It's time Britain's politicians stopped lying about colonialism

Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem, 'The White Man’s Burden' portrayed colonialism as a burdensome civilisational mission.

The Victorian novelist penned the poem in 1899 as he encouraged the United States to annex the Philippines. Colonialism to Kipling and his contemporaries was a noble pursuit required to civilise the "savages". But such racist logic stood at odds with the reality on the ground.

In the subsequent invasion of the Philippines, entire villages were exterminated and whole populations were imprisoned in concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed. And the racism that underpinned colonial conquest was not restricted to the colonies. Filipinos on the US mainland were dehumanised and depicted as animals.

The ‘burden’ was, indeed, real, but it was borne by the people who were brutalised in the name of colonialism. The people of Africa and Asia whose resources were stolen and whose lands were carved up, the Native Americans who suffered genocide and the millions of victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

125 years on, Kipling’s racist myth lives on. 

In a desperate attempt to woo over the Tory faithful in his now-failed Conservative Party leadership bid, Robert Jenrick recently told the press that the former colonies owed Britain a "debt of gratitude for the inheritance we left them."

Unable to offer any solutions to the material concerns of communities across Britain, Jenrick instead opted for the familiar right-wing culture war playbook, wading into a row about reparations.

The new Justice Secretary claimed "the territories colonised by our empire were not advanced democracies," going on to say that the British empire "broke the long chain of violent tyranny as we came to introduce – gradually and imperfectly – Christian values."

This obnoxious distortion of history couldn’t be further from the truth. The rich history of India tells a different story.

Thousands of years before British colonial rule, the subcontinent was home to the Indus Valley civilisation. This was a civilisation known for its sophisticated urban planning system, which included the world’s first known sanitation systems. Its cities contained baked-brick homes and the similarity in size of these buildings demonstrated a remarkable degree of egalitarianism and wealth distribution. It was in India that the first accurate system of standardised weights and measures was developed. And they had likely traded with ancient Mesopotamia for hundreds of years.

Britain must come to terms with its colonial past

In the centuries that followed, numerous kingdoms ruled the Indian subcontinent. Many were key participants in the Indian Ocean trading network alongside Arab, African and Malay kingdoms – exchanging both commodities and ideas.

By the 17th Century, Mughal India was the manufacturing marvel of the world, known for its agriculture, textile, shipbuilding and steel industries. 

India was, of course, not without its problems prior to British rule. Mughal power was waning, and the kingdoms were increasingly fragmented. But British rule did usher in the end of India’s economic dominance. Prior to British colonial rule in India, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent — as large as all of Europe put together. 

By the time the British empire had left India, this had dropped to three percent. 

Drawing on detailed data on tax and trade, economist Utsa Patnaik estimates that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

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Simply put, Britain’s industrialisation was built on India’s deindustrialisation. India’s centuries-old textile industry is a case in point.

As Shashi Tharoor points out, "As late as the mid-eighteenth century, Bengal’s textiles were still being exported to Egypt, Turkey and Persia in the West, and to Java, China and Japan in the East, along well-established trade routes, as well as to Europe."

Britain’s response was to cut off the export market for Indian textiles. With Britain’s cloth manufacturers unable to compete with cheap Indian handloom fabrics, they sought to eliminate the competition, with soldiers of the East India Company smashing the looms of Bengali weavers. Indians were instead forced to purchase British-made textiles as the hand-spun cotton and weaving industries were mercilessly dismantled.

Famines were another hallmark of colonial India. India suffered 24 major famines between 1850 and 1899. The last major famine of British India, the Bengal famine of 1943, resulted in the deaths of three million people. While people died of starvation, colonial authorities continued to export rice from India to elsewhere in the empire.

But what about the railways? The frequent retort of empire apologists conveniently ignores that the railways were built to transport raw materials from the hinterlands to the ports for shipping to Britain. Its tracks were laid by poorly paid Indian labourers and shareholders profited from construction, with the British government guaranteeing a fixed return financed entirely by the Indian taxpayer.

The transatlantic slave trade, where 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas, to be made to labour for free, remains one of the worst crimes in human history.

Just imagine the profit margins of the largest companies in Britain today if they’d never paid their workers for over 400 years. Such was the magnitude of the exploitation. Britain, of course, accumulated vast wealth from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and such wealth financed the growth of numerous industries in Britain.

As Eric Williams’ noted in his seminal text Capitalism and Slavery, the triangular trade gave a triple stimulus to British industry:

"The Negroes were purchased with British manufactures, transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries, By 1750 there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution."

Shipbuilding too received a direct stimulus from the triangular trade as did the ancillary trades concerned with the repairs and upkeep of British ships.

According to a recent study, places in Britain with the highest levels of slavery wealth saw increases in total income of more than 40% relative to a counterfactual in which Britain was not involved in slavery.

In 1833, Britain borrowed the modern equivalent of £17 billion to compensate 46,000 slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’ — a debt that was still being paid off by taxpayers until 2015. The slaves themselves? They got nothing.

The notion that Britain had colonised a quarter of the world to promote economic development is a laughable myth that has zero credibility. On the contrary, it was colonialism that aided Britain’s economic development. If a debt is to be discussed, it must be the reparations owed to its former colonies for the exploitation they endured.

This isn’t unprecedented. Germany paid reparations for the genocide and colonial crimes in Namibia. The United States paid reparations to the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Canada made reparations to indigenous peoples.

Last month’s Commonwealth Summit in Samoa demonstrated the strength of feelings from the former colonies on this issue. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s response, however, was to ignore such discussion and insist the country is moving forward. Moving forward means coming to terms with the past. For Britain, it is long overdue.

Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Metro and the Independent. He is the former editor of Tribune Magazine and is currently writing a book on the history of British South Asian political activism in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.