An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

42. THE BRITISH IN INDIA

The generation after the Crimean War saw Britain reach the peak of her power. Far outstripping her competitors in industrial production (it was still some time before America and Germany caught up), mistress of the seas and of an ever-expanding empire on which, as the saying went, the sun never set, Britain’s boast, paradoxically, was in something quite different: in being the world champion of freedom and liberalism in both political and economic life. But how was it possible to be both liberal and imperialist at the same time?

The clue lay in the so-called doctrine of benign intervention: the teaching that Britain, alone among the empires of world history, had acquired her empire for the benefit, not of her own, but of her subject peoples, to whom she communicated the fruits of her liberal civilization by her benign interventions in their lives – in other words, by her annexation of their territories and taking over of their government. This teaching was expounded by Britain’s foremost liberal thinker, John Stuart Mill, in his essay, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention”, in which he asserted that England was “incomparably the most conscientious of all nations… the only one whom mere scruples of conscience… would deter” and “the power which of all in existence best understands liberty”.⁸¹
As Noam Chomsky writes, Mill “urged Britain to undertake the enterprise [of humanitarian intervention] vigorously – specifically, to conquer more of India. Britain must pursue this high-minded mission, Mill explained, even though it will be ‘held up to obloquy’ on the continent. Unmentioned was that by doing so, Britain was striking still further devastating blows at India and extending the near-monopoly of opium production that it needed both to force open Chinese markets by violence and to sustain the imperial system more broadly by means of its immense narco-trafficking enterprises, all well known in England at the time. But such matters could not be the source of the ‘obloquy’. Rather, Europeans are ‘exciting odium against us’, Mill wrote, because they are unable to comprehend that England is truly ‘a novelty in the world.’ A remarkable nation that acts only ‘in the service of others’. It is dedicated to peace, though if ‘the aggressions of barbarians force it to a successful war’, it selflessly bears the cost while ‘the fruits it shares in fraternal equality with the whole human race’, including the barbarians it conquers and destroys for their own benefit. England is not only peerless but near perfect, in Mill’s view, with no ‘aggressive designs’, desiring ‘no benefit to itself at the expense of others’. Its policies are ‘blameless and laudable’. England was the nineteenth-century counterpart of the ‘idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity’, motivated by pure altruism and uniquely dedicated to the highest ‘principles and values’, though also sadly misunderstood by the cynical or perhaps paranoid Europeans…”⁸²
There are indeed grounds for a certain cynicism here: the main motive of Britain’s imperial expansion was undoubtedly commercial profit, a profit that was unquestionably immoral when gained at the expense of jobless Indian textile workers⁸³ or Chinese opium addicts.⁸⁴ Britain’s empire in India, for example, was acquired by the need to protect and expand the commercial interests of the East India Company. Indeed, the Company was British India – with its own civil service and army – until, being “too big to be allowed to fail”, it was taken over and “nationalized” by the British government.
However, a balanced picture of British imperialism must recognize that there were other, nobler motivations, if not among the businessmen and entrepreneurs, at any rate among the Evangelical missionaries who poured into the new dominions. For mission, and protection from false religion, remains the only really defensible justification of one people’s dominion over another. It was at the root of the idea of Christian Rome, which brought Orthodoxy to the peoples of the Mediterranean basin and to the Slav nations to the north. The Russian Empire extended it still further into Asia and even America – and with much less damage to indigenous cultures than the Western missionaries. With their heretical ideas and disdain for both Byzantium and Russia, the British could not be expected to follow this example: pagan Rome was their role model. Nevertheless, they did see religious mission as an important part of their duty, “the white man’s burden”, and part of the justification of their colonialism.
The French were even more missionary-minded than the British. Thus “when King Charles X came to the Chamber of Deputies formally to announce intervention in Algeria, he justified it as ‘for the benefit of Christianity’.”⁸⁵
“In one sense,” writes Dominic Lieven, “religion was a relatively unimportant factor in Britain’s empire. From the seventh and eighth centuries, for instance, Muslim conquerors converted the Near East and southern Mediterranean to Islam, in the process forever changing identities and geopolitics in a vast region. Religion was also very important in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, great effort being put into subsequent conversion of the indigenous population. Though Elizabethan imperialists sometimes talked the language of religious mission, in reality little effort went into converting indigenous peoples to Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Until 1813 the East India Company strictly limited missionary activity in India. Only with the onset of the Evangelical Movement in the late eighteenth century did missionaries begin to play a role of any significance in the British Empire. Even subsequently, however, missionaries never converted large communities and when compared to the activities of the Islamic or Spanish empires, their impact was very small.”⁸⁶
Nevertheless, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill had mentioned “the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry” as one of the main benefits of British imperialism.
After citing this phrase, Niall Ferguson writes: “Nowadays, the modern equivalents of the missionary societies campaign earnestly against ‘usages’ in far-flung countries that they regard as barbaric: child labour or female circumcision. The Victorian non-governmental organizations were not so different. In particular, three traditional Indian customs aroused the ire of British missionaries and modernizers alike. One was female infanticide, which was common in parts of north-western India. Another was thagi (then usually spelt ‘thuggee’), the cult of assassin-priests, who were said to strangle unwary travellers on the Indian roads. The third, the one the Victorians most abhorred, was sati (or ‘suttee’): the act of self-immolation when a Hindu widow was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre… Between 1813 and 1825 7,941 women died this way in Bengal alone…”⁸⁷
However, in 1857 the Indian Mutiny deeply impressed upon the British the limitations of their power in the reformation of Hindu “usages or superstitions”. The mutiny was sparked by the fact that the cockade on the new turban issued to Indian troops appeared to be made of cow or pig hide. This offended their religious sensibilities, and so “at root the Vellore mutiny was about religion”.⁸⁸
