CapitalistImperialistPig

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 ...

I like to put in a good word for hypocrisy. It's always fashionable to deplore it, and it can be annoying, especially on Fox News, but let's look at the other side of the coin. Niall Ferguson, in his book Empire, juxtaposes Queen Victoria worrying about extending her reign to yet more of the world as the least Britain could do for the poor wretches not yet incorporated into the empire even while Britain was busy using it's imperial muscle to become the great drug dealer of the world. Empty words, no doubt, but even empty words have their weight. If you invest a lot of intellectual effort in persuading yourself of your righteousness, it can be harder to ignore the ways your words fail to match your actions. After the Indian rebellion of 1857, the British East India Company was disbanded, and the Brits made two promises to the Indians: no more meddling in Indian religion, and no discrimination against the "natives." Well, they sort of kept the first. Gandhi, af...

(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...