Subservient to the British crown

Niall Ferguson in his 2003 book `Empire’ glorifies the British Empire for facilitating the spread of liberal capitalism around the world, and how much it did for free trade. He holds the British Empire irreproachable because how much worse other empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned out to be. He justifies the Empire because it enacted the will of history and had disseminated the benefits of free market and parliamentary democracy.

He extols British investors for putting huge amounts of money into developing the economies of Africa and Asia.

Did Niall Ferguson ever wonder, while writing his book, about the rapacity in which Britain looted the wealth of its colonies? As for liberal capitalism and free trade, imposed British manufactured goods wiped out local industries in its colonies, reducing much of Africa and Asia under Britain to penury.

Britain’s colonies in Asia and Africa hardly had any democracy worth the mention, where protests for independence were met with the bullet.

On 13 April 1919, peaceful protesters defying a government order and demonstrating against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India were blocked inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by Gurkha soldiers. The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, kept firing until they ran out of ammunition, killing around 1,000 protesters and injuring another 1,100 within 10 minutes.

Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you.

In Kenya, in the Mau Mau uprising of 1951-60, thousands of Kenyans were mistreated, raped and tortured by British colonial forces. Members of the Kikuyu tribe were detained in camps, since described as “Britain’s gulags” or concentration camps, where they were systematically tortured and suffered serious sexual assault.

Estimates of the deaths vary widely: historian David Anderson estimates there were 20,000, whereas Caroline Elkins believes up to 100,000 could have died.

In South Africa, during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population – mainly women and children – and detained them in camps, which were overcrowded, and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations.

Of the 107,000 people interned in the camps, 27,927 Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.

There were the torture centres in Aden in the 1960s, where nationalists were kept naked in refrigerated cells. When the Empire was facing communist insurgents during the Malaya Emergency of the 1950s, they simply decided to imprison the entire peasant population in detention camps.

The list of British colonial atrocities goes on and on.

In India, the rapine and pillage conducted by the British saw a thriving economy, that had a share of global GDP of 23 percent before the colonial era, reduced to utter poverty, with less than 3 percent share of global GDP, by the time the British left the subcontinent.

Around 35 million Indians perished of starvation alone, while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tonnes of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.

In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece, while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.

In 1947, when the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan, by Cyril Radcliffe over a single lunch, on the eve of its independence, there was murder, rape and lynching between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. About two million people were killed in this homicidal fury. And 17 million people were uprooted from their native lands. The communal divide in India, was a fire that the British encouraged and stoked, through its insidious divide and rule policy.

In Australia, almost 50 percent of the aboriginal peoples died of the small pox epidemic brought in by the first fleet that arrived in Sydney in 1788. What is worse is that dozens of massacres of indigenous people were carried out by the British right up until the 1920s.

Yet, countries like Australia celebrate 26 January, the day the British arrived on the shores of Australia, as Australia Day, with scant respect for the sentiments of the native population. How come Australia, whose majority is populated by people that Britain had expelled, is so loyal to Britain, that it even displays the Union Jack on its flag? A lack of self-identity, perhaps. As also, a scant regard for its native culture, heritage and peoples. This, indeed, is worthy of excoriation.

A YouGov poll conducted in Britain found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past. YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain’s history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened, and 23 per cent holding neither view. Most Britons, would, perhaps, hang their heads in shame were they educated about the indefensible and reprehensible acts of the British Empire against its colonies.

Yet there are no reparations or apologies coming from Britain. The British government had, infact, disposed of around 20,000 undisclosed files from 37 former British colonies on atrocities committed against them. In 2015, it was found that The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was hiding around 600,000 historical documents in breach of the 1958 Public Records Act. A severe lack of compunction, perhaps, as the Queen still heads the odd and motley 54-member Commonwealth of Nations.