Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Sathnam Sanghera (ч. 6)

На самом деле, это настолько хорошая идея, что она пришла в голову и другим людям. Председатель Совета Королевского общества Содружества Джон Хоуп затронул эту тему, написав в апреле 1964 года письмо на The Times , в котором утверждал, что Содружество может "стать уникальным инструментом расового сотрудничества во всей области человеческих усилий".51 Аналитический центр Demos предложил это в 2002 году,52 его директор представил, как королева отправляется в мировое турне, чтобы извиниться за "прошлые грехи Британской империи ".53 В цитируемой ранее статье Роджер Бойес и Джейн Фланаган написали, что "преобразующий жест, который Британия могла бы сделать в пост-елизаветинскую эпоху, - это возглавить (или выслушать, проследить и помочь сформировать) переоценку влияния рабства на бывшие колонии в рамках всего Содружества".54 Филипп Мерфи, тем временем, вслух задается вопросом: "А стоит ли?

Содружество может прийти на помощь Великобритании, которой в настоящее время, похоже, так трудно вести разумные дебаты о своей империи. Во многих отношениях Содружество - идеальный форум для обсуждения на самом высоком уровне последствий и наследия колониализма. Все его члены были глубоко сформированы этой историей - от Великобритании как колониального гегемона до мельчайших колониальных зависимостей; от стран, формировавшихся под влиянием британского империализма на протяжении столетий, до тех, где его прямое воздействие длилось не более одного поколения... Содружество обладает редким "конкурентным преимуществом" в своей способности выслушать и, возможно, помочь примирить дико противоречивые точки зрения".55

Очень правильно.

Должен признаться, что при свете дня, спустя примерно двенадцать часов и под воздействием кофе, а не пива, некоторые проблемы с планом становятся очевидными. Не в последнюю очередь, судя по недавним заявлениям, король Чарльз делает все возможное, чтобы противостоять очевидному. Летом 2022 года, когда он еще был принцем Уэльским, сообщалось, что он общался с экспертами и мировыми лидерами по теме рабства, "и что он надеется, что благотворительная организация возьмет на себя мантию, чтобы лучше просвещать и информировать",56 похоже, не обращая внимания на то, что довольно крупная организация, возглавляемая его матерью, могла бы справиться с этой задачей. Совсем недавно он вслух выразил надежду, что Содружество сможет сыграть "незаменимую роль" в решении "самых острых вопросов современности", упомянув все, от изменения климата до утраты биоразнообразия, возможностей для молодежи, глобального здравоохранения и экономического сотрудничества, за исключением одного вопроса - британского империализма, который волновал его и многие страны Содружества больше, чем любой другой в последнее время.57 Более того, некоторые могут сказать, что Содружество, в которое входят многие страны Карибского бассейна, официально потребовавшие репараций через CARICOM, - это именно та организация, которая не подходит, учитывая ее близость к британской империи . Как и многие британские международные благотворительные организации в послевоенный период, Содружество и связанные с ним организации набирали сотрудников прямо из империи: например, Королевское общество Содружества в 1961 году назначило председателем Алана Леннокс-Бойда, человека, который был государственным секретарем по делам колоний в правительстве консерваторов в 1954-1959 годах и который считал, что по экономическим причинам неразумно предоставлять колониям независимость до того, как они будут готовы.58 В начале своей книги Филип Мерфи отмечает, что во время своего докторского исследования в конце 1980-х - начале 1990-х годов он "познакомился с идеей Содружества как большого, успокаивающего одеяла для уменьшающейся группы послевоенных имперских энтузиастов [Консервативной] партии".59 и добавляет позже, что "собрания Содружества" в определенном свете "могут показаться не столько семейными встречами, сколько группами поддержки жертв особо жестокого похитителя".fn360

В то же время можно утверждать, что символ монарха и связанная с ним символика королевской семьи настолько связаны с имперским проектом, что королю Карлу не хватило бы дистанции, чтобы помочь решить эти вопросы через Содружество. В конце концов, королева Елизавета I спонсировала ранние миссии работорговцев и оказала честь работорговцу Джону Хокинсу, подарив ему герб с изображением закованного в цепи африканца.61 Королевская африканская компания управлялась из королевских дворцов и отправила в Америку больше порабощенных африканских женщин, мужчин и детей, чем любая другая организация за всю историю трансатлантической работорговли.62 Ост-Индская компания одалживала Карлу II огромные суммы денег (в конце 1670-х годов эти переводы стали подарками королевским особам, которые не нужно было возвращать).63 Георг III защищал трансатлантическую работорговлю и выступал против ее отмены во время своего правления.64 Принц Уильям, третий сын Георга III и будущий Вильгельм IV, поддерживал рабовладельческое лобби на протяжении конца XVIII - начала XIX веков и произнес речь в поддержку рабства в Палате лордов.65 Предки Виндзоров были директорами Ост-Индской компании и получили огромные суммы в качестве "компенсации" за отмену рабства.66 Такие места, как Верхняя Бирма, были аннексированы от имени королевской семьи.67 Три пары шалей", упомянутые в своеобразном Амритсарском договоре 1846 года, по которому Кашмир был передан королю-тирану, были подарены британскому монарху.68 Королева Виктория использовала королевские туры для демонстрации одобрения имперской политики.69 Королевские особы регулярно получали долю награбленного, когда британское государство грабило такие места, как Бенин70 Найденную там собаку породы пекинес, которую привезли в подарок королеве Виктории, окрестили "Лути" и даже нарисовали ее портрет.71 Королевская семья не возвысилась над расизмом империи даже в двадцатом веке. По словам Хилари Сапир, турне по Южной Африке в 1947 году было "пропитано" расовой сегрегациейfn472 и, по крайней мере до конца 1960-х годов, придворные королевы запрещали "цветным иммигрантам или иностранцам" работать на канцелярских должностях в королевском доме.73 (вскоре после того, как королева пообещала "отдать себя, сердце и душу" "новой концепции равного партнерства наций и рас").74

Но именно благодаря этому опыту Содружество, возглавляемое королем Карлом, могло так хорошо функционировать в качестве органа по установлению истины и примирению.75 В любом случае он и его семья уже много лет неловко ходят на цыпочках вокруг этой темы. Я имею в виду не только то, что произошло во время того катастрофического визита на Карибы. Или высказывания принца Гарри в недавнем документальном фильме Netflix об историческом участии королевской семьи в рабстве . Я думаю о десятках случаев, когда они выражали сожаление - обычно не доходящее до прямых извинений - в связи с колониальными катастрофами. Например, Чарльз, будучи еще принцем Уэльским, сказал на Барбадосе в 2021 году, что "ужасающее зверство рабства навсегда запятнало нашу историю". В 2011 году королева отметила "прискорбную реальность" отношений Великобритании с Ирландией, а в 1995 году поставила свою подпись под подробными извинениями перед общиной маори в Новой Зеландии за убийства и кражу земель, совершенные во времена королевы Виктории76.76 Два года спустя, выступая на мемориале Джаллианвала-Багх в память о резне в Амритсаре в 1919 году, она заявила, что "историю нельзя переписать, как бы нам иногда ни хотелось обратного. В ней есть моменты как печали, так и радости".77

Кроме того, король Карл просто не может избежать острого желания планеты вывести Британию из монолога и начать настоящий диалог. Пока я пишу, нация только что стала свидетелем пышной коронации нового монарха, причем пышность сама по себе является имперским наследием,78 И на протяжении всего этого времени королевский двор делал все возможное, чтобы не ввязаться в новые противоречия с имперским привкусом. Не в последнюю очередь было решено, что королева Камилла не будет носить корону с бриллиантом Кох-и-Нур, захваченным Ост-Индской компанией после ее победы во Второй англо-сикхской войне 1849 года и теперь претендующим на Индию (среди прочих стран).79Однако оказалось, что королева будет носить корону, украшенную одним из бриллиантов "Куллинан", которые имеют имперское происхождение и сами по себе являются спорными.80 Южноафриканский профсоюзный деятель по имени Звелинзима Вави, чей отец работал на шахтах во время апартеида, заметил, что если королева наденет этот бриллиант, это будет "как плевок в лицо южноафриканцам... Мы остаемся в глубокой, позорной нищете, мы остаемся с массовой безработицей и растущим уровнем преступности из-за угнетения и разрухи, вызванных ею и ее предками".81

Официальные усилия по разрядке напряженности вокруг драгоценностей короны были еще больше подорваны, когда издание Guardian сообщило, что в архивах Управления по делам Индии, правительственного учреждения, некогда отвечавшего за управление Британией на субконтиненте, хранился объемный документ, раскрывающий зачастую кровавое происхождение ряда других драгоценностей короны.82 В то же время метель заголовков в преддверии коронации привлекла внимание к участию королевской семьи в рабстве, когда Британия строила самую большую империю в истории человечества. Среди прочего, они были вдохновлены письмом на от активистов республиканских и репарационных движений из двенадцати стран с просьбой к новому монарху начать процесс "официальных извинений и восстановления справедливости",83 премьер-министр Сент-Китс и Невис в Карибском бассейне заявил, что его страна "не была полностью свободной", пока король Карл оставался главой государства,84 а высокопоставленный министр правительства Ямайки объявил, что коронация ускорила планы страны по превращению в республику.85 Освещение событий было столь неустанным, что король Чарльз пошел дальше, чем когда-либо делал любой британский монарх, и выразил публичную поддержку независимому исследовательскому проекту, изучающему участие британской монархии в трансатлантической работорговле.86 Для некоторых, однако, это исследование слишком мало и слишком поздно, потому что оно предполагает не более чем поддержку работы одного исследователя с докторской степенью, который может представить или не представить доклад к 2026 году.

Неловкость была ощутимой, и если новая воображаемая миссия Содружества по деколонизации начнет казаться слишком трудной для тех, кто в ней участвует, я предлагаю им вспомнить, что несогласие с колониализмом само по себе является имперским наследием. Покажите мне любое событие или спор во времена Британской империи, и я найду британцев, которые выступали против него в то время. В наши дни современные британские политики утверждают, что вы не патриот, если не "гордитесь" британской имперской историей. Но, как мы узнали, были британцы, которые сопротивлялись империализму в то время, как это происходило . Более того, эта традиция прижилась в Содружестве: несогласие - одна из самых ярких особенностей церемонии открытия Игр Содружества. Международный олимпийский комитет может запретить политические жесты, но Федерация игр Содружества, контролирующая проведение Игр, ввела правила, поддерживающие право спортсменов на протест по социальным вопросам. Так, дайвер Том Дэйли выступил в поддержку прав ЛГБТК+, продолжая свою работу по привлечению внимания к тому факту, что во многих странах Содружества однополые отношения до сих пор считаются преступлением.87 Церемония открытия отсылала к мрачным эпизодам имперской истории, изображая порабощенных людей в цепях, влекущих на стадион гигантского быка.88 (эти цепи были изготовлены в таких местах, как мой родной город). На сайте CGF также есть ссылка на "историческую несправедливость" Британской империи.89 Это не пустые жесты: один из тех, с кем я разговариваю перед церемонией, в получасовой очереди за тяжелым карри, - гей, менеджер по заказам телекоммуникационных компаний, который говорит мне, что позиция Дэйли - одна тех вещей, которые заставили его заказать билеты. "Этому нужно найти подтверждение, и Игры Содружества позволяют это сделать".

Кроме того, мировой интерес к наследию колониализма только растет - отчасти, как я подозреваю, потому, что постоянно появляется новая информация, а империи вроде Британской делали все возможное, чтобы подавить плохие новости в то время.fn590 В Нидерландах премьер-министр страны принес официальные извинения от имени голландского государства за историческое участие страны в работорговле, заявив, что рабство должно быть признано в "самых ясных выражениях" как преступление против человечества, и король Виллем-Александр последовал его примеру,91 заказав исследование роли королевской семьи в колониальном прошлом страны.92 В 2020 году бельгийский парламент создал специальную парламентскую комиссию для изучения колониального прошлого Бельгии и возмещения ущерба,93 В то время как возвращение десятков тысяч артефактов, включая человеческие черепа, в настоящее время является предметом активного обсуждения между Бельгией и Демократической Республикой Конго, Руандой и Бурунди, и предпринимаются значительные дипломатические и национальные усилия для выяснения происхождения 84 000 предметов.94 Президент Португалии Марселу Ребелу де Соуза заявил, что его страна должна извиниться за свою роль в трансатлантической работорговле, в результате которой 6 миллионов африканцев были насильственно вывезены из страны, в основном в Бразилию.95 Европейский союз предположил, что может потребоваться возмещение ущерба за то, что он назвал "преступлением против человечества", в результате которого миллионы людей были подвергнуты "невыразимым страданиям" из-за участия Европы в работорговле.96 Недавно Папа Римский сообщил, что в Ватиканском музее ведутся переговоры о возвращении артефактов, награбленных у коренных народов Канады, и выразил заинтересованность в возвращении других колониальных предметов.97 Тем временем делегация африканских королей в составе пятнадцати человек недавно посетила Ямайку и провела консультации с Комиссией КАРИКОМ по репарациям.98

В целом, британцы по-прежнему не желают сталкиваться с этой историей. Недавно в статье под заголовком "Два века забвения" журнал Economist сообщил, что британцы "не проявляют особого интереса к ее переоценке",99 и в основном равнодушная реакция на заявления ведущего судьи Международного суда ООН о том, что Великобритания, вероятно, должна выплатить более 18 триллионов фунтов стерлингов в качестве репараций за свою историческую роль в трансатлантическом рабстве.100 Однако есть признаки того, что отношение к этому вопросу меняется очень медленно. Опрос, опубликованный весной 2023 года, показал, что 44 % британцев считают, что королевская семья должна выплатить определенную компенсацию за свою роль в работорговле.101 Англиканская церковь выделила 100 миллионов фунтов стерлингов в компенсационный фонд, чтобы "исправить прошлые обиды", вызванные ее участием в работорговле.102 Тринити-колледж в Кембридже рассматривает обвинения в том, что он извлекал выгоду из рабства.103 Семья Уильяма Гладстона, одного из самых известных премьер-министров Великобритании, недавно посетила Карибский бассейн, чтобы извиниться за историческую роль страны в рабстве и предложить компенсацию.104 Риши Сунак, который в парламенте заметил, что "попытки разобраться в нашей истории - это... не то, на чем мы будем концентрировать нашу энергию", получил призыв от некоторых членов парламента начать переговоры с лидерами стран Карибского бассейна о возмещении ущерба за участие Великобритании в рабстве.105 После того как коронация возобновила опасения по поводу исторического участия монархии в рабстве, Эд Дэйви, лидер либерал-демократов, призвал к национальному обсуждению роли, которую мы играли в этой торговле. Фонд, владеющий газетой "Гардиан" , выразил сожаление по поводу участия ее манкунианских основателей в работорговле и пообещал миллионы фунтов "сообществам потомков, связанных с основателями "Гардиан" в XIX веке".106 Профессор Верен А. Шепард, председатель Комитета ООН по ликвидации расовой дискриминации и директор Центра исследований возмещения ущерба при Вест-Индском университете, призвал британское государство и монархию последовать примеру газеты и изучить свои собственные исторические связи с трансатлантическим рабством.107 И наконец, министр иностранных дел Австралии Пенни Вонг заявила, что Британия должна быть готова столкнуться с тревожной реальностью своего колониального прошлого в современном Индо-Тихоокеанском регионе. Уроженка Малайзии Вонг, опираясь на историю своей семьи, связанную с британским колониализмом, утверждает, что таким странам, как Великобритания, будет трудно найти общий язык в этом регионе, если они будут оставаться "укрытыми в более узких версиях" своего прошлого. Такие истории иногда могут быть неприятными - и для тех, чьи это истории, и для тех, кто их слышит. Но понимание прошлого позволяет нам лучше разделять настоящее и будущее".108

Хорошо сказано. Британцы больше не могут сидеть и самозабвенно размышлять о том, была ли их империя "хорошей" или "плохой". У мира на уме другие вопросы. В частности, Британия не может надеяться на здоровые отношения со странами Карибского бассейна, не преодолев глубокое социальное, экономическое, образовательное, экологическое и психологическое неблагополучие, которое она посеяла в этом регионе. Наши короли не могут вести кампанию по сохранению и охране природы, не признавая того, что их предшественники сделали с окружающей средой и животными по всей Африке и Азии в эпоху империи. Мы не можем после Brexit пытаться установить новые торговые отношения с Малайзией, Индией, Маврикием, Гайаной, Нигерией, не задумываясь о том, что мы сделали с этими местами во время колонизации. Мы не можем читать странам лекции о гомофобии, как мы это часто делаем, не признавая, что мы решительно навязали гомофобию большой части мира. Мы не можем вести переговоры о договорах по изменению климата и лоббировать развивающиеся страны по этому вопросу, не признавая, что мы были первопроходцами в создании антропогенного изменения климата на планете. Мы не можем осуждать США за их расовые проблемы, как мы склонны это делать, хотя сами способствовали распространению и утверждению многих из этих расистских идей. Мы не можем предлагать решения величайших геополитических проблем мира, не признавая, что мы помогли создать их, и не в последнюю очередь в Палестине. Мы не можем руководить гуманитарными проектами, не говоря уже о том, чтобы участвовать в "гуманитарных войнах", не признавая тот ущерб, который мы причиняли во имя гуманизма на протяжении сотен лет. Или, говоря проще: Британия не может надеяться на плодотворное будущее в мире, не признавая того, что она сделала с миром в первую очередь.

