7-26-05, 9:43 am
Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business, Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (which continues to bring to global scholarship the weltanschauung of Herbert and the praxis of J. Edgar) has written for hip Marxists a campy coffee table book titled Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and Its Lessons for Global Power.
Actually, the work, which is often entertaining in its cataloguing of the rogues who built the largest colonial empire in human history in the name of liberty, progress, and civilization by for and of free trade, has virtually no lessons for the US or other contemporary global imperialist powers. While many reviewers have seen it as a sort of advice book to the Bush administration on how to run an empire, it is a generally defensive, descriptive work filled with idiosyncratic facts and testy cliches. While it is racy in the way that a Rupert Murdoch tabloid is racy, it doesn’t have much of an analysis of anything, unless one considers the lame argument that terrible as the British were, they did pave the way for the glorious liberal capitalism of today as analysis. The magnitude of British crimes in India and Africa were so great that they are impossible to ignore. Also, as Ferguson insists over and over again (he does stay on message) the people of India and the other colonial regions might have been worse off on their own or in the hands of other empires, who were usually worse than the British or at least no better.
The best example of this 'analysis' is Ferguson’s notation that between 1757 and 1947 (the end of the Indian Raj) British GDP rose 347% while Indian GDP rose 14%. Most of the profits, Ferguson concedes went to British firms. Indian capitalist development was stunted, and 1.6 million left to work in the Empire under conditions which 'were little better than those inflicted on African slaves.... ' Also, there were famines that killed millions, including the notorious 1876-1877 famine where, Ferguson concedes 'the British predilection for laissez-faire economics actually made matters worse.' (A very British understatement if ever there was one).
But, Ferguson goes on to ask and implicitly answer the following dumb rhetorical question. Would the Indians have been better off under the Mughals, the Dutch, or the Russians? Oddly, he doesn’t mention the French, with whom the British were fighting for India in the Seven Years War. From that he goes on to state that under British rule, the 'total share of after tax-income (for Indian villages) actually rose from 45 to 54 percent.' Thus, Ferguson concludes in a Monty Python way 'there can therefore by little doubt that the British reduced inequality in India.'(This sounds like a commercial for a Reagan-Bush tax cut, although I doubt it would fool too many Indians.
And even if the Indians were not too prosperous, Ferguson goes on to say that things might have conceivably been worse under a Mughal regime had the great 1857 uprising that imperialists call the 'Sepoy Mutiny' and Indian scholars see as their first war of independence succeeded.
So, Ferguson concludes, 'Indian nationalism was fueled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few,' meaning that after the defeat of the war of independence the British spent too much time bribing Maharajas and other feudal vestiges instead of building their laissez-faire Empire with the necessary number of Indian 'brown Englishmen' in the Civil Service. The Empire might have lived on much longer had it been true to its capitalist mission.
Here there is really a double whammy. The British revolution of the 17th century resulted in a compromise in which the capitalist class ruled through alliances with a hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. Bribing aristocrats and either cultivating or establishing monarchical puppets was as much a part of the British game plan as the forward pass was in American football.
Of course, Ferguson sets up straw men. The Indians had they triumphed would have had a chance to make their own history free of the British and the Mughals, just as the Chinese were not limited to a choice between English opium salesman and Manchus. Imperialism was a system that was destroying because it had to destroy the very feudal elites whom Ferguson disparages. The later anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century would mobilize millions around programs of national and social liberation. In those revolutions, the Communist movement was the most thoroughgoing and in China, Vietnam, and the US semi-colony of 'protectorate' were the most successful. However, appeals of a socialist nature in India, Sri Lanka, the African colonies, and other colonial regions were also important. For Ferguson none of the liberation struggles anywhere have much meaning. In a work that covers more than three centuries and repeats endlessly the central role of India to the empire, for example, there are only three disconnected and Anglo centric references to Gandhi.
Along with many interesting quotations, facts, and factoids, there are glaring omissions and a fair number of historical errors of fact. One might expect such errors in a work that seeks to provide a narrative history of the largest colonial empire in history from the 18th century to its demise.
