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219 pages

English

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Newsinger challenges the claim that the British Empire was a kinder, gentler empire and suggests that the description 'rogue state' is more fitting. In a wonderful popular history of key episodes in British imperial history, he illustrates the darker side of the glory years - Britain's deep involvement in the Chinese opium trade; Gladstone's maiden parliamentary speech defending his family's slave plantation in Jamaica - paying particular attention to the strenuous efforts of the colonised to free themselves of the motherland's baleful rule.

Sujets

Military history

World War I

British Empire

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Publié par	Bookmarks
Date de parution	07 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909026216
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

“On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries”
Ernest Jones, Chartist and socialist, 1851
About the author
John Newsinger is senior lecturer in the School of History and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College. His most recent books include Orwell’s Politics (Macmillan, 2000), United Irishman (Merlin, 2001) and Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement (Merlin, 2004).

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lorna Chessum and our sons, Jack and Ed; to Hannah Dee and Mark Thomas at Bookmarks; to Chris Bambery and John Rose for their comments and advice; to Christine Gardner and Robert Maisto for their hospitality; to my typist, Rose Senior; and to my colleagues and friends at Bath Spa University, in particular, Alan Marshall.
THE BLOOD NEVER DRIED
A People’s History of the British Empire
John Newsinger
To the Leicester Old Comrades: Chris Lymn, Mal Deakin, Andy Wynne, Jim Tolton, John Peach and the late Ken Orrill

