Inglorious Empire
‘The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly’: Macaulay’s Minute on Education, 2 Feb 1835, is published in Henry Sharp, Selections from the Educational Records, Bureau of Education, India, I, Calcutta, 1920.
‘most fully admitted that the great body of the people’: Quoted in Zastoupil and Moir, (1999), p. 140–141.
It is difficult to argue…that such education acquired as much reach: From Margrit Pernau (ed.), Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State and Education before 1857, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
‘become a sort of hybrid’: Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, p. 298.
All Indian aspirations and development of strong character: British Rule Condemned, p 9.
European subordination of Asia was not merely economic: Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012.
To the memory of the British Empire in India: Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, London: Macmillan, 1951.
made Chaudhuri a poster child for scholarly studies of how Empire creates: Ian Almond, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
‘these two processes of self-othering’: Ibid, p. 115.
moved to Oxford, there to live out his centenarian life: Ibid, p. 120.
seeing even in Clive’s rapacity…the ‘counterbalancing grandeur’ of the grand imperialist: Chaudhuri, Autobiography, p. 3; Chaudhuri, Clive of India, p. 11.
‘Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer: David Lelyveld, ‘The Notorious Unknown Indian’, New York Times, 13 November, 1988.
‘all the squalid history of Indo-British personal relations’: Chaudhuri, Autobiography, p. 15.
‘mythological histories…where fable stands in the face of facts’: Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism, Clarendon Press, 1992.
Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of: Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
arguments made for propagating English literature through the English language: Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838.
‘the rise of Raj revisionism’: Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’; see also Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (2004); Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
‘it is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue’: Howitt, p. 88.
‘in our schools pupils imbibe sedition’: J. D. Rees, The Real India, London: Methuen, 1908, pp. 162–163.
the study of which, even in Oxford, induces a regrettable tendency towards vain: Ibid, p. 343.
‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured’: Richard West, ‘Wodehouse Sahib’, Harpers and Queen, 1988, pp. 114–115.
‘let the English who read this at home reflect’: Quoted in British Rule Condemned, p. 19.
large numbers of trees were chopped down since the opium poppy: Arupjyoti Saikia, ‘State, peasants and land reclamation: The predicament of forest conservation in Assam, 1850s-1980s’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2008, pp. 81–82.
The term Puliyur has lost its meaning: For details of India’s environmental destruction under the British, see Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Routledge, 1995.
cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase: Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 1.
why cricket acquired such a hold in Bengal society between 1880 and 1947: Anonymous, ‘Cricket in Colonial Bengal (1880–1947): A lost history of nationalism’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 23 (6), 2006.
‘saw cricket as an identifier of social status’: Nandy, p. 53.
‘an English cricketer and an Indian prince’: Buruma, p. 234.
‘attacked the political and economic aspects of British imperialism’: Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket, London: Orient Longman, 1980, p. 22–3.
sports such as gymnastics and cricket were made compulsory to develop: Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
CHAPTER 7: THE (IM)BALANCE SHEET: A CODA
‘an exercise in benign autocracy and an experiment in altruism’: See www. andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/lawrence-james/books/raj-the-making-and-unmaking-of-british-empire.
Recent years have seen the rise of what the scholar Paul Gilroy: Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
A 2014 YouGov poll revealed that 59 per cent of respondents: www.yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire/
‘the optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods’: Ferguson, Empire, p. xx.
But human beings do not live in the long run; they live, and suffer, in the here and now: These arguments are cogently substantiated by Linda Colley, ‘Into the Belly of the Beast’, The Guardian, 18 January 2003, and Philip Pomper, ‘The History and Theory of Empires’, History and Theory, Vol. 44 (4), December 2005, Wiley for Wesleyan University, pp. 1–27.
Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history: Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 362.
‘whether all this has been for better or worse, is almost impossible to say’: Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 200.
‘Its operation was driven instead by narrow interests and visceral passions’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 500.
‘between 1757 and 1900 British per capita gross domestic product’: Ferguson, Empire, p. 216.
the Indian government brought electricity to roughly 320 times as many villages: Paul Cotterrill, ‘Niall Ferguson’s Ignorant Defence of British Rule in India’, New Statesman, 16 August 2012.
India was… an ‘extractive colony’: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail, New York: Crown Business, 2012.
Colonial exploitation happened instead: See Cotterrill, ‘Ferguson’s Ignorant Defence’ and ‘The Incomplete State: Charles Tilly and the Defence of Aid to India’, www.thoughcowardsflinch.com/2012/02/07/the-incomplete-state-charles-tilly-and-the-defence-of-aid-to-india/, 7 Feb 2012.
‘When the English came to India’: William Jennings Bryan, British Rule in India, Westminster: British Committee of the Indian National Congress, 1906, p. 19.
‘The empire was run on the cheap’: Jon Wilson, ‘False and dangerous’, The Guardian, 8 February 2003.
‘In return for its moment of greatness on the world stage’: Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
‘Why, for example, should one assume that eighteenth-century India’: Professor Andrew Porter’s review of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, (History review no. 325) www.history.ac.uk/ reviews/review/325.
He talked admiringly of spices and jewels, precious stones: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
The annual revenues of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb: John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 188.
The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus: Chunder Dutt, Economic History of India, p. xxv.
‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain’: Wilson, ‘False and Dangerous’.
‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, London: Dover Thrift Editions, 1990, originally published in the volume Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902.
‘The question…’: Ferguson, Empire, p. xxix.
‘The industrial revolution did not occur because’: Das, ‘India: How a rich nation’; see also Das, India Unbound, pp. 228–243.
‘Ten per cent of the army expenditure applied to irrigation’: William Jennings Bryan, p. 12.
