Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (15 page)

“The overt racism of the British in India, which affected the institutions of government, contributed powerfully to the growth of nationalist sentiment,” recalls Tapan Raychaudhuri, an emeritus fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. “All Indians, whatever their status, shared the experience of being treated as racial inferiors.... The life stories of Indian celebrities are full of episodes of racial insults.”
⁷⁸
For all its alleged liberalism and the capitalist institutions it forced on its captive peoples, the British Empire bred, inculcated, and propagated racism as its ultimate justification. Even though it was history’s largest empire, its rulers seemed incapable of functioning without thoroughly deceiving themselves about why, for a relatively short period of time, they dominated the world. For this reason alone, the British Empire should not be held up as an institution deserving emulation, least of all by the first nation that broke free of it, the United States of America.

Racists though they may have been, Britons have long claimed that they bequeathed to the world the most advanced and effective economic institutions ever devised. “For many British people,” as P. J. Marshall puts it, “it is axiomatic that their record in the establishment of colonies of settlement overseas and as rulers of non-European peoples was very much superior to that of any other power.”
⁷⁹
The popular Niall Ferguson, author of
Colossus,
an admiring if condescending book on America’s emerging empire, is primarily an economic historian, and his influential glosses on the British Empire stress, above all, its contributions to what later came to be called “globalization.” He is on the same wavelength with
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman, bestselling author of
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization
and
The World Is Flat,
who also thinks that the integration of capital markets and investor
protection contribute mightily to the well-being of peoples under the sway of either the British or the American empires. Though the idea does not survive close scrutiny, it has proved a powerful ideological justification of imperialism.

It is not news that somewhere around 1 billion people today subsist on almost nothing. With rare exceptions, the countries that the various imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exploited and colonized remain poor, disease- and crime-ridden, and at the mercy of a rigged international trading system that Anglo-American propagandists assure us is rapidly “globalizing” to everyone’s advantage. But, as the
New York Times
pointed out, “The very same representatives of the club of rich countries who go around the world hectoring the poor to open up their markets to free trade put up roadblocks when those countries ask the rich to dismantle their own barriers to free trade in agricultural products.”
⁸⁰
According to World Bank data, 390 million of India’s 1.1 billion people— almost a third of them—live on less than one dollar a day.
⁸¹
Typically, the former U.S. colony of the Philippines, a resource-rich country with a large Sino-Malay population, remains the poorest nation in East Asia, the world’s fastest-growing economic region—a direct result of U.S. imperialism. Similarly, impoverished Latin America still struggles to throw off the legacies of American “backyard” neocolonialism.
⁸²
All this is among the best-known economic information in the world.

According to the apologists for the British Empire, however, such bad economic news cannot be true, because these problems were solved over 150 years ago. Ferguson maintains that “the nineteenth-century [British] empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labor.”
⁸³
After the Irish famine (1846-1850) and the Indian Mutiny (1857), the British “recast their empire as an economically liberal project, concerned as much with the integration of global markets as with the security of the British Isles, predicated on the idea that British rule was conferring genuine benefits in the form of free trade, the rule of law, the safeguarding of private property rights and non-corrupt administration, as well as government-guaranteed investments in infrastructure, public health, and (some) education.”
⁸⁴

Unfortunately, this argument is an offshoot of the old nineteenth-century Marxist conception that politics are mere superstructural reflections of underlying economic relations, and that a single worldwide
economic system is emerging that will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and peace for all. As the economic theorist John Gray observes, “It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the Cold War. Neoliberals, such as Friedman [and Ferguson], have reproduced the weakest features of Marx’s thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history.”
⁸⁵

The idea that the British Empire conferred economic benefits on any groups other than British capitalists is pure ideology, as impervious to challenge by empirical data as former Soviet prime minister Leonid Brezhnev’s Marxism-Leninism or George Bush’s belief that free markets mean the same thing as freedom. At the apex of those who profited from British-style “free trade” at the end of the nineteenth century was the Rothschild Bank, then by far the world’s largest financial institution with total assets of around forty-one million pounds sterling. It profited enormously from the wars—some seventy-two of them—during Queen Victoria’s reign, and financed such exploiters of Africa as Cecil Rhodes.

Ferguson, who wrote a history of the House of Rothschild, knows these things and does not deny them when he turns from imperial panegyrics to history. “In the age before steam power,” he writes, “India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The British had first raised tariffs against their products; then demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected.”
⁸⁶
The result was poverty and dependence for India. As Oxford historian Tapan Raychaudhuri puts it, “Early in the nineteenth century India lost its export trade in manufactures and became a net importer of manufactured goods and a supplier of mainly agricultural products to Britain for the first time in its history. ... In India the favorable terms granted to British exporters and the doctrine of laissez-faire meant that Indian industries received no protection and hardly any encouragement until the mid-1920s, and then only in response to persistent Indian pressure.”
⁸⁷
Precisely at the time that the British were preparing India for its poverty-stricken modern fate, two other nations were laying the foundations for their own contemporary status as the world’s first and second most productive nations—the United States, protected from its inception to about 1940 by tariffs on manufactured imports that averaged 44 percent; and
Japan, which kept itself free of imperialist domination and copied the economic practices of Britain, the United States, and Germany rather than paying much attention to their economic treatises on free markets.
⁸⁸