In the 20th century, the Soviet revolution is barely mentioned, the Soviet contribution and Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Communist movement contributions to victory over both fascism and colonialism are completely invisible. It’s the Americans who do in the Empire at Bretton Woods (there is a grain of truth in this, but only a grain) which limps off into the sunset after Suez.
At first I was amused at Ferguson’s failure to blame the socialists, the Communists, and the Soviets for teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of colonialism—certainly such omissions would make him suspect at the Hoover Institution. Then, I began to realize that the omission of the entire left pretty much was really central to his argument, namely the omission of the peoples living under colonialism, who are in effect children who never grow up, never have a history and a culture worth understanding, except if it permits Englishman to show off.
Imperialism in its direct colonial and modern indirect neo-colonial forms is essentially about the ruling classes of the colonizing countries keeping their subjects/citizens, whom they treat as commodities, at bay, by treating colonial resources and peoples as commodities that can be exploited without protection, thus producing increased wealth through super profits that pays for a few more carrots at home along with a lot of cheap entertainment, something like the old Roman bread and circuses, for poor cockneys who cheer on Queen Victoria, and pre-welfare state East Enders and hernias and respiratory diseases constantly being told how better and how better off they were than poor Hindus.
My answers to Ferguson are simple, but they are answers he can never get or he would not be a such an apologist for the British colonial empire. Modern imperialism is all about the rise of commercial and industrial capitalism, systems with no limits to their exploitation of all commodities including labor. It was the class war, which triumphed in the form of the English bourgeois revolution of the 17th century that made the empire possible to begin with and the industrial revolution of the late 18th century that gave the empire its enormous advantage over its rivals, not missionaries and laissez-faire capitalism.
How else could a nation so lucky that the weather kept the Spanish Armada from conquering it have become the largest colonial empire in human history? The Protestant Revolution/Reformation, itself an important feature of the ongoing bourgeois revolution, helped bring about the conflict with rich feudal Spain, which could loot the Western Hemisphere, but not use the loot for bourgeois development. The revolution/reformation provided the mobilizing language for the overthrow of the Stuart absolutist monarchy, although the parsons and preachers whose sermons mobilized support for Cromwell’s new model army in the wars of the 1640s became, a Karl Marx noted, the political philosophers (of whom John Locke was the most important) who provided the ideology for the completed the revolution in the 1680s. The political revolution then interacted dialectically with the development of commercial capitalism through the empire and its transformation into industrial capitalism.
But none of this history exists in Empire.
Ferguson’s conclusions, which don’t have that much to do with his narrative, are 'there would certainly not have been so much free trade between the 1840s and the 1930s had it not been for the British Empire.' Free trade from a colonial empire that covered one fourth of the world and restricted the economic development of its colonies? The pound sterling bloc that the US buried at Bretton Woods when it set up the IMF and the World Bank? The economic policies and principles of those who brought on the Great Depression?
One could go on, but why bother? Ferguson has some hope though in Tony Blair’s reaction to the post 9/11 world, which he takes as the most vital statement on Britain’s role in the world in the post-Suez period, stating hilariously that 'it is hard to think of a Prime Minister since Gladstone so ready to make what sounds like undiluted altruism the basis of his foreign policy.'
In his last pages, Ferguson tops himself by literally quoting Kipling, 'The Empire’s greatest Poet,' on the 'White Man’s Burden.' Even though 'no one would dare use such politically incorrect language today.' Ferguson sees the Bush administration taking up that 'burden' not only to fight international terrorism, but to spread 'the benefits of capitalism and democracy.' 'And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self interest is manifestly uppermost.'
It is really an achievement to span more than three centuries and the whole globe and learn nothing, but Ferguson has accomplished that feat. Maybe he could interest Donald Trump or some like-minded British capitalist in opening a theme park called Empire, a Disneyland for the Tories of all nationalities. One could steam up the Congo River, slaughter Indian holograms at Amritsar, supervise South African holograms in Gold Mines, party at the opening of the Suez Canal, and tell starving Irish holograms in the late 1840s to either shape up or ship out. It might lead to video game spin-offs and, of course, be a fitting monument to Ferguson’s empire.