Примечания

Introduction: Spot the Colonial Inheritance

‘One of the most extraordinary of the urban manifestations of the British empire was the creation of new capitals,’ writes John M. MacKenzie. ‘The notion of their foundation (a historic phenomenon throughout the history of empires, not least in India) had been around in the British empire since the nineteenth century … Ottawa emerged from the tiny lumbering village of Bytown and became respectively the capital of Upper and Lower Canada in 1857 and of the Canadian Confederation after 1867 … Some capitals of planned new colonies, such as Adelaide in South Australia, were carefully laid out with environmental and social factors in mind.’ Other examples include Rangoon, Canberra and Lusaka. John M. MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings: Structure, Function and Meaning, Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 240–41.

David A. Johnson, ‘A British empire for the twentieth century: the inauguration of New Delhi, 1931’, Urban History 2008, 35:3; David A. Johnson, ‘The Library: New Delhi: The Last Imperial City’, The British Empire, https://www.britishempire.co.uk/library/newdelhi.htm; Team LHI, ‘When New Delhi Became India’s Capital’, Peepul Tree, 30/06/2022, https://www.livehistoryindia.com/story/eras/new-delhi; K. V. Sundaram, Vaddiparti Lova Surya Prakasa Rao and Vernon Ram, ‘Delhi’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Delhi; Gautam Sen, ‘How Narendra Modi is decolonising India’s colonial mindset’, Firstpost, 17/09/2022, https://www.firstpost.com/opinion-news-expert-views-news-analysis-firstpost-viewpoint/how-narendra-modi-is-decolonising-indias-colonial-mindset-11275531.html; ‘New Delhi’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Delhi;

Miki Desai and Madhavi Desai, ‘The colonial bungalow in India’, The Newsletter: International Institute for Asian Studies, Summer 2011, https://www.iias.asia/sites/iias/files/nwl_article/2019-05/IIAS_NL57_2627.pdf; ‘Lutyens Bungalow Zone’, World Monuments Fund, https://www.wmf.org/project/lutyens-bungalow-zone.

According to one historian, the veranda was ‘a nagging reminder of the frailty of white European occupation, its thinness on the ground, an almost defiant acknowledgment, signalling an unwillingness to be more deeply rooted in the country’. Cited by Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, E. & F. N. Spon, 1997, p. 95; Jeremy Kahn, ‘Lutyens’ bungalows: Saving a slice of imperial New Delhi’, New York Times, 08/01/2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/arts/08iht-30kahn.9075163.html.

‘After the Mutiny in 1857, the British moved out of the Walled City and settled in the area just north of it and called it Civil Lines. By 1890 European residents comprising railway officials and mill managers moved into Civil Lines, and over 110 large colonial houses came up. 3 hotels, Maidens Hotel, Swiss Hotel and The Cecil, were also established during this time.’ See ‘1903: Maidens Hotel’, Historic Hotels of the World: Then & Now, https://www.historichotelsthenandnow.com/maidensdelhi.html.

https://www.maidenshotel.com/our-heritage

Sen, ‘How Narendra Modi is decolonising India’s colonial mindset’; Sanju Verma, ‘Decolonising Bharat: The Modi Factor’, Daily Guardian, 19/09/2022, https://thedailyguardian.com/decolonising-bharat-the-modi-factor/; Kabir Jhala, ‘Controversial $1.8bn redevelopment of Delhi’s parliament complex enters second phase’, Art Newspaper, 28/09/2022, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/28/first-phase-of-controversial-18bn-redevelopment-of-delhis-parliament-complex-is-complete.

These durbars took place in 1877 when Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India; in 1903 to mark the accession of Edward VII; and in 1911 when George V announced the relocation of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi. John M. MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, Yale University Press, 2022, pp. 57–63.

Statues became, according to John M. MacKenzie, ‘an essential aspect of imperial propaganda’ and then, in the post-colonial era, came under intense scrutiny by nationalists across the former empire. ‘Throughout Africa, most British statues were either destroyed, put into storage, or repatriated. An example is the Sudan, which returned two notable statues to Britain in 1957 following the Suez crisis … The British themselves removed the statue of Lord Delamere from Nairobi in 1963 just ahead of independence. Other transfers included the highly sensitive one of the brutal John Nicholson. Although the Indian government has generally been sensitive about the survival of statues, particularly during the prime ministership of Nehru, both external and internal political relationships have ensured that they have been a source of controversy … Nevertheless, some were decapitated or otherwise damaged (arms and hands cut off for example) in the aftermath of independence or at key emotional moments, such as the hundredth anniversary of the Indian Revolt of 1857. It is an irony that statues, for example at the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, may now be noticed more as an intriguing aspect of cultural heritage. It is also surprising that the Marxist government of West Bengal has been more sympathetic to British statues than the administrations of other states, partly in an attempt to encourage investors, partly to develop tourism. In the case of Pakistan, all statues were removed into museums or storage in view of the Islamic ban on the representation of the human form.’ See MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, pp. 191–3, 318; ‘Coronation Park: Where the Statues of the Raj Rest in Ruins’, Outlook India, https://www.outlookindia.com/national/coronation-park-where-the-statues-of-the-raj-rest-in-ruins-photos-82480.

Rizwan Ahmad, ‘Renaming India: Saffronisation of public spaces’, 12/10/2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/10/12/renaming-india-saffronisation-of-public-spaces.

Verma, ‘Decolonising Bharat’.

‘Parakram Diwas’, National Today, https://nationaltoday.com/parakram-diwas/.

Havelock Island (named for General Henry Havelock), Neil Island (named for Brigadier General James Neill) and Ross Island (named after Sir Daniel Ross, Marine Surveyor General), are now respectively named Swaraj Dweep, Shaheed Dweep and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep. See ‘PM Modi renames 3 Andaman & Nicobar islands as tribute to Netaji’, Economic Times, 31/12/2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-modi-renames-3-islands-of-andaman-and-nicobar/articleshow/67311674.cms.

See Peta Thornycroft, ‘South Africa’s Port Elizabeth changed for Xhosa “click language” name Gqeberha to cut colonial ties’, Telegraph, 24/02/2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/24/south-africas-port-elizabeth-changed-xhosa-click-language-name/; Ahmad, ‘Renaming India’; Kaleigh Bradley, ‘What’s in a Name? Place Names, History, and Colonialism’, Active History, 02/02/2015, http://activehistory.ca/2015/02/whats-in-a-name-place-names-history-and-colonialism/; Calla Wahlquist, ‘“The right thing to do”: restoring Aboriginal place names key to recognising Indigenous histories’, Guardian, 28/05/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/29/the-right-thing-to-do-restoring-aboriginal-place-names-key-to-recognising-indigenous-histories; ‘South African city of Port Elizabeth becomes Gqeberha’, BBC News, 24/02/2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-56182349; Fernando Fong, ‘Georgetown Won’t Be Renamed Tanjong Penaga’, TRP, 15/03/2022, https://www.therakyatpost.com/news/malay sia/2022/03/15/georgetown-wont-be-renamed-tanjong-penaga/; ‘Ogimaa Mikana: Reclaiming/Renaming’, Tumblr, https://ogimaamikana.tumblr.com/.

Man Aman Singh Chhina, ‘PM Narendra Modi unveils new naval ensign, here’s why it is significant’, Indian Express, 02/09/2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-naval-ensign-why-indian-navy-set-new-8121252/.

Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 25. Young continues: ‘In almost every case, colonial rule established the colonizer’s language as the official language, of administration, law, and education, while the local languages which had previously fulfilled these functions were degraded to the status of “native” languages or dialects and ignored.’

Amrit Dhillon, ‘Don’t say hello, it’s too western, Indian civil servants told’, The Times, 03/10/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1df7bc02-4269-11ed-abc9-d0d53e948d21?shareToken=9cfc72be6c540ab1b0d8e8e2a9c5c69e.

Vande Mataram is also the title of India’s national song, which has its own contentious political history. It is considered offensive to Muslims because the Motherland is identified with Hindu goddesses. Elsewhere, the colonial elements of Indian ‘army uniforms, crests, military band instruments, names of regiments and buildings, mess rules and perhaps even bagpipes’ are being Indianized. See André J. P. Elias, ‘“Vande Mataram!”: Constructions of Gender and Music in Indian Nationalism’, Asian Music 2017, 48:2, pp. 90–110.

Amrit Dhillon, ‘Modi employs new tool in India’s war against the English language: Hindi medical degrees’, Guardian, 22/10/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/modi-employs-new-tool-in-indias-war-against-the-english-language-hindi-medical-degrees.

‘The most spoken languages worldwide in 2022’, Statista, https://shorturl.at/rzO18.

‘Instead of marginalizing English as an unwanted colonial legacy, India will be better off appropriating it as its own,’ argued Nitin Pai in Mint recently. ‘If there is [such] a thing as Australian English, there certainly is Indian English. There are far more English-speakers in India than there are people in Australia. It is the enduring failure of English departments at our universities that they have not asserted this claim. Words like “prepone” and “co-brother” might not exist in English (UK) but are part of English (India). With over 150 million people comfortable in it, English is an Indian language and we must proclaim it as one.’ See ‘The Intersection: English is an Indian language’, Mint, 27/02/2023, https://www.nitinpai.in/2023/02/27/english-is-an-indian-language.

PTI, ‘More than 19,500 mother tongues spoken in India: Census’, Indian Express, 01/07/2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/more-than-19500-mother-tongues-spoken-in-india-census-5241056/.

MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, pp. 235–7, 244–8.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/885417/india-most-read-english-publications/

‘The teaching of Shakespeare in India’, Leah Marcus notes, ‘goes as far back as the early eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth, had become routine in British government schools.’ She continues: ‘the editing of Shakespeare in India … generated distinctive features that became models for later British editions’. Caroline Ritter adds: ‘Three years after independence, one might expect Shakespeare plays and the BBC news would be rare in Nigeria. Yet, instead of disappearing, British plays, broadcasts, and books not only remained but drew large audiences … A cultural version of the British empire took root and sustained itself far beyond the formal end of political rule.’ Leah S. Marcus, How Shakespeare Became Colonial: Editorial Traditions and the British Empire, Routledge, 2017, pp. 132–3; Caroline Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Culture Project of the Late British Empire, University of California Press, 2021, p. 1.

‘English literature appeared as a subject in the curriculum of the colonies long before it was institutionalized in the home country … As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum still reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum.’ See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 3.

Ciara Nugent, ‘Western Architecture is Making India’s Heatwaves Worse’, Time, 16/05/2022, https://time.com/6176998/india-heatwaves-western-architecture.

One of the first ever colonial agencies for urban development, in Dublin in the eighteenth century, was named the Wide Streets Commissioners. In 1878 a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives remarked: ‘If they looked for crime, vice, destitution, and everything that was bad, they would go to the narrow slums and lanes, where these evils were actually engendered. If they made good wide streets, depend upon it they would greatly promote the virtue, morality, and health of the people, so that in the interests of every community, the Government should insist upon the laying out of wide streets.’ See Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp. 14, 44, 59, 84.

Correspondents would sometimes just provide the name of the addressee, their trade and the bazaar they tended to frequent. Mark R. Frost, ‘Pandora’s Post Box: Empire and Information in India, 1854–1914’, English Historical Review 2016, 131:552, p. 1057.

Brian Stoddart, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 1988, 30:4, p. 658.

‘Why is cricket so popular in India?’, Wisden, 10/03/2021, https://wisden.com/stories/why-is-cricket-so-popular-in-india.

Stoddart, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire’, p. 656.

Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War, Windmill Books, 2012, p. 269.

Stoddart, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire’, p. 654.

Ronald Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem, recalled the incident, which took place when Palestine was in the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, in a diary entry. ‘At tea afterwards with the Military Governor [of Hebron] we found tennis, and I was asked to play. An Arab handed me the balls for service and as he turned to pick up more emitted a curious clank. Looking closer I discovered that both he and his colleague at the other end were long term criminals, heavily chained by the ankles, whom the local police officer had sent up from the gaol to act as ball boys. I could not believe that such a practice (convenient though it were) would favourably impress a Cabinet Minister, but Lord Milner seemed to endure it with fortitude.’ See Ronald Storrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, G. P. Putnam’s, 1937, p. 454; Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, Abacus, 2001, p. 8.

Brian Stoddart adds that ‘one immediate problem for the imperial power was that, having encouraged the measurement of social progress by comparing colonial against British achievements in sport, there would always come the day of a colonial victory that might be interpreted as symbolic of general parity’. One came about in India in 1911 when the Mohan Bagan district squad defeated the East Yorks Regiment 2–1. The triumph, which occurred at a time of great political instability, was widely viewed as evidence of Indian advancement and even dominance. According to one newspaper published in Bengali: ‘It fills every Indian with pride and joy to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden, bare-footed Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in that peculiarly English sport.’ Stuart Laycock and Philip Laycock, How Britain Brought Football to the World, The History Press, 2022, pp. 18, 31–2, 60–61, 301–2; Brian Stoddart, Sport, Culture and History: Region, Nation and Globe, Taylor & Francis, 2013, pp. 129–30; Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 365.

Rashtrapati Bhavan’s official website claims that it ‘epitomizes India’s strength, its democratic traditions and secular character. Rashtrapati Bhavan was the creation of architects of exceptional imagination and masterfulness, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker … Originally built as the residence for the Viceroy of India, Viceroy’s House as it was then called has metamorphosed into today’s Rashtrapati Bhavan. From being a symbol of imperial domination and power, it is today emblematic of Indian democracy and its secular, plural and inclusive traditions.’ See ‘Welcome to Rashtrapati Bhavan’, Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Office and Residence of the President of India, https://rashtrapatisachivalaya.gov.in/rbtour/; G. A. Bremner, ‘Stones of Empire: Monuments, Memorials, and Manifest Authority’, in G. A. Bremner (ed.), Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 86.

Mark Abadi and Shayanne Gal, ‘Only about 30% of the world’s population drives on the left side of the road’, Insider, 19/10/2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/which-countries-drive-on-left-2018-10?r=US&IR=T.

Timothy Parsons, The British Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A World History Perspective, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 151–2.

Ritter, Imperial Encore, p. 5: ‘Confrontations such as Mau Mau and Suez were determinant in both how and when Britain gave up political rule in Africa. But … cultural initiatives did not relent – and were in fact strengthened – during the events that marked the waning and then formal end of empire. Throughout the state of emergency in Kenya, for example, British cultural work proceeded apace. British organizations published schoolbooks on East African oral histories, staged plays in the British Council’s centre in Nairobi, and transmitted educational and cultural programs over the BBC.’

Matthew Partridge, ‘19 December 1932: BBC World Service begins’, Money Week, 19/10/2020, https://moneyweek.com/365399/19-december-1932-bbc-world-service-begins.

‘Much of this diaspora was located in the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa,’ Potter continues. ‘These people, and these places, were perceived to be part of a white, English-speaking British world … Seeking to reflect and ensure the continued existence of a transnational community of Britons, the BBC inevitably assigned a secondary status to others … non-whites in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and indigenous peoples in the dominions, were largely ignored … The white British world was perceived to be the most important part of the empire, from which most could be gained by strengthening imperial bonds, and in which the need to do such work seemed most pressing.’ See Simon J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 7, 14.

Benjamin Parkin and Alice Hancock, ‘Inside the mysterious downfall of India’s Cox & Kings’, Financial Times, 22/01/2022, https://www.ft.com/content/3f1448d5-d1c2-412b-b660-5264680d2a0b.

Thomas Manuel, Opium Inc: How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire, HarperCollins India, 2021. Cited in https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/opium-inc-how-a-global-drug-trade-funded-the-british-empire-by-thomas-manuel/.

It was British empire’s pushing of opium that eventually led to regulation. As James Mills explains, ‘consumers of intoxicants and narcotics were certainly the reason for the establishment and early development of today’s international drugs regulatory system, as the 1909 Shanghai Opium Conference led directly to the establishment of the Opium Advisory Committee and the Permanent Central Opium Board at the League of Nations. It was Asian consumption of local drugs, opium and to a lesser extent cannabis which drove these processes and historians have therefore focused on these.’ The United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime adds that the impetus for 1909’s International Opium Commission came from US President Theodore Roosevelt’s government, and the ‘international ramifications of the Chinese opium problem were the primary motive for convoking the Commission. In 1906 an imperial edict had been published prohibiting the cultivation and smoking of opium in the Chinese Empire over a period of ten years. This was being implemented with greater success than had been anticipated, and meanwhile the Indian Government, pressed by rising British public opinion, had agreed to a contemporaneous reduction in the export of Indian opium to China, the revenue alone from which had amounted to almost £3,000,000 sterling in 1907. While the regional aspect of opium smoking and of international trade in prepared opium constituted the primary concern of the Commission, its members were already well aware of the wider geographical scope of the narcotics problem in general, including addiction to manufactured opiates … Although the Commission was not intended to establish binding obligations, it nevertheless accelerated the efforts which only three years later led to the conclusion of The Hague Opium Convention of 1912, establishing narcotics control as an institution of international law on a multilateral basis.’ See James Mills, ‘Decolonising drugs in Asia: the case of cocaine in colonial India’, Third World Quarterly 2018, 39:2, pp. 218–31; https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bulletin_1959-01-01_1_page006.html.

