Next week, Channel Four will broadcast a startlingly obscene TV series. A handsome historian will walk around the rubble and mass graves of Soviet Russia and declare with an aggressive smile, “If it hadn’t been Stalin, it might have been somebody worse. In any case, Russia has been ruled by murderous despots for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on Stalin.” He will argue that the collapse of Stalinism was “one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century.”
Sounds impossible? Thankfully, it is. But Niall Ferguson will be doing the same thing for an equally psychopathic form of totalitarianism – one that in fact killed even more people. For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate “blemishes” that have been over-rated and over-stated. “If it hadn’t been the British, it might have been somebody worse,” he says. “In any case, empires have been with us as a means of power and control for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on the British Empire.” He adds, “I am fundamentally in favour of empire,” and says the Americans should be our successors as imperial rulers of the world.
His latest series, accompanied by a flimsy-but-fat book, is called ‘The War of the World’. Picking up where his last work ‘Empire’ left off, he argues that one of the primary causes of genocidal violence in the twentieth century was the collapse of Empires. While the British Empire, with its “elevated aspirations”, kept a lid on ethnic tension, its retreat allowed them to erupt. Ferguson has, to his credit, been admirably honest about the origins of his dedication to empire. “Thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa,” he says mistily about growing up in Kenya. “Scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief… It was a magical time.”
Perhaps for him. Ferguson does not mention that during this “magical” childhood he was surrounded by the very recent survivors of Gulags and torture centres built by his beloved Empire. Less than a decade before, the mass British theft of Kenyan land has prompted a backlash. Thousands of destitute Kenyans began to fight against them. They responded by herding more than 300,000 Kenyans into gulags to be whipped, castrated and raped. Many had their eardrums burst with knives, others were doused in paraffin and burned alive. The soldiers were told they could kill anyone they wanted “so long as he is black” – and they slew more than 50,000. Ah, such mischief.
Today, Ferguson poses as somebody who is simply providing a hard-headed balance sheet of Empire. Yes, there were “drawbacks”, he admits – but we have to weigh them against the good things. The problem is that his calculations consistently underestimate or ignore the massive crimes of Empire, and grossly overstate the benefits. His historical judgement is constantly skewed, both by his childhood affection and by his almost punk-style desire to spit at historical orthodoxies.
Let’s look at two specific examples. Ferguson repeatedly praises the empire for integrating the poorest parts of the world into the global economy, making them richer in the process. But far from building up India to make it capable of self-rule, in reality the British destroyed it. When Clive of India arrived in Calcutta, he described it – as all visitors did – as “extensive, populous and as rich as the city of London.” It was a place of such “richness and abundance [that] neither war, pestilence nor oppression could destroy [it].” But he did his best. Within the first century of British occupation, the population fell from 150,000 to 30,000 as its industries were wrecked. By the time the British left, it was one of the poorest places in the world. Jawaharlal Nehru, the man the Indian people elected after Ferguson’s heroes finally left, explained, “Those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are poorest today. Indeed, some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty.”
For ordinary Indians,Ferguson’s ‘development’ meant starvation and foreign pillage. While Britain’s per capita income increased in real terms by 347 percent during the time it owned India, there was no increase at all in per capita income for Indians. None. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century – the period when Ferguson says the Empire’s “elevated aspirations” were most evident – it fell by more than 50 percent.
Or look at how Ferguson describes the British Empire’s conscious policy of mass starvation of Indians in the 1870s and 1890s. In reality, severe nature climate disruption hit India, and there was massive crop failure. The British viceroy – Lord Lytton, appointed because he was Queen Victoria’s favourite poet – declared that grain shipments to London must continue, by force if necessary. The institutions that Ferguson presents as Britain’s glorious gift to India – the railways and telegraph lines – were in fact used to more efficiently steal and ship out India’s food, so Londoners could enjoy them over breakfast. Some gift.
