British Empire: the Truth behind the Myth

By E. Hughes

The British Empire was a venture that saw in its wake the beginnings of the modern world, and the opening up of the new world, and many other landmasses and islands, to the British, and other European powers. It was however the British who would in many cases dominate proceedings.

What is the truth behind the myth, then? The truth is that the empire was based on capitalism and mercantilism(1) and a search for cheap and plentiful raw materials like timber, flax and cotton, and the opening up of new markets which would enable Britain to sustain an empire, create enormous wealth and give her a prime role in world affairs. So, much of the beginnings of empire then were based on the profit motive, with dominion and conquest, even colonialism itself, coming a second place. This quest for power and personal gain was also to begin a fury of such injustice, racism, prejudice, genocide, class division and ethnic and national tension, that it still shapes the political, ethnic, material and social world we live in today.

The first experiment in English colonisation was in Ulster, now in the much-troubled province of Northern Ireland. English, amongst other, colonists went here because of offers of land, bolstered by the racist belief that the Irish were uncivilised compared to English settlers. There was also a belief that as the Irish didn't cultivate the land or fence it, they didn't own it. This was the major excuse for the English to claim and settle the land. A little later these justifications were also used in the colonies of North America to take land off the original natives, committing genocide in many cases, and later still elsewhere. Here then were the first 'motives' and 'justifications' for colonies and empire, a divisive and racist reasoning that in a few centuries would become a full blown philosophy with a complex set of values, beliefs and ideologies given a sheen of respectability from many scientists, that further encouraged and justified in the 19th century the aggressive expansion of the British Empire and the ruthless suppression and exploitation of peoples, often seen as 'inferior', all over the world. In effect, adding gross insult to grievous injury.

As well as colonisation and the search for raw materials and new markets, there was also the slave trade, which the British eventually dominated. The Caribbean colonies, the centre for the very lucrative sugar trade, and the North American cotton plantations needed intensive enforced labour, so African men, women and children by the millions were kidnapped, and in exchange their captors were given guns, beads and other useless trinkets. The enslaved suffered an incredible barbarity and brutality en-route to the colonies, and then were sold like cattle to plantation owners to be worked until they collapsed, died or become useless to their owners. Some estimates suggest that up to 100 million Africans were transported on slave ships during a 400 hundred-year period, many dying of hunger, brutality, overcrowding or disease on the long journey. The skin colour of Africans would very quickly be used as a marker of their slave status. This period, some historians argue, is where the origins of a specific European racism begin, directed towards those with darker and black skin, especially Africans, but also other peoples too. The empire's fortunes led on to the industrial revolution were founded on this ruthless greed, and the vast enormity of wealth created from the slave and sugar trade, and others.

In the wake of such injustice, philosophies and ideologies from these histories of domination and ruthless exploitation began to take shape. The pseudo scientific racism that began to flourish in the early-middle 19th century, and quietly dominate almost all British science throughout the greater part of the 19th century, was part and parcel of older populist racial beliefs that were to develop into a dominant ideology, with its own set of pseudo-scientific values and belief systems. One of these was 'The Great Chain of Being', an evolutionary scale which placed white European men at the top, and, in a graded table of humankind, placed Aboriginal Australians and Kalahari bushmen at the very bottom. What is evident in much of the propaganda about race and class at this time, and in later periods such as in Nazi Germany, is the pretence of learned science masking abominable and vile hatreds, prejudices and deeply ill formed notions, that were widely disseminated, understood and tacitly accepted.

During the Victorian era, and at the height of the empire's power, the British Empire was being promoted as "the white man's burden" a notion Rudyard Kipling made famous and repeated by countless others, a burden that was wholly for the 'civilising' of the more 'primitive' peoples in the world, and not in any way for the gain of British people. This crude reasoning was happily accepted by some, and more cynically and hypocritically by others, as long as conquest and the search for profit went unhindered. In these seeds were sown the destructions of cultures, and at the same time the creation of wealth and power for the British, and other European nations.

The slave trade which, made Britain arguably the wealthiest country in the world by the end of the 18th century, was then driven underground by the same empire, for supposedly benevolent reasons. But Britain, though abolishing slavery in 1807 in Britain itself, still made and sold slave ships as late as the 1860's, and had few qualms about the institution of slavery in America, taking the South's side during the Civil War. Britain's huge wealth, and prominence as a great power politically, militarily, economically and socially, lie in greater part because of the vast wealth created during Britain's dominant position in the African slave trade. Many of the early banking houses including Barclays and Lloyds were established from the wealth of the trade, and many prominent and even aristocratic families have their roots in the blood of the slave trade. This trade created widening divisions between European and non-European people, divisions that are still clearly evident today, and also deeply rigid social inequalities in Britain. Much of the world's economic, political and social system today can be traced back to Britain's success in dominating the slave trade. It can be said, quite honestly, that the slave trade was the making of modern Britain, and the making of Liverpool too.