James Mills argues that empire had an indirect influence over the development of the cocaine trade. ‘It was suggested that by 1929 “somewhere between a quarter and a half a million individuals [were] taking cocaine in India” … Men and women used the drug, those that did so could be rich or poor, and Muslim and Hindu were numbered among those that sought it. It was consumed for a range of purposes, from the medicinal to the recreational.’ Mills suggests that cocaine use was not the product of British colonial policy, but was a consequence of colonial migration and colonial trade. British authorities did not profit from exporting cocaine to India, but it was British and Indian people who smuggled it to sell it there: ‘There is no well-organised supplier of the drug that might be accused of acting as the East India Company may have done with opium in China. Instead, what emerges from the records is a diverse and disparate range of opportunists who sourced batches of the drug to smuggle into India to take advantage of the prices inflated by British controls.’ See Mills, ‘Decolonising drugs in Asia’, pp. 218–31.

See Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India, University of Chicago Press, 2012; Asheesh Kapur Siddique, ‘Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World’, Journal of British Studies 2020, 59:2, pp. 264–90; Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, University of California Press, 2012.

Rohan Deb Roy, ‘White Ants, Empire, and Entomo-politics in South Asia’, Historical Journal 2020, 63:2, p. 3.

In the mid-1860s, the first diamonds to be unearthed in southern Africa were discovered on a farm belonging to Nicolaas and Diederik de Beer, located close to what is now the city of Kimberley. The arch-imperialist and unabashed white supremacist Cecil Rhodes soon got in on the action, acquiring a claim to the De Beers mine in 1871 before buying up the majority of diamond mines in the region, aiming for a monopoly of the world diamond market. See ‘De Beers S.A.’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/De-Beers-SA.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Verso, 2018, pp. 218–22.

Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization, Grove Books, 2007, p. 44.

See Phil Chamberlain, Nancy Karreman and Louis Laurence, ‘Racism and the Tobacco Industry’, Tobacco Tactics, 10/02/2021, https://tobaccotactics.org/wiki/racism-and-the-tobacco-industry/.

Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘What’s in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular Culture and the Politics of Akpeteshie (Local Gin) in Ghana, 1930–67’, Journal of African History 1996, 37:2, pp. 215–36; Deborah Toner, Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023; Jason Gilbert, ‘Empire and Excise: Drugs and Drink Revenue and the Fate of States in South Asia’, in James Mills and Patricia Barton (eds.), Drugs and Empire: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500–c. 1930, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 117–18; Erica Wald, ‘Governing the Bottle: Alcohol, Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2018, 46:3, pp. 397–417; Paul Nugent, ‘Modernity, Tradition, and Intoxication: Comparative Lessons from South Africa and West Africa’, Past and Present 2014, 222:9, pp. 141–2; Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘Threats to Empire: Illicit Distillation, Venereal Diseases, and Colonial Disorder in British West Africa, 1930–1948’, in Jessica Pliley, Robert Kramm and Harald Fischer-Tiné (eds.), Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and ‘Immorality’, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 162–5, 172; Sugato Mukherjee, ‘Mahua: The Indian liquor the British banned’, BBC, 22/11/2022, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20221121-mahua-the-indian-liquor-the-british-banned; MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, p. 33.

John W. Frank, Roland S. Moore and Genevieve M. Ames, ‘Public Health Then and Now: Historical and Cultural Roots of Drinking Problems among American Indians’, American Journal of Public Health 2000, 90:3, pp. 344–51.

‘Many travelogues and memoirs give us a fair idea of what happened in the kitchens during the Raj,’ writes Pushpesh Pant. ‘This was the time when the curry was invented. Although it shares its name with the native dish, kari, it was a pale imitation of the considerably spicier korma and salan … curry powder thus reduced all to a common denominator – fish, chicken, mutton and eggs … Slowly but surely, and inevitably, the ruler’s repast deviated from the original to the local, becoming tinted by Indian/regional elements. Conversely, the injection of the British/European elements subtly changed Indian recipes and encouraged creative chefs to experiment and innovate. This accelerated the evolution of classics such as chilman main biryani; shahi tukrha, as we know it; and badam ki jali.’ See Pushpesh Pant, ‘INDIA: Food and the Making of the Nation’, India International Centre Quarterly 2013, 40:2, pp. 11–12.

Ferguson, Empire, p. xxiii.

https://www.visitsingapore.com/travel-guide-tips/about-singapore/

Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire, Penguin Books, 2017, p. 242.

The Blackpast website explains how Freetown was ‘founded by British Naval Lieutenant John Clarkson and freed American slaves from Nova Scotia. Freetown was part of the larger colony of the Sierra Leone which was founded by the Sierra Leone Company (SLC) in 1787. The SLC, organized by British businessman and abolitionist William Wilberforce, sought to rehabilitate the black poor of London and former slaves of North America by bringing them to the settlement in Sierra Leone where they would stop the African slave trade by spreading Christianity through the continent. The first groups of blacks, about 400 Londoners, arrived in Sierra Leone in 1787 and established Granville Town, named after British abolitionist Granville Sharp. When the settlement was destroyed by the indigenous inhabitants in 1789, British abolitionists sent a second, larger party of 1,100 former American slaves who had been resettled in Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution. These settlers established Freetown in 1792. In 1800, 500 Jamaican Maroons were landed by the British. The surviving Londoners, the Nova Scotians, and Jamaican maroons intermarried to create the Creole population of Freetown.’ ‘Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1792–’, Blackpast, 20/04/2011, https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/places-global-african-history/freetown-sierra-leone-1792/; ‘Freetown’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Freetown.

Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 273.

Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation, Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 7.

The disambiguation sections for town and city names on Wikipedia and geotarget.com.

‘Birmingham (disambiguation)’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_(disambiguation); ‘How many places are named Birmingham?’, geotargit.com, https://geotargit.com/called.php?qcity=Birmingham.

‘Victoria’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria.

@corinne_fowler, 09/08/2023, https://twitter.com/corinne_fowler/status/1545851689994944514?t=1YXQ5bmi6ZybQRrUTKKDmg&s=03.

@andrewpopp6, 17/10/2022, https://twitter.com/andrewpopp6/status/1581968843404021761.

Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance, Verso, 2017, pp. 111–12.

Norman C. Baldwin, Imperial Airways (and Subsidiary Companies): A History and Priced Check List of the Empire Air Mails, Francis J. Field, 1950.

‘Passage to India’, P&O Heritage, 15/08/2017, https://www.poheritage.com/features/passage-to-india.

The Guardian recently explained the complex history: ‘Bin Sulayem and DP World originally bought P&O – then a London listed company – in 2006 for £3.3bn. It paid a huge premium, about 70% over the market value, for a group that Margaret Thatcher had once described as “the fabric of the British empire”. However, the ports were always its key target: Bin Sulayem admitted then that he had limited knowledge of the ferry business that came alongside, but denied he had plans to sell them off. They were however sold to a separate state-owned entity, Dubai World, around the time of the financial crisis, before DP World bought them back for $322m (£244m) in 2019. Among its 70 ports worldwide, the closest to home, as far as most sacked P & O workers see it, are the big container operations at London Gateway and Southampton. Both now are the central hubs of the first freeports, Thames and Solent, putting DP World firmly in the slipstream of post-Brexit government economic policy.’ See Gwyn Topham, ‘DP World’s controversial history of P&O ownership’, Guardian, 18/03/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/18/dp-world-p-and-o-ownership-dubai.

Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 138–9.

Serkan Karas and Stathis Arapostathis, ‘Electrical Colonialism: Techno-politics and British Engineering Expertise in the Making of the Electricity Supply Industry in Cyprus’, in Alain Beltran, Léonard Laborie, Pierre Lanthier and Stéphanie Le Gallic (eds.), Electric Worlds / Mondes électriques: Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions (19th–21st Century), P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2017; Moses Chikoweo, ‘Subalternating Currents: Electrification and Power Politics in Bulawayo, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1894–1939’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2007, 33:2, pp. 287–306.

Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski, ‘Artificial States’, February 2006, Harvard University and New York University, https://williameasterly.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/59_easterly_alesina_matuszeski_artificialstates_prp.pdf.

Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp. 11–14.

Charles Currier, ‘A Plan of the Town of New Haven with All the Buildings in 1748 Taken by the Hon Gen. Wadsworth of Durham to Which Are Added the Names and Professions of the Inhabitants at That Period – Also the Location of Lots to Many of the First Grantees …’, Rare Maps, https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/20308/a-plan-of-the-town-of-new-haven-with-all-the-buildings-in-1-currier.

Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 15.

Ibid., p. 228.

William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 246.

Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 381.

Ibid., p. 380.

Headrick explains that ‘in terms of railroads, the difference between Africa and India is astounding. India caught the railroad boom at its height and emerged from the colonial age with a complete and efficient railroad system. In contrast tropical Africa emerged from colonialism with only scattered unconnected lines, serving mainly Europe’s need for raw materials.’ See ibid., p. 196.

Victoria Falls Bridge (once known as the Zambezi Bridge) opened in 1935. Leroy Vail points out that the bridge, which was part of Cecil Rhodes’ failed Cape-to-Cairo line, was an unsolicited project, initiated in part to create employment for British workers, and that Nyasaland was nevertheless required to pay for the bridge. See Leroy Vail, ‘The Making of an Imperial Slum: Nyasaland and its Railways, 1895–1935’, Journal of African History 1975, 16:1, pp. 89–112; Paul Cotterell, The Railways of Palestine and Israel, Tourret Publishing, 1984, p. 23.

In Johnny Mansour’s ‘The Hijaz–Palestine Railway and the Development of Haifa’, Jerusalem Quarterly 2006, 28, p. 9, he explains that ‘at the beginning of the British mandate period in Palestine, the British strategic decision to construct a modern port in Haifa stemmed from purely colonialist considerations without addressing any local interests in Palestine.’

MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings, p. 109.

Ibid., pp. 109–18.

Ibid., pp. 125–36.

‘The general post offices of all the most significant colonial and imperial cities were often among the grandest buildings, as they were in British cities. They were freighted with all kinds of symbolic significance as well as the highly practical business of the imperial posts.’ See ibid., p. 148.

‘Churches and cathedrals … became more than religious statements. They also laid down powerful ethnic, cultural and political markers that deeply embedded them in the whole business of imperial expansion and rule.’ See ibid., p. 203.

Robert Home reports that ‘the new town idea, which was being implemented in Britain under the New Towns Act of 1945, was applied in many colonies, not only in Hong Kong and Singapore, but also in India, Israel, Malaysia and elsewhere. These were all states struggling with large-scale population growth and political upheaval.’ Some of this upheaval was caused by empire, of course. India housed around 5 million people in 118 new towns built between independence and the early 1980s, while the Brits built thirty railway towns by 1941, including the likes of Kharagpur. See Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 214.

See Ritter, Imperial Encore, p. 1; MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings, pp. 35–40.

‘The marketing of fairness technologies demonstrates an evolution from portrayals of civilising medicines and hygienic soaps between the 1890s and 1920s to more explicit messages about idealised beauty and fairness in the 1930s and 1940s,’ writes Mobeen Hussain. ‘During the 1920s, most advertisements focused on “clear” complexions and protecting the skin from the climate. However, terms such as “bleaching”, “whitening” and “vanishing” became more prominent, initially targeting European women in the colonies.’ See Mobeen Hussain, ‘Combining Global Expertise with Local Knowledge in Colonial India: Selling Ideals of Beauty and Health in Commodity Advertising (c. 1900–1949)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 2021, 44:5, p. 940; Richard Assheton, ‘Nigeria’s advertising regulator recently banned the use of foreign models and voiceover artists’, The Times, 26/08/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nigeria-becomes-first-country-to-ban-foreign-models-in-adverts-3xv8klvp7.

Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 84, 100.

Adam Edwards, ‘In praise of the British baddie’, Daily Express, 23/04/2010, https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/170852/In-praise-of-the-British-baddie; John Bleasdale, ‘Things Britain Does Better than America | Top 5 Best British Baddies’, Hotcorn.com, 18/10/2020, https://hotcorn.com/en/movies/news/top-5-best-british-villains-movies/; ‘Evil Brit’, TVtropes.org, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilBrit; ‘10 films about the ugly face of the British empire’, 28/06/2018, Dmovies.org, https://www.dmovies.org/2018/06/28/top-10-films-atrocities-british-empire/; Vincent Flood, ‘Hollywood, and the enduring British villain’, Screen Robot, 09/07/2019, https://screenrobot.com/hollywood-enduring-british-villain/ [URL inactive].

Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 17.

Sarah Cheang takes up the theme, writing that ‘in many respects, the nineteenth-century dog fancy represented a microcosm of the broader issues at stake in Victorian society … Dogs were remade culturally with imagined pasts and assumed correlations between form and function, and the best dogs were thought to be those with high-class, purebred ancestries.’ Victorian ideas of race, culture and hierarchy were built into dog breeding and dog shows. Cheang proffers the example of Pekingese dogs. ‘The Pekingese was constructed as capable of race memory, with some aficionados claiming that Pekingese dogs reared in Britain disliked thunderstorms because they actually remembered tropical typhoons or that tawny pekes would not mate with pekes of other colors because the dogs themselves were conscious that yellow was the sacred color of the Chinese emperor and empress. This colonial nostalgia, projected onto the animals, enabled an array of incredible assertions to be indulged within an orientalist fantasy of exotic palaces and silk-clad mandarins … given the importance of notions of human selective breeding and racial purity, and the essentialist class and race hierarchies that underscored eugenicist projects at home and colonial projects abroad, it was considered only natural for a Chinese palace dog to exhibit what was thought to be aristocratic Chinese behavior as an innate or instinctive aspect of its breeding … Through the use of authenticating stories, objects, and people, fantasies of China were produced through the agency of upper-class women who were able to shape “China” in Britain, even as their male relatives – army officers, diplomats, and traders – were attempting to shape China abroad. In this process, possession of the most favored dog of a fading Chinese Imperial household was used to signify the victory of Western imperialism in China and also the high social and imperial status of Pekingese dog owners.’ See Meg Daley Olmert, ‘Genes unleashed: how the Victorians engineered our dogs’, Nature, 16/10/2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07039-z; Helen Cowie, ‘Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton, The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain’, American Historical Review 2021, 126:2, pp.855–6; Sarah Cheang, ‘Women, Pets, and Imperialism: The British Pekingese Dog and Nostalgia for Old China’, Journal of British Studies, 45:2, pp. 359–87, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/abs/women-pets-and-imperialism-the-british-pekingese-dog-and-nostalgia-for-old-china/DE527C14F5805999402ACC870519FE91; Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (eds.), Making Animal Meaning (The Animal Turn), Michigan State University Press, 2011, pp. 113–25; W. Gordon Stables, The Practical Kennel Guide: With Plain Instructions How to Rear and Breed Dogs for Pleasure, Show, and Profit, Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1877.

Chapter 1: The Civilized Island

Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War, Windmill Books, 2012, p. 259.

Hilary McD. Beckles, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s ‘Barbarity Time’ in Barbados, 1636–1876, University of the West Indies Press, 2016, p. xi.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 13, 62–3.

Peter Frankopan explains: ‘Sugar plantations were created in the Atlantic on Madeira, the Canary Islands and São Tomé before being introduced by the Flemish and Dutch to Brazil and to one island of the Caribbean after another; it spread further, as production later took off in Louisiana and above all in Cuba, which by the nineteenth century was the most productive sugar island in the world.’ See Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. xiii; Mark Cartwright, ‘The Portuguese Colonization of São Tomé and Principe’, World History Encyclopedia, 28/05/2021, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1763/the-portuguese-colonization-of-sao-tome-and-princi/; Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story, Bloomsbury, 2023, p. 341.

https://twitter.com/aljhlester/status/1671173980999368705

and this highly illuminating episode of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Empire podcast, ‘Royal African Company: Slavery Inc’, 06/06/2023, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Ya8NX0DAXZkQ62dOyLRDM?si=0e0f295e32334b7c.

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 356; Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 30.

Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History, Torva, 2023, p. 159; Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 353.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 360.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 5.

The phrase ‘colony of a colony’ seems to originate from Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, Knopf, 1974.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 78.

‘A professional soldier … reported being horrified in the West Indies in 1816 at the sight of a white woman in the slave market examining the genitals of male slaves “with all possible indelicacy”.’ Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, pp. 77, 81, 82.

Melanie Newton, ‘“The Children of Africa in the Colonies”: Free People of Colour in Barbados during the Emancipation Era, 1816–1854’, University of Oxford, DPhil. thesis, 2001, p. 64.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 145.

