In Defence Of The British Empire
Before anyone falls off their chair, this is not a defence in any way of the worst excesses of the British Empire. It is not a defence of the “Black and Tans”, the Amritsar Massacre, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the overthrow of the Mosaddegh regime to protect British oil interests in Iran, the 1956 Suez intervention or any of the other black marks commonly held against the British Empire. Nor am I suggesting that the history of the world would have been better had the redcoats prevailed at Yorktown, though maybe that one might be interesting to ponder on.
What it is, is a plea for some long overdue nuance and for some context, a recognition that the British Empire had many positive as well as negative aspects to it. That as well as exploiting it, the British also invested in their Empire. And other Empires had far gorier aspects to them than the British Empire, though listening to many of the critics, one would be forgiven for assuming that only the British had an Empire or any involvement with slavery. That the British Empire was uniquely cruel is certainly what many political activists wish to mislead gullible young people into assuming. No wonder they are determined that its history is not talked about with context or taught properly.
In fact it could even be argued that the excesses committed during the British Empire are viewed as so shocking because they were so unusual and rare compared to the frequently brutal excesses of other empires. British parliamentarians and statesmen were often amongst the fiercest critics of those events, once the facts and circumstances of them became more widely known. Winston Churchill was a fierce critic of the Amritsar Massacre, though not of some of the other events, and Lloyd George was a fierce critic of the Boer War. Many were involved in the campaign against the slave trade and in favour of agricultural reforms such as the repeal of the corn laws which had restricted imports of agricultural products priced below British agricultural products from 1815 to 1846. The Empire was far from a totalitarian society with only one permitted point of view.
https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/amritsar-massacre/
The British have, or had, a tradition of doing things rather better than anybody else, at least until becoming increasingly gripped by declinism. As Tucker Carlson explained in this brilliant video, the British Empire didn’t just seize and take things, it built things, made places better, stamped out barbaric practices such as sati in India, where widows were expected to sacrifice themselves on their late husband’s funeral pyre. It gave places the British language and other British practices such as the Rule of Law, an independent judiciary, transportation and other infrastructure, freedom of expression and British literature.
If the British really were such savages then how did it raise the biggest volunteer army in history to fight for it in World War Two? This included 2.5 million men from India serving in the British Indian Army in WW2, probably the biggest volunteer army in history, winning many gallantry medals and George Crosses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_II
Indeed such volunteers rallied to the cause of the Empire from every corner of it in Britain’s hour of need. And not only rank and file volunteers served, so did former enemies and senior statesmen such as the legendary Boer general Jan Christian Smuts, who went on after the defeat of the Boers to the British to subsequently lead Empire armies in East Africa during World War One and to then even serve in the War Cabinet of the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, despite it also containing Alfred Milner who had been his direct opponent in the Boer War.
Smuts continued to serve as a member of the British delegation at the 1919 Versailles Conference, along with Milner and Louis Botha, Smut’s senior commander in the Boer War. Botha memorably told Milner: "Seventeen years ago my friend and I made peace at Vereeniging – it was a bitter peace for us, bitter hard. We lost all for which we had fought – our independence, our flag, our country. But we turned our thoughts and efforts then to saving our people; and they, the victors, helped us. It was a hard peace for us to accept, but as I know it now, when time has shown us the truth, it was not unjust – it was a generous peace that the British people made with us, and that is why we stand with them today side by side in the cause which has brought us all together”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Botha
Similarly, people much closer to home volunteered to fight in British forces during the two world wars. Notwithstanding the unhappy relationship between Britain and Ireland for much of the nineteenth century, over 200,000 men from Ireland still fought not many years later in World War One in several theatres of war, and 30,000 of them died serving in Irish regiments of the British Army and up to 49,400 overall. Over 80,000 volunteered to fight in World War Two, including Victoria Cross winners, Donald Garland and Eugene Esmonde of the Royal Air Force and James Joseph Magennis of the Royal Navy.
If the British were really such ruthless and repressive occupiers of foreign lands, why would so many from those lands willingly flock to the cause in Britain’s hour of need?
In any event the notion that British statesmen and politicians sat around in Whitehall, Wesminster and Buckingham Palace plotting to colonise the world, as so many today would have us believe, is entirely false and ridiculous. Unlike many of the world’s other empires, the British accumulated a lot of their territories largely by accident rather than design. The expansion of British involvement in India for instance, arose from the French going on the offensive there in the Seven Years War between 1756 and 1763, as well as in Canada, against British trading posts there. The French were decisively beaten and British hegemony in India thus came about with the British East India Company prevailing over its French rivals, and then cementing that triumph through alliances with Indian principalities.
