Facts Every Anglo Indian Should Know 1

This is a quick post in what will become a “Facts Every Anglo-Indian Should Know” series.

1.  In AD 1757-1760 the English East India Company, the most powerful private-public partnership ever developed, extorted the right to collect taxes from the citizens of Bengal.  These taxes were  previously collected by the local Moghul king and spent in Bengal.

2.  Fifty years later almost the whole of India was controlled by this British Government- EEIC Corporate partnership, which depended on tax collectors, not traders, for its income.  Most of these monies were repatriated to Britain.

3.   Britain maintained her control of India for the next two hundred years — until 1947.

4.  In 1750 when Britain began her control of Bengal, the sub continent of India accounted for about 25-30% of world GDP and world manufacturing.   Bengal was acknowledged to be the richest segment of the entire world.

5.  When Britain ended her reign two hundred years later, the poverty stricken hulk of India lay devastated and vivisected.  Sectarian war raged and three countries had been formed from the wealthy country Britain had acquired by war and stealth two hundred previously.

6.  At the end of Britain’s reign over India, India accounted for just 5% of world GDP and about 3% of world manufacturing.  Bengal (now mostly Bangladesh) is now one of the poorest countries in the world.

7.  Despite these facts, British historians continue to write about the gifts the Empire brought to Indians, and “The English Speaking Peoples” — Churchill’s term — continue to believe them.

8.  Authors and columnists like Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, Irving Kristol and Robert Kagan have become apologists for Imperial policies and are calling for America to become more like the British Empire, and wage preemptive wars to  preserve “peace” and improve America’s strategic international position.

History and Myth

My previous post discussed the creation of  imperial myths and the particular ability of the British to create,  propagate and then convince themselves of the “eternal verities” of their own myths.   I am convinced that I am seeing a nearly identical phenomenon in America.   The subject is endlessly fascinating.

However, my primary purpose in this blog is to examine the effect of the actions of the British Raj during the period of about 1800-1950 on my family and the world then and now.   Nevertheless, as we will see, it is impossible to completely separate “America” from the “British Empire” and the “British Empire” from “The Raj” during this period.   The East India Company, slavery, opium, and several Britons from what became the United States,  pervade the colonial history of America, British India and South East Asia.  Thus you will often find me using the term “Anglo American”, as opposed to “British”.  The actions of the two nations are often so close that the term “Anglo American”  becomes more accurate than “British”.

Many of my next posts will focus on the extraordinarily successful attempts of the British in India to manipulate their own citizens  in India and Britain into speaking with a single voice, and to play off the various religions, castes, sects and “nationalities” of the subcontinent against each other.   It is a virtuoso performance which, I am convinced,  could have been carried on for another century if the two wars of the 20th century had not economically weakened Britain, and if her even more rapacious cousin America had not been standing in the wings shouting for Britain to get off center stage.

Enter from side stage the stars: Ochterlony, Cornwallis, the “Wellington” brothers, Blanchett, Roberts, Macauley, Kipling, Orwell, Churchill, and supporting chorus.

Creating Imperial Myths

It’s been a few days since I last blogged —  I’ve been busy on a few other projects, so I have taken a few days off to think about Raj related American issues.

Conclusion?  The thrust of recent American political demonology begins to bear an eerie resemblance to Britain’s imperial mythology of a century ago.  We Americans are engaged in creating a set of demons which we claim will destroy us if we do not slay them first.  Among these demons are “Muslims”, “Immigrants” and “Deficits”.   My Anglo Indian American “nose” is particularly attuned to Imperial cant.    While the demons being conjured up by the American Empire may not be identical with the demons used by the Brits, their purpose and the methods used to create them are identical and universal.  Some of my posts will define these common characteristics and attempt to provide data to refute them.  This short piece is a quick backgrounder.

I am bemused with the news that  Peter King, the  Republican Congressman from NY has decided to hold hearings on American Muslims who are reputedly aiding “Muslim Terrorism”.   The same Peter King who supported the IRA.   The same IRA which was trying to blow up  retail stores I used to shop in when I lived in England.

Just Bemused?  Nothing stronger?  See below:

A few years ago I would have been shocked and appalled at such a hearing as King’s.  My muted reaction is a measure of my recently acquired and painfully accepted knowledge of my adopted country.  Nothing that we now do, nor the reactions of my fellow citizens to them, shocks me.  The country of Camelot, to which in 1962 I believed I had brought my young family, no longer exists.  Maybe it never did.

