledge” so as to make them “capable of all the privileges of citizens” p200-1. Another word Schama might have used is ‘racist’, not least to describe Curzon’s statement, to an audience at Calcutta University, that “truth is a western concept”? p206

Macaulay’s vision, and that of his contemporaries, was of “taking ‘inert’ Asia (another favourite cliché) and injecting it with the dynamism of progress” p202. Under British paternal guidance, India would produce surpluses of cash crops for export and purchase manufactured British goods with the profits, in a cycle that would produce both economic and moral development for the colonial wards.

Though it cannot be said that Indian society was free of barbaric practices, the British never missed an opportunity, whether they understood these practices properly or otherwise, to use them as a justification for the civilising mission, not withstanding its own barbarous and far more lethal nature p210-1.

British rule over India in the early nineteenth century had, in some respects, been at its most enlightened. Administrators had shown an notable degree of sympathetic cultural engagement and thirst for knowledge, immersing themselves intellectually in their surroundings. But, alongside this, the familiar dynamics of imperialism were ever-present. Wars for ‘stability’ begat instability, which begat further wars, further militarization, and further taxation to pay for an East India Company (EIC) army that by the 1830s comprised nearly a quarter-million (mostly Indian sepoys), making it one of the biggest in the world p205.

Soon the sympathetic scholars of early imperial rule were pushed aside by the likes of James Mill, Macaulay, and Charles Trevelyan who, though they felt qualified to write about or actually govern India, evidently saw no need to engage with its culture and history in any serious way. Mill wrote his “History of British India” without ever having visited the country. What, after all, was there for the British to understand, outside of their own exalted perspectives? Macaulay proclaimed that he had “never found [anyone] distinguished by their proficiency in the eastern tongues who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” p212

The orientalists resisted the new chauvinism for a time. The Macaulays and Trevelyans envisaged effecting their civilising mission by co-opting an upper strata of Indian society, educating it in the finer points of the white man’s culture, and then allowing that knowledge to cascade down towards the lower orders. But in this “class of person, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, opinions morals and intellect [p212 – it is not clear who Schama is quoting at this point. Macaulay or Trevelyan presumably] the orientalists saw only the prospect of “a clique detached from the rest of Indian society ... a cultural mongrel group, with a vested interest in telling the sahibs what they wanted or needed to hear” p212. But it was the chauvinists’ mode of imperial rule that was to prevail, and the orientalists - with their hookahs, their Sanskrit, their Indian mistresses (and sometimes wives) and mixed-race children – that were to be consigned to history, soon to be followed, it was hoped, by the corrupt and effeminizing culture that they had so foolishly embraced p215.

But far from raising its subjects up from their backward squalor, the new imperial model performed what Schama describes as a “rolling economic demolition job” on Indian society p218. The loss of the EIC’s monopoly on the indigo trade devastated exporters, while the mass import of Lancashire-produced textiles did the same to Indian manufacturing industry and the local economies built around it. No pain no gain, was the considered view of the British modernizers content to see the modern industrial economy do its work. But the gains proved sparse while the pain was deep and extensive. Emily Eden, sister of the Governor-General Lord Auckland, described her journey through famine-ravaged India northwest to the Sikh court of Ranjit Singh:

“You cannot conceive the horrible sights we see, particularly children; perfect skeletons in many cases, their bones through their skin; without a rag of clothing, and utterly unlike human creatures...The women look as though they had been buried, their skulls look so dreadful” p219-20 [ emphasis in original].

Between 1846 and 1850, Charles Trevelyan presided over another civilising famine, this time in Ireland which, in those short years, “lost a quarter of its population: 1 million died of starvation or famine-related diseases, and another million turned to emigration as their only chance of survival” p220. Trevelyan viewed this as “the judgement of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people, and as God has sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise” p221. It was the luck of the Irish that Trevelyan should be the Treasury official in charge of the relief effort , as well as God’s spokesperson on Earth.

Part of the problem had been a failure to predict understand or know how to deal with the fungal infection attacking the potato crop. But the real problem was that of a population forced to live on a razor’s edge of high rents for the land they worked and very low wages. They had no capacity to deal with any further hardship, let alone the devastation of the very crop that was “the beginning and the end of their diet” p225.

However, as far as Trevelyan was concerned, if the Irish could not afford to eat then this was a natural outcome of market forces, and not something to be interfered with. Trevelyan therefore opposed any attempts to stop the export of oats from starving Ireland, on the grounds that this would cause “discouragement and feeling of insecurity” to business, and thus do more harm than good p226.

As was the case with the workhouses on the mainland, the fear of the great and the good that the poor and malnourished may try to exploit them resulted in relief provisions so brutally sparse as not to attract the no doubt ever-present shirkers and freeloaders. Harry David Jones, the chairman of the board of public works, warned Trevelyan, “I believe everyone considers the government fair game to pluck as much as they can” p226. Hard-labour in exchange for a pittance of sustenance kept hundreds of thousands teetering on the edge of starvation. In one workhouse at Skibbereen, 226 inmates died between October 1846 and January 1847 p227.

As the tragedy became increasingly hard to gloss over, wealthy benefactors (including the Queen and Prince Albert) began to fund charitable efforts such as soup kitchens. But the callousness of official policy remained stubbornly intact. The public works relief projects had been so inundated that they were wound up and replaced by a new generation of workhouses. But these would be available only to those holding a quarter of an acre or less, thereby excluding “the vast majority of even the poorest” peasant families p228. The choice was no choice, give up what little you have to the landlord so as to qualify for the workhouse, or keep it and starve. Thus was Trevelyan’s social revolution brought about. Smallholders migrated to the ports or the workhouses (or were simply evicted), the landlords then demolishing the cabins in their wake as the small plots were consolidated into tenant farms. So every cloud (for the starving poor) had a silver lining (for the landlord class).

His career untroubled by the role he played in these events, Trevelyan went on to preside over the creation of what we now recognise as Whitehall: a cluster of spacious buildings around London’s Houses of Parliament in which the main departments of government would have their offices. Trevelyan argued that this was far more than a practical, administrative exercise.

“[W]e are organising, Christianising and civilising large portions of two ancient continents, Africa and Asia; and it is not right when the inhabitants of those countries come to the metropolis they should see nothing worthy of its ancient renown. Now I conceive that a plan of the kind I have sketched... would give the honour due to the focus of our liberties, of that regulated freedom which we hope will overspread the world” p233.

This new citadel of imperial government - like the communal burial bits of Ireland, and the tiny infant graves marked with shapeless rocks, marked with no epitaphs, at Connemara on the Atlantic shore p227 – would stand as the monuments to the civilising mission of Charles Trevelyan and Britain’s empire of good intentions.