Rise of the working class

7. Imperialism: the British Empire

Chris Gaffney

Source: Labor College lecture
First published: Labor College Review, November 1986
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter

Imperialism: The British Empire Chris Gaffney Henry VIII (1509-47) said: “this realm of England is an empire” and this was part and parcel of his efforts to make himself independent of the Pope.

The Irish Fitzgeralds were provoked in 1534 into rebellion and their power was destroyed. The new English policy was to destroy any Irish chief showing signs of independence, and an Anglicisation of the rest so that they were transformed from tribal leaders into English landlords over what had been tribal land. A concerted effort was made to abolish Irish law, particularly its notions of communal property.

This policy was effective but slow, and about the middle of the 16th century it was abandoned for a policy of direct confiscation, the forced sale of Irish land to English speculators and the establishment of colonies of English settlers. Fifty years of continual war, famine and confiscation reduced much of Ireland to empty land. Nearly half of Queen Elizabeth’s foreign war expenditure went to fight the Irish wars.

This situation was complicated by the reformation, which became a means of destroying Irish native customs and institutions. Spanish monarchs sought to exploit the Irish grievances and the Irish welcomed the priests not out of fondness for the Pope but because the Catholic Church was seen as the enemy of the invading English. The English conquest was completed in the early 1700s. Wholesale confiscation of the land followed and the establishment of plantations loyal to Britain, especially in Ulster.

English historian John Richard Green writes: “Enormous profits fell to the planters who could get three times as much gain from an Irish as from an English estate by a fierce exploiting of the natural resources of the island and its cheap outlawed labour.”

The English Civil War of 1641-69 weakened English control of Ireland, resulting in massacres of settlers and savage reprisals by English and Scottish troops. Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland in August 1649 to reconquer the country for the Commonwealth and the speculators of the City of London.

The native Irish papists had been solidly Royalist during the civil war and therefore in the eyes of Cromwell deserved to be massacred, as they were in great numbers at Drogheda and Wexford. The memory of this lingers on in Ireland even today.

The bulk of land in the provinces of Ulster, Leinster and Munster passed to English landowners, while the Irish peasants remained as labourers or as rack-rented smallholders. Many died in the war and many were shipped to virtual slavery in the American plantations — 20,000 in 1653 alone. The population of Ireland fell from 1,500,000 in 1641 to 850,000 in 1652, and of these about 150,000 were English or Scottish settlers.

Ireland became a source of cheap food and raw materials for England. At first, cattle were reared and by 1660 about half a million were exported annually to England. But even this export was prohibited in 1666, when it was found to be causing a fall in prices and rents.

When cattle began to be replaced by sheep, a further act forbade both the export of wool to other countries and the export of anything but raw wool to England. Later still, the Irish cloth industry was deliberately destroyed when it became a dangerous competitor. The following year the Navigation Acts ordered all goods imported into England to be imported in English ships or the ships of the country where they were produced.

The following principle was laid down: “the colonies … should be subordinated to parliament, thus making a coherent imperial policy possible”. The acts were aimed mainly at England’s principal trading rivals, the Dutch, and led directly to a series of trade wars from 1652-74. The Dutch hold on trade in tobacco, sugar, furs, slaves and codfish was broken and the foundations of English territorial power in India were laid. English trade in China dates from these years.

The gradual emergence of what was to become known as the British Empire had its roots in domestic affairs — if we can call the subjugation of the Irish a domestic affair. By 1688, after the defeat of the Stuarts, the Whig oligarchy imported William of Holland to replace the Stuarts, setting the stage for a 100-year conflict against France, the rising power in Europe.

Although the English King was Dutch, for all practical purposes Holland became a British protectorate. As long as the French Bourbons were associated with absolutism and bloody persecution of Protestants, Holland was obliged to seek the protection of the British.

By 1700, the Spanish Empire was in a state of rapid decomposition, creating a kind of vacuum in Europe, which the highly centralised bureaucratic military state of France seemed destined to fill both in Europe and in exploitation of the Spanish domains, which Spain was no longer capable of defending.

