Empire of Violence (1)

I have just read Legacy of Violence: a History of the British Empire by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins. I think that it is one of the most disturbing books that I have ever read.

When I was in primary school during the 1950s, we had a picture of the queen on the wall and here were taught about the glories of the British Empire, which had more recently become the British Commonwealth. In our school atlases the parts of the world which had been controlled by Britain were coloured red. We marvelled at the scope of its influence.

We were taught the narrative that the British were the best colonizers, because they had brought civilization, freedom from superstition, true religion, Christianity, education and economic development to the nations they conquered. We were taught that we were privileged to be part of this great endeavour.

I have read enough history since those days to realize that this narrative was not true. I came to realise many British leaders were morally flawed and many of their practices were harmful, but I had not realized the fall extent of the harm done to the people colonised. Elkins uses information from various archives to demonstrate the full horror of the way that the British treated the people in the colonies that it controlled.

The worst feature of what happened is that throughout the era, the British trumpeted the goodness of what they were doing in their colonies. Unlike other imperial countries that did terrible things, they claimed that they were bringing education and civilization to people that were not ready for it. They claimed to be ruling "children", so they needed to use violence to establish “moral force” from time to time.

The British government loves to stand in judgment on the human rights records of other nations, particularly those that they do not like. Once you understand their own history, it is clear that they have no moral ground to stand on. What they did, and what they continued to do right up into the 1960s, was far worse than anything done in the countries like Iran and China that the British grandstand against today. This is a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.

If the British people understood what their leaders had done down through the years (and covered up) they would be hugely embarrassed. They would want their leaders to hide, rather than judge other nations. The following posts will give examples from the book.

The well-known philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1861 advocated for a narrative of human development that was intimately bound with Britain’s civilizing mission.

Britain, having already climbed the arduous civilizing scale, sat secure in their position atop the hierarchy of civilisations and in their role as self appointed shepherds of reform. In contrast, he endowed the non-Europeans of the empire with child-like qualities and juxtaposed them with the progressive images of the British. Like children, non western populations were not yet ready for liberty (p.50).

Before Mill wrote these words, Britain had declared martial war in Ireland (1798 and 1848) Barbados (1805 and 1816) Ceylon (1817 and 1848) Demerara (1823) Jamaica (1823-1824) Cape Colony7 1835, 1846 1850-53) And Canada (1837-38). This legalised extraordinary acts of coercion and suspension of due process (p.51).

Jamaica is just one small example of the violent legacy. Disputes about justice caused clashes between blacks and whites in Jamaica in 1864. According to the official report,

439 Blacks died, many summarily executed, one thousand dwellings were burned, no fewer than six hundred Blacks were flogged. At first an ordinary cat was used for flogging, but afterwards, for the punishment of men, wires were twisted around the cords, and the different tails so contracted were knotted (p.58).