This is quite different to the active scheming and plotting for empires through conquest of Hitler, Stalin, the Kaiser, Louis XIV, the Ottoman Emperors and Napoleon Bonaparte.
When active political involvement in Empire matters did arise, it was often a matter of struggling and campaigning to bring recalcitrant businesses such as the East India Company under effective political control or, as in the case of the slave trade, of stamping it out. Colonial settlers were undoubtedly very ruthless in many cases, however it was very rare for that to arise from direct political or military orders from Britain. In fact it was often the opposite, with the settlers being where they were because they had fled the British Crown’s immediate jurisdiction. They were also of course engaged in a struggle for survival, seeking to establish themselves far from actual British protection, at least in the early years of founding their new settlements.
The British Raj in India itself was only formally established in 1858 with the appointment of the first Viceroy, Charles Canning, as British political leaders struggled to bring burgeoning territories under their control and away from that of the previous private owners such as the East India Company who had until then behaved as a law unto themselves over previous decades.
The nearest thing to a direct carve up of territory by politicians would be the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, where large swathes of Africa came under the control of the European empires. However if the British had absented themselves from that Conference, does anyone seriously suggest that Africa would have not still been colonised, or that the British colonies would have fared any better as part of the French, Belgian, German or Portugeese Empires, all of whom had far worse records than the British Empire.
https://www.africamuseum.be/en/discover/history_articles/the_human_zoo_of_tervuren_1897
I began by mentioning some of the British Empire’s worst excesses, but for context it should be remembered that people in Britain suffered too, often in a similar way to people overseas. One such example was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which saw 18 deaths and hundreds of injuries at a protest called for Parliamentary reforms. Working conditions in British mills, mines and factories of that era were extremely harsh. It seems perverse to call on the descendants of such people to pay reparations when they were victims themselves.
Let us also recall that Britons too were kept as slaves by the North African Barbary Corsairs who raided the shores of Britain, Ireland and elsewhere in search of potential captives to sell into slavery. One such incident in 1625 saw Mount’s Bay in Cornwall being raided and 60 men, women and children being captured and taken into slavery. These raids only ceased in 1816 when a British fleet sailed into Algiers to bombard it until the slaves held there were released.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Barbary-Pirates-English-Slaves/
Plenty of examples exist to show the manifold excesses of other empires. Haiti, for instance, suffered from the enormous burden of having to pay a 150 million franc indemnity to the French Empire, remarkably former slaves in Haiti were also valued in this settlement, as part of an 1825 agreement between France and Haiti to permit the Haitians to keep their recently won independence from France. A colossal sum in those days, these payments did not end until 1947, though you seldom hear this subject being raised by our EU worshipping elite, so keen to pillory the British Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy
Other empires do indeed have far darker events in their history, events such as the Armenian Massacre where over a million Armenians were forced out of their homes into the deserts of Syria and Iraq by the Ottoman armies in 1915 and 1916, over 50 per cent of whom are estimated to have died and the sacking of Smyrna in 1922 that led to the deaths of up to 100,000 Greek and Armenian civilians and forcible removal of over a million others to Greece, are two examples from just one part of the world.
https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/06/history-ancient-greek-city-smyrna/
The excesses of the twentieth century of Nazi Germany, Communist China, the Soviet Empire, and others, certainly take the extent of man’s inhumanity to man to a whole new level.
The British Empire does not have comparable skeletons in its cupboard to rank on a level with the atrocities and acts of genocide of other Empires, despite the attempts of critics rushing to fabricate such charges. The tidal wave of media onslaughts over the supposed finding of mass graves of indigenious peoples in Kamloops, Canada, was one of the most egregious, recent examples of rushing to twist a narrative, regardless of actual facts. In reality, British Canada generally had a far more harmonious relationship with its indigenous people than the United States had.
https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/in-kamloops-not-one-body-has-been-found
If the British Empire treated its colonies so badly, why did virtually every one of them voluntarily join the British Commonwealth after their independence? Even countries that were in other empires such as Gabon, Mozambique and Rwanda have joined the Commonwealth too. Burma and Eire are amongst a small minority who either didn’t join or permanently left.
Anyway, enough of explaining away the downsides of the British Empire. Let us extol the positives. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century British colonies in the Caribbean such as Barbados, Jamaica and the Bahamas noticeably prospered and had more harmonious societies than independent neighbouring states such as Cuba and Haiti. In fact many refugees from “free” Haiti made their way to the colonised Bahamas in search of a better life.
