…this episode in Indian history
will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them
peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded
from outside dangers. The Golden Age.
-
Winston Churchill
Churchill's
Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II,
by Madhusree Mukerjee
In the seventeenth century – before Britain got her hands on
it – Bengal was described by physician François Bernier as “the finest and most
fruitful country in the world.” An
embellishment, perhaps, but he found markets brimming with rice, sugar, corn, vegetables,
mustard, and sesame; fish and meat were plentiful; vibrant towns and cities were
interspersed with lush farmland.
Once the British East India Company got its hands on Bengal,
with its estimated annual gain of £1,650,000 per year, it was quickly to become
one of the world’s poorest.
By 1769, Bengal had no gold,
silver, or other valuables left. A group
of Armenian merchants – whose trade in the region long preceded that of the
British – petitioned the Calcutta Council, complaining that the lack of
currency had brought virtually all business to a halt, so that “not only a
general bankruptcy is to be feared, but a real famine, in the midst of wealth
and plenty.”
Shortly thereafter, it is estimated that about one-third of
the people of Bengal – numbering 10 million – perished. Weather played a role, but the region had
dealt with such situations before. British rule
was new:
In the first years of the rule of
the British East India Company, the total land tax income was doubled and most
of this revenue flowed out of the country. As the famine approached its height
in April 1770, the Company announced that the land tax for the following year
was to be increased by a further 10 percent.
Yeah, that would help.
The historian William Dalrymple has
called Robert Clive [Commander-in-Chief of British India] an "unstable
sociopath" due to these harmful policies and actions that resulted in
famines and atrocities towards local native Indians and peasants. Changes
caused by Clive to the revenue system and existing agricultural practices to
maximize profits for the company partially led to the famine of 1770.
Famines were interspersed with contributions of men and
wealth in support of the British Empire – Afghanistan, the Middle East, and World
War One; rebellions and massacres.
Returning to Mukerjee’s book and the events leading up to
and during World War II: in March 1942, the Japanese smashed the Empire’s
defenses and occupied Burma. Rice imports
to India’s poor were cut off. British
authorities reacted with a scorched-earth policy: rice was removed from Bengal;
transport facilities such as barges were transferred away from the region. In case of further advances, the enemy was
deprived of these resources; the people of Bengal were deprived of these
resources in the meantime.
Further, food and grains were transferred out of India in
support of other parts of the Empire – primarily the home island, but also in
stores for the purpose of feeding the not-yet-defeated-but-as-of-now-still-enemy
populations of the Balkans and Italy. In
exchange, India received notes – promises to pay. Slowly, Britain was becoming a substantial
debtor in favor of India. All the while,
necessary food and supplies were leaving the region.
In the war, where was the potential of freedom for the Indian
people? Britain on the one hand, the
Japanese on the other. It was a fight
that offered no meaningful gain to the population, only cost.
We are introduced to Frederick Lindemann – better known as
Lord Cherwell; born in Germany, he later came to Britain. He was an important advisor to Churchill
during the war – perhaps his pre-eminent advisor; Churchill appointed him as
the British government's leading scientific adviser. For some idea of his
character:
He advocated the "area"
bombing or "strategic bombing" of German cities and civilian homes
during the Second World War by falsely stating data to Winston Churchill from a
study on the psychological impact of Germany's Birmingham Blitz and Hull Blitz
on the local populations.
Per Mukerjee, Cherwell was so deeply racist that the
presence of any black person evoked “physical revulsion.” When it came to India, his recommendations to
Churchill almost always prevailed.
Conclusion
The Bengal famine of
1943 was a major famine of the Bengal province in British India during
World War II. An estimated 2.1–3 million, out of a population of 60.3 million,
died of starvation, or of malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition,
population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care.
Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the
economy and social fabric. Historians have frequently characterised the famine
as "man-made", asserting that wartime colonial policies created and
then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view holds that the famine arose from
natural causes.
The British Empire led by Churchill, through action and
inaction, was the primary driver in this famine. There were dozens of opportunities to take
action to relieve the suffering or to not cause the suffering in the first place, and in virtually every instance Churchill chose
to do precisely the opposite.
Mukerjee will provide the details.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIt's an old story. "They make a desert and they call it peace," Tacitus famously said. He died in 117 A.D. I call it *Centralized Chaos Parading As Order*--aka a "Generation of Peace," a "Thousand Points of Light," and the "Community of Nations."
ReplyDeleteFox News Hottie and recently appointed U.S. State Department Spokesbabe Morgasmic (sic) Ortagus calls it glue, as in "I think that America is the glue that holds the world together." That's some super-adhesive glue. Did she ever take a passing gander at Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, or Yemen?
It just goes to show you. Not even extraordinarily fetching limbs can overcome foreign-policy cretinism. Sad!
Weirdest thing I have read in a while "In the first years of the rule of the British East India Company."
ReplyDeleteA corporation ruled? I'm sure it did. Sounds like the epitome of a crony.
"I am for peace. But when I speak, they are for war." -Psalms
ReplyDelete• As I was asked to post my email reply as a comment here, which I couldn't do at the time because of my limited home platform but which I can now as I am at a library computer, here it is (part 1):-
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• You write "Once the British East India Company got its hands on Bengal, with its estimated annual gain of £1,650,000 per year, it was quickly to become one of the world’s poorest [countries]", and then quote "By 1769, Bengal had no gold, silver, or other valuables left... In the first years of the rule of the British East India Company, the total land tax income was doubled and most of this revenue flowed out of the country ...".
