No defence for the British empire

Neil Davidson
Socialist Worker
24 June 2006

Niall Ferguson presented the first episode of his television series The War of the World this week. His apology for imperialism must be robustly challenged, writes Neil Davidson

Historian Niall Ferguson is perhaps the best known of the new generation of media dons. Where his nearest rival, Simon Schama, exudes a vague left liberalism and is apologetic over the British empire, Ferguson is ferociously and unashamedly neo-conservative.

A right wing perspective does not, of course, automatically preclude historical value.

But in his most recent work any insights have been submerged into an ideologically driven agenda which, if he were a Marxist, would lead to his books being dismissed out of hand rather than applauded.

Empire (2002) argues that the British empire was a force for good in the world, despite what he describes as unfortunate omissions and unintended consequences. Colossus (2004) argues that the US should consciously take up the imperial baton, even at the cost of doing away with what remains of its social security system.

Now The War of the World (2006) claims that one reason for the 20th century being the most murderous in history is not – as Marxists have argued – because of inter-imperialist wars, but because of the disintegration of these empires.

Channel 4 has obligingly provided him with a TV series to publicise each of his books.

His ideas have been gratefully adopted by the political representatives of the Anglo-American ruling class. In January last year Gordon Brown declared, at a press conference in Tanzania of all places, that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.”

Although expressed in the pious verbiage of which Brown is a master, the theme is pure Ferguson – a point which those deluded souls who think that a Brown-led Labour Party will move to the left might do well to ponder.

Ferguson’s ideas therefore need to be challenged, particularly at the moment, when every conceivable argument will be marshalled to justify an attack on Iran. But how?

We should obviously highlight his unsustainable claims. For example, Ferguson claims that Britain was unique among empires in encouraging democratic government in the colonies.

Why then – with the one exception of India – are the most democratic and economically developed ex-colonies to be found, not in the once-British areas of Africa and Asia, but in the territories ruled by the more backward states of Spain and Portugal in Latin America?

There are similar problems with his claims for the economic benefits of empire for its subjects. Ferguson argues that investment flowed from the metropolitan centres to the colonies. In fact, most British investment flowed to other advanced countries, to white settler dominions like Australia or to semi-dependencies like Argentina.

Rather than contributing to capitalist development, in many areas the British consciously acted to reinforce – or even introduce – feudal social relations in order to maintain their control. Iraq in the 1920s is only the most obvious example of this manoeuvre.

Divisions

Finally, there is the issue on which Ferguson lays so much emphasis in his new book – ethnic divisions. “The peak of violent death (as opposed to death by starvation) in modern India was of course in 1947, as the British withdrew and Hindu and Muslims slaughtered one another,” Ferguson writes.

Some tribal and religious divisions existed before British rule. But the British quite consciously pursued a policy of divide and rule by making these worse – often by giving privileges to one group within colonial society.

In other areas, the British either introduced (Ireland) or encouraged (Palestine) ethnically distinct colonial-settler groups to act as spearheads for imperial rule.

In this respect, the US today is following in British footsteps, as it seeks to control Iraq through enforcing divisions between Sunni, Shia, Kurd and Turkoman. These divisions have historically had virtually no political significance for the inhabitants of that ravaged country.

Ferguson’s easy acceptance of ethnic divisions can be traced back to attitudes to “race”. He seems to be one of the few people outside the openly fascist right who is prepared to use the term without quotation marks. Ferguson writes, “Human beings do seem predisposed to trust members of their own race as traditionally defined.”

In a debate with the Independent columnist Johann Hari, Ferguson has argued that there is a big difference between the horrors of empire and the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis.

According to Ferguson, the British in India, for example, merely displayed “incompetence, negligence and indifference”. The key for Ferguson is intentionality – Hitler meant to kill Jewish people while the British Lords Lytton and Curzon did not intend to kill Indian peasants.

Connections

The first thing to say here is that Hitler himself saw a number of connections between the British empire and the “Thousand Year Reich”, a fact which has been brought to our attention in the writings of – Niall Ferguson!

“Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed his admiration for British imperialism. ‘The wealth of Great Britain’, Hitler declared, ‘is the result… of the capitalist exploitation of the 350 million Indian slaves.’ That was precisely what Hitler most admired – the effective oppression of an inferior race.”

Does Ferguson think that Hitler was correct in this assessment? He tactfully avoids telling us.

Against Ferguson’s attempt to absolve the British empire from blame, it is necessary to point out that droughts did not tend to turn into famines under the Mughal Empire, nor under the post-colonial Indian state. They did under late British rule because the empire had destroyed the economic system which had previously sustained the peasantry. It then subjected them to the rigours of free market capitalism which rejected any serious attempt to “relieve” the starving.

The British rulers of India could have done more, but the real guilt lies with the economic system which they oversaw, and whose effects were not restricted to India. Exactly the same catastrophe had occurred in Ireland during the 1840s, when over a million more victims were offered up to the gods of economic orthodoxy.

This points to another way in which we must go beyond simply a liberal critique of Ferguson. Opposing the excesses of empire, or even the empire as a whole, without also opposing British capitalism, implies that the latter could have evolved without any exploitation of the less developed world.

Because Ferguson sees nothing beyond capitalism, he has to justify the imperial system on which it rested. And in doing so he can always defeat his liberal critics by asking what their alternative would have been.

As he writes in Empire, “The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?” Liberals have no answer to this, but Marxists do.

History

We look at history through the eyes of the oppressed and exploited, whose experience Ferguson completely ignores. To read Ferguson, you would think that the British empire came to an end simply because of financial exhaustion after the Second World War. The revolt of the colonial peoples is passed over in virtual silence. I think that one reason for this is connected with contemporary politics.

In Colossus, Ferguson writes, “I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job. Economic globalisation is working but needs to be underwritten politically, as it was a century ago.”

In fact, there is virtually no chance of the US realising Ferguson’s dream of a new colonial empire. There are internal reasons for this in the economic inability of the US to maintain such an empire. But it is also the case that no people will now accept foreign domination in the way that pre-capitalist societies were forced to. If nothing else, surely Iraq demonstrates this.

Ferguson shows us what our rulers would like to do, if they were unconstrained by economic reality or popular resistance. But the impossibility of restoring a colonial empire should not blind us to the destruction our rulers will unleash as an alternative.

Neil Davidson is chair of Livingston branch of the Scottish Socialist Party and secretary of Edinburgh Central branch of the PCS union. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000) and Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003).

Why people like Andrew Bolt make australians seem racist

Column - Don’t believe us; we’re not racist

Andrew Bolt Blog

Pulbished at the Herald Sun, Australia
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 03:25pm

336 Comments

IF we weren’t so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn’t now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.

Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we’re too prejudiced?

But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame.

After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?

There’s no doubt that Indians here - not least the 90,000 students - have something to worry about, especially in Victoria. In this one state alone, and in just one year, an astonishing 1447 people of Indian origin were punched, kicked, raped or robbed.

That fact alone should worry us most in this affair that has now led to two angry demonstrations by Indians in Melbourne, hysterical coverage in the Indian press, official protests from the Indian Government and the burning in India of effigies of Kevin Rudd.

It’s the sheer level of violence, not the motives driving some thug to kick in a student’s teeth, that should shame and alarm us. After all, it’s no less terrifying to be kicked in the head by a saint.

It also hurts just the same whether you’re Indian, English or a Colac farmer, so we should be angry that it’s not just Indians being bashed, but people born right here who are kicked unconscious at railway platforms, glassed in pubs, shot in Flinders St or pack-attacked to death outside nightclubs.

Where are the police? Where are the punishments? How did we fail to civilise so many young men, now acting like gleeful extras in a Tarantino splatter-fest or an Underbelly celebration of ferals? How did we fail even to make them fear to break the law?

Yet this violence alone was not enough to make our leaders and police do much beyond some ritual tut-tutting and a spasmodic police blitz or two.

It’s only when the Indian students cleverly claimed they were victims of racism that - kaboom - these muggings became an international conflict involving the leaders of two nations, with Australia scrambling to protect not just its reputation but the $2 billion a year we earn from these foreign students.

Prime Minister Rudd hurried into Parliament this week to reassure India we weren’t racist at all: “Australia is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance.”