And even this was not enough. Lytton went further and declared all relief efforts illegal. Anybody who tried to provide food to starving Indians was several punished. The result? One journalist noted that the train lines of India were strewn with “bony remnants of human beings” begging for grain. “Their very eyeballs were gone… Their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies – they had none; only the framework was left.” Some 29 million innocent people died, a crime worthy of Stalin and Mao.
There were thousands of brave British people (and far more Indians) who warned at the time that this was an obscenity. The great radical journalist William Digby wrote that when “the part played by the British empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument.” (True, he didn’t count on the historian being Niall Ferguson).
But where does this figure on Ferguson’s balance sheet? He dedicates a few dry lines to it. To give some sense of perspective, he gives almost as much space to describing a statue of the Prince of Wales that was made out of butter. He then swiftly and reflexively minimises the crime, chiding anybody who compares it to Nazism (“the intention was not murderous”) and demanding to know “would Indians have been better off under the Moghuls?” (Yes, actually.)
Ferguson’s new imperialist analysis of the twentieth century – spat at us from Channel Four next week – doesn’t have much more intellectual credibility. At its core is the belief that empire keeps a lid on ethnicity. (It’s a weirdly Titoist belief from a man dedicated to neoliberalism). But in reality, far from supressing ethnicity, imperialism actually created, codified and stoked many of the ethnic tensions he laments. It was not the people of Rwanda who officially divided their country into Hutus and Tutsis, and invented race myths asserting the inherent supremacy of the Tutsis – a process that placed a genocidal time-bomb under that society. No, it was the Belgian imperial masters who wanted to divide and rule. Ferguson admits in passing that the British played Hindus and Muslims off against each other in India, but doesn’t even seem to notice how this affects his thesis that multiethnic empires are the best way to contain ethnic tension. Stoking ethnic division is an inevitable part of imperial rule.
Anyway, as those of us who were foolish enough to back George Bush’s invasion of Iraq have learned, you can’t laud the occasional positive effects of imperial violence – the toppling of a fascist dictator, say – without quickly becoming complicit in the downside: the torture, the suppression, the use of chemical weapons in a civilian city. Ferguson doesn’t even try very hard to distance himself from the downsides. He usually follows up his tepid criticisms by saying anybody else would have been even worse.
Perhaps it is foolish to take Ferguson so seriously. If he is remembered at all, it will be as the inspiration for Irwin, the ludicrous telly-don in Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ who takes increasingly preposterous and indefensible positions in a quest for contrarianism. When he says the Americans should have threatened to nuke China in the 1950s or that the Indians should be grateful for Empire, does he mean a word of it? I doubt it.
Even the premise of his new book is disingenuous. He claims that H.G. Wells’s book ‘The War of the Worlds’ was an eerily astute prophecy of the twentieth century, predicting the technological destruction of cities. The only snag is that the Martians turned out to be other human beings. But if Ferguson had read the book properly, he would know that Wells wrote the book as a warning against imperialism. He wanted British readers to know what it felt like to be invaded by a vicious, technologically superior force and subjected to their whims. No doubt he is clawing at the bottom of his grave in rage to see his work hijacked and used to provide the title for a work of imperialist revisionism.
But whenever somebody argues that there are great swathes of humanity who are inherently incapable of self-rule and must be forever subject to imperial masters – even this tenth-rate Rudyard Kipling – it’s an essential act of intellectual hygiene to condemn them. Ferguson politely does not tell us precisely who these people who must be always colonised are, but I think we can assume that – like the servants and maids who waited on him as a child, ignoring the blood-stains all around – they are black- and brown-skinned, bwana.
POSTSCRIPT I: My sources for this article include the amazing book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’ by Mike Davis, Noam Chomsky’s ‘Year 501’, and ‘The Discovery of India’ by Jawaharal Nehru.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: You can send letters for publication in the Independent on this article to letters@independent.co.uk
You can send feedback for me to johann@NOSPAMjohannhari.com
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