Colonial populations in Africa and elsewhere largely welcomed the efforts of the British to eliminate juju, obeah and other superstituous excesses and cruelties. Standards set by the British in this regard were regarded as important to continue after those countries gained their independence. Some countries sadly lapsed in those efforts or went backwards. The 2001 African Charter of Human Rights and People’s Rights referred to juju as an “obnoxious cultural practice” and stressed the importance of countries continuing their efforts to stamp it out.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2022-12/PAP-Guidelines-EN.pdf
In World War Two, the British Empire deployed its vast resources to the fullest extent in facing down Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan. Indeed it did so to the point of fully exhausting itself and taking on vast quantities of debt to finance the struggle. Without that commitment, the subsequent history of the world may well have been considerably different. It deployed its resources too in closing down the slave trade, not only the transatlantic slave trade, but the vast slaving centres such as Zanzibar, Benim and Khartoum, where General Gordon lost his life seeking to close down slavery in the Mahdi Empire.
Between 1808 and 1860 the Royal Navy’s West Africa squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. Around 2,000 British sailors died in this campaign, however this aspect of the history of slavery tends to be quickly overlooked by critics of the British Empire as it conflicts with their seeming desire to paint the British as uniquely evil. Indeed many Africans remained involved in attempting to supply slaves and saw its abolition as cutting off an important source of income. Feelings were so strong that rioting and rebellions continued for decades after abolition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Africa
Far from simply stripping its colonies of their resources, the British also built things. In India alone, great buildings such as Bombay Railway Station, the Taj Mahal hotel, also in Bombay and the vast Indian Railway network were all constructed in the era of the British Raj.
I recall too, the joyous celebrations in numerous African, Asian and Caribbean countries when the British voluntarily relinquished the yoke of Empire in the late 1950s and 1960s to grant so many lands their independence. Indeed some would say it was rushed through too soon, and those voices often included local voices too, such as the Ghanaian politician, J B Danquah. However Britain no longer had either the resources or the will to keep that show on the road. Contrary to the popular myth, the Empire was not solely a lucrative exercise in asset stripping of foreign lands, it also came with a financial burden, both in terms of administration, financial support and the garrisoning of numerous, far flung outposts.
Indeed, when witnessing the rush of migrants to our shores today I can’t help but fancifully think perhaps it could even be worth bringing back the Empire to save them the trouble of coming here if they still really want to live amongst us that much.
Yes, any reasonable person would have to conclude that many aspects of the British Empire were a force for good in the world, rather than of evil. Without the British Empire, slavery may well have endured for far longer than it did and remained far more widespread than it is today. And without the British Empire being willing to continue the war alone against Hitler in 1940, to use its vast resources to continue the struggle despite being vastly overstretched on all fronts, I suspect the subsequent outcome to that war and the history of the world would have been very different.
I hope that in time more people will feel able to take some pride in its achievements, and to study its history properly, instead of simplistically condemning it out of context. Far better also to keep the downsides in context and judge them by the standards of the time. Remember too, of course, that this all happened well before the era of television or the internet. News of events took months to get from one part of the Empire to another or back to the British mainland. Anything bad was quite easy to cover up or keep secret.
Compared to the Soviet Empire, Tsarist Russia, the Nazi Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, the Spanish, Portugeese and Belgian Empires and the rest, there is a lot to appreciate about the British Empire.
Our so-called elites don’t want that of course. Far easier to put the Empire’s successes behind a curtain to forget about and to focus on the bad bits, bad bits that everyone else was either equally guilty of or were actually far worse, as that is what suits their agenda of looking down on their own country and its people.
Indeed they go further and further with their misrepresentation of the British Empire. The BBC’s current adaptation of Charles Dickens novel “Great Expectations” is the latest, depressing manifestation of that. How many more gullible minds will allow such manipulation and deception to persuade them into hating their own country and its history, as that is what this game really is. It’s time to stop them getting away with it, especially as the narrative is a false and deliberately destructive one.
Far from being ashamed of the British Empire, Britons should take pride in the Empire’s many achievements, though of course being grown up enough to acknowledge its flaws. And from many quarters of the world I’d say a bit of gratitude is called for, not ignorant calls for unjustified reparations, unless the liabilities of a particular family can be pinpointed and something suitable arranged on a voluntary basis.
Reasons of space and time permit only a cursory commentary on the many issues I’ve raised here. For a far more comprehensive look at the issues I would recommend Nigel Biggar’s new book “Colonialism : A Moral Reckoning” and relevant parts of Robert Tombs “The English and their History”. I’ll resist the temptation to insert any Amazon affiliate links and content myself by stating both books can be found in most good bookshops.
“Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there and lock up the doors.”
In the name of God, go!
― Oliver Cromwell