Hilary McD. Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, University of the West Indies Press, 2013, p. 110.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 259.

Ibid., p. 260.

Ibid., pp. 259–60.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 176.

Robert Mendick, ‘A year after becoming a republic, Barbados pursues damages for sins of its colonial past’, Telegraph, 25/11/2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/25/year-becoming-republic-barbados-pursues-damages-sins-colonial/.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 263–4.

Ibid., p. 364.

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, pp. 61–2.

Ibid., p. 63; Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 159.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 268.

Ibid., p. 267.

Ibid.

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 3.

James Robins, ‘Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?’, New Republic, 16/02/2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161127/can-historians-traumatized-history.

Ibid.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 62, 269.

Mendick, ‘A year after becoming a republic’.

Paul Lashmar and Jonathan Smith, ‘He’s the MP with the Downton Abbey lifestyle. But the shadow of slavery hangs over the gilded life of Richard Drax’, Observer, 12/12/2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/hes-the-mp-with-the-downton-abbey-lifestyle-but-the-shadow-of-slavery-hangs-over-the-gilded-life-of-richard-drax; Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 62–3, 123.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. xiv.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 34.

Ibid., p. 359.

‘Barbados – Home of Many Windmills’, Barbados.org, https://barbados.org/windmill.htm#.YtlVjHbMKUk.

Jordan Buchanan Smith, ‘The Invention of Rum’, PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 2018, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1050790; ‘Rum: liquor’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/rum-liquor; Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 89.

Philip Whitehead, who has run the plantation for nearly four decades, was recently quoted in the Daily Telegraph remarking: ‘To me it’s crazy they have vilified Richard Drax. It’s not right. Of course no one can condone slavery in any form. But back in the 1600s slavery was not viewed as it is now. We know it’s a crime now but it wasn’t looked at like that then.’ See Mendick, ‘A year after becoming a republic’; Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 361.

As Niall Ferguson points out, it often gets forgotten that the Caribbean was much more valuable to Britain than the American colonies were: in the seventeenth century, nearly 70 per cent of British emigrants headed for the West Indies to chase the cash, with British–Caribbean trade far outweighing British–American trade, and the sugar trade far outweighing the trade in tobacco. ‘For most of the eighteenth century, the American colonies were little more than economic subsidiaries of the sugar islands, supplying them with the basic foodstuffs their monoculture could not produce … The problem was that mortality on these tropical islands was fearful, particularly during the summer “sickly season”. In Virginia it took a total immigration of 116,000 to produce a settler community of 90,000. In Barbados, by contrast, it took immigration of 150,000 to produce a population of 20,000. People soon learned. After 1700 emigration to the Caribbean slumped as people opted for the more temperate climes (and more plentiful land) of America.’ Ferguson, Empire, pp. 72–3.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 123.

Richard Godwin, ‘Roll with the rum punches in Barbados’, The Times, 15/01/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roll-with-the-rum-punches-in-barbados-m333dxb6g.

Ibid.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 265–7, and ‘George Washington House’, Barbados.org, https://barbados.org/george_washington.htm#.Yt GJR3bMKUk.

Thomas Harding, White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022, pp. 115, 127–8, 135.

Sathnam Sanghera, ‘Alex Renton on exposing transatlantic slave traders – in his own family’, The Times, 30/04/2021, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/alex-renton-my-relatives-the-slave-owners-088cdgfnw.

Alex Renton, Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery, Canongate Books, 2021, pp. 93–4, 316–18; Sanghera, ‘Alex Renton on exposing transatlantic slave traders – in his own family’.

‘Who We Are’, Caricom, https://caricom.org/our-community/who-we-are/.

Will Pavia, ‘Caribbean nations to seek $33trn in slavery reparations’, The Times, 12 September 2023.

https://shorturl.at/epDE9

Alison Flood, ‘“Imperially nostalgic racists” target Empireland author with hate mail’, Guardian, 12/03/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/12/imperially-nostalgic-racists-target-empireland-author-with-hate-mail.

‘Toni Morrison at Portland State, May 30, 1975’, Mackenzian, https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf, p. 7.

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, ‘Queen Elizabeth II & Empire (with David Olusoga)’, Empire podcast, 13/09/2022, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5fvidV68X1ddQrNLfdJOaz?si=879ddc1fb23f4c18&nd=1.

Renton, Blood Legacy, pp. 88–92.

Ibid., p. 306.

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 4.

Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Polity, 2023; Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth, ‘Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution’, Working Paper 30451, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2022, http://www.nber.org/papers/w30451.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History, Vintage, 2017, pp. 392–4.

Lisa Jewell and Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, Penguin Books, 2000; Joy DeGruy, a clinical psychologist, authored Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Joy DeGruy Publications, 2017; Jacquelyn Clemons, ‘Black Families Have Inherited Trauma, But We Can Change That’, Healthline, 26/08/2020, https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/epigenetics-and-the-black-experience; GHFP, ‘Trauma of slavery and epigenetics’, Healing the Wounds of Slavery, 15/10/2018, https://shorturl.at/KMOS2.

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 169.

Yeo also put into context the increasingly common claim that the greater incidence of Type 2 diabetes and obesity in South Asians can be explained as a response to colonial famines. The Huffington Post recently claimed that millions of Indians died as a result of famine during the Raj, and quoted Dr Mubin Syed, a radiologist from Ohio who also works in vascular and obesity medicine, arguing that South Asians have a tendency to generate and store fat and not burn it off because they are ‘starvation-adapted’. The argument goes that surviving just one famine doubles the risk of diabetes and obesity in the next generation, and the fact that some recent generations of Indians have survived thirty-one famines or more makes them particularly prone to illness. ‘Exposure to even one famine has a multi-generational effect of causing metabolic disorders including diabetes, hyperglycemia and cardiovascular diseases,’ said Dr Syed. In response Yeo tells me: ‘the argument that South Asians are “starvation adapted” is an attempt to provide an explanation for a biological phenomenon. The answer is we don’t know, but the timeline looks a little short for that to have happened. The most recent examples of such adaptations have probably come from the Polynesians, as they colonized the South Pacific. This happened over a period of a couple of thousand years.’ Giles Yeo adds: ‘What is true is that colonialism, then latterly globalisation, brought about huge changes in diet, some for better, some for worse. This has resulted in an upward shift in bodyweight throughout the world. Those who can’t store as much fat safely, such as south Asians, then bear the brunt of getting type 2 diabetes and other metabolic conditions.’ Faima Bakar, ‘How History Still Weighs Heavy on South Asian Bodies Today’, Huffington Post, 14/03/2022, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/south-asian-health-colonial-history_uk_620e74fee4b055057aac0e9f.

Paul Lashmar and Jonathan Smith, ‘Barbados plans to make Tory MP pay reparations for family’s slave past’, Guardian, 26/11/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/26/barbados-tory-mp-pay-reparations-family-slave-richard-drax-caribbean-sugar-plantation.

Joshua Nevett, ‘Richard Drax: Jamaica eyes slavery reparations from Tory MP’, BBC News, 30/11/2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63799222.

Mendick, ‘A year after becoming a republic’.

Ibid.

Of the Slavery Abolition Act’s sixty-six paragraphs, thirty-seven were devoted to the financial arrangements for compensating owners of the enslaved. See Kris Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation, Scribner, 2022, pp. 98–9.

The duration of the apprenticeship scheme varied according to individual colonies. The Emancipation Bill came into force in August 1834. The Act set six years as a maximum length of apprenticeship, but allowed individual colonial governments to decide if they wanted to opt for a shorter term. Antigua gave immediate freedom. The problems with the apprenticeship scheme led to its early abandonment. The length of apprenticeship also depended on the status of the formerly enslaved: for those who had previously worked in the fields (praedials) it was six years, for skilled workers and domestics (non-praedials) it was four years. See https://shorturl.at/jnHLR; https://shorturl.at/MN248 [URL inactive]; Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, pp. 211–27.

Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire, pp. 98–9, 109; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920, Hansib Publishing, 1993, pp. 16–17; Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, pp. 211–27.

Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire, pp. 100–101.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, pp. 217–18.

Ibid., p. 218.

Ibid., p. 219.

Jo N. Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History, ABC Clio, 2005, p. 230.

The Ellis Castle, Ruby and Graeme Hall plantations were owned by non-whites. See Hilary Beckles, Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers’ Protest 1838–1938, Ian Randle Publishers, 2004, p. 58.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 219.

Beckles, Great House Rules, p. 137.

Renton, Blood Legacy, p. 306.

Ibid., pp. 5, 317.

Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 31.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 363.

It’s often forgotten that Britain repealed the Corn Laws in the same year as it abolished preferential sugar duties – the acts were passed by different governments (Peel’s ministry collapsed in the summer) – but it was all part of the same movement, and West Indian workers were the ones who suffered most. See Keally McBride, Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 94–5.

Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 12.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 363.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, p. 52.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 363.

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, pp. 383–4.

The acclaimed British economic historian Professor Sir Roderick Floud recently took on the claim made by a reader of the Guardian that his ancestors who ‘worked in the mills and factories of Lancashire … in the most appalling conditions’ did not benefit from black slavery. ‘Everyone in Britain and the rest of the developed world has benefited from at least 200 years of cheap tobacco, coffee, chocolate and, above all, tea and sugar, produced by slaves or indentured labourers (or, today, low-paid workers) in conditions even worse than those his forebears experienced in Manchester and Salford in the 1840s,’ he wrote in a letter published by the newspaper. ‘In addition, they were probably paid to make clothes out of raw cotton grown by slaves in the southern United States. The direct responsibility for slavery certainly lies with the slavers and plantation owners, including the British royal family and most of the aristocracy and merchant classes who invested in the hateful trade. But the moral responsibility has to be borne much more widely and should be in our minds whenever we buy “cheap” goods today.’ See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/the-fair-way-to-pay-slavery-reparations; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/20/like-it-or-not-we-all-bear-some-responsibility-for-slavery.

https://twitter.com/hyfreelance/status/1555987388383596546/photo/2

https://twitter.com/hyfreelance/status/1555987388383596546?t=rWzrJKDuaJNdjZGw9tj3CA&s=03.

Theo Usherwood, 13/07/2022, 10:38am, https://twitter.com/theousherwood/status/1547153369273454593.

Explaining memes is even more awkward than explaining jokes: @historyinmemes, 17/07/2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CgHyAsZ L P Gx/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=; @NoContextBrits, 21/07/2022, 9:17pm, https://twitter.com/NoContextBrits/status/1550213282883067904?t=VNiv2rBcDFq9aUj5lujiEA&s=03.

Chris Ship, ‘A new “Cambridge way” for future tours as William and Kate respond after Caribbean trip’, ITV News, 28/03/2022, https://www.itv.com/news/2022-03-28/a-new-cambridge-way-for-future-tours-as-william-and-kate-respond; Russell Myers, ‘William and Kate Middleton’s open-top parade branded “awful” echo of colonialist past’, Mirror, 24/03/2022, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/william-kate-middletons-open-top-26552102.

‘Of all ceremonial events, it was perhaps royal tours which had the greatest public and press prominence in colonial territories,’ writes John M. MacKenzie of attitudes at the height of empire. ‘These promoted rituals of visibility supposedly reflecting the mystique, global diplomatic leverage, theatrical effects and imperial marketing power of the British royal family. They embraced an endless round of ceremony, featured in the illustrations of the many commemorative books published in their wake … The major climax of these tours comes with the extensive empire tour of the Duke and Duchess of York (future George V and Queen Mary) on HMS Ophir in 1901, when they visited Gibraltar, Malta, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada. Between mid-March and early November they covered 50,000 miles, 38,000 of them by sea. As usual, the emphasis was on the unity and loyalty of the empire …’ MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, pp. 66–7.

‘Jamaica … is a country that is very proud of our history, very proud of what we have achieved, and we are moving on and we intend to attain in short order our goals and fulfil our true ambitions as an independent, developed, prosperous country.’ Nadine White, ‘Jamaica: government “has already begun” process of removing Queen as head of state’, Independent, 22/03/2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/world/jamaica-queen-head-of-state-b2041296.html; Olivia Stringer, ‘William and Kate’s huge tour blow as “others set to follow Jamaica’s republican demands”’, Express, 25/03/2022, https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1586240/royal-news-republican-kate-middleton-prince-william-duke-duchess-cambridge-caribbean-jamai.

@afuahirsch, 24/03/2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CbfxG7GKEkB/.

Roya Nikkhah, ‘Prince William casts doubt over future leadership of the Commonwealth’, The Times, 26/03/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-william-casts-doubt-over-future-leadership-of-the-commonwealth-nd2wx2wn5.

Ship, ‘A new “Cambridge way” for future tours as William and Kate respond after Caribbean trip’.

Not long afterwards in June, the then Prince Charles called for the history of trafficking by slave traders of African people to be taught as widely as the Holocaust in Britain. According to reports, he believed the gap in Britons’ knowledge had to be bridged, and he said in a speech that he was on a ‘personal journey of discovery’ and was continuing to ‘deepen his own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact’. Emily Atkinson, ‘Prince Charles “wants slave trade to be taught as widely as Holocaust”’, Independent, 26/06/2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/prince-charles-slave-trade-holocaust-b2109517.html.

100

Pravina Rudra, ‘Queen Elizabeth made us feel less embarrassed about Britishness and empire’, New Statesman, 09/09/2022, https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-british-empire-embarrassed.

101

Steven Erlanger, ‘A Global Outpouring of Grief Mixes with Criticism of the Monarchy’, New York Times, 8/9/2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-reaction.html.

102

Ninian Wilson, ‘Anti-monarchy marchers in Dublin throw coffin marked “RIP British Empire” into river’, The National, 19/09/2022, https://www.thenational.scot/news/22313008.anti-monarchy-marchers-dublin-throw-coffin-marked-rip-british-empire-river/.

103

Bernard Lagan, ‘Anti-monarchy protesters burn Australian flag on day of mourning’, The Times, 22/09/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anti-monarchy-protesters-burn-australian-flag-on-day-of-mourning-pnkpbmtcd.

104

Larry Madowo, 09/09/2022, 8:12am, https://t.co/1PyK2l6vqZ.

105

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘“There hasn’t been closure”: India mourns Queen but awaits apology’, Guardian, 14/09/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/14/india-mourns-queen-elizabeth-apology-commonwealth.

106

Maya Jasanoff, ‘Mourn the Queen, Not her Empire’, New York Times, 08/09/2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/queen-empire-decolonization.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes.

107

Nile Gardiner, 18/09/2022, 1:53pm, https://twitter.com/NileGardiner/status/1571482566942724096.

108

Ian Cobain, ‘Revealed: the bonfire of papers at the end of Empire’, Guardian, 29/11/2013, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/29/revealed-bonfire-papers-empire.

109

Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire, p. 72.

110

Troy S. Floyd, The Columbian Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526, University of New Mexico Press, 1973, p. 97, cited by Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 41.

111

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 42; Michael Taylor, ‘The Manchester Guardian: The Limits of Liberalism in the Kingdom of Cotton’, Guardian, 29/03/2023, https://shorturl.at/qyEFW.

112

When the contract was eventually sold to the South Sea Company for £7.5 million, Queen Anne retained over 20 per cent of the stock. Corinne Fowler, Thread Reader, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505483656000946176.html.

113

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 44.

114

Trevor Burnard, ‘As a historian of slavery, I know just how much the royal family has to answer for in Jamaica’, Guardian, 25/03/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/25/slavery-royal-family-jamaica-ducke-duchess-cambridge-caribbean-slave-trade.

115

Corinne Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections, Peepal Tree, 2020, p. 33.

116

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, pp. 122–3, and The First Black Slave Society, p. 199.

117

David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch spoke about the royal family’s intense involvement in slavery on the Harry & Meghan documentary series aired by Netflix. ‘Who dreamed that Britain would have a black princess?’ asked Olusoga, connecting the couple’s mixed-race relationship to the history of British empire. ‘It was a conclusion to a history that was so improbable as to be astonishing.’ Meanwhile, Hirsch observed that ‘the first ever commercial slave voyage conducted by the British was financed by Queen Elizabeth I. It continued being financed by kings and queens right up to its abolition.’ Olusoga added that he had hoped that the entry of a person of colour into the royal family would offer a way into confronting difficult questions about empire, but had been disappointed. https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81439256, Episode 3. 4¢20²; Sathnam Sanghera, ‘David Harewood on racism, prejudice and Covid’s victims in ethnic communities’, The Times, 26/02/2021, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/david-harewood-on-racism-prejudice-and-covid-s-victims-in-ethnic-communities-x55qns9gf.

118

The Daily Show

, 17/09/2022, https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1570911281497915392?t=WzNIQC0-Zt4cd0Gfk3EU9Q&s=03.

119

Dalrymple and Anand, ‘Queen Elizabeth II & Empire (with David Olusoga)’.

120

Jenny S. Martinez, ‘The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Rise of International Non-Governmental Organizations’, in Dinah Shelton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 222–49.