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• To put it in context, that particular damage would have happened anyway, because it was driven by an outflow of bullion overseas and the only alternative was French rule that would have done the same, perhaps even quicker - a particular case of the problems of absentee landlordism that Nassau Senior analysed and described early in the nineteenth century. That is, it had nothing to do with the very real abuse - often by private actors - that was allowed to develop under the as yet under-regulated British systems of the day (see Macaulay et al); that caused yet other damage, but ironically was more survivable as it was of a sort that the locals were used to at local hands and had workarounds to offset (even though things like that got worse under the British of the day). Interestingly, it was knowing about such things that made American colonists scared by even a light tax going to Britain, as it was a crucial difference from even a heavy tax that did not go overseas (Britain did eventually offer to guarantee that the tax would only be spent locally, but it was too late). It is also worth noting that the British approach in India had become much more professional and competent by the early part of the nineteenth century (often taught by Indians who had learned under earlier empires, that the British then taught the Dutch). That approach had changed not only at the detail level but also with a reversal of the flow of bullion a little later, largely at China's expense but partly because European colonies became cost centres that drew on mother country treasuries to generate even bigger gains at home (that gain was undone later by world trade changes, when a fall of the price of silver against gold led to the "Fall of the Rupee", but that didn't hurt locals so much).
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• Yours sincerely,
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• P.M.Lawrence
• As I was asked to post my email reply as a comment here, which I couldn't do at the time because of my limited home platform but which I can now as I am at a library computer, here it is (part 2):-
ReplyDelete• You also write "In the [Second World] war, where was the potential of freedom for the Indian people? Britain on the one hand, the Japanese on the other. It was a fight that offered no meaningful gain to the population, only cost."
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• That is not in fact the case, because it omits the effect - thwarted but planned - of the 1930s adaptation to Indian circumstances of the Dominion approach to empire that Britain had already developed and applied elsewhere (which shows that it was genuinely intended). Largely to have the cake and eat it, the idea was to set up "responsible self government" by locals that would keep them allied and strategically connected but pass them the drain on the mother country treasury. That could be put in place quickly in the "White Dominions", but was visibly unworkable in India without much preparation. So Britain started that in the late 1920s, with a view to Dominion status for India by the 1960s once safeguards were in place against religious strife and there were enough Indians trained by working alongside British colleagues and experts (Sir Lionel Curtis's and Sir Reginald Coupland's "dyarchy") to avoid any Babu degeneration into nepotism or a trained-monkey, by the book Permit Raj. Those who thwarted that - NOT the Indians, who fancy they did, but socialists at home and anti-imperialists in the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. who had leverage over a war-indebted Britain - gave independence to the very India and Pakistan that emerged from failing to achieve that (the same sort of thing happened to those colonies that gained independence in the 1960s but had been scheduled to get it in about the 1990s).
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• Yours sincerely,
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• P.M.Lawrence
• As I was asked to post my email reply as a comment here, which I couldn't do at the time because of my limited home platform but which I can now as I am at a library computer, here it is (part 3):-
ReplyDelete•
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• "The British Empire led by Churchill, through action and inaction, was the primary driver in this famine".
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• It would be more accurate to call it the proximate or immediate driver; if by "primary" you mean "necessary and sufficient condition", that was, of course, the Japanese advance that you so well described. What happened was a good analogue of fire fighters knocking down houses to make a fire break; if they don't, either the fire anyway destroys those and yet more, or it is only sheer luck that saves the lot.
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• It may be worth remembering that Indian culture has little grasp of objective reality, so practically all history it writes is unselfconscious spin or even revisionism. There are nuggets of edited and selected truth there, when it suits, but it must always be properly supplemented and handled with care to get anything like objective insight out of it. So Churchill's judgment that you cite is perfectly accurate up to the limits of human fallibility and far less biased than any modern Indian's is likely to be.
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• P.M.Lawrence
Mr. Lawrence, thank you for your comments. You clearly have some depth in this topic.
DeleteI offer only a couple of thoughts in reply. First, British, French, or other, the case is that outsiders of one sort or another meant to control the people and resources of India. Whoever it was – and perhaps the British were a “better” colonial lord than the French would have been, perhaps not – I find little in the way of Christian benevolence in such acts.
Carrying the White Man’s Burden, a poem written for the Americans regarding the Philippines, sounds charitable – in fact, it is little but a cover for control of people and resources. One could say that the spreading of British law and trade was beneficial – but on what standard, on what basis? I am hesitant to apply such descriptions. We see the “natives” fighting bitterly against colonial rule even today; perhaps it is because they don’t view foreign rule as “better.”
While it seems likely that the descriptions in the book are somewhat biased in favor of Indians and opposed to the British, it seems even more likely that the British government – while prosecuting the war and otherwise – always favored the population in the island vs. the population in far-off colonies when push came to shove.
So, I don’t mean any of this to negate your points – they may all be valid; just that I don’t see that your points change the general thrust of the situation: who held the power and authority to act, or not act? People in India starved while under British rule; decisions could have been made otherwise by the British rulers. They may have starved in any case, but then the British would not have been responsible.