Britain’s brutal colonial past: Owen Jones
To be avoided by those whose sensibilities are likely to be offended or their held stands shaken!
Quotes:
India a cash cow
Consider India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. At the beginning of the 18th-century – before it was conquered – its share of the world economy was well over a fifth, nearly as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the country won independence, it had dropped to less than 4 per cent. India was treated as a cash cow; the revenues that flowed into London’s Treasury were described by the Earl of Chatham as “the redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven”. By the end of the 19th-century, India was the world’s biggest buyer of British exports and provided highly paid work for British civil servants – all at India’s expense.
As India became increasingly crucial to British prosperity, millions of Indians died completely unnecessary deaths. Over a decade ago, Mike Davis wrote a seminal book entitled Late Victorian Holocausts: the title is far from hyperbole. As a result of laissez-faire economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation needlessly. Millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.
Famine victims’ fault
The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since. Up to four million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 after Winston Churchill diverted food to well-fed British soldiers and countries such as Greece. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks”, he argued. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” he said to his Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. In any case, the famine was their fault for “breeding like rabbits”. Churchill had form: back in 1919, he declared himself “strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”, arguing that it would “spread a lively terror”.
We normally associate “concentration camps” with the Nazis, but the term entered into general circulation because of the British. During the Boer War at the turn of the 20th-century, up to a sixth of the Boer population – mainly women and children – perished after the British imprisoned them in camps. Their homes, farms and crops were burned, their sheep and cattle butchered in a scorched earth policy.
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Opinions
To be avoided by those whose sensibilities are likely to be offended or their held stands shaken!
Quotes:
India a cash cow
Consider India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. At the beginning of the 18th-century – before it was conquered – its share of the world economy was well over a fifth, nearly as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the country won independence, it had dropped to less than 4 per cent. India was treated as a cash cow; the revenues that flowed into London’s Treasury were described by the Earl of Chatham as “the redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven”. By the end of the 19th-century, India was the world’s biggest buyer of British exports and provided highly paid work for British civil servants – all at India’s expense.
As India became increasingly crucial to British prosperity, millions of Indians died completely unnecessary deaths. Over a decade ago, Mike Davis wrote a seminal book entitled Late Victorian Holocausts: the title is far from hyperbole. As a result of laissez-faire economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation needlessly. Millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.
Famine victims’ fault
The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since. Up to four million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 after Winston Churchill diverted food to well-fed British soldiers and countries such as Greece. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks”, he argued. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” he said to his Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. In any case, the famine was their fault for “breeding like rabbits”. Churchill had form: back in 1919, he declared himself “strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”, arguing that it would “spread a lively terror”.
We normally associate “concentration camps” with the Nazis, but the term entered into general circulation because of the British. During the Boer War at the turn of the 20th-century, up to a sixth of the Boer population – mainly women and children – perished after the British imprisoned them in camps. Their homes, farms and crops were burned, their sheep and cattle butchered in a scorched earth policy.
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Opinions