Not in my worst dreams of an America run amok, did I think I would be taxed to torture prisoners and hold them indefinitely without trial.  And that there would be no outcry.  Was I naive in 1962?  Apparently so.  We had already invaded Cuba (1960) without provocation, and I now know the “defenders” of my adopted country (our military leaders) were recommending “nuking” Cuba (1962).

Nevertheless, Kennedy did reject their advice.  I still believe there was a decade or so there, where Americans had a chance to make a new world.  People like me and the entire world were desperately cheering them on.  We were all Americans then.

What happened?  A nation can always be frightened and seduced by charismatic leaders.  After the debacle of Vietnam and Watergate we elected a dull and honest man.  After one term we rejected the dull honesty of a Carter for the charisma of a Reagan – a politician who probably honestly believed in the potency of incantations and charms.  A charming man.  We were seduced by his fairy tale promises of “Morning in America” and frightened by his warnings about the “Evil Empire”.   The Anglo American political imperial duo of Reagan and Thatcher in combination with the military, commercial and banking power of Anglo America was too much for labor, the essential counter balance in a capitalist system.   In the last three decades the seeds  planted during the Reagan years have grown into set of beliefs similar to the combination of jingoism and fear of early 20th Century Britain.

As bad as the situation in America is now, it can get a lot worse.  At home we are beginning to round up large numbers of “ethnics”.  UDA’s we call them.  Muslims next?   Then the homeless?  Then the poor?

Abroad, the heart that pumps our life blood, oil, is beginning to suffer from arrhythmia.  Our citizens have already accepted the idea that invading a country which threatens our “security”  is justified.  All it takes now is to define “security”.  And that is where the media and “mind control”  come in.

Now, it turns out that we Anglo Indian denizens of The Raj, who were paying attention, know quite a lot about “Muslims” and “Security” and “Afghanistan” and the Middle East.   We also know,  if we want to know, a whole bunch about “mind control”.  After all it was we “The Raj Brits” who  manufactured a whole theology of “racial” superiority.  We convinced ourselves it was our duty to rule the “subject races” of India.  It was our genius to use the same “subject races” of the Raj (mainly Indian Muslims) to conquer other Muslim nations on the other shore of the Indian Ocean.  It was thus that we expanded and maintained the Raj.  And we got the Indian Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims to  pay for it all!  And we convinced ourselves the Indians liked doing it!  After all, we said to ourselves, we were employing Indians we had defined as the “martial races of India” to do what they did best, and wanted to do anyway, weren’t we?  And weren’t we confining the conniving “babus” to what they did best?  Pushing paper?  Isn’t that why we were able to run our Empire with a “thin red line?”  Of course, we said, our success was its own answer to such a question.  We are the superior race.

It was sheer bloody genius!  The Victorians were the greatest flim flam artists of all time.  And what incredible self deception.   For nearly two hundred years we Brits convinced ourselves that The Raj was benign, and that the British Empire was a gift from God– really we did!  “Pax Brittanica” we called it, while we massacred and stole our way through Africa and Asia.  While our cousins exterminated indigenous people in Australia and North America we professed our racial superiority.  Didn’t Darwin say it would be so?  Social Darwinism was the Word from God.  Survival of the fittest old chap.  Darkies are closer to monkeys, and all that   And yet we Brits, and Americans and Australians convinced ourselves we were doing God’s work.  We still do.

I am an American now.  America, once a colony of Britain,  inherited its penchant for self deception and hypocrisy from England.  When my President, Ronald Reagan, started talking about Evil Empires three decades ago, my skin crawled with remembrance of horrors past.  When Peter King starts “hearings” on “Muslims” I hear echoes of past pogroms.  When I hear Fox News declaiming on danger from “extremists” and “immigrants” and “deficits” I know we are all being manipulated.   The Gipper’s spirit lives on.  It is Morning in America again – after we solve a few nagging problems like “terrorists” and “immigrants” and  and getting “the lazy unemployed” to work so we can reduce “deficits”.

I do not know what the future holds, but I see very alarming symptoms of American “brain washing”.   Our American attempt to maintain our mercantile Empire at the beginning of this century looks very like the British attempt to maintain her Imperial Empire a century ago.   WW1, the European civil war, was the result.

So.. some of the posts in this blog will define  myths used to justify the current and future actions of the American and British Empires, and attempt to provide data to rebut them.