CapitalistImperialistPig

The first well documented empire seems to have been the of Sargon, almost 4500 years ago. A couple of thousand years later, Cyrus came up with a radical innovation. Whereas previous empires had been frankly exploitative and xenophobic, Cyrus claimed his conquests to be for the benefit of both conqueror and conquered, bringing them the blessings of higher civilization. It was an innovation subsequently widely adopted, and also invented independently elsewhere. This was a radical departure from tens of thousands of years or human experience in which we divided ourselves into we, the real people, and they, who weren't really people at all. This new inclusiveness, Prof Haarari points out, was hardly hyprocrisy free, but it had long term consequences in terms of the internal digestion of foreign cultures. Over periods of many centuries, the conqered became one with the conqerors. This is vividly illustrated in the cases of the Roman, Arab, and Chinese empires, where assimilation i...

Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power is much better on the rise than the demise. Also, the so-called Lessons for Global Power are little more than a few paragraphs of moralizing on behalf of an activist or perhaps neocon American foreign policy. Overall, the book betrays its origins in a television series in a rather superficial treatment of many points, especially the loss of the empire. One cardinal point that deserved more consideration was the inherent contradiction between imperial exploitation and the notions of free trade and self government at the heart of the British ethos. Ferguson blames the post World War II imperial collapse on the financial effects of the conflicts with other empires and especially on U.S. opposition, but I think that's way too simple. The case of India is probably most instructive. India was the cash cow of Empire and the source of many of the soldiers for its other imperi...

Live blogging Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson. After World War I, the British Empire had one last spasm of expansion, scarfing up big chunks of the formerly Ottoman Middle East, German's African colonies, and more of the Pacific. The Imperial impulse was largely exhausted though, and the Empire was starting to cost more money than it made. The lesson of the American rebellion had been absorbed much earlier and resulted in the white and protestant colonies winning a large measure of self-rule and independence - privileges not extended to the earlier colonies of Ireland and India. India had played a major role in the British war effort - one million Indian volunteers had fought for Britain, and many of the English educated Indian intellectuals, including Gandhi, had supported it. After the war, first Ireland and then India had asked for the same deal that Australia, Canada, etc had got. The new Arab coloni...

By Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the British Empire sprawled over five continents and hundreds of islands. It was by far the largest empire that had ever existed. The war of revenge against the dervishes - Salafis in the Sudan - culminated in the slaughter of Omdurman. Machine guns and artillery beat spears and muskets. But signs of rot were already showing up. The turn of the twentieth century war against the Boers in South Africa was brutal, difficult, and was conducted ultimately with a policy of burning farms and imprisoning women and children in concentration camps, where poor food and sanitation killed tens of thousands. Of course this was a small scale slaughter compared to some previous colonial wars, but this time the victims, or many of them, were white Europeans. The peace would be a technical victory but mostly a loss. Disgust with the conduct of the war combined with the well-founded suspicion that it had been fought for the benefit of a tiny number of rich ...

Niall Ferguson argues that the average stay-at-home, working class Brit did not get a whole lot of economic benefit out of the empire. Of course the plunderer's made their fortunes, and trade brought jobs, but emigration to Australia or Canada had a higher payoff and lower taxes. Supporting Army, Navy, and Empire was not free. One popular product they did get was vicarious adventure. There was an endless appetite for books and magazine stories of plucky/lucky Brit's triumphing over beast and foe in exotic locales. Wars were a kind of amplified adventure fiction, especially when the hapless foes couldn't inflict many casualties with spear and musket vs. machine gun. Britain averaged more than a war per year during Victoria's long reign. The favorite crackpot science of the day, eugenics, held that by eliminating the weak, such wars actually improved the human race - a theme later taken up by A. Hitler.

Whatever fit of morality seized England in the abolition of the slave trade seems to have abated by the latter nineteenth century, as they rushed pell-mell into Africa. The powers of Europe (England, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia) agreed to divy Africa. In part this was Bismark's strategy of playing England vs. France, but Prussia grabbed a piece too, just to confuse the map a bit. Once again, technology and money were the key players. As in India, private enterprise led the way, armed with credit and the new Maxim gun - an early machine gun. Cecil Rhodes found the Kimberly diamond mines a proper capitalist competition, with hundreds of small companies competing and driving down prices. Armed with Rothschild money, he and Lord Rothschild were able to buy up the lot and make serious money the old fashioned way, as the De Beers cartel. Rhodes used some of the profits to fund his overthrow of the Matebele and start his own country - Rhodesia. Proof of the unsatirizability...

Discuss: It might seem self-evident that they [Indians] would have been better off under Indian rulers. That was certainly true from the point of view of the ruling elites the British had overthrown and whose share of national income, something like 5 per cent, they then appropriated for their own consumption. But for the majority of Indians it was far less clear that their lot would improve under independence. Under British rule, the village economy’s share of total after-tax income actually rose from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. Since that sector represented around three-quarters of the entire population, there can therefore be little doubt that British rule reduced inequality in India. And even if the British did not greatly increase Indian incomes, things might conceivably have been worse under a restored Mughal regime had the Mutiny succeeded. China did not prosper under Chinese rulers. The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the man...

Correctly or not, Niall Ferguson sees the origins of the Indian independence movement in an event called The White Mutiny. After the rebellion of 1857 and the dissolution of the East India Company, India was ruled by a tiny cadre of civil servants, about 900 to rule a country of 250 million. This highly competitive civil service was entered by passing very demanding exams in history, politics, morality, Indian languages and much else. As Queen Victoria had promised, this civil service was open in theory to Indians as well as Britons. Indians created their own schools to study for the exams and eventually Indians were in fact admitted. The rules, however, had an important racist clause. Although both were members of the covenanted civil service, the Indians were not entitled to conduct trials of white defendants in criminal cases. In the eyes of the new Viceroy, this was an indefensible anomaly; so he requested a bill to do away with it. Ferguson, Niall (2008-03-17). Empire: The ...