Premier John Brumby agreed, and offence at the charge of racism was dutifully taken on almost every talk-radio station in the country, including even the ABC.

Yet who can blame Indians for thinking this worst of us, and treating Rudd’s denials as mere spin, when we’ve spent so much time telling the world we really are steeped in racism, right up to our red necks?

Only last year, Rudd himself announced we’d been so evilly racist that we’d even stolen Aboriginal children by the thousands just because they were black - a false claim cheered in every school despite the inability of “stolen generations” activists to name even 10 such “stolen” children.

Last year, too, we gave the the world Australia, a movie made and promoted with the help of $80 million of taxpayers’ money, which portrayed us as so racist that we’d actually sent Aboriginal children into the path of the Japanese army during World War II, while carefully evacuating the white ones.

More nonsense, yet how keen our opinion makers have been to slander us as bigots on evidence just as bogus.

Remember how the Cronulla riot was described as a racist uprising, rather than a booze-fuelled backlash of locals given too little police help against Lebanese gangs?

Remember how Pauline Hanson was vilified as the symbol of racist middle Australia, rather than of merely the sneered-upon working class and bush folk who had been taken for granted for too long by our smug political class?

So, after accusing ourselves of so much racism with so little reason, why should we now be surprised when Indians agree that - yes, indeed - we’re as racist as we’ve always said?

The difference is that this time we stand to lose billions of dollars from our trade in education services to India. Stupidity becomes too stupid to endure when it costs, and the fact is we really aren’t so racist at all. Indeed, our problem may in part be the opposite.

That so many Indian students are bashed and robbed can be largely explained by the kind of part-time jobs they tend to take, being hard workers - the late shifts in 7-Eleven stores, taxis and petrol stations, for instance.

Imagine how safe these students are when they then go home alone late at night, often walking or taking near-deserted trains back to the tough suburbs where the cheap rents are. How safe would your own children be?

But some attacks aren’t so easily explained away. Some, you might say, are “racist” in that Indians are famously peaceable - less likely to break the law and less likely to fight back when attacked by those who do. To thieves and thugs, they’re soft targets.

That said, other attacks, as Victoria Police now belatedly admit, are indeed no-mucking-about racist. But to whose shame are these racists, really?

True, video footage of the infamous pack-attack on Sourabh Sharma on the Werribee train shows thugs of various ethnicities, including, it seems, the Anglo kind.

But what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.

Hear it from Macquarie University student Mukul Khanna, called back home by his worried parents: “A lot of my Pakistani friends have left the place after being brutally attacked and robbed . . . Interestingly, the attackers are mostly not locals and are themselves people of foreign origin.”

Or read it in an edited statement that Tanveer X, bashed in January, gave to Beyond India Monthly: “When I turned on Anderson Rd I saw four black men . . . One of them came running behind us and hit me with the stick. Then they started hitting my wife . . . I want action against those African guys.”

And have it confirmed in this Herald Sun report from last year, when Indian taxi drivers protested at having been the victims of most armed robberies on cabbies: “This year between May 8

and August 2 there were 12 reported robberies on taxi drivers in Flemington, Moonee Ponds and Ascot Vale.

“Police will not officially acknowledge any particular ethnic group is a target, or that any other group is carrying out the crimes. But in every case the victims told police their attackers were African . . .” And in all but two their victims were Indians.

Note yet again the reluctance of police to admit they have trouble with African gangs—or gangs of any particular ethnicity.

Recall also how former chief commissioner Christine Nixon banned police from even using the word “gangs” and falsely claimed the crime rates for Sudanese were at the community average, rather than way, way above.

Note, also, how few media outlets will even discuss the ethnicity of some of the people now bashing Indian students, for fear of seeming racist.

That’s how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true—that we’re so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.

And so we are hanged for our virtues. Again, I must point out Australia has home-grown racists, too, and too many children growing up underparented and uncivilised.

They, too, bash Indians - and each other. But to call us a racist nation on the scanty evidence so far is grossly unfair.

That we should take such offence is evidence we’re actually not, no matter how loudly and how foolishly we once insisted we were.