121

Derek Peterson points out that ‘reformers seeking to limit working hours, improve factory conditions, and magnify workers’ political voice found in the figure of the slave a useful means of illuminating the inhumanity that industrial capitalism was cultivating in Britain’. He continues: ‘This political strategy was widely adopted in the early 1830s, when campaigners working for the Ten Hours Bill borrowed freely from abolitionist discourse … A banner commonly carried in working-class rallies depicted a deformed white man with the inscription Am I Not a Man and a Brother? Josiah Wedgwood’s famous icon of the supplicant slave gave working-class men and women a means of highlighting the inhumanity of factory labor.’ See Derek R. Peterson (ed.), Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, Ohio University Press, 2010, pp. 15–16.

122

Martinez, ‘The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Rise of International Non-Governmental Organizations’, pp. 225–6; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, Routledge, 1992, pp. 3–6; Antoinette M. Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865–1915’, Women’s Studies International Forum 1990, 13:4, pp. 295–308; Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915, University of North Carolina Press, 1994; https://www.guernicamag.com/sara-ahmed-the-personal-is-institutional/; Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Harvard University Press, 2013.

123

Anti-Slavery International is ‘the organizational successor of early organizations that grew out of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that was formed in 1839 by British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and others, and had ties to the 1823 Anti-Slavery Society’. See Martinez, ‘The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Rise of International Non-Governmental Organizations’, pp. 225–6.

124

Though this is an area of considerable debate, with Samuel Moyn dismissing the relationship between human rights and abolitionism and Michael Barnett, after distinguishing between human rights and humanitarianism, arguing that abolition only led to the latter. Martinez, ‘The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Rise of International Non-Governmental Organizations’, pp. 225, 248; William Mulligan and Maurice Bric (eds.), A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013, pp. 5–6.

125

In a seminal work on the subject, Wilhelm Grewe refers to the years 1815–1919 as the ‘British Era’ of international law. Others have seen Britain’s efforts to uphold international restrictions, particularly a ban on piracy and the slave trade, as the forerunners of strong international norms, including the seeds of human rights law. In Rage for Order Benton and Ford note: ‘Continuities with imperial law also show up in food policy debates before the World Trade Organization that echo arguments presented by British policy makers in the late nineteenth century to justify standing by while famines took the lives of millions of Indians … More broadly, when international actors engage in debates today about when and under what conditions humanitarian intervention is permissible, or when they dispute the legalities of “small wars”, they do so using language and categories elaborated within the British global order.’ See Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850, Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 20, 191–2.

126

‘For the architects of empire in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries, it was the abolitionist project that made Britain uniquely qualified to govern its African subjects,’ explains Derek Peterson. William Mulligan adds that ‘the abolition of slavery was rooted in a civilizing mission that was bound up with and perhaps fatally compromised by its association with imperial expansion.’ See Peterson (ed.), Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, p. 6; Mulligan and Bric (eds.), A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 5–6.

127

See Catherine Hall’s essay ‘Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s’, in her collection White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, Polity Press, 2013, pp. 205–10; Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 109.

128

Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, Cornell University Press, 2012, p. 175.

Chapter 2: Useful Plants

Jayeeta Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea: making empire’s garden’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 2006, 43:4, p. 453.

Needless to say, Kew Gardens has become yet another locus of tension in the imperial culture wars, with a public battle raging between those who want Kew to acknowledge its colonial role and those who would rather it didn’t. As ever with these things, the warring parties, like squabbling children, blame one another for starting it, but from where I stand its roots lie in Kew Gardens releasing its new strategy – a ten-year manifesto for change – in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter protests. It declared an aim to engage in open dialogue about its imperial and colonial past, which might seem like a logical thing to do, given that it proudly advertised its colonial role while it was involved in colonialism and given the open imperial racism of some botanists at the time. Nevertheless, shortly after its release, Kew’s Manifesto – which contained a pledge to ‘decolonise’ the garden’s collections – caught the attention of Tory MP Sir John Hayes, who complained that it represented ‘preposterous posturing by people who are so out of touch with the sentiment of patriotic Britain’. Initially, Kew’s Director, Richard Deverell, seemed to defend the initiative, saying that staying silent on issues of race could be seen as complicity. But later he told the Daily Telegraph in an interview that Kew had found the word ‘decolonise’ ‘unhelpful’ and that ‘you’re not going to read anything, I think, that is critical of Kew’s, or indeed British history’. As I’ve argued many times, this is no way to approach history of any kind: we should seek to understand historical events through the prism of real evidence, not treat them like a beloved grandmother who needs to be shielded from insult or attack. But, with Kew reliant on the government for some of its funding, maybe he had no choice. Or perhaps the more generous take is that he realized it wasn’t a battle he needed to embark on so publicly: Kew seems to be quietly continuing with its decolonizing efforts without making a fuss about them. Kew has since published its ‘History, Equity and Inclusion’ report by a working group formed to do this and which is on its website with a clear list of actions by sector. And I can’t help noticing that Kew currently has strong relations with leading imperial historians in the UK and overseas, and has recently been associated with two acclaimed books that fully engage with its colonial history (Just the Tonic; Palace of Palms). It has more than a dozen PhD students hard at work mining primary sources on broadly historical topics, and hosted a conference on Botany, Trade and Empire in 2021. Just like the National Trust, Historic England and the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, which recently published its ‘Racial Justice Report 2022’, it’s work they appear to take seriously. See Nazia Parveen, ‘Kew Gardens director hits back at claims it is “growing woke”’, Guardian, 18/03/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/18/kew-gardens-director-hits-back-at-claims-it-is-growing-woke; Daniel Capurro, ‘We are not trashing history, says Kew chief’, Telegraph, 14/01/2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/14/kew-gardens-change-wont-decolonising/; Ursula Buchan, ‘Has Kew Gardens Really Climbed Down after Criticism over its “Decolonisation of Science” Policy?’, History Reclaimed, 03/02/2022, https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/has-kew-gardens-really-climbed-down-after-criticism-over-its-decolonisation-of-science-policy/; Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World, University of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 175.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, p. 10.

Robert S. Anderson, Richard H. Grove and Karis Hiebert, Islands, Forests and Gardens in the Caribbean: Conservation and Conflict in Environmental History, Macmillan Caribbean, 2006, p. 141.

Parker, The Sugar Barons, pp. 143, 259. ‘According to one clergyman in Barbados in the 1730s, “the face of the earth appeared, as it were, a dry crust, burnt up and gaping”, while a contemporary noted that “excessive drought, the number of people running off, and the miserable condition and poverty” of an island that had been the source of colossal fortunes only a century before now meant that famine and disaster seemed inevitable … Plantation agriculture in the Caribbean opened up other environmental hazards too. These included destructive landslides that were dangerous to workers and damaging to ecosystems. Rampant deforestation did not only have implications for soil run-off but magnified the threat posed by hurricanes because of the removal of trees that served as natural protection for animal and plant life alike.’ Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 377.

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 31–2; J. H. Galloway, ‘Botany in the Service of Empire: The Barbados Cane-Breeding Program and the Revival of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1880s–1930s’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 1996, 86:4, pp. 682–706.

Galloway, ‘Botany in the Service of Empire’, p. 682.

Ibid., p. 687.

Ibid., p. 692. Today, Barbados continues to supply the Caribbean with new varieties of sugar cane via the West Indies Central Sugar Cane Breeding Station, an institution which grew out of the imperial project and which is now financed by an array of governments in the Caribbean and Central and South America. ‘West Indies Central Sugar Cane Breeding Station’, Cane Breeding Station, https://www.canebreedingstation.com/our-team/. John Redman Bovell recently featured on one of Barbados’ banknotes.

Mark Nesbitt, ‘Trade and Exploration’, in David Mabberley (ed.), A Cultural History of Plants in the Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 67–84.

Kate Teltscher, Palace of Palms: Tropical Dreams and the Making of Kew, Picador, 2020; Caroline Donald, ‘Why the Palm House at Kew is still a palace of exotic wonders after all these years’, Telegraph, 25/07/2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardens-to-visit/palm-house-kew-still-palace-exotic-wonders-years/.

Teltscher, Palace of Palms, pp. 230, 232.

https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/marianne-north-gallery

Queen Victoria introduced the Kentia palm into many of her residences, which inspired many Brits to do the same, and the houseplant remains a mundane legacy of British empire in many homes today. In 1897 Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem ‘Recessional’ in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It would subsequently be set to music and sung as a hymn across empire, and opens with the lines: ‘God of our fathers, known of old, / Lord of our far-flung battle-line, / Beneath whose awful hand we hold / Dominion over palm and pine.’ See Teltscher, Palace of Palms, pp. 302–3.

Chelsea Ritschel, ‘The reasons why palm oil is so controversial’, Independent, 12/10/2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/palm-oil-health-impact-environment-animals-deforestation-heart-a8505521.html.

Jonathan E. Robins, Oil Palm: A Global History, University of North Carolina Press, 2021; Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Janice Henderson and Daphne J. Osborne, ‘The oil palm in all our lives: how this came about’, Endeavour 2000, 24:2, pp. 63–8.

‘Elites fretting about disease and the moral character of the urban poor made soap into a leading “Victorian Fetish”,’ writes Jonathan E. Robins. ‘Advertisers often used racist caricatures of Africans to sell soap, depicting black children turning white after a good scrubbing. And soap figured prominently in accounts of Britain’s “civilizing” work in Africa.’ Robins, Oil Palm, p. 78.

Ibid., pp. 78, 83, 217–45, 254; Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa, p. 83.

Max Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule, Hurst, 2021, p. 48.

Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, p. 430.

A history textbook from the 1930s talked about how the territories of empire depended on one another economically. ‘We began by saying that once upon a time men in this country provided themselves with almost everything that they wanted. Nowadays we get much of what we want from overseas. A great many of the things come from different parts of the empire. There are, for instance, meat from New Zealand, wheat for flour from Canada, wool from Australia, tea from Ceylon, fruit from South Africa, and so on. We could easily make a long list of the things in our own homes which were sent to us by men living in the empire.’ See John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 188–9.

Kerry Lotzof, ‘Joseph Banks: scientist, explorer and botanist’, Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/joseph-banks-scientist-explorer-botanist.html.

It was a significantly greater fortune than North inherited. Banks was nothing less than one of the wealthiest men in England.

‘There were … professional precedents predating Banks’s involvement with the Cook voyage. The British Museum had taken on Daniel Solander (Banks’s assistant on the Endeavour) as a paid naturalist and curator as early as 1763.’ See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 312.

Andrew Wulf, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, Windmill Books, 2009, pp. 219–20; ‘Sir Joseph Banks’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Banks.

As the National Museum Australia explains, ‘Botany Bay wasn’t James Cook’s first choice of name for the bay. He first named it “Sting Ray Harbour”. On 6 May 1770, Cook changed the name in his journal. First to “Botanist’s Bay”, before settling on “Botany Bay” because of the “great quantity of new plants … collected by Mr Banks and Dr Solander”’: https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/endeavour-voyage/kamay-botany-bay/settling-on-a-name#:~:text= Botany%20Bay%20wasn’t%20James,great%20quantity%20of%20new%20plants%20%E2%80%A6.

Wulf, The Brother Gardeners, p. 208.

https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/recognising-invasions/plans-for-a-colony/

Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, pp. 233–4.

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/mutiny-on-bounty

B. W. Higman, Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture, University of the West Indies Press, 2009, p. 149; Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, p. 233.

On Hooker’s expedition to the Himalayas, the imperial dimension becomes even more explicit when you take into account the fact that the Rajah of Sikkim imprisoned him and a companion because they had ventured into his territory without permission, setting in train a series of events which led to the annexation of Sikkim.

Hooker introduced some twenty-five species of rhododendrons and helped to create the Victorian craze for them. From Kew, seedlings were sent to Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall and the plant then spread to Europe and North America. They can still be seen at Kew, in the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall and at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. The new Sikkim rhododendrons were also hybridized with other species. See Richard Milne, Rhododendron, Reaktion, 2014, ch. 3, https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/126022575/Rhododendron_ext_002_.pdf.

It was, for a brief period, called the Kew Museum of Vegetable Products.

Teltscher, Palace of Palms, pp. 240–41.

‘Mark Nesbitt’, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/people/mark-nesbitt.

Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish, ‘Seeds of Industry and Empire: Economic Botany Collections between Nature and Culture’, Journal of Museum Ethnography 2016, 29, p. 61.

Ibid., p. 56.

‘History and curation of economic botany collections’, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/projects/history-curation-economic-botany-collections.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 94; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 103–33.

Katharina Weingartner, ‘“The Fever”: Questioning Malaria Management as a Colonial Legacy’, Development 2020, 63, p. 312.

Randall M. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Ibid., p. 4.

Ibid., p. 54.

Ibid., p. 87.

Kennedy, Pathogenesis, pp. 178–87.

Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt, Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water, Kew Publishing, 2019, pp. 84–7, 91–3, 101–2.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 95.

Cited in ibid., p. 146.

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 113.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 96.

Walker and Nesbitt, Just the Tonic, pp. 52–3.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, pp. 101–2.

Arjo Roersch van der Hoogte and Toine Pieters, ‘Science in the service of colonial agro-industrialism: The case of cinchona cultivation in the Dutch and British East Indies, 1852–1900’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2014, 47:A, pp. 12–22; Walker and Nesbitt, Just the Tonic, pp. 52–3.

‘Until the inter-war period and the advent of synthetic anti-malarials, the only cure was quinine,’ writes Patricia Barton. ‘Despite an increasing number of government schemes devised at both provincial and central level to distribute quinine in higher quantities to more people’, it is estimated that in 1938, in the United Provinces, a historical area in India, now the state of Uttar Pradesh, the average treatment per patient was 22.5 grains at a time when the prescribed dose was 30 grains per day for at least one week. ‘Even the combined Indian production and imports failed to meet the needs of malaria patients in India … only 10 per cent of malaria sufferers were being treated by the mid-1930s … even the combined annual world production of cinchona would [have been] insufficient to meet Indian demand.’ See Patricia Barton, ‘“The Great Quinine Fraud”: Legality Issues in the “Non-Narcotic” Drug Trade in British India’, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 2007, 22:1, pp. 8–10.

‘In the nineteenth century many chemists attempted to synthesise quinine, which would enable its manufacture in factories without the need to harvest bark. In 1856, eighteen-year-old William Henry Perkin attempted it using coal tar. He failed, but noticed that the resulting mixture was a deep purple. He was astute enough to experiment with his failed sludge to see if it would dye fast to cloth. It did, and he became the accidental inventor of the first synthetic aniline dye, mauveine. Before this, purple dye was only obtainable from expensive natural sources. The results led to an explosion in demand for purple clothing, previously only available to the highest classes in society, termed “mauve madness” or, in Punch magazine, “mauve measles”.’ See Walker and Nesbitt, Just the Tonic, p. 46.

‘During the early nineteenth century the political situation in South America became unstable, as nations asserted their independence from Spain,’ write Walker and Nesbitt. ‘In 1844, Bolivia brought in measures to control cinchona harvesting but failed to pay workers proper wages and a black market in barks arose. European empires urgently desired better control over quantity, quality and price [of cinchona], and expressed concerns over sustainability that were perhaps an early form of “greenwash” to hide their desire for direct control of such an essential medical resource.’ Walker and Nesbitt, Just the Tonic, p. 41.

Ibid., p. 57.

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 141–65; Keogh, The Wardian Case, pp. 153–7; Ghillean Prance and Mark Nesbitt (eds.), The Cultural History of Plants, Routledge, 2005, pp. 338–9.

‘100 years on – the unsolved mystery of the rubber boom slaves’, Survival International, 01/08/2011, https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/7541; Tom Peck, ‘The mystery of the missing Amazonian rubber slaves’, Independent, 02/08/2011, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazonian-rubber-slaves-2330280.html.

Initially, it was not profitable to cultivate rubber in Ceylon; tea was the more profitable crop, and land was devoted to the cultivation of tea rather than rubber. The variety of rubber (Ceará) first cultivated was not best suited to soil and climatic conditions in Ceylon, and did not yield much latex. But towards the end of the century, tea prices fell and rubber prices rose. Also, a new variety of rubber (Pará) was introduced that was better suited to the environment and higher yielding. Rubber cultivation took off in Ceylon around 1904. See Roland Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900, Brill, 2008, pp. 96–8.

Lucile Brockway points out that ‘nineteenth-century European colonial expansion was characterized by both competition and cooperation among the powers. The Dutch from their botanic garden on Java engaged in parallel activities of plant transfer and development … sometimes competing with the British, sometimes cooperating with them, and in the end, fixing the market through cartel agreements. The French copied British and Dutch plantation methods in their rubber industry in Indochina.’ Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 8.

Ibid., p. 142.

Natalie Aster, ‘Natural vs. Synthetic Rubber: Key Market Trends & Statistics’, Market Publishers, 31/07/2018, https://marketpublishers.com/lists/23821/news.html.

James Hagan and Andrew Wells, ‘The British and rubber in Malaya, c1890–1940’, University of Wollongong Faculty of Arts, 2005, https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2648&context=artspapers.

See ‘Malayan Emergency’, National Army Museum, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/malayan-emergency. Souchou Yao, The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War, NIAS Press, 2016, p. 42, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1379592/FULLTEXT01.pdf [URL inactive].

Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Bodley Head, 2022, p. 501

Ibid., pp. 491–508.

Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: how Britain tried to legitimise Batang Kali massacre’, Guardian, 06/05/2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/06/britain-batang-kali-massacre-malaysia.

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 143.

Data from the International Rubber Study Group based in Singapore shows that the Asia-Pacific region dominates both production and consumption of natural rubber. Total world production of natural rubber in 2022 was led by Thailand, followed by Indonesia and Vietnam. Other large producers include India, China and the Cambodia–Myanmar–Laos region. Malaysia is now the eighth largest producer in the world. Sir Henry Wickham’s seeds, once germinated at Kew, were shipped to British territories overseas. As the International Rubber Study Group explains it, the first viable seedlings arrived in Sri Lanka in 1876. In 1876 and 1877 seedlings were shipped to other countries in South-east Asia that had suitable climates, including the modern countries of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. From Malaysia, rubber plantations arrived in Thailand in the early 1900s. Singapore became a major centre of the rubber trade in the inter-war period. See W. G. Huff, ‘The Development of the Rubber Market in Pre-World War II Singapore’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1993, 24:2, pp. 285–306; ‘Natural Rubber Market – Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2023–2028)’, Mordor Intelligence; Global Industry Analysts, ‘Global Industry Analysts Predicts the World Industrial Rubber Products Market to Reach $136.5 Billion by 2026’, CISION PR Newswire, 24/03/2022 https://shorturl.at/ovLQ2.

Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, p. 257; Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Carolus Linnaeus’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carolus-Linnaeus; Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe, ‘Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections’, Journal of Natural Science Collections, 6, pp. 4–14.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, pp. 86–94; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 27–8.

Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, p. 432.

Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case, pp. 89–92.

Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, p. 434.

Ibid., pp. 441–2.

Nesbitt, ‘Trade and Exploration’, p. 82.

Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, p. 442.

Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, pp. 86–8.

Ibid., pp. 86–7.

‘It needs to be considered why an entire decade went by before a local discovery could be assimilated into the official tea quest,’ writes Jayeeta Sharma. ‘Apart from reporting on the jungles where the tea grew, these experts were already seeking means to “improve” the plant. In their view, Nature’s bounty, bestowed upon these otherwise unproductive domains, could only be of full use once it was subjected to the civilising influence of China, the original home of tea. [A British expert] proclaimed that the indigenous plant in Assam was unacceptably savage. As he saw it, the most important measure for the new tea enterprise was the importation of Chinese seeds of unexceptionable quality, and of small numbers of the finest sorts of tea plant … in England, tea, obtained from the awe-inspiring Celestial Empire … had come to signify refinement and luxury in the flourishing bourgeois world of consumption. But the “savage” native product of Assam, it was feared, would not suit the refined London palate, which, for the present, the East India Company saw as its best customer … [It was a Chinese] hybrid that served as the plant of choice for the plantations established by the Assam Company and other entrepreneurs. Only in the 1880s was this plant finally abandoned in favour of the indigenous [Indian] variety. It is tempting to see the growing discomfort with mixed race in British imperial discourses, or the opposition to white colonisation in the tropics, as mirrored in the distaste evinced by the later generation of English planter for the tea hybrid. In a fascinating turnaround, the Assam plant [eventually won] praise for its “robustness and vigour”, so well suited for the cruder palate of the British working classes, while the hybrid was condemned for its effeminacy and artificiality.’ Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, pp. 437–43.

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 92.

Sharma, ‘British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea’, pp. 429–30.

‘Top 10 Tea Producing Countries in the World 2021’, Farrer’s Tea & Coffee Merchants, 02/06/2023, https://farrerscoffee.co.uk/blogs/blog/top-10-tea-producing-countries-in-the-world-2021.

Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, pp. 207–13.

Matthew Adams, ‘Book review: Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World’, Arts & Culture, 05/08/2017, https://shorturl.at/ghmr5.

The Young Queen Victoria gushed about the tea’s ‘quality and flavour’, saying she was ‘extremely pleased’, and predicted that ‘this Experiment’ would ‘have a major influence over the prosperity of the British empire in the East’. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, p. 85.

Ibid., p. 8.

‘Decades before Coca-Cola refreshed the world or McDonald’s served fast food to millions, tea growers combined propaganda, politics, and ideas derived from pre-existing consumer and commercial cultures to create tea drinkers in places as diverse as Glasgow, Cincinnati, and Calcutta.’ Ibid., p. 9.

The development of the imperial press, explains John M. Mackenzie, ‘was dependent on the development of agencies as the prime means for the collection and dissemination of news, a service ideally suited to the operations of the electric telegraph and international cables. The most celebrated was Reuters, founded by Paul Julius Reuter, a migrant from Germany via France after the European revolutionary activity of 1848. Arriving in Britain in 1851, Reuter started a telegram company and a news service for the banking and financial sector. In 1858 this attracted its first newspaper client and thereafter built up a major international network serving British colonial papers.’ MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, p. 251.

Daniel R. Headrick explains in The Tools of Empire that the art of sending electrical signals through networks of telegraph wires and submarine cables proved difficult to master. The ocean’s depths were unknown until the 1860s, and the science of sending electrical impulses hundreds of miles away was in its infancy. The Hooghly River in Calcutta was crossed by a cable installed there in 1839, which appears to be the earliest instance of underwater telegraphy. But it wasn’t until 1843 that a reliable insulating substance was found. This was gutta-percha, a natural plastic made from the sap of a Malayan tree. ‘In 1850, John and Jacob Brett laid a cable across the English Channel. It was made of a single strand of copper wire coated with gutta-percha. A few hours after its debut, a fisherman’s anchor broke it. The next year another cable was laid alongside the first. This one was made of four copper wires insulated with gutta-percha, sheathed with iron wire, and then wrapped in jute and coated again with pitch; thus protected, it worked well into the next century. Two years later, in 1852, a cable linked England and Ireland. Submarine telegraphy was born.’ Investors became overly excited about how this technology might change the world and what followed echoed what would happen in the dot-com bubble of the 1990s: if a cable could span the Channel, the fevered thinking went, then cable could also span the Atlantic Ocean. Dwayne Winseck describes how submarine telegraph systems and telegraph news – the global media of their era – ended up being a feature of the global financial crisis of 1873. While new cables from Britain to South America, and from Australia to New Zealand, opened in the mid-1870s, the bubble had burst, and the industry did little more than tick over for the next ten years. Nevertheless, the technology did, as Headrick tells it, eventually transform human communications. ‘The first cable to India, which cost £800,000, never transmitted a single message … There followed a rush to install submarine cables … In the 1870s, after the triumph of the cables to America and India, there emerged a powerful submarine cable industry … By the 1890s there were several cables to Canada and Australia. The missing link was a cable from British Columbia to New Zealand … In 1902 this line was completed, and all parts of the British Empire could henceforth communicate by a cable network upon which the sun never set. Cables were an essential part of the new imperialism.’ Headrick adds in The Tentacles of Empire that the effects were profound: in the early nineteenth century it could take eight months for a letter to make it from Britain to India, and the writer would not expect to receive a reply in less than two years; even with the emergence of steamships, letters would take six weeks to get to India, or to get from India to Britain. Incredibly, contemporary communication, in the digital age, still depends on a global network of physical cables lying under the sea. The Shetland Islands recently lost internet and telephone services after a cable that connected it to the mainland was cut, and news reports conveyed the fact that many modern cables follow the routes of cables laid down in the imperial age. As the Sunday Times explained, about 97 per cent of the world’s internet traffic travels through ‘a million-mile network of wires under the sea’, and as ‘every millisecond is money’, ‘sending signals across the ocean floor is done by the shortest route possible. For this reason, they tend to follow the paths first laid down a hundred years ago.’ See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 157–63; Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Empire, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 97; Dwayne Winseck, ‘Submarine Telegraphs, Telegraph News, and the Global Financial Crisis of 1873’, Journal of Cultural Economy 2012, 5:2, pp. 197–212; Tom Calver, Jack Clover, Michael Keith and Venetia Menzies, ‘The ties that bind: how we rely on a fragile network of undersea cables’, Sunday Times, 30/10/2022.

John Tully, ‘A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha’, Journal of World History 2009, 20:4, pp. 559–79.

A German agricultural scientist called Dr Hindorf, working for the German East African Company, thought that sisal might be successfully grown in the part of East Africa now known as Tanzania, which the Germans had controlled since the late nineteenth century, and his hunch was correct. Sisal was a big hit for the German East Africa Company, and came to supplant Ceará rubber, a dry-adapted rubber species, as their most profitable crop. Then, following the First World War, the British were granted all of Germany’s colonial sisal plantations; the colony was named Tanganyika, and subsequently renamed Tanzania. A few years ago Tanzania became the world’s second largest producer of sisal, after Brazil. Benjamin E. Sawe, ‘Top Sisal Producing Countries in the World’, World Atlas, 15/04/2017, https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/top-sisal-producing-countries-in-the-world.html; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 168–82.

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 58.

Ibid., pp. 144–5.

Some of this injustice is being confronted. In the summer of 2022, the descendants of the hunter-gatherers who discovered rooibos tea received their first share of the multimillion-pound profits. Long considered a local ‘poor man’s drink’, the tea was first brewed for its health benefits thousands of years ago by the Khoi and San people in what is now South Africa. A payment of 12.2 million rand (£610,000) from South Africa’s rooibos tea industry to the indigenous communities was the first tranche of a deal that took years to hammer out, and, in future, an annual levy of 1.5 per cent of the tea’s ‘farm-gate price’ should be paid into a trust controlled by the Khoi and San. In a separate case in 2022, unresolved at the time of writing, Kenyan tribes sued the UK government over allegations of historic crimes including land theft, eviction and torture in the Kericho region of western Kenya, famous for its tea, between 1902 and 1962. The Talai and Kipsigis have gone to the European Court of Human Rights to ask for compensation of £168 billion along with an apology, while UN experts have expressed concern that there has been no accountability for the violation of the human rights of over half a million people from the area during British rule. Their allegations detail the forced expulsion of their people from favoured land in the Rift Valley in order to create tea plantations, and the subsequent detention of some tribe members in terrible conditions near Lake Victoria, resulting in many deaths. Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, surviving tribe members returned to their homelands but never reclaimed them, instead residing in flimsy accommodation beside the tea estates. ‘Today, some of the world’s most prosperous tea companies, like Unilever, Williamson Tea, Finlay’s and Lipton, occupy and farm these lands and continue to use them to generate considerable profits,’ said the plaintiffs. Kenya exports more black tea than anywhere else in the world. See Jane Flanagan, ‘Tribes win payout from South African tea industry over rights to rooibos’, The Times, 14/07/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tribes-win-payout-from-south-african-tea-industry-over-rights-to-rooibos-2zlcsmw96; ‘Kenyan group sues UK government over what it calls colonial-era land theft’, Reuters, 23/08/2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/kenyan-group-sues-uk-government-over-what-it-calls-colonial-era-land-theft-2022-08-23/; Nazia Parveen, ‘How Kenyans are seeking amends for British tea steeped in “stolen lands”’, Guardian, 02/12/2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/02/kenyas-dispossessed-seek-redress-for-britains-colonial-injustices; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 109; ‘History of Indian Tea’, Indian Tea Association, https://www.indiatea.org/history_of_indian_tea; Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, pp. 3–7, 86–7, 92–3.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Praeger, 2003.

Judith A. Carney and Richard Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, University of California Press, 2011.

100

Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, cited in Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, p. 249. Fowler also points out an intriguing legacy of empire in Britain: the non-regimented approach taken by West Indian tenants in their allotment gardening, as opposed to the traditional British habit of planting vegetables in segregated rows. ‘Mixed plantings were rooted in African gardening practices, and, as more recent expertise in raised-bed gardening has shown, these help to avoid insect-borne and other plant diseases’ (p. 243).

101

The vital importance of indigenous knowledge and its exploitation by the West has recently been acknowledged by Alex Antonelli, Director of Science at Kew. In an opinion piece for Nature, Antonelli calls for scientists ‘to re-evaluate their fundamental assumptions, and re-examine how they work with partners across cultures and power structures’. He argues that nothing less than the world’s future food security depends on indigenous knowledge. Alexandre Antonelli, ‘Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems’, Nature 2023, 613, 239–42, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00021-4.

102

For more, see Hortense Le Ferrand and Abbas Bacha, ‘Discovery and Rediscovery of Gutta Percha, a Natural Thermoplastic’, MRS Bulletin 2021, 46, pp. 84–5.

103

Mark Nesbitt, ‘Botany in Victorian Jamaica’, in Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (eds.), Victorian Jamaica, Duke University Press, 2018, p. 236.

104

Ibid.

105

Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 56.

106

The story is told beautifully by Wulf in The Brother Gardeners.

107

Converting prices to their 2019 equivalents, Floud found that in 1775 a nursery in York sold a rhododendron, either from the Appalachian Mountains or from Asia, for £1,142. Another nurseryman, William Thompson, sold a swamp magnolia imported from the American South for £736. Trees could fetch huge sums. In 1734 Frederick, the Prince of Wales, wanting to fill his new garden at Carlton House, bought a 25-foot-tall tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) for the price of £38,120 – the most expensive tree in a list of plants sold by the nursery of Robert Furber in London. See Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden, pp. 56–7; Nesbitt, ‘Trade and Exploration’, p. 82.

108

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 1.

109

Ibid., pp. 138–9.

110

Ibid., pp. 142–3.

111

Ibid., p. 143.

112

Ibid., pp. 142, 182.

113

Dunne, cited by ibid., p. 201.

114

Ibid., p. 208.

115

Ibid.

116

Clive Cookson, ‘Biodiversity body warns of $423bn annual hit from “invasive alien species”’, Financial Times, 04/09/2023, https://shorturl.at/fBM37.

117

‘The prickly pear story’, The State of Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, 2020, https://www.daf.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/55301/prickly-pear-story.pdf.

118

Phil Lambdon and Quentin Cronk, ‘Extinction Dynamics under Extreme Conservation Threat: The Flora of St Helena’, Front. Ecol. Evol. 2020, 8:41, pp. 1–10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.00041; Quentin Cronk, ‘The Past and Present Vegetation of St Helena’, Journal of Biogeography 1989, 16:1, pp. 47–64; Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 96–125.

119

Anuradha Varanasi, ‘How Colonialism Spawned and Continues to Exacerbate the Climate Crisis’, State of the Planet, 21/09/2020, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/21/how-colonialism-spawned-and-continues-to-exacerbate-the-climate-crisis/.

120

Ibid.

121

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik, ‘To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past’, Open Democracy, 8/10/2018, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/to-fix-climate-crisis-we-must-acknowledge-our-imperial-past/.

122

Fowler states that the Jamaican mahogany forests were so ‘depleted’ by the 1740s that ‘the English had to import their timber from elsewhere in the Americas’. See Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, p. 31; https://www.jstor.org/stable/23546503.

123

Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 386, 388, 441, 388.

124

Ibid., p. 389.

125

‘Back in the 19th century, the British Raj built alliances with local elites in order to secure its rule,’ wrote Raza. ‘In exchange for their loyalty, the Raj turned representative chiefs into unrepresentative aristocrats, granting them magisterial powers, a paramilitary apparatus and immense landed estates (jagirs) on newly irrigated land. The relationship set off a mutually beneficial pillaging of the region, whereby the British Raj and the now-landed aristocrats siphoned off rents, land revenues, and export cash crops like indigo, opium and cotton, all at the expense of previously pastoral tribesmen now forced to settle and toil as local farmers. Combined with expanding canal irrigation, tribesmen’s coerced settlement and exploitation – the British viewed seasonally migrating tribes as a security threat – left them further exposed to floods.’ See Shozab Raza, ‘Flooding has devastated Pakistan – and Britain’s imperial legacy has made it worse’, Guardian, 31/08/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/31/flooding-pakistan-britains-imperial-legacy.

126

L. Parsons, R. Safra de Campos, A. Moncaster, I. Cook, T. Siddiqui, C. Abenayake, A. Jayasinghe, P. Mishra, L. Scungio and T. Billah, Disaster Trade: The Hidden Footprint of UK Production Overseas, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2021, p. 22.

127

Ibid., p. 80. Parsons et al. continue: ‘Although the relationship between landslides and tea plantations is widely noted … it is nowhere more in evidence than Sri Lanka … According to historical data, the “first eight decades of the 19th century recorded only six major landslide events in Sri Lanka, but the two decades since 1981 have registered five major occurrences of landslides”: a trend which has accelerated in recent years. Whilst Sri Lanka experienced an average of less than 50 annual landslides up to 2002, this number has since rapidly increased … ever since British colonisers first introduced tea to the Sri Lankan highlands in 1839, the region’s endemic hazards have been structured increasingly by the products that are grown and traded there.’

128

Damien Gayle, ‘Climate emergency is a legacy of colonialism, says Greenpeace UK’, Guardian, 21/07/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/climate-emergency-is-a-legacy-of-colonialism-says-greenpeace-uk.

