via mozu
If Britain could, over the next 250 years, transform itself from a backward, undemocratic state into a modern industrial power, why could not any of the nations it colonized have done so, too? Why assume that it was only colonization that allowed India or Ghana to develop?
One answer might be that the countries that Britain colonized were even more backward than Britain was at the time, and lacked the social and intellectual resources to transform themselves as Britain did. But the reality, at least in some of its colonies, was the opposite. Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.
Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did.
What of democracy and liberalism? The Enlightenment helped transform the intellectual and moral culture of Europe in the eighteenth century, and laid the ground for modern ideas of equality and liberty. “All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies,” as the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, “are implicit in it, and indeed come out of it.”
But if the European Enlightenment was crucial to the development of progressive social ideals, European colonialism as a practice denied those ideals to the majority of people. It maintained slavery, suppressed democracy, and was rooted in a racialized view of the world. It was not colonialism but anticolonial movements that truly developed Enlightenment ideals. From the Haitian revolution of 1791, the first successful slave revolt in history, to the Quit India movement, to the liberation struggles of Southern Africa, the opponents of empire demanded that equality and liberty applied to them, too.
Supporters of the British Empire argue that its rule was far more benign than the terror of the Belgian Congo. That is not to place the moral bar very high. But here, too, there is considerable historical amnesia. From Tasmania, where a whole people were virtually wiped out for resisting British rule in the “Black War” of the 1820s and 1830s; to Jamaica, where the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 led to a six-week rampage by British troops, during which more than four hundred people were killed and almost the same number summarily hanged; to Ireland and a history of bloody terror from Oliver Cromwell’s savage war of conquest in the seventeenth century to what the Irish historian Thomas Bartlett called the “universal rape, plunder and murder” wrought by British troops after the 1798 Irish rebellion, to the brutal acts of revenge exacted during the Irish War of Independence by the Black and Tans, a British-controlled paramilitary police force, in the 1920s; to India, where some three million died in the Bengal famine of 1942–1943, caused by the British decision to export rice, for use in the war theaters and for consumption in Britain, from a state that usually imported rice, and at a time of great local shortage—the experience of the “order” of the British Empire was cruel and ferocious. Even Niall Ferguson, in his paean to the British Empire, acknowledges that “when imperial authority was challenged… the British response was brutal.”
Perhaps the most egregious claim of the apologists is that the British Empire should be lauded because it helped end slavery
In 1807, Britain passed a law banning the slave trade. But for three centuries, that trade had been dominated by Britain; three centuries of savage enslavement, pitiless brutality, and casual mass murder. Twelve million Africans are thought to have been transported to the Americas, half of them in the peak years of the Atlantic slave trade between 1690 and 1807. In those peak years, about half of these slaves were taken on British ships. Historians estimate that at least one in ten, and possibly one in five slaves, died on the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the New World. This suggests that half a million Africans may have lost their lives while being transported on British ships.
“It is important to remember,” the historian David Olusoga observes in his recent book Black and British: A Forgotten History, “how few voices were raised against slavery in Britain until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Church of England was largely silent on the issue, as were most of the politicians.” This was inevitable, he adds, because “too much money, too many livelihoods and too much political power were invested; millions of British people lived lives that were intimately connected to the economics of slavery and the sugar business.”
It was not the British Empire that began the struggle against enslavement, but slaves themselves, and radicals in Europe. When slaves rose up, the British response was savage, and not just in British colonies. In Haiti, after the revolutionaries defeated the French, Britain sent more than 20,000 men to try to retake the island as a British colony. They, too, were humiliatingly defeated by the army of former slaves.
As Marika Sherwood shows in her book After Abolition, Britain continued to profit from the slave trade even after 1807. Britain, she writes, “not only continued to build slaving vessels, but it financed the trade, insured it, crewed some of it and probably even created the many national flags carried by the vessels to avoid condemnation.” Slavery flourished unhindered. It took another three decades before Britain ended slavery itself with the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act; and even then, not throughout the empire. Not until the twentieth century was slavery legally abolished in colonies such as Burma, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
Even where the Abolition of Slavery Act did end slavery, it did not end slave-like conditions. Slave owners were handsomely compensated for the loss of their “property.” Some £20 million (about £16 billion, or $22 billion, in today’s values) was set aside by the British government to recompense 46,000 slave owners. Not only did the slaves themselves receive no reparation, but, under the Act, they were compelled to provide forty-five hours of unpaid labor each week for their former masters, for a further four to six years after their supposed liberation. “In effect,” writes David Olusoga, “the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.”
The suggestion that the British Empire was good because it ended slavery reflects historical amnesia of the most decadent kind.
According to opinion polling, some 43 percent of Britons think that the British Empire was a “good thing” and 44 percent that British colonialism is “something to be proud of” (compared to 19 percent who think the empire was bad, and 21 percent who believe that colonialism is a matter for “regret”).
Why has the debate erupted now? For many, the obvious answer seems to be Brexit. The desire to leave the European Union, critics insist, is little more than a form of nostalgia for a Britain that has gone, and for an empire that is no more. The “need for nostalgia” argument is, however, a recurring theme throughout postcolonial British history. “
Liberals may despise empire nostalgia, but many promote arguments about intervention and governance that have their roots in an imperial worldview. We should not imagine that apologists for empire are simply living in the past. They seek, rather, to rewrite the past as a way of shaping current debates. That makes it even more important that their ideas and arguments are challenged openly and robustly
イギリスの植民地化によって、経済的にも発展させてやったし、自由平等といった啓蒙主義も伝道してやったし、奴隷から解放させてやったんだ、というのは嘘っぱちで、イギリスは、植民地を食い物にしていたし、植民地に自由平等をもたらしたのは反植民地主義だったし、奴隷に反対するどころか、奴隷制度にずっと、協力し、それでもうけていたし、奴隷蜂起は弾圧していたやないけ。法的に奴隷解放しても、奴隷状態は継続させていたやないけ。
リベラルは、帝国主義に対する郷愁はないが、しかし、他国介入には賛成しており、それが、帝国主義的発想に根を持つことを自覚しておらんのではないか、と。
ちなみに、
イギリス軍って独に駐留しているんだね。