Liverpool's Role:

In a telling book called 'Liverpool-Capital of the Slave Trade', Liverpool's command of, domination and complete immersion in the slave trade is made readily apparent. Liverpool's prominence and prosperity, and her position as the second city of the empire, is virtually in greater part due to the role the city played in the slave trade, and other trades related to this, such as sugar, rum and cotton. Many of the merchants involved in the slave trade were also MP's, who campaigned vigorously for the trade; the great Victorian Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal who opposed the aggressive expansion of empire, was from a prominent Liverpool slave trading family that had made their fortune in the trade. With enormous wealth, came enormous political power, and it can perhaps be said that some of Liverpool's slave trading merchants became richer than any other people had been before, this wealth helping to modernise Britain, put Liverpool on the map, and where much of the capital for industrialisation and the factory system came from. It can also be said that, as Britain became fabulously wealthy, the divisions between rich and poor, powerful and oppressed, became more acute. In the book 'Liverpool-Capital of the Slave Trade', it asserts that slavery had "raised the town itself from an obscure place amongst ports to be one of the richest and most prosperous trading centres on the face of the earth." The evidence of the slave trade can be found in street and road names all over Liverpool: names as familiar as Bold Street, Hardman Street, Rodney Street, Earle Road, Seel Street, Sir Thomas Street and others dotted around the city. All of these were names of men and families involved in the slave trade. It is Liverpool's forgotten shame.

Famines under British Rule:

The British Empire can also be held to account for the famines that occurred under British rule, especially the Great Famine in Ireland, and the famines that happened in the latter half of the 19th century in India. The Irish famine, in a country that had been underdeveloped largely due to British mismanagement and neglect, even wilful neglect, changed the face of Ireland for good. This famine, which happened according to one source from 1846 to 1850, and more generally seen as between 1846-47, was the final crushing horror to centuries of poverty, colonialism, and extremely harsh rule by the British. The Irish peasantry were seen as the lowest possible sort of people, even subhuman, in racial and class terms, and the absolute crushing poverty is something that has epitomised Ireland as a nation from centuries past to contemporary times. It can be said, as with slavery and the domination of India, that people are still suffering trauma because of the famine in Ireland. Irish people, forced to leave for other shores, and to Britain itself, became the new class of paupers, derelicts, gangsters, and the bedrock of the working class and underclass in Britain, the US, Australia and many other countries, and of course Liverpool. What is deeply ironic about empire, and the imperial nature of Britain/England, is that Britain, and certainly English society and culture, regarded itself as a bastion of liberty; yet all the while this freedom was used to deny freedom to many others, in the pursuit of freedom. This argument, this utter contradiction, not particularly or solely British, goes to the heart of all empires, and can be seen best and understood clearly and simply in the hypocrisy of American political life, particularly international policy, today.

Third World Poverty, a Direct Result of Colonial Misrule:

India, the 'Jewel in the Crown' of the British Empire, has as much reason to rue British colonial administration as many others do. According to Amitabh Pal, before the British came to control India, parts of India were wealthier than Europe; by the end of British rule in 1947, India's ability to feed itself had dropped by 25 percent from the year 1900. Equally, under British rule 29 million people died as a result of famines in India in the second half of the 19th century. These statistics in India alone are tragic and alarming in themselves, but the whole picture, the reality of empire, is far more stark, and in truth deeply disturbing. Amitabh Pal, writing in an essay entitled 'THIRD WORLD POVERTY A DIRECT RESULT OF COLONIAL MISRULE', states clearly and simply that: "At the 50th anniversary of India's independence, it's time for former colonial overlords like Britain to acknowledge their role in creating the crushing poverty prevalent in the Third World." Where the history of empire is concerned, truth hasn't been so much buried as completely ignored and forgotten. The reality is so shocking and disturbing that it either provokes outrage, disbelief or a tendency to believe any criticism is over exaggeration; but the truth is out there.

Some suggested reading and other links:

Mark Curtis's 'Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World'
Gail Cameron's & Stan Crooke's 'Liverpool-Capital of the Slave Trade'
www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/Empire.html
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
www.victorianweb.org/history/race/rc5.html
www.sit.wisc.edu/~chingari/Chitti/colonization&poverty.htm
www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_1/welcome.htm
www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famine.html

1)Capitalism is the creation and accumulation of wealth for its own sake, which in Britain helped finance factories, overseas ventures and the industrial 'revolution'. Mercantilism, closely linked to capitalism, is a system whereby one nation, one group, or one individual takes goods from one place to another, to sell at a profit for money, or barter in exchange for other goods. The Slave trade, spice trade and opium trade were all part of this system.