What we are talking about here is, in Mike Davis’s phrase, “the making of the third world,” the poverty-stricken southern hemisphere that is still very much with us today. “The looms of India and China,” Davis writes, “were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.”
⁸⁹
In a well-known formulation, the social theorist Karl Polanyi wrote in his seminal work
The Great Transformation
(1944): “The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society.... Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.”
⁹⁰

Ferguson agrees; it is just that he, like Marx, sees all this chaos as “creative destruction,” the birth pangs of a new world order, Lenin’s famous willingness to break eggs in order to make an omelet. (“But how many eggs must you break,” one wag famously asked, “to make a two-egg omelet?”) “No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism,” Ferguson argues, “but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British empire enforced it.”
⁹¹

Thomas Friedman similarly acknowledges that contemporary American-sponsored globalization is not a naturally occurring process. American imperialism enforces it: “The most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investments is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for this era of globalization, just as the British navy did for the era of globalization in the nineteenth century.”
⁹²
If Mexican corn farmers are driven out of business by heavily subsidized American growers and then the price of corn makes tortillas unaffordable, that is just the global
market at work. But if poor and unemployed Mexicans then try to enter the United States to support their families, that is to be resisted by armed force.

After all their arguments have been deployed, how do analysts like Ferguson and Friedman explain the nineteenth-century poverty of India and China, the several dozen Holocaust-sized famines in both countries while food sat on the docks waiting to be exported, and their current status as “late developers”? Students of communism will not be surprised by the answer. In India, Ferguson argues, the British did not go far enough in enforcing their ideas. “If one leaves aside their fundamentally different resource endowments, the explanation for India’s underperformance compared with, say, Canada lies not in British exploitation but rather in the insufficient scale of British interference in the Indian economy.”
⁹³

When Mao Zedong introduced Soviet-style collective farms into China and did not get satisfactory results, he did not abandon them but turned instead to truly gigantic collectives called “communes.” This Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s produced a famine that took some thirty million Chinese lives, a monument to communist extremism similar to the extremes of laissez-faire that the British dogmatically imposed on their conquered territories—and that Ferguson would have preferred to be yet more extreme.

The historical evidence suggests a strong correlation exists between being on the receiving end of imperialism and immiseration. The nations that avoided the fates of India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines did so by throwing off foreign rule early—as did the United States—or by modernizing militarily in order to hold off the imperialists (and ultimately join them)—as did Japan.

Even so, the United States is the heir to the British Empire in at least one sense: it is still peddling the same self-serving ideology that its London predecessors pioneered. In a typical speech from the White House, given on September 17, 2002, President George W. Bush said, “The United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. ... Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty—so the United States will work with individual
nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity.” This kind of rhetoric gives democracy a bad name.

Some who deplore the British Empire’s racism and the fraudulent economic benefits it offered its imperial subjects are nonetheless willing to applaud its gentlemanly endgame, arguing that the way the empire dismantled itself after World War II was “authentically noble” and redeemed all that went before. Ferguson takes up this theme, too. “In the end, the British sacrificed her empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the empire’s other sins?”
⁹⁴
Much of this is Anglo-American claptrap, but at its core there is a theoretical distinction that is important. First, a look at the argument.

P. J. Marshall asserts categorically: “The British entered into partnerships with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill.. . . The unwillingness of the British government after 1945 to be dragged into colonial wars is irrefutable, even if it is not easy to explain.”
⁹⁵
This idea, a staple of Anglophile romanticism, is simply untrue. When he was writing in 1996, Marshall was surely aware of the Malayan Emergency, a bloody colonial war to retain British possession of its main rubber-producing southeast Asian colonies that lasted from approximately 1948 to 1960. It was the British equivalent of the anti-French and anti-American wars that went on in nearby Indochina. Although the British claimed victory over the insurgents, much like the French did in Algeria, the long and deadly conflict led to independence for Britain’s colonies and the emergence of the two successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.

The so-called Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960—in the immediate wake of the global war against fascism—was one of the most vicious colonial wars Britain ever fought. No one knows precisely what “Mau Mau” means or even what language it comes from, but it was the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, some 1.5 million strong, who led the rebellion for freedom from British oppression. Kenya’s white settler population was different from similar groups in other colonies. A great many came from Britain’s upper classes, and they assumed privileges in their new East African enclave that had long since been abolished in their
homeland. Caroline Elkins, an American historian who has reconstructed the revolt against these expatriates, writes, “Kenya’s big men quickly established a leisurely life-style aspired to by all Europeans in the colony. On their estates or farms or in European neighborhoods in Nairobi, every white settler in the colony was a lord to some extent, particularly in relationship to the African population.... [T]hese privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic life-style, filled with sex, drugs, and dance, followed by more of the same.”
⁹⁶