The English had a direct interest in these matters, as conquest by France would upset the balance of power in England. Secondly, a French victory would reverse the work of the 1689 settlement by restoring the Stuarts and substituting a military despotism for the rule of “a commercially minded aristocracy and an aristocratic mercantile class”.

Lastly, the Spanish colonies in America were fast becoming a choice field for English traders.

The two great wars of this period, the War of the League of Augsburg 1689-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), were also trading and colonial wars. As yet the establishment of colonies was left to the private enterprises of chartered companies and the state only intervened to resist foreign attack in the interests of the English merchant class.

Only later in the century would the British wage war with the deliberate intention of building a colonial empire. By 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht confirmed British naval superiority and gave the British a monopoly of supplying the Spanish colonies with slaves.

The importance of this is seen in the fact that between 1680 to 1786 an average 20,000 slaves were shipped from Africa each year. The next thirty years from 1713 were an era of peace, during which British exports increased by at least 50 per cent.

The American and West Indian plantations grew in wealth and population. The plunder of India poured in, while Holland declined in wealth and power and France’s recovery from the war was slow, retarded by the centralised stranglehold of the bureaucracy.

England now definitely took the lead in European commerce and the conditions necessary for the establishment of an empire were created.

Colonial war

Behind the naval superiority of which so much has been made, behind the exploits of General Wolfe against the French in Quebec, and the military victories of Frederick the Great of Prussia, was the power of British money able to buy the best arms and equipment and to buy European allies and maintain them in the field with vast subsidies.

British finance allowed Prussia, industrially and commercially undeveloped, to establish itself as a great European power. The British strategy was to secure and buy a European ally, Austria in the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48) and Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756-63).

Both of these wars were related to struggles in the colonies, which continued during the intervening “peaceful” years. By means of this ally and a small expeditionary force sent to the continent, the French were tied down in Europe, while under the screen of the navy the British were able to made profitable war on French colonial possessions in America, India and the West Indies. There was little fighting of importance in the latter as the British navy was able to seize isolated French possessions, often without resistance.

The East India Company grew steadily through the 18th century, and by 1740 it had capital of £3,000,000 on which a 7 per cent dividend was paid to shareholders. This was only part of the profits to be made.

Although the company had a monopoly on trade between England and India, company servants were free to engage in internal trade. High incomes were derived from bribery, extortion and private trade. Even the directors of the company were forced to condemn a system that they themselves created, and which finally threatened the profits of the shareholders.

They complained of the “deplorable state to which our affairs are on the point of being reduced from the corruption and rapacity of our servants” and later, “we think the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade had been obtained by a series of the most tyrannic and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any country”.

The French arrived in India at the end of the 17th century, when the company was firmly established, and the newcomers were forced to secure their position by armed force. The English company soon created its own private army and a clash was inevitable.

India in the 18th century was exceptionally weak and divided. The Mogul Empire was breaking up and its local officials were establishing themselves as independent rulers. With their superior weapons the English and the French were able to intervene into local disputes and play kingmaker, establishing pliable puppets.

The first real conflict came in 1746 around Madras, which was captured by the French and subsequently lost by treaty. Hostilities ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. An incident in 1757, the so-called “Black hole of Calcutta”, in which a number of English people died, involved merely the ordinary prison of the East India Company. The English prisoners were there because of a dispute between the company and the Nawob of Bengal. The prison was overcrowded, particularly for the hot season. The incident resulted from callousness paralleled by the suffocation of 80 Indian prisoners on an English prison train in 1921.

The treaty of Madras gave the East India Company lordship over most of the country, while the French were confined to a few defenceless trading stations. Now there were to be no limits to the exploitation of India.

From Bengal alone between 1757 and 1766 the company and its servants extorted more than £6,000,000 in bribes. Trading monopolies in salt, opium and tobacco yielded immense fortunes. In 1769 and 1770 the English created a famine over wide areas by cornering the market in rice and refusing to sell except at exorbitant prices.

