"Mark Houlsby"
wrote in message ...
Tim Hanke wrote (to Mark Houlsby):
(snipped)
Even the Chinese are actually a patchwork of ethnicities, even though you
may consider them all to be short yellow people with slanted eyes....

On the contrary, I believe that Mark Houlsby *is* aware of the existence of
Yao Ming, a 226 cm (7'5") tall Chinese basketball star in the NBA.

As one of my political science professors noted in college (I was at
Harvard, but he was visiting for the term from MIT), many of the most
successful and stable Third World countries are former British colonies
which absorbed a semblance of British institutions. Stand up straight and
take some pride in your own country, man, this is a compliment to your
native culture.

India may have benefited somewhat from British colonisation, since it still
is a democracy. There remain, however, very serious problems both of
population and of an ecological nature in that country. I am pleased to know
number of Indians who, if they are typically resourceful and industrious,
may indicate that India could solve its problems. I do hope so....

'They left no noble monuments behind and no religion save a concept of
Englishness as a desirable code of behaviour--of chivalry, it might be
described, tempered by legalism.'
--V.S. Naipaul (1964, An Area of Darkness, p. 201; on the British in India)

Dear Mr. Houlsby,

I hope so too. But I am afraid that I may have to disillusion you further
about the historical record of British imperialism in India.

"For many years, British books on India formed a small but precise genre of
their own, involving the use of phrases like 'the heady smell of spices and
woodsmoke', and descriptive invocations of cruel maharajahs, sly holymen,
rebellious tribesmen and the heat of the Deccan, together with occasional
appearances by tigers, missionaries, memsahibs, gymkhanas, Kipling and tiffin.
This extended into histories of the edifice lately termed 'the Raj', and
although it is now rare to find imperial dogma articulated so openly, a
nostalgic subtext still hovers beneath the pages of many books, like a loyal
native bearer lurking discreetly under the verandah of one of M.M. Kaye's
bungalows.

The subcontinental response to this British-imagined India has been richly
impressive in the realms of fiction, but generally flimsy when it comes to
historical or biographical writing. Too often, a narrow, obfuscatory
nationalism has been the only way of facing the region's history, enabling
the father of the nation--be he Jinnah or Gandhi--to emerge dressed in a
spotless suit, sherwani or dhoti. There has been a consistent failure to
recognise or acknowledge the real role of Indian politicians in what happened
in the 1930s and forties. Although personally I believe that British rule in
India had a primarily destructive effect, it does not follow that the ousters
of the imperialists were therefore blameless, or that they do not share
responsibility for what took place. Even at its height, the European presence
in the subcontinent neer amounted to more than 0.05 per cent of the total
population. British rule in India was always a joint venture, which depended
heavily on collaboration.

While it lasted, it was an effective but shallow way of governing, which may
explain why all that remains of the Indian Empire half a century on is a
handful of fine buildings, a stagnant legal system and bureaucracy, and a
mutated language....

The British did *not*, as if often claimed, give India democracy, except in
a primitive form at the level of provincial government. The decision to grant
a universal franchise to the people of India (and from time to time to the
people of Bangladesh and Pakistan) was made by the relevant elites *after*
independence. The most durable legacy of the Indo-British encounter can be
found in the British Isles, in the form of two million citizens of
subcontinental descent--'the Asian community', as politicians say, although
whether a Bengali Muslim and a Gujurati Hindu really belong to the same
community must be open to question.

The story of India's journey to independence and division remains a contentious
and hugely sensitive area of history. In Britain it is viewed as an
embarrassment, in Bangladesh as a betrayal, in India as a mixed blessing, and
in Pakistan as a matter too tender even to be seriously discussed."

--Patrick French (1997, Liberty or Death, xxiv-xxv)

"'Right-wing' critics of liberalism in the Raj looked with satisfaction to the
journalism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1883 famously said that the
Raj was 'founded not on consent but on conquest'....Once Indian nationalism
became an even half-serious proposition, the Raj could not long endure.
Racist, by any standards, it undoubtedly was; economically exploitative too,
as nearly all modern historians wish to point out; but the British will to
govern by force had its limits when consent was absent. The massacre of
protestors at Amritsar by General Dyer--379 killed and 1200 wounded--on
13 April 1919, followed by a proclamation of martial law, was a disgrace from
which the British Raj never recovered its semi-legitimate self-estimation for
decency and justice. Thirty years before independence it sealed the Raj's
fate..."
--A.N. Wilson (The Victorians, pp. 500-1)

"India, of course, was the greatest captive market in world history, rising
from third to first place among consumers of British exports in the quarter
century after 1870. 'British rulers', writes Marcello de Cecco in his study
of the Victorian gold standard system, 'deliberately prevented Indians from
becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced
materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation
of an autonomous industrial structure in India.' Thanks to a 'government
stores policy that reserved most government purchases to British products and
by the monopoly of British agency houses in organizing the import-export
trade', India was forced to absorb Britain's surplus of increasingly
obsolescent and noncompetitive industrial exports. By 1910 this included
two-fifths of the UK's finished cotton goods and three-fifths of its exports
of electrical products, railway equipment, books and pharmaceuticals. As a
result, observes de Cecco, Britain avoided, 'having to restructure her
industry and was able to invest capital in the countries where it gave the
highest return'. Thanks to India, 'British financiers were not compelled to
'tie' their loans to British exports because the Imperial outlet was always
available for British products....