129

Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

130

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Amitav Ghosh: European colonialism helped create a planet in crisis, Indian author says’, Guardian, 14/01/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/14/amitav-ghosh-european-colonialism-helped-create-a-planet-in-crisis. ‘Why has this crisis come about?’ Ghosh recently asked out loud. ‘Because for two centuries, European colonists tore across the world, viewing nature and land as something inert to be conquered and consumed without limits and the indigenous people as savages whose knowledge of nature was worthless and who needed to be erased. It was this settler colonial worldview – of just accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, consume, consume, consume – that has got us where we are now.’

131

‘Present development challenges causing high vulnerability are influenced by historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, especially for many Indigenous peoples and local communities,’ the IPCC report said. ‘Officials and scientists from around the globe now recognize the significant role colonialism has played in heating our planet and destroying its many gifts.’ See Varanasi, ‘How Colonialism Spawned and Continues to Exacerbate the Climate Crisis’.

132

Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 446–7. The Balfour paper was ‘On the Influence Exercised by Trees on the Climate of a Country’ in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science, 1840, reprinted in 1849.

133

Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 469–70; J. S. Wilson, ‘On the general and gradual desiccation of the earth and atmosphere’, Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Transactions, 1858.

134

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 450.

135

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, ‘Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism’, in Navroz K. Dubash (ed.), India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 81–91; Gayle, ‘Climate emergency is a legacy of colonialism, says Greenpeace UK’; Macmillen Voskoboynik, ‘To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past’; Chermaine Lee, ‘Understanding Climate Colonialism’, Fair Planet, 14/08/2022, https://www.fairplanet.org/story/understanding-climate-colonialism/; Harriet Mercer, ‘The link between colonialism and climate change examined’, The Week, 25/04/2022, https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/environment/956530/the-link-between-colonialism-and-climate-change-examined; Harriet Mercer, ‘Colonialism: why leading climate scientists have finally acknowledged its link with climate change’, The Conversation, 22/04/2022, https://theconversation.com/colonialism-why-leading-climate-scientists-have-finally-acknowledged-its-link-with-climate-change-181642; Martin Mahony and Georgina Endfield, ‘Climate and Colonialism’, University of East Anglia Prints, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65708/4/Climate_Colonialism_pre_print.pdf; Deniss Martinez and Ans Irfan, ‘Colonialism, the climate crisis, and the need to center Indigenous voices’, Environmental Health News, 04/11/2021, https://www.ehn.org/indigenous-people-and-climate-change-2655479728.html; David M. Driesen, ‘Review: Colonialism’s Climate?’, International Studies Review 2007, 9:3, pp. 484–6; Vanessa Nakate, ‘African nations can’t “adapt” to the climate crisis. Here’s what rich countries must do’, Guardian, 08/11/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/08/rich-countries-climate-crisis-cop27-africa-loss-and-damage; ‘Barbados PM hails “loss and damage” addition to climate agenda at Cop27 – video’, Guardian, 08/11/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2022/nov/08/barbados-pm-hails-loss-damage-addition-climate-agenda-cop27-video?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1667931135; Varanasi, ‘How Colonialism Spawned and Continues to Exacerbate the Climate Crisis’; Yessenia Funes, ‘Yes, Colonialism Caused Climate Change, IPCC Reports’, Atmos, 04/04/2022, https://atmos.earth/ipcc-report-colonialism-climate-change/; John Letzing and Minji Sung, ‘What does colonialism have to do with climate change?’, World Economic Forum, 09/09/2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/colonialism-climate-change-pakistan-floods/; ‘“A form of colonialism”: Activists demand climate reparations’, Al Jazeera, 25/09/2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/25/why-are-climate-activists-calling-for-reparations; ‘Climate Colonialism’, Oxford Talks, 25/01/2021, https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/48b2c915-3965-496e-8dc0-ade137f218cb/.

136

Nakate, ‘African nations can’t “adapt” to the climate crisis’.

137

Parsons et al., Disaster Trade, pp. 98–100.

138

Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 486.

139

Ibid., pp. 474–5.

140

Ibid., p. 472.

141

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 466.

142

Guillaume Blanc continues: ‘There are around 350 national parks in Africa, and in most of them, local populations have been driven out in favour of either animals, forests or savannas … Over the course of the twentieth century, at least a million people have been driven out of protected zones in Africa … These environmental policies were devised by Europeans during the period of colonization. And, since independence, they have been implemented by individual African states. The leaders of these states … systematically bow to any orders imposed by the international conservation institutions. Behind every incident of social injustice imposed on those living in natural environments throughout Africa, the presence of UNESCO, the WWF, the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature] or Flora & Fauna International (FFI) is never far away.’ Meanwhile, the ‘Our Land, Our Nature’ conferences have recently seen ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, representatives and speakers from around 18 countries’ share ‘evidence and first-hand testimonies of racist conservation atrocities and land theft, as well as presented an alternative model that respects human rights and the environment’. Guillaume Blanc, The Invention of Green Colonialism, Wiley, 2022, pp. 1, 11–12; https://www.ourlandournature.org/; https://shop.survivalinternational.org/collections/books/products/decolonize-conservation-global-voices-for-indigenous-self-determination-land-and-a-world-in-common-book?s=03.

143

Keogh, The Wardian Case, p. 7.

144

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 486.

145

Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, p. 118.

146

Keogh, The Wardian Case, pp. 96–8.

147

Ibid., p. 100.

Chapter 3: Phenomenal People Exporters

‘The legacy of Indian migration to European colonies’, Economist, 02/09/2017, https://www.economist.com/international/2017/09/02/the-legacy-of-indian-migration-to-european-colonies.

Franco-Mauritians own an estimated 36 per cent of the total land, which is mainly agricultural. See Tijo Salverda and Iain Hay, ‘Change, anxiety and exclusion in the post-colonial reconfiguration of Franco-Mauritian elite geographies’, Geographical Journal 2014, 180:3, pp. 236–45 at 244 n. 6.

Larry Wells Bowman, ‘Mauritius’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Mauritius/The-arts-and-cultural-institutions.

‘The legacy of Indian migration to European colonies’.

Joseph Cotterill, ‘Reforms in Mauritius hint at discontent over ethnic representation’, Financial Times, 30/10/2018, https://www.ft.com/content/cd36800a-cb1b-11e8-8d0b-a6539b949662.

Figure from Aapravasi Ghat.

Annick Lutchmeenaraidoo, 06/10/2021, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4588700667862125&set=p.4588700667862125&type=3.

‘Very grand houses were also a characteristic of Indian colonial cities,’ writes John M. MacKenzie. ‘Calcutta famously became the “City of Palaces” with major residences in Chowringhee Road and elsewhere. Moreover, around Calcutta there were mansions which symbolised the interpenetration of the rural and the urban in the manner in which they were used as weekend retreats, as the residences of zamindars (the feudal landowners underpinned by the Permanent Settlement system in Bengal), Bengali elites and wealthy British businessmen and senior administrators.’ See MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings, p. 173.

Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Hurst, 2013, p. xx.

Melvin Hunter, ‘Racist Relics: An Ugly Blight on our Botanical Nomenclature’, Scientist, 24/11/1991, https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/racist-relics-an-ugly-blight-on-our-botanical-nomenclature-60358 [URL inactive].

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. xx.

Horseracing being another legacy of British imperialism. ‘Wherever the British went, the laying out of a racecourse was an immediate ambition and racing became an increasingly formalised activity.’ MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, p. 89.

Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920, Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 24. There were often connections between territories that adopted indenture. As Reshaad Durgahee explains, Arthur Hamilton-Gordon was appointed Governor of Mauritius in 1871 and ‘his transfer from Mauritius to become Governor of Fiji in 1875 connected the two colonies. In Fiji he initiated the use of Indian indentured labour to support the colony’s burgeoning sugar industry.’ See Reshaad Durgahee, ‘The Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Indentured Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916’, PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017, https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/44058/.

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 2.

Beckles, The First Black Slave Society, pp. 211–27; Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 16–17.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 18.

Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, p. 61.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 179.

‘In March 1837, John Gladstone, a representative of the West Indian Association (representing sugar planters), requested by letter a meeting with the Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg, and Sir George Grey, his deputy,’ explains an illuminating blog on the National Archives website. The letter stated: ‘Unless a system of regular continuous labour is then adopted, the cultivation of the sugar cane cannot then be carried on to a productive result.’ Gladstone was eager to acquire ‘a supply of Hill Coolies from Bengal’ on a five-year indentured labour contract. Nevertheless, less than three years later, Lord John Russell, the new Colonial Secretary, suspended the Indian indenture plan to British Guiana in response to criticism from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), declaring ‘I am not prepared to encounter the responsibility of a measure which may lead to a dreadful loss of life on the one hand, or, on the other, to a new system of slavery.’ Thirty-eight of the 419 ‘coolies’ that Gladstone’s ship had landed in May 1838 had passed away, and seventy more were listed as unwell a few months later. By 1845 Gladstone was no longer involved in the Caribbean sugar business. Michael Mahoney, ‘A “new system of slavery”? The British West Indies and the origins of Indian indenture’, The National Archives, 03/12/2020, https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a-new-system-of-slavery-the-british-west-indies-and-the-origins-of-indian-indenture/; Kale, Fragments of Empire, p. 32. In Mauritius, indentured Indian workers proved cheaper than formerly enslaved people (‘Creoles’) as soon as the latter were ‘apprenticed’ in 1834. Even before they achieved full freedom from owners’ control in 1838, they were being evicted from plantations and replaced by Indians. Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 50–52; Kale, Fragments of Empire, p. 61.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 25.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 137.

‘The legacy of Indian migration to European colonies’.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 120.

M. D. North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture: Forced Labour in the Political Economy of Mauritius 1834–1867’, in Kay Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire: 1834–1920, Routledge, 1984, p. 93.

Daniel Workman, ‘Top 10 Exports from Mauritius’, World’s Top Exports, https://www.worldstopexports.com/top-10-exports-from-mauritius/?utm_content=cmp-true.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 19.

Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, ‘Contesting “White Slavery” in the Caribbean: Enslaved Africans and European Indentured Servants in Seventeenth-Century Barbados’, BRILL: New West Indian Guide, 01/01/2017, https://brill.com/view/journals/nwig/91/1-2/article-p30_2.xml?language=en; Richard B. Allen, ‘Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World’, Asian History, 29/03/2017, https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-33#acrefore-9780190277727-e-33-note-3. ‘For [some] … early colonists in places such as Virginia and Barbados were “loose vagrant people” whose interests centred on “whoreing, thieving or other debauchery”,’ writes Peter Frankopan. ‘Planters often saw little distinction between indentured servants who came from Europe and those shipped from Africa, with the former often being referred to as “white slaves”. In some cases, enslaved African people were heavily outnumbered by indentured Europeans.’ See Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, pp. 355–6.

Allen, ‘Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World’.

Ibid.

Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 142–84.

Clare Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 7.

Until 1849, when the practice was abolished, those found guilty in Bengal and Madras were given a permanent tattoo on their forehead broadcasting their name, crime and date of sentence. See ibid., pp. 211, 216.

Clare Anderson explains in A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies that these transported convicts left a mark on the world in all sorts of ways. After the Anglo-Sikh Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, soldier convicts were shipped to the Straits Settlements and Burma, where they were used as prison guards in cities like Moulmein. These prisoners also constructed the Horsburgh Lighthouse, Government House (now the National Museum) and St Andrew’s Cathedral in Singapore, as well as dockyards, harbours and bunds. Indian prisoners of war in Mauritius worked on the island’s citadel in Port Louis and constructed the road system to link the city to its sugar plantations. Ibid., pp. 222–5.

Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 203; Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History, Jacana, 2013; Ferguson, Empire, p. 280.

Lester, Boehme and Mitchell, Ruling the World, p. 9.

Elkins, Legacy of Violence, p. 505.

‘Malaysia Population 1950–2023’, Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/MYS/malaysia/population.

Elkins, Legacy of Violence, p. 505.

Ibid., p. 563.

Patrick Wintour, ‘UN court rejects UK claim to Chagos Islands in favour of Mauritius’, Guardian, 28/01/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/28/un-court-rejects-uk-claim-to-chagos-islands-in-favour-of-mauritius. For more, see Philippe Sands, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022.

Elkins, Legacy of Violence, pp. 410–41; ‘Who is to blame for partition? Britain’, Alex von Tunzelmann, 19/08/2017, New York Times.

‘The commonly repeated statement that one-third of Bengal’s population died – i.e. about 10m people – is barely credible,’ writes Tim Dyson. ‘Even a figure of 5m may well lie outside the plausible range. However, famine mortality and large-scale out-migration did cause significant depopulation in large parts of Bengal.’ Tim Dyson, A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 79–81.

‘Britain is responsible for deaths of 35 million Indians, says acclaimed author Shashi Tharoor’, Independent, 13/03/2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-britain-shashi-tharoor-british-empire-a7627041.html.

Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, ‘Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century’, World Development 2023, 161. Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel’s ‘How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years’, Al Jazeera, 02/12/2022, claims that this ‘is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.’

Nathan Sentance, ‘Genocide in Australia’, Australian Museum, 12/07/2022, https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/genocide-in-australia/. The most verifiable source on massacres is the remarkable project by Lyndall Ryan to map all those for which documentary evidence can be found. You can expand the map to get the details of every individual massacre. See ‘Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1788 to 1930’, The University of Newcastle, Australia, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php.

Amanda Meade, ‘Sydney Morning Herald apologises for failing “dismally” on coverage of 1838 Myall Creek massacre’, Guardian, 09/06/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/09/sydney-morning-herald-apologises-for-failing-dismally-on-coverage-of-1838-myall-creek-massacre; https://twitter.com/aljhlester/status/1667797627516207105; Sentance, ‘Genocide in Australia’; Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 175; Lorena Allam and Nick Evershed, ‘Almost half the massacres of Aboriginal people were by police or other government forces, research finds’, Guardian, 15/03/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/16/almost-half-the-massacres-of-aboriginal-people-were-by-police-research-finds.

Ryan Lyndall, ‘List of multiple killings of Aborigines in Tasmania: 1804–1835’, SciencesPo, 05/03/2008, https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/list-multiple-killings-aborigines-tasmania-1804-1835.html; Kristyn Harman, ‘Explainer: the evidence for the Tasmanian genocide’, The Conversation, 17/01/2018, https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-evidence-for-the-tasmanian-genocide-86828.

Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, pp. 24–5.

Jalil Sued-Badillo referenced by ibid., p. 24.

Ibid.

Ferguson, Empire, pp. 65–6.

Kennedy, Pathogenesis, pp. 173–4.

Ibid., pp. 175–6.

Naipaul captured the complexity of his experience in a letter in 1954: ‘I certainly do not want to go back to Trinidad or any other island in the West Indies if I can help it. I very much want to go to India. However, there are many difficulties. I cannot be employed on the Indian side because I am British, and on the British side, I cannot be employed because I am not English. I think it is almost impossible for me to do anything worthwhile in this country, for reasons you doubtless know …’ See Chandrima Karmakar, ‘V. S. Naipaul: From Memory en route to Roots’, https://ntm.org.in/download/ttvol/Contextualising_Migration_SpecialIssue/article%209.pdf.

Kale, Fragments of Empire, p. 2; Derek Walcott, ‘Nobel Lecture: The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, The Nobel Prize, 07/12/1992, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/.

Saunders, Indentured Labour in the British Empire.

‘Island Delight, and the Origins of the Jamaican Pattie’, Island Delight, https://www.island-delight.co.uk/history-of-the-jamaican-patty/; Danny Friar, ‘History of Jamaican Food’, Mas Media: Leeds Carnival Blog, 28/02/2018, https://leedsmasmedia.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/history-of-jamaican-food/; Lisa Rough, ‘Jamaica’s Cannabis Roots: The History of Ganja on the Island’, Leafly, 14/05/2015, https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/jamaicas-roots-the-history-of-ganja-on-the-island.

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, pp. 27–8; Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 120.

‘Between 1860 and 1911, 152,184 Indian indentured workers went to the then British colony of Natal to work primarily on the sugar plantations. They were followed by free Indian migrants. White settlers felt threatened by a settled Indian population and passed legislation to curb their immigration, trading, employment and residence rights. The struggle of Indians against this racist legislation was spearheaded by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.’ Goolam Vahed, ‘“An evil thing”: Gandhi and Indian Indentured Labour in South Africa, 1893–1914’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 2019, 42:4, pp. 654–74.

One of the pioneer investors in the new colony of Swan River in Western Australia in the late 1830s was an East Indian Company trader who brought indentured Indians with him to set up his ‘run’. See Malcolm Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire: Framing a Distant Colony, Australian National University Press, 2014, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wwvzc.

Preston Merchant, ‘Fiji’s Indian Cane Cutters’, Time, 17 September 2007, https://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1662439,00.html.