Clive of India, English hero of the wars, amassed one of the largest fortunes by taking bribes and “presents” from native rulers. In 1767 the British government insisted on a £400,000 share of the plunder and in 1773 in the name of checking company abuses the government partly took over the administration of the conquered provinces.

The exploitation, far too valuable to be allowed to continue in private hands, was now systematised by an act giving partial government control. It marked the beginning of the transition from the first stage of British penetration, in which India was the source of certain valuable commodities not able to be produced in Britain to the next stage in which India would become an important market for British manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the victors met to deal out the colonial remains of the defeated French. The English acquired a number of key points: Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon, Heligoland and the Cape of Good Hope, then held only by a few Dutch farmers and seen as valuable only as a stopping place on the way to India. In between times the British had colonised Australia and lost the United States of America.

Let us return to India and the civilising mission of the British to the heathen. In 1813 the East India Company lost its monopoly by an act of parliament. The company made most of its money from the sale of Indian goods to the English market, particularly London its base and the centre of British merchant capital. By 1813, however, London was not the centre of the mushrooming British industry. From this time on the Indian market was opened to the factory-made Lancashire cotton cloths.

In less than 10 years the value of exports doubled and the export of cotton goods reached nearly £2,000,000 a year by the 1920s. The company kept its tea monopoly until 1833. As about £ 4 million worth of tea was sold annually at twice the price paid in Canton, profits were considerable.

The first Opium War, in 1839-42, was fought just at the time when Lancashire was ready to flood China with cheap cotton products, as it had done in India. The war, ostensibly fought to force the Chinese to buy Indian opium against their will, had the more general purpose of breaking down barriers to the free export of British goods to China.

A certain Sir George Campbell remarked in the House of Commons: “If the Chinese are to be poisoned by opium I would rather they were poisoned for the benefit of our Indian subjects than for the benefit of any other exchequer.”

After this war, the British seized Hong Kong and five “treaty ports” were opened to British traders. A second opium war (1856-58) opened the way for the penetration of the Yangtze Basin.

Lancashire goods destroyed the handloom industry of India with astonishing rapidity. Dr Bowring, a prominent free-trade advocate, in a speech made in parliament in 1835, declared:

Some years ago the East India Company annually received of the produce of the looms of India to the amount of from six million pieces of cloth. The demand gradually fell off to somewhat more than one million pieces and has now nearly ceased altogether.

… Terrible are the accounts of the wretchedness of the poor Indian weavers, reduced to absolute starvation. And what was the sole cause? The presence of the cheaper English manufacture … Numbers of them died of hunger; the remainder were, for the most part, transferred to other occupations, principally agricultural … The Dacca muslins, celebrated over the whole world for their beauty and fineness, are almost annihilated from the same cause.

The population of Dacca, the main centre of the Indian textile industry, decreased between 1815 and 1837 from 150,000 to 20,000. Less spectacular but more important than the depopulation of Dacca was the gradual destruction of the self-supporting communities that formed the ground pattern of Indian social life. Karl Marx, speaking of both India and China, wrote:

"The broad basis of the mode of production is here formed by the unity of small agriculture and domestic industry, to which is added in India the form of communes resting upon the common ownership of the land … The English commerce exerts a revolutionary influence on these organisations and tears them apart only to the extent that it destroys by the lower price of its goods the spinning and weaving industries, which are an integral part of this unity.

The destruction of the village handicraft industry thrust the peasants back to exclusive dependence on agriculture. India, like Ireland, became a purely agricultural colony, supplying Britain with food and raw materials. The destruction of handloom industry meant not only that Lancashire goods secured a monopoly market but that Indian cotton and jute were exported to England instead of being made up at home.

This process was assisted by heavy taxation in India, which was part of the price that had to be paid for the benefit of British rule. Faced with a demand for payments in cash, the peasants were forced to sell their surplus produce at prices that bore no relation to the cost of its production. In many parts of India the tax collector quickly developed into a species of landlord.