But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its
conqueror's suddenly precarious commercial supremacy? In a word, it couldn't,
and India was forced-marched into the world market, as we shall see, by
revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign
consumption at the price of their own food security....Between 1875 and 1900,
years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports
*increased* from 3 million to 10 million tons: a quantity that, as Romesh
Dutt pointed out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people.
By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's
wheat consumption as well as allowing London grain merchants to speculate
during shortages on the Continent.

But Indian agriculture's even more decisive contribution to the imperial
system, from the East India Company's first *illegal* shipment of opium to
Canton, was the income it earned in the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere....
Indeed England's systematic exploitation of India depended in large part upon
India's commercial exploitation of China. The triangular trade between India,
China and Britain had a strategic economic importance in the Victorian world
system that transcended other far larger flows of commerce....By *forcibly*
enlarging the Chinese demand for the narcotic and, thus, the taxes collected
on its export, the two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-58) and the punitive
Treaty of Tianjin (1858) revolutionized the revenue base of British India.
'Opium', says John Wong, 'serviced the cost of imperial expansion in India.'
Opium shipments from India reached a peak of 87000 chests in 1879, the biggest
drug transactions in world history....

'The sale of Bengal opium to China', Latham explains, 'was a great link in
the chain of commerce with which Britain had surrounded the world. The chain
worked like this: The United Kingdom paid the United States for cotton by bills
upon the Bank of England. The Americans took some of those bills to Canton
and swapped them for tea. The Chinese exchanged the bills for Indian opium.
Some of the bills were remitted to England as profit; others were taken to
India to buy additional commodities, as well as to furnish the money remittance
of private fortunes in India and the funds for carrying on the Indian
government at home.'...

Britain's dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian
narcotraficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the whle free-trade imperium....
Moreover, China was *forced* at bayonet point to cede control over tariffs to
the British inspector-general of the Imperial Maritime Customs Administration,
a de facto imperial proconsul who 'came to enjoy more influence with the
Foreign Office than did the British Minister in Peking.'"

--Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 298-301)

"...William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized
on the eve of Queen Victoria's death that when 'the part played by the British
Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years
hence, the *unnecessary* deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal
and most notorious monument.' A most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist
Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural
selection, passionately agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as
*avoidable* political tragedy, not 'natural' disaster....how do we weigh
smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern
grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died
alongside railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?"
--Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 8-9)

"(Sir Richard) Temple's perverse task was to make relief as repugnant and
ineffective as possible. In zealously following his instructions to the
letter, he became to Indian history what Charles Edward Trevelyan...had become
to Irish history: the personificatin of free market economics as a mask for
colonial genocide.

In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple
purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow
Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory
camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects.
The deliberately cruel 'distance test' refused work to able-bodied adults and
older children within a ten-mile radius of their homes. Famished laborers
were also prohibited from seeking relief until 'it was certified that they had
become indigent, destitute, and capable of only a modicum of labour'....

In self-proclaimed Benthamite 'experiment' that eerily prefigured later Nazi
research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple
cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to 'a school full of refractory
children', down to one pound of rice per diem *despite* medical testimony
that ryots--once 'strapping fine fellows'--were now 'little more than animated
skeletons...utterly unfit for any work'. (Noting that felons traditionally
received two pounds of rice per day, one district official suggested that 'it
would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in
the way proposed'.)...In the event, the 'Temple wage', as it became known,
provided *less* sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous
Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of them modern caloric
standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government....

Temple meanwhile proclaimed that he had put 'the famine under control'.
(Digby sourly responded that 'a famine can scarcely be sid to be adequately
controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead'.)...Exactly as medical
officials had warned, the 'Temple wage' combined with heavy physical labor
and dreadful sanitation turned the work camps into *extermination camps*....
Post-mortem examinations, moreover, showed that the chief cause of death...
was textbook starvation, with full-grown men reduced to under sixty pounds of
weight....

Temple's ferocious response to reports of mass mortality in the camps was to
blame the victims...'Nor will many be inclined to grieve for the fate which
they brought upon themselves, and which terminated lives of idleness and too
often of crime.'"

--Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 37-41)

During the Second World War, there was a great famine in Bengal, which
caused a few million deaths, toward which any British relief was much too
little and too late.

"Jinnah stated in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that the British
were 'irresponsible' and 'incompetent' to have allowed the famine to develop,
and pointed out that Churchill's administration would not have remained in
office for twenty-four hours if people had been dying of starvation in their
thousands every week on the streets of Britain....Wavell wrote that he
considered the Cabinet's stand over food imports to Bengal to be nothing short
of 'scandalous', and threatened resignation if nothing was done to halt the
deaths from starvation....Under pressure from Wavell and Amery, Churchill
asked Roosevelt if he could borrow US ships to bring wheat from Australia....
The Americans refused to assist, for fear of damaging their own war effort....

In February 1944, when the worst of the crisis had passed, Wavell sent a
telegram to Amery which read: 'Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters
that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation
here...is incalculable. Atempt by His Majesty's Government to prove on the
basis of admittedly defective statistics that we an do without help demanded
would be regarded here by all opinion British and Indian as utterly
indefensible...'"

--Patrick French (Liberty or Death, pp. 182-3)

'Heart of Smugness' by Maria Misra (23 July 2002, The Guardian):
'Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties
of its empire.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...761626,00.html

Here are some reviews of 'Late Victorian Holocausts':

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...424896,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...436292,00.html

'I was born to destroy this evil government.'
--Mohandas Gandhi (1930, on the British Raj in India)

--Nick