The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire
John Newsinger
First published July 2006
Bookmarks Publications Ltd,
c/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
Copyright © John Newsinger
ISBN 1905192126
Printed by Cambridge Printing
Designed by Bookmarks Publications
Contents
Introduction: the blood never dried
The Jamaican rebellion and the overthrow of slavery
The sugar empire
The years of revolution
The overthrow of slavery
Abolition
Morant Bay, 1865
The Irish famine
The Great Hunger
Evictions
John Mitchel and the famine
1848 in Ireland
Irish Republicanism
The Opium Wars
“The safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of ”
The First Opium War
The Taiping rebellion
The Second Opium War
The Third Opium War
Crushing the Taiping rebels
The Great Indian Rebellion, 1857-58
By the sword
Company rule
The Great Rebellion
War
Repression
The war at home
The aftermath
The invasion of Egypt, 1882
Ismail and the bankers
“Egypt for the Egyptians!”
The Liberal response
“Vast numbers of Egyptian dead”
The Mahdi and Sudan
Reconquest
The post-war crisis, 1916-26
The Irish struggle
The revolt in Egypt, 1919
“Holding India by the sword”
War in Iraq
The Chinese Revolution, 30 May 1925
The Palestine revolt
Zionism and Imperialism
The mandate
The road to revolt
The Great Revolt, 1
The Great Revolt, 2
Defeat and aftermath
Quit India
India and the Labour Party
Towards “Quit India”
Quit India
“The final judgement on British Rule in India”
The end of British rule
The Suez invasion: losing the Middle East
Iranian oil
Egypt and the Canal Zone
Nasser and the road to war
Collusion and invasion
Aftermath
The Iraqi endgame
Crushing the Mau Mau in Kenya
Pacification
The Mau Mau revolt
War
Repression
Independence
The other rebellion : Southern Rhodesia
Malaya and the Far East
The First Vietnam War
A forgotten intervention: Indonesia 1945-46
Reoccupying Malaya
The emergency
Confrontation
Britain and the American Empire
Labour and the American alliance
From Suez to Vietnam
A British Gaullism
New Labour
Invading Iraq
Notes
Index
Introduction: the blood never dried
I N 2003 N IALL F ERGUSON published his Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World , a volume intended to capture the spirit of the times. Empires and imperialism were being celebrated as a duty that powerful states owed to their weaker brethren. This duty was to be put into effect with catastrophic consequences with the invasion of Iraq. Ferguson followed this bestselling volume with another one, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire , establishing himself as a latter day Rudyard Kipling, urging the American ruling class to take up “the white man’s burden”. 1
One problem with contemporary apologists for empire, however, is their reluctance to acknowledge the extent to which imperial rule rests on coercion, on the policeman torturing a suspect and the soldier blowing up houses and shooting prisoners. It is the contention of this book that this is the inevitable reality of colonial rule and, more particularly, that a close look at British imperial rule reveals episodes as brutal and shameful as in the history of any empire. Indeed, a case in point is the methods the British used to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. This is especially pertinent, because in a personal reminiscence Ferguson tells his readers that “thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa”. His father worked for two years in Kenya after independence, but as he observes, “scarcely anything had changed…We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili—and our sense of unshakeable security. It was a magical time.” Indeed, he still has “the carved wooden hippopotamus, wart hog, elephant and lion which were once my most treasured possessions”. 2 Now this is, of course, all very touching but his “magical time” was only made possible by one of the most ferocious episodes of colonial repression in British imperial history which does not merit so much as a mention in his book. The Mau Mau revolt of the 1950s was put down with terrible brutality, the routine use of torture, summary executions, internment on a massive scale, and the hanging of over 1,000 prisoners. How seriously should we take a history of the empire that somehow misses all this? Hopefully this volume will serve, at least in part, as an antidote to Ferguson’s work.
First, however, let us make clear what we are primarily concerned with here. Imperialism has two dimensions: firstly, the competition between the great imperial powers, competition that in the 20th century produced two world wars and the Cold War. This competition is the driving force of modern imperialism, and it has wreaked terrible damage on the world, consuming millions of lives. What this book is primarily concerned with, however, is not the relationship between the British Empire and its imperial rivals, but with the second dimension—the relationship between the imperial power and its conquered peoples. The best description of this relationship was provided by George Orwell in his novel Burmese Days , where he wrote that imperialism consisted of the policeman and the soldier holding the “native” down, while the businessman went through his pockets. 3 Of course, countries were not invaded and occupied just for reasons of economic exploitation. Strategic considerations were also an important factor, although these strategic considerations invariably involved protecting colonies that were of economic importance.
It is the contention here that imperial occupation inevitably involved the use of violence and that, far from this being a glorious affair, it involved considerable brutality against people who were often virtually defenceless. For too long the image of imperial conquest that has prevailed in Britain is that propagated by the 1964 film Zulu . This tells the epic story of a small band of British soldiers battling against overwhelming odds at Rorke’s Drift (in today’s South Africa) in 1879. The British fight with both courage and honour and emerge victorious, more because of their national character than their superior weaponry. What the film conveniently leaves out is the subsequent slaughter of hundreds of Zulus wounded, clubbed, shot and bayoneted to death, some hanged and others buried alive. 4 This was and remains the reality of colonial warfare.
It is worth remembering that the much trumpeted “Shock and Awe” that the United States promised to inflict on Iraq in 2003 had been inflicted by the British on city after city throughout the world in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Bombardments that left hundreds dead, districts reduced to rubble, and populations cowed are hardly worth the notice of most historians. If it had been British cities shelled by an invader, the story would have been very different. How many readers, one wonders, have even heard of the British bombardment of the Indonesian city of Surabaya in November 1945? A battle that is still celebrated as “Heroes Day”, a vital episode in that country’s struggle for independence, is altogether unknown in Britain, the country that carried out the attack.
Once a country was conquered, imperial rule was maintained by force. Whatever the particular architecture of imperial rule, it always rested in the end on the back of the policeman torturing a suspect. Those who affect surprise at the excesses of Abu Ghraib need to be reminded that these are the inevitable and unavoidable consequences of colonial rule. The aim in what follows is to provide evidence of this.
The book is also concerned to celebrate, dare one say “glorify”, resistance to empire. From the slaves who overthrew slavery in the Caribbean, to the Indian rebels of the 1850s, from the Irish Republicans who took up arms during and after the First World War, to the Palestinian peasants fighting against the British and the Zionists in the 1930s, from the Mau Mau in the 1950s to the Iraqi resistance of today, brave men and women have resisted empire. The book also chronicles the extent to which radicals and socialists in Britain organised, demonstrated and protested in solidarity with these resistance movements. While the Stop the War Coalition can legitimately claim to be the largest and most powerful anti-imperialist and anti-war movement in British history, it stands in an honourable tradition. It was in the 1850s that the Chartist and socialist Ernest Jones responded to the claim that while the sun might never set on the British Empire, similarly “the blood never dried”. Anti-imperialists today stand in the tradition of Ernest Jones and William Morris, another socialist and fierce critic of the empire—a tradition to be proud of.
And what of those who support and glorify the British Empire? What they have to be asked is how they would r