The result has been, throughout the whole of the 19th century and up to the present time, a progressive impoverishment of the people, a continuous decline in the average size of landholdings as the proportion of the total population dependent upon agriculture rose, and growing indebtedness of the peasantry to village moneylenders.

An official investigation showed that in a village in Poona the average holding was 40 acres in 1771, 17.5 acres in 1818 and only seven acres in 1915. In Bengal and elsewhere the holdings are much smaller, averaging about 2.2 acres.

More recent figures — the increase between 1921 and 1931 of landless labourers from 291 to 407 per thousand of the population and of the estimated agricultural indebtedness between the same dates from £400,000,000 pounds to £675,000,000 — seem to show that this impoverishment not only continued during the 20th century but developed at an increasing rate.

The abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1813 coincided with a period of conquest and aggression. In 1824 an expedition was sent into Burma and its coastal area occupied. The seizure of Singapore in the same year gave the British another strategic base.

By 1838 the British controlled the whole of Burma and dethroned the Amir of Afghanistan, putting in a puppet supported by an army of 15,000. In 1842 a rising of the tribes forced the army to withdraw from the capital, Kabul. As it retreated through the Khyber Pass the British army was surrounded and destroyed.

The belief in the invincibility of the white conquerors was gone. The wars against the Sikh, which the British nearly lost at great cost, didn't help this.

British rule was based on a highly trained and disciplined army of sepoys and on the support of native princes and landowners who owed their privileges to the British.

Thus, while destroying the village community, the social base of the masses, the British preserved a kind of petrifying feudalism, a corrupt and artificially maintained oppression of princes. So long as the two exploiters worked together there was no danger of revolt, particularly as India was still entirely agricultural and fragmented.

But by the middle of the 19th century the British policy of “lapse” — that the British would take over states where the rulers died without an heir — began to cut across the custom by which the native prince could choose an heir.

Parallel with this was the steady undermining of Indian culture and religion, which was deeply resented by the high-caste sepoys — the backbone of the army. The famous incident in 1857 of the cartridges greased with animal fat was the final straw. The “mutiny”, or the “War of Liberation” as it is known by Indian historians, was not a mass struggle but a revolt of the professional army led by reactionary feudal rulers whose power was threatened by annexation and British innovations.

Outside the centre of India there was little activity. The small size of the British forces was compensated by their control of the telegraph and artillery. Within a few months, the mutiny was checked. The British reaction belies the myth that the British Empire existed for the benefit of its colonial peoples.

Sir John Kaye and G.B. Malleson, in their History of the Indian Mutiny state: “Volunteer hanging parties went into the district and amateur executioners were not wanting to the occasion. One gentleman boasted of the number he had finished off quite ‘in an artistic manner with mango trees for gibbets and elephants for drops’, the victims of this wild justice being strung up as though for pastime in ‘the form of a figure of eight’.”

The authorities of the city of Benares admitted that 6000 people “regardless of sex, or age” were slaughtered in and around Allahabad alone. This was not an isolated incident, and these atrocities were committed long before the Cawnpore massacre, which has been used ever since to excuse them.

After the suppression of the mutiny there was a general reorganisation of the British forces in India. The East India Company had plainly outlived its usefulness and was dissolved, its functions being taken over directly by the government. The number of British soldiers was increased to 65,000. The princes, although their real powers steadily declined, were from this time kept loyal with titles and subsidies and by the tacit understanding that, within reason, they could torment and plunder their subjects as they pleased under the protection of British bayonets.

Railway and road building went on apace. The object of these was partly military, partly commercial. They made it possible for troops to be rushed to any corner of the country and they also made it possible for English goods to penetrate everywhere and for Indian corn, cotton, tea and other raw materials to be carried cheaply in bulk to the ports.

They had an additional and unintended consequence. However much the British bourgeoisie were determined to keep India as an agricultural colony and a market for their industrial products, the necessity of creating a network of railways defeated this aim.

The railway not only transformed things, it transformed people. It created an industrial middle class-and an industrial working class. It bound the whole country into an economic unity it had never before possessed and gave it the beginnings of a political unity. It made possible for the first time a real struggle for national independence.

