British colonialism left a terrible legacy, says Jack Straw. Shame, then, that Blair wants a return to it
Randeep Ramesh Monday November 18, 2002 The Guardian
History rarely runs smoothly, but not many want to recall that Britain's colonial past was a switchback ride of subjugation, exploitation and imperial force majeure. Even rarer are those who admit today's problems were created by yesterday's actions. Yet the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, in an interview with the New Statesman, has done just that.
Mr Straw candidly says that most of the problems "we have to deal with now are consequences of the British colonial past". He talks about British betrayal in Palestine, incompetence over Kashmir and the looting of land in Africa. This refresher course is worth taking - not least because as foreign secretary Mr Straw is engaged in constructing and marketing the idea of Britain to the public and the world.
Britain has been even more reluctant to draw up a balance sheet of colonialism than other European colonial powers, such as France (in Algeria) and Belgium (in the Congo). Here, there is little talk of hunger as official policy - and yet how else would famines have been eliminated in independent India, when they deprived millions of life under the British Raj even as late as 1943? Nor is much thought given to the massacres and rebellions that punctuated every year of Pax Britannica. Rarely do you see the bodies concealed under the mound of imperial hubris.
Britain's wealth was made on the backs of those it suppressed. Cheap labour fuelled big profits for Britain as the best land was taken for plantations and minerals dug out and shipped off to be processed in Europe. Exports that competed with British goods were banned - wrecking the Irish wool industry and the Indian cotton one. Echoes of this policy continue today ensuring that countries rich in resources remain poor.
Britain would like to be remembered for planting good governance, hospitals, schools and, when none of the above applies, railways on foreign soil. Yet half a century ago, it snuffed out the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya with concentration camps and brutal martial law where soldiers were offered £5 for the murder of an insurgent. And the railways Britain bequeathed were not for the natives anyway, but for the invaders: India and Pakistan got trains and tracks but the network was far less dense than anything in Europe.
Largely unchallenged, the idea that colonisation was sometimes unfortunate but mostly enlightened has taken root. For many, anything else is little short of traitorous. Mr Straw's comments so infuriated the Daily Mail that its foam-flecked opinion ended up in its news coverage. There the paper claimed "wherever British colonisers went, they took improved education, healthcare and medical knowledge". These assertions are more fantasy than fact. The British in India never attempted to educate the masses - six-sevenths were illiterate at independence. Under British rule the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by 20%, while India's per capita income did not rise from 1757 to 1947.
That most modern states would rather remember their triumphs than the means they used to achieve them is axiomatic. Imperialism, originally seen as a project of historical destiny, has built on the myth of empire as a force for good.
Now the colonialism of the last century is a throwback that is making a comeback. The new liberal imperialism is one of supposedly voluntary colonialism, where the sovereignty of states is traded for stability and peace. This thinking can be seen in the financial bailouts by the IMF of bankrupt nations, where elected politicians hand over fiscal policy to global bankers in return for cash.
This policy was first cast into words on this side of the Atlantic by Robert Cooper, Tony Blair's former foreign policy adviser. Couched in the language of multilateralism, it advocated force to save the world. But what has prevailed is a rougher neocolonialism originated by hawks in the Bush administration. They see military intervention as the best cure for the malaises of the modern world. It is this analysis, not Mr Straw's, that is shaping the new world order under the cover of the war against terror. In the process of quelling chaos, the new American empire will back coups and assassinate at will. Afghanistan may be run in name by Hamid Karzai but it is Bush's envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, who calls the shots.
On Iraq the White House talks of democracy and ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. These are noble aims, but they are undermined by leaks suggesting a grab for oil, money and power. Seeping out are plans for a post-Saddam Iraq as a colonial outpost of American. Its large oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia, could be tapped more efficiently than at present and pay for the 75,000 troops required to administer the new Iraq.
Europe, too, has been infected by the contagion of colonialism once again. The international high representatives in the Balkans run nations in a manner not seen since the viceroys of the Victorian age. Silvio Berlusconi speaks of Christianity civilising the barbarians outside Europe's gates.
The prime minister's actions belie the words of his foreign secretary. The consensus is that in an interdependent world one country's problems become another's. So renegade regimes and rogue states are smothered and replaced by a succession of protectorates. New Labour sees the left's distrust of intervention as weakness. Mr Blair's moral crusades are unburdened by truth that such meddling is endlessly problematic.
Dressed up as benign assistance or humanitarian interventionism, the years ahead will once again see great powers intervene in the affairs of independent peoples. The imperial era, dead enough for Eric Hobsbawm to describe as an "irrecoverable part of the past", has been resurrected for the future.