‘temperate, respectful, patient, subordinate, and faithful’: Ibid, p. 187.
‘Our force does not operate so much by its actual strength’: Mason, A Matter of Honour.
[It was] the practice of the miserable tyrants whom we found in India: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches—Volume 4, Project Gutenberg, 2008. www.gutenberg. org/files/2170/2170-h/2170-h.htm.
British interfered with social customs only when it suited them: See, for example, the impassioned appeals by anti-slavery campaigners for the British government to put an end to certain traditional practices of servitude, which were of course completely ignored by Company officialdom: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, A Brief View of Slavery in British India, 1841, Manchester: The University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/60228274.
‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire’: Lawrence James, The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; also published as Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, London: Little, Brown &Co., 1997.
For whom was the British empire an open society?: See the essays in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little: See https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history.
As of 2014 Britain accounted for 2.4 per cent of global GDP: www.quandl.com/collections/economics/gdp-as-share-of-world-gdp-at-pp-by-country.
‘Ferguson’s “history” is a fairy tale for our times’: Priyamvada Gopal, ‘The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale’, The Guardian, 28 June 2006.
Henry Labouchère, published an immediate rejoinder: Henry Labouchère, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’ was first published in the London magazine, Truth, edited by Labouchère, in February 1899.
CHAPTER 8: THE MESSY AFTERLIFE OF COLONIALISM
A 1997 Gallup Poll in Britain revealed: Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), 28, 128, cited in Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 602–627. Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503593.
‘wholly unprecedented in creating a global hierarchy’: Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire. The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012, p. 42.
‘the memory of European imperialism remains a live political factor’: Mark Mazower, ‘From the Ruins of Empire’, Financial Times, 27 July 2012.
he sees in Empire cause for much that is good: Ferguson, Empire, p xxv.
Without the spread of British rule around the planet: Ibid, p. 358.
The East India Company has collapsed, but globalization: Philip Pomper, ‘The History and Theory of Empires’, History and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 1–27, published by Wiley for Wesleyan University. www.jstor.org/stable/3590855.
the liberal-capitalist ‘rise of Asia’ of which India is a contemporary epitome: Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, p 42 et seq.
‘[T]he British empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a grand scale’: Richard Gott, ‘White wash’ (book review of Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire by David Cannadine), The Guardian, 5 May 2001.
if looted Nazi-era art can be (and now is being) returned to their rightful owners: See the discussion in Erin Johnson, ‘If we return Nazi-looted art, the same goes for empire-looted,’ Aeon. www.aeon.co/ideas/if-we-r etur n-nazi-looted-art-the-same-goes-for-empir e-looted?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=oupphilosophy&utm_campaign=oupphilosophy.
‘if a strong man were to throw four stones’: ‘The Koh-i-noor diamond is in Britain illegally. But it should still stay there’, The Guardian, 16 February 2016.
Part of the legacy of colonialism is the worldwide impact of the methods: For a searching political analysis of the Empire and its continuing implications, see two books by John Darwin, The Empire Project, London: Penguin, 2010; and Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, London: Allen Lane, 2013.
the resultant militarization of Pakistan: Husain Haqqani, India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t we Just Be Friends? (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James, Why Nations Fail, New York: Crown Business, 2012. Akbar, M. J., Nehru, New Delhi: Viking, 1988.
Ali, Abeerah, ‘The Role of the British Colonial/Imperial Rule in the Introduction of Representative Institutions in India (1857–1947)’, Journal of European Studies, 29, 2013.
Allen, Charles, Plain Tales from the Raj, London: Abacus, 1988.
Almond, Ian, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn, London: Verso, 1991.
Anderson, Clare, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, India Wins Freedom, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2004.
Bailkin, Jordanna, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006.
Barrier, Norman G. (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1981.
Bayly, Christopher A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
———, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Bhargava, M. B. L., India’s Services in the War, Mukat Bihari Lal Bharagava, 1919.
Bhatia, H. S. (ed.), Military History of British India, 1607–1947, New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1977.
Bolts, William, Considerations on Indian Affairs: Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, London: Printed for J. Almon, 1772.
Bose, Sugata, ‘Starvation amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin’, 1942–45, Modern Asian Studies, 24, 1990.
———, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhash Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Brecher, Michael, Nehru: A Political Biography, London: Beacon Press, 1962.
Breckenridge, Carol A. and van der Veer, Peter (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Burton, Antoinette, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Campbell-Johnson, Alan, Mission with Mountbatten, London: Macmillan, 1985.
Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire, London: Allen Lane, 2001.
Cashman, Richa
rd, Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket, London: Orient Longman, 1980.
Chandra, Bipan, India’s Struggle for Independence, New Delhi: Viking, 1988.
———, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905, New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2010.
Chatterjee, Partha, and Pandey, Gyanendra (eds), Subaltern Studies VII, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Chatterjee, Partha, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
———, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Chaudhuri, K. N., The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, London: Macmillan, 1951.
———, A Passage to England, London: St. Martin’s Press, 1960.
Chaudhury, Sushil, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000.
Cohn, Bernard S., An Anthropologist Among The Historians and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Collingham, E. M., Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947, Oxford: Polity Press, 2001.
Collins, Larry and Lapierre, Dominique, Mountbatten and the Partition of India, New Delhi: Vikas, 1975.
Corfield, Penelope J. (ed.), Language, History and Class, London: Blackwell, 1991.
Dalrymple, William, White Mughals, London: Harper Perennial, 2002.
Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Darwin, John, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, London: Allen Lane, 2013.
Das, Durga, India: From Curzon to Nehru and After, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 1967.
Das, Sudipta, ‘British Reactions to the French Bugbear in India, 1763–83’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1), 1992.