Rachel Sturman argues that ‘many elements of modern attempts to establish international labor rights and protections can be traced through … the official British imperial system of Indian indentured labor … [it] occasioned new ideas, among both supporters and opponents, about what constituted a legitimate and humane labor system and about how to ensure that the humanity of such laborers would be protected. While the system remained exploitative and grounded in both coercion and neglect, political pressure from anti-slavery activists coupled with bureaucratic exigencies led to the institution of a modern (and in some cases pioneering) regulatory regime that rendered the conditions of indentured life and labor subject to a variety of new forms of scrutiny and intervention. Most significantly, these efforts to create a legitimate system ultimately sought to protect the laborers’ humanity not only by distinguishing indenture from slavery, but by prompting a framework of laws and regulations that was oriented toward welfare provisioning.’ Rachel Sturman, ‘Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes’, American Historical Review 2014, 119:5, pp. 1439–65. For an account of the ways that humanitarian attempts to protect indigenous peoples were related to those to safeguard indentured Indians see Amanda Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

‘The legacy of Indian migration to European colonies’.

Richard B. Allen, ‘Re-conceptualizing the “new system of slavery”’, Man in India 2012, 92:2, pp. 225–45; Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. x.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 121–4, 128; Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 172.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 123.

The legal adviser to the Mauritius government recommended the man be sent home, and he returned to Bombay. Ibid., p. 125.

Ibid., pp. 130, 141, 134–5, 154.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 62.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 158.

Ibid., p. 197.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 83.

Brij V. Lal, ‘Labouring Men and Nothing More: Some Problems of Indian Indenture in Fiji’, in Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, p. 144.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 200.

Ibid., p. 204.

Ibid.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 109.

Ibid.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 190.

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 175.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 181.

Ibid., p. 183.

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 26.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 191.

Lal, ‘Labouring Men and Nothing More’, p. 132.

Ravindra K. Jain, ‘South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840–1920: Asylum Stability and Involution’, in Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, p. 165.

Alan H. Adamson, ‘The Impact of Indentured Immigration on the Political Economy of British Guiana’, in Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, p. 46.

Ibid.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 191–2.

Harding, White Debt, p. 257.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 186.

Marianne D. Ramesar, ‘Indentured Labour in Trinidad 1880–1917’, in Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, p. 67.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 186.

North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture’, p. 99.

Clare Anderson, ‘The British Indian Empire’, in Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, p. 229.

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 120–21.

Ibid., p. 178.

North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture’, p. 99.

100

Ibid., p. 108.

101

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 127.

102

Ibid., p. 163.

103

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 5.

104

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 76.

105

David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons’, American Historical Review 1983, 88:2, pp. 251–80; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 84, cited in Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 79.

106

Ralph Shlomowitz and John McDonald, ‘Mortality of Indian Labour on Ocean Voyages, 1843–1917’, Studies in History 1990, 6:1, pp. 35–65, cited in Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 84.

107

Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease, p. 89.

108

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 139.

109

Ibid., p. 148.

110

Ibid., p. 150.

111

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 57.

112

Kale, Fragments of Empire, pp. 90–91.

113

Lal, ‘Labouring Men and Nothing More’, p. 141.

114

Kale, Fragments of Empire, p. 7.

115

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 158, 165, 139.

116

Kale, Fragments of Empire, p. 147.

117

North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture’, pp. 87–8.

118

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 160.

119

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 231.

120

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 113.

121

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 172.

122

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 191.

123

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, pp. 68–9.

124

Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, p. 8.

125

Ibid., p. 11.

126

‘Slave Route Monument: Le Morne, Mauritius’, Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/le-morne-slave-route-monument.

127

Some arrived after the British had actually officially abolished the slave trade. As the Truth and Justice Commission of Mauritius, established in 2009, explains, planters exploited the labour of so-called ‘recaptives’ or ‘liberated slaves’. ‘Following the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, the British Government sent its Navy to seize enslaved peoples on board French and other ships. Those slaves were referred to as “liberated Africans”, a misnomer as they were far from free. In effect, they were given to private employers or a Government Officer as apprentices or indentured labour for a period of up to fourteen years … Some had been freed from slave ships illegally trading in slaves, hence the term “Liberated Africans” being applied to them. They did not benefit from the Act of Abolition of Slavery in 1833 and continued to work with their employers until their contract had expired … In [the report of P. Salter, the Acting Collector of Customs] on Liberated Africans in Mauritius, in 1826 … we learn that between 1813 and 1826, out of 2,998 Liberated Africans brought to Mauritius, some 291 had died even before being apprenticed. Women constituted only ¼ of them. More than 9% of the Liberated Africans died within less than a month after landing, dying of dysentery, cholera, and the small pox, as well as from severe cases of malnutrition and dehydration which prevailed on the slave vessels.’ See Truth and Justice Commission, Report of the Truth and Justice Commission, vol. 1, Mauritius Government Printing, 2011, https://shorturl.at/oAP05, pp. 69, 149.

128

Rosabelle Boswell, ‘The Immeasurability of Racial and Mixed Identity in Mauritius’, in Zarine L. Rocha and Peter J. Aspinall (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 457–78.

129

In 1838 there was a debate within the Colonial Office about whether planters should be discouraged from immediately ejecting Creoles and replacing them with indentured Indians. To do so seemed to be abandoning the former slaves whom humanitarians like Colonial Secretary James Stephen had spent so much energy trying to emancipate.

130

Cotterill, ‘Reforms in Mauritius hint at discontent over ethnic representation’.

131

‘People say that hundreds of slaves threw themselves off the cliff rather than face the horrors of dehumanization. There’s another, even darker tale: some say that after the British passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1834, a group of soldiers and police went to the Le Morne area to let runaway slaves know that they were finally free. But the slaves, seeing the authorities approaching, feared that they were being recaptured and returned to their masters, and climbed to the top of the mountain summit and threw themselves off committing suicide by landing in the ocean … It should be noted that there is yet to be any archaeological evidence of the tragedy like bones found on the beach … In 2009, Mauritius established the Slave Route Monument as a symbol to recognize and commemorate the impact and influence of slavery and the slave trade on Mauritian history. It was part of a larger UNESCO effort officially launched in Benin in 1994 known as the Slave Route Project, looking to have such monuments erected in countries affected by the slave trade.’ See ‘Slave Route Monument: Le Morne, Mauritius’.

132

Larry Wells Bowman, ‘Mauritius’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Mauritius.

133

In a letter addressed to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Prime Minister’s Office asserted that ‘it can safely be said that in Mauritius, no person can be discriminated against by reason of his/her religion, race or belief and if there is any attempt to do so, there are sufficient safeguards to enable that person to denounce such discrimination and seek redress’. Affirmative Action, Alternative Report 2021.

134

Adamson, ‘The Impact of Indentured Immigration on the Political Economy of British Guiana’, p. 47.

135

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. 56.

136

Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 217.

137

Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, Picador, 2008, p. 5.

138

Adamson, ‘The Impact of Indentured Immigration on the Political Economy of British Guiana’, pp. 48–9.

139

‘The legacy of Indian migration to European colonies’.

140

José Moirt, Gagner, ne suffit pas!, trans. Eric Bahloo, Cathay Printing, 2019.

141

Lindsey Collen, ‘Another Side of Paradise’, New Internationalist, 02/05/2009, https://newint.org/features/2009/05/01/mauritius-class.

142

Cotterill, ‘Reforms in Mauritius hint at discontent over ethnic representation’.

143

Ibid.

144

Affirmative Action, Alternative Report 2021.

145

Leo Couacaud, Sheetal Sheena Sookrajowa and Jason Narsoo, ‘The Vicious Circle that is Mauritian Politics: The Legacy of Mauritius’s Electoral Boundaries’, Ethnopolitics 2022, 21:1, pp. 48–79.

146

The government has stated that ‘stability is the pillar of socio-economic progress’, and therefore it will not consent to a census based on communal affiliation. It has been argued that the decision not to collect information on ethnicity is an anti-colonial act: a rejection of imperial systems of racial classification. However, it should be noted that, at independence, four parliamentary seats were reserved for under-represented communities based on ‘the latest official published census’. Since the last census that collected this information was published in 1972, this still determines the allocation of these seats. Sheetal Sheena Sookrajowa observes that ‘it remains a paradox that the main national political parties which are now clamoring for national unity by refusing to perform an ethnic count of the population for electoral purposes, are themselves informally using the ethnic rationale to govern, from the nomination of candidates and coalition negotiations to the appointment of members of parliament.’ See Cotterill, ‘Reforms in Mauritius hint at discontent over ethnic representation’; Sheetal Sheena Sookrajowa, ‘Legibility and the Politics of Ethnic Classification of the Population in the National Census of Mauritius: A Statist Perspective’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 2021, 27:2, p. 140.

147

‘… a majority of them live in housing estates, devoid of bare amenities and in over crowdedness …’. See Truth and Justice Commission, Report of the Truth and Justice Commission, vol. 1, p. 2.

148

‘… due to their poor performance at school, few can get employed in Government services’. See ibid.

149

‘… they have no real effective pressure groups to make their voices heard in higher and political quarters, most of their grievances remained unheard’. See ibid.

150

‘Stigmatisation [has] prevailed for centuries in Mauritius … across all communities, including the Creole community.’ See ibid., p. 226.

151

‘Due to selective breeding, some slaves were deprived of the right to develop monogamous family relationships. Psychologically, selective breeding influenced slaves to believe that family relationships were of little value, and fostered insecurity.’ See ibid., p. 227.

152

‘It was found that Creoles, who are currently defined as slave descendants, routinely experienced racist attacks.’ See ibid., p. 288.

153

‘Examples of “racist” events include biased bureaucratic reports, hidden inquests, empty review procedures, the touting of equality policies never enforced, denial of earned recognition, exclusionary socialising, and covert maintenance of housing segregation.’ See ibid.

154

‘Indo-Fijians’, Minority Rights, https://minorityrights.org/minorities/indo-fijians/.

155

Mangai Balasegaram, ‘Special Report: Different Class: The Marginalisation of Indians in Malaysia’, Between the Lines, https://betweenthelines.my/malaysias-indians-marginalised-over-a-century/.

156

Bahadur, Coolie Woman, pp. 194, 198, 200–201, 202, 204.

157

Truth and Justice Commission, Report of the Truth and Justice Commission, vol. 1, p. 3.

158

Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, ‘Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean Indentured Labour Migration’, Modern Asian Studies 2017, 51:2, pp. 462–84.

159

Kamala Kempadoo, ‘“Bound Coolies” and Other Indentured Workers in the Caribbean: Implications for Debates about Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery’, Anti-Trafficking Review 2017, 9, pp. 48–63, https://www.antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/article/view/263/252.

160

Emiliano Mellino and Shanti Das, ‘Seasonal fruit pickers left thousands in debt after being sent home early from UK farms’, Guardian, 13/11/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/13/seasonal-fruit-pickers-left-thousands-in-debt-after-being-sent-home-early-from-uk-farms.

161

‘Qatar World Cup of Shame’, Amnesty International, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/qatar-world-cup-of-shame/.

162

‘Exploited and marginalized, Bangladeshi tea workers speak up for their rights’, UN News, 21/03/2021, https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1087622; ‘The Exploitation of Tea Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka’, The Borgen Project, 22/08/2021, https://borgenproject.org/tea-plantation-workers-in-sri-lanka/; Justin Rowlatt and Jane Deith, ‘The bitter story behind the UK’s national drink’, BBC News, 08/09/2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-34173532. See Amy Huxtable, ‘A cuppa reality: The truth behind your brew’, University of Sheffield, https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/research/forced-labour.

163

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 142–84.

164

S. Rukmini, ‘World Bank Finds Evidence of Labour Abuse on Assam Tea Plantations It Owns with the Tatas’, Huffington Post, 07/11/2016, https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/world-bank-finds-evidence-of-labour-abuse-on-assam-tea-plantatio_in_5c0fe358e4b051c73eabf82c.

165

‘Between May 1863 and May 1866, about 84,915 labourers were imported into the Assam tea gardens,’ writes Rana P. Behal. ‘But the returns for 1866 showed only 49,750 as working on the gardens. The remaining 35,165 either died or deserted. A larger number of deserters also seemed to have died of hunger or exhaustion in the jungles. In the tea gardens inspected by the Commissioners in 1868, the average rate of mortality ranged from 137.6 per thousand to 556.6 per thousand.’ See Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 155;

166

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 151, 167.

167

Rana P. Behal, ‘Coolie Drivers or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System’, Modern Asian Studies 2010, 44:1, pp. 29–51.

168

Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, p. 208.

169

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 167, 168, 159.

170

‘Commonwealth countries can do much more to expand trade links with the UK, post-Brexit,’ concluded a set of trade experts at the Commonwealth Secretariat soon after the Brexit vote. ‘We already know there’s a Commonwealth advantage in trading between member states,’ claimed the Secretariat’s head of international trade policy, Dr Mohammad Razzaque. ‘Where the UK is already a significant trading partner, Commonwealth members can mobilise pro-active policy support to relatively easily expand trade further. In some cases, bilateral trading arrangements could also be the way forward.’ See ‘Trade opportunities for Commonwealth post-Brexit’, The Commonwealth, 10/01/2017, https://thecommonwealth.org/news/trade-opportunities-commonwealth-post-brexit.

171

‘Seven developing nations send over 10 percent of their world exports to the UK: Botswana, Belize, Seychelles, Mauritius, St Lucia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. 24 countries send more than 30 percent of their total EU trade exports to the UK. For example, the UK absorbs more than 70 percent of such exports from St Lucia and Tuvalu.’ ‘Trade opportunities for Commonwealth post-Brexit’. See Emily Jones, ‘Brexit: Opportunity or peril for trade with small and poor developing economies?’, GEG: Global Economic Governance Programme, https://www.geg.ox.ac.uk/publication/brexit-opportunity-or-peril-trade-small-and-poor-developing-economies.

Chapter 4: White Saviours

‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, Song Facts, https://www.songfacts.com/facts/band-aid/do-they-know-its-christmas.

London’s Kingsway International Christian Centre, founded by a Nigerian, is home to the largest church congregation in Western Europe. Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 334.

Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 36; Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 253–5.

As expertly summarized by Jenny Edkins in Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. xix, 6, 7, 103, 122, 109–10. See also Charlotte Lydia Riley, Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain, Bodley Head, 2023, p. 199.

Jessica Howard-Johnston, ‘Band Aid 30: A neo-colonial controversy?’, Pi Media, 04/12/2014, https://uclpimedia.com/online/band-aid-30-a-neo-colonial-controversy.

Bim Adewunmi, ‘Band Aid 30: clumsy, patronising and wrong in so many ways’, Guardian, 11/11/2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/11/band-aid-30-patronising-bob-geldof-ebola-do-they-know-its-christmas.

The fashion among certain white women on Instagram to pose with black children in Africa, ‘without any indication as to whether they even had consent from their families to take as well as share their photos’, has inspired the parody social networking account ‘Barbie Saviour’. Meanwhile, Kelsey Nielsen and Olivia Alaso have combined forces to launch the No White Saviours (NWS) campaign group, with the aim of challenging, in the words of the Guardian, ‘underlying domination in development narratives and the relationship between white and black people. An issue that dates back to the first Europeans who raided Africa for slaves and raw materials.’ See Habiba Katsha, ‘David Lammy is right to call out the “white saviour” narrative – if only Comic Relief understood that’, Independent, 28/02/2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/david-lammy-comic-relief-stacey-dooley-white-saviour-charity-africa-a8801676.html; Patience Akumu, ‘Charity at heart of “white saviour” row speaks out’, Guardian, 03/03/2019, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/03/we-need-to-talk-about-race-no-white-saviours-tells-stacey-dooley-comic-relief.

It came after TV presenter Stacey Dooley travelled to the continent for the charity, prompting Labour MP David Lammy, who is of Guyanese descent, to remark that films of white British celebrities going to Africa perpetuated ‘an old idea from the colonial era’ and that ‘many black’ Britons were ‘deeply uncomfortable’ with such ‘poverty porn’. See Kyle O’Sullivan, ‘Why Comic Relief stopped sending “white saviour” celebrities to Africa after scandal’, Mirror, 18/03/2022, https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/comic-relief-stopped-sending-white-26491455.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/history

https://shorturl.at/diMSY

https://www.fauna-flora.org/news/raiders-lost-archive-episode-one/

Nicola Banks and Dan Brockington, ‘Mapping the UK’s development NGOs: income, geography and contributions to international development: GDI Working Paper’, GDI Working Paper 2019-035, University of Manchester, 2019, https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/gdi/publications/workingpapers/GDI/GDI-working-paper-2019035-banks-brockington.pdf, p. 8.

‘Fast Forward’, Bond, 01/07/2014, https://www.bond.org.uk/resources/fast-forward/.

Riley, Imperial Island, p. 199.

Written in response to the US taking over the Philippines after the Spanish–American War, it begins: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden / Send forth the best ye breed / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need; / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.’

Ferguson, Empire, p. 140; Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, ed. Kim A. Wagner, Oxford World’s Classics, due to be published February 2024.

Ferguson, Empire, p. 139.

Arvind Sharma, Sati: Historical and Phenomenological Essays, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001, pp. ix–x, 3, 10–11, 16–17, 49; Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 63.

According to a data scientist at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, Save the Children International is the biggest of Britain’s INGOs, with almost £1 billion of annual income, more than double the income of Oxfam, the INGO in second place. That’s before you add the income generated by the Save the Children Fund, which is at number four.