And while it did this, it made the retention of India ever more necessary for British Imperialism. Besides being a great market for articles of consumption, India became a market for the products of heavy industry, for the means of production, and a field for the export of capital. Hundreds of millions of pounds were poured into the railways, mines, roads and other works and tens of millions were drawn out every year as interest upon these loans.

It would require much more time to look at the other areas of British expansion.

Let us return for a final look at Ireland in the 19th century. From the protracted and systematic bleeding of the Irish peasantry we proceed to the creation of famine in the interests of British merchants and landowners. In 1846 what is known as the Potato Blight killed between one million and 1.5 million people. This disaster was the responsibility of the British. In fact, there was no famine but a failure of one crop, the potato. In 1847, while hundreds of thousands died, food to the value of £17 million was exported to England from Ireland under guard of English troops.

In 1835, figures of the Irish Poor Law Commission showed that the total value of Irish agricultural produce was £36 million. Of this £10 million went in rent, £20 million in taxes, tithes and the profits of middlemen and less than £6 million to the producers.

The peasants grew wheat to pay debts and potatoes to feed their families. A saying of the time was: “Providence sent the potato blight but England made the famine.” The same process as occurred in India was again found in Ireland.

The British ruthlessly exploited Ireland’s dominant agriculture and suppressed any developing industrialisation. The hand spinners and weavers were driven out by the machine-made goods of Lancashire. Between 1841-81 the number of workers in Ireland’s textiles industries decreased from 696,000 to 130,000. It was only in the north-east that shipbuilding and linen weaving were carried on — almost entirely by British capital. For this reason the English ruling class always saw the north-east (now Ulster) as especially important.

What took centuries to achieve in India and Ireland was crowded into a generation in the case of Egypt. The British were able to reduce the country to impossible financial dependence and debt, take control of its resources including the Suez canal, impoverish its largely peasant population and for 25 years prior to World War I run the country for the exclusive benefit of British bankers under Consul-General Sir Evelyn Baring (of Baring Brothers, the banking house).

By the late 19th century British imperialism was at its height. The export of capital was linked with territorial expansion, as both cause and effect. British investments provided pretexts for annexation, after which British state power was used as a means of furthering the monopoly interests of the London bondholders.

By 1900 the amount of British investment abroad was about £2 billion, from which a yearly income of £100 million was drawn. Outside the empire the largest investments were in South America. The interest on these investments, mainly paid in foodstuffs and raw materials, now far exceeded the profit derived from foreign trade. Britain was increasingly a parasitic usurer state and, relatively speaking, industry declined. In 1851 25 per cent of the people were engaged in industry, but by 1901 only 15 per cent were so engaged.

Unemployment emerged, rarely below the one million mark in the years before the war, and the economy faced crisis in 1902-04, 1908-09 and 1914, only cut short by the war.

Capital that should have been invested to keep factories in Britain up to date went abroad in search of super-profits. Inevitably, Britain’s industrial plant began to suffer and manufacturers were less and less able to produce goods in competition with other countries. By 1870, Britain’s industrial monopoly was lost.

Germany and the Unites States were not prepared to leave the British unchallenged. Coming later on the scene, they could take advantage of more modern factories and little by little they began to outproduce and undersell Britain. Britain was saddled with old machinery that was not being renewed. The following figures tell the story.

On the eve of World War I, Britain was still very powerful. She controlled 55.5 million square miles of territory and more than 400 million people. The British navy was still the most powerful in the world. But the division of the spoils, particularly so far as colonies were concerned, had been made on the basis of relative strengths far back in the 19th century.

Germany and Italy were late-corners to imperialism. It was in the backward but not strictly colonial area of the Balkans that German-British rivalry centred. Both here and in South America and within the British Empire itself, German trade was increasingly at the expense of British. Since there was no longer any unappropriated territory left for colonisation the redivision of the world could only be affected by war — a world war in which all the great powers were concerned, a war that was the beginning of the end for British colonialism and its last stage, imperialism.

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