(Based on Niall Ferguson's Empire ) The British East India Company had a strict policy against encouraging Christian prosetlyization. They presciently feared that such efforts would interfere with their aim to extract the maximum rent from the Indian economy. After the evangelical success in demolishing the Atlantic Slave trade, however, those evangelicals could not be persuaded to forbear any longer, and an intense parliamentary campaign culminated in orders to let in and support the missionaries. Their forthright goals were to save the Indians from their benighted religion and bring them the blessing of Christianity and Capitalism. Their passion was particularly aroused by three Indian practices they found extremely offensive: female infanticide, thagi (quasi-religious associations of murderers and thieves), and suttee (or burning widows alive on their husband's funeral pyres). If they had confined their attentions to these, Indian resentment might have been manageable - ...

I'm becoming a fan of historian Niall Ferguson, who unfortunately appears to have formerly occupied the same body now inhabited by Niall Ferguson, Republican party hack. He has a nice eye for the telling detail. He claims out that the famous Boston Tea Party was actually a reaction to a decrease in taxes on Tea, and that the perpetrators were smugglers who were thereby put out of business.

A famous book about the founders of Apple and Microsoft was called Accidental Empires. The same description applies to the most valuable element of the British empire, India. According to Niall Ferguson, for 150 years, the British were in India merely to trade, but they fortified their trading posts, which have grown into some of the most important Indian cities: Mumbai, Madras, and Calcutta. During that time they existed by the grace of the Mughal emperor, and that of some of his deputies. Two key elements changed that. One was the British triumph in a long struggle with France. The other was the ongoing disintegration of the Mughal empire, a Muslim dynasty that had conquered much of India some centuries before. The struggle with France had occasioned a build up of English force in India, and victory had chased out their European rival. Short-sighted Indian princes, struggling with each other for power were eager to accept help from the warlike foreigners. And thus they invit...

Niall Ferguson finds it notable that after making his name, knighthood and fortune from piracy, Henry Morgan invested his profits in a Jamaican Sugar plantation. The British Empire's progress beyond piracy continued with the importation of what became the hot commodities in Europe's first mass consumer market. Caffeine, sugar and nicotine were the new drugs of choice - uppers, says Ferguson, versus the traditional European downer of alcohol. After drugs, the next consumer market was for textiles, namely the highly refined textiles of India. The economics of this early import trade were relatively simple. Seventeenth-century English merchants had little they could offer Indians that the Indians did not already make themselves. They therefore paid for their purchases in cash, using bullion earned from trade elsewhere rather than exchanging English goods for Indian. Today we call the spread of this process globalization, by which we mean the integration of the world as a single ...

Every empire is built on theft. Perhaps we have become enough better to disdain such now. The big global empires of the western Europeans began with Spain's looting of Mexican and Peruvian gold and silver. The enormous fortunes so acquired excited intense envy in the rest of Europe, including England. It took a century or so before the English really got the hang of making long ocean voyages, but they were determined to find some gold of their own to steal. When they found they lacked the Midas touch, they turned to piracy instead. The successful pirates, like Morgan and Drake, gained knighthoods, while less accomplished ones like Walter Ralegh found scaffold and noose. Such is the tale told by Niall Ferguson in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power . Despite such scruffy beginnings, Ferguson is something of an apologist for empire at heart. In particular, he is critical of the viewpoint that the effects of empire are purely...

I'm reading a new book, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970 by John Darwin. An early quote: It was also the case that British expansion had no master-plan. It had almost always been true that colonial schemes or their commercial equivalents were devised not by governments but by private enthusiasts in search of wealth, virtue or religious redemption. Sometimes they dragged Whitehall in their wake, to get its protection, secure a monopoly or obtain a licence to rule through a charter or patent. By ‘insider-dealing’ in the political world, they might conscript Whitehall's resources for their colony-building. Sometimes Whitehall insisted on an imperial claim on its soldiers’ or sailors’ advice, or to appease a popular outcry. But, once entrenched at their beachhead, the ‘men on the spot’ were hard to restrain, awkward to manage and impossible to abandon. Darwin (2009-10-15). The Empire Project (p. 3). Cambridge University Press. Kindle E...

It's a familiar notion, at least on the economic left, that capitalist industrialism was built on the surplus extracted from Europe's colonies. I wonder if the truth might not be almost the reverse: that the colonies were build from the surplus extracted from industrialization. Spain and Portugal were the foremost early colonial powers, and extracted fantastic fortunes from their brutally oppressive colonies. The trouble with extractive colonialism in the model of the various East India companies is that they give enormous profits to a few individuals but at great cost to economic efficiency. Rent extraction adds little or nothing to technology or production, but it also penalizes all sorts economic productivity, especially in the colonies, but also in the colonizers. Settler colonialism, in the model of the US, Canada, and Australia has generally been a big success - for the colonizers, though of course catastrophic for the victim nations). They have developed industrially ...

Arun has me thinking about Capitalism and and Colonialism. Many, perhaps most, of colonial ventures started with trade, or ambitions of establishing trade. That is a very capitalistic enterprise. It's when the capitalist sees an opportunity to establish a exclusive license, as in the British East India Company that he becomes transformed into a rent seeker. Many of the worst evils of colonialism are associated with the consequences of this rent seeking. As usual, the successful rentier makes a great fortune, but as Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations comes at the expense of both the colony and the colonizing nation. It's a matter of economic efficiency. My attempts to find a good, reasonably brief, reasonably ideologically uncontaminated book on colonialism have so far failed.