“The year 1857 was the Evangelical movement’s annus horribilis. They had offered India Christian civilization, and the offer had been not merely declined but violently spurned. Now the Victorians revealed the other, harsher face of their missionary zeal. In churches all over the country, the theme of the Sunday sermon switched from redemption to revenge. Queen Victoria – whose previous indifference to the Empire was transformed by the Mutiny into a passionate interest – called the nation to a day of repentance and prayer: ‘A Day of Humiliation’, no less. In the Crystal Palace, that monument to Victorian self-confidence, a vast congregation of 25,000 heard the incandescent Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon issue what amount to a call for holy war:
“’My friends, what crimes they have committed… The Indian government never ought to have tolerated the religion of the Hindoos at all. If my religion consisted of bestiality, infanticide and murder, I should have no right to it unless I was prepared to be hanged. The religion of the Hindoos is no more than a mass of the rankest filth that imagination ever conceived. The gods they worship are not entitled to the least atom of respect. Their worship necessitates everything that is evil and morality must put it down. The sword must be taken out of its sheath, to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousands.’
“These words would be taken literally when the sections of the Indian army that remained loyal, the Gurkhas and Sikhs in particular, were deployed. In Cawnpore Brigadier-General Neill forced captured mutineers to lick the blood of their white victims before executing them. At Peshawar forty were strapped to the barrels of cannons and blown apart, the old Mughal punishment for mutiny. In Delhi, where the fighting was especially fierce, British troops gave no quarter. The fall of the city in September was an orgy of slaughter and plunder…”⁸⁹
In fact, the British response to the Mutiny was anything but liberal⁹⁰, and it resulted in a significant change in British imperial policy with regard to the conversion of the natives. From now on, the emphasis would be less on the saving of souls and more on the political and economic benefits of British rule. Thus “on 1 November 1858 Queen Victoria issued a proclamation that explicitly renounced ‘the right and the desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’. India was henceforth to be ruled not by the East India Company – it was to be wound up – but by the crown, represented by a Viceroy. And the government of India would never again lend its support to the Evangelical project of Christianization. On the contrary, the aim of British policy in India would henceforth be to govern with, rather than against, the grain of indigenous tradition.”⁹¹
“From another angle,” continues Lieven, “Protestantism was vital to the whole English sense of imperial mission. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, most Englishmen believed that the Protestant conscience was at the core of all progress. They were convinced that the Protestant had a sense of individual responsibility and a strong motivation to better himself and succeed in life. He was self-disciplined, purposeful and based his life on firm moral principles, which he derived for himself by reading the Bible and struggling to define his own path to salvation. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberalism had no doubt of their descent from the Protestant tradition even if they had sometimes lost faith in a personal god. By contrast, Catholics were seen to be the slaves of sentiment, tradition, ritual and ignorance. Muslims were worse, and Hindus and Buddhists worst of all. Racial stereotypes of Africans in the late nineteenth century were very familiar from sixteenth-century Ireland: the natives were shifty, immoral and idle, and needed for their own good to be forced to work. Nor had English attitudes to Catholics in general or the Irish in particular necessarily changed much over the previous 300 years. In 1882 the Regius Professor of History at Oxford University commented that ‘the Celts of Ireland are as yet unfit for parliamentary government… Left to themselves, without what they call English misrule, they would almost certainly be… the willing slaves of some hereditary despot, the representative of their old coshering chiefs, with a priesthood as absolute and as obscurantist as the Druids.’
“Such views explain the English imperialist’s powerful sense of cultural superiority and civilizing mission among indigenous populations. They explain too the doctrine of terra nullius, first proclaimed in sixteenth-century Ireland, which justified the expropriation and exploitation by a more civilized invading people of human and natural resources which a backward native society was wasting. Armed with this doctrine, one could easily justify the expropriation of indigenous peoples’ land and the eradication of indigenous culture in the name of progress. One could even at a pinch justify turning the lazy African into a productive slave or forcing the Chinese government to allow the import of opium, since these were essential to the development of the British-led international economy and the latter was the driving wheel of progress.
“Whether Catholics, Muslims and pagans could actually be converted to English Protestant virtues and, if so, how quickly the task could be accomplished was a moot point. As one might expect, the Enlightenment and its early Victorian heirs were optimistic. Some Enlightened eighteenth-century observers expected the conversion of Irish Catholics to ‘rationality’, on other words to the culture of the Protestant elite but with God largely removed. In the 1830s it was widely believed that consistent government policy, particularly as regards education, would lead to Anglicization first of India’s elites and then of the whole population. In the reformers’ minds there was no doubt that this would be wholly to Indians’ advantage, their belief in mankind’s perfectibility being matched only by their utter contempt for non-European cultural and intellectual traditions. As Charles Trevelyan put matters, ‘trained by us to happiness and independence, and endowed with our learning and political institutions, India will remain the proudest monument of British benevolence.’ In these first pristine years of Victorian liberal optimism some Englishmen had a faith in rapid progress to rationality along unilinear paths foreordained by history which was subsequently equalled by Lenin’s.
“In the British imperial context this vision always had its doubters. They included pragmatists conscious of the social disruption and political danger liberal policy might create; financial officials aware that Westminster would insist on India living on its own revenues, and that the latter barely sufficed to pay for army, police and administration – let alone ‘luxuries’ like education. More ideological opposition to liberalism also existed. This encompassed an increasing tide of late Victorian racialism, which stressed the innate biological inferiority of non-Whites. It included too romantics and, later, anthropologists, who gloried in native culture and proclaimed the need to preserve its unique traditions.
“But the British Empire could never give up its basic, albeit stuttering commitment to progress and enlightenment, since these were essential to its British elite’s understanding of history, their perception of themselves and of the legitimacy of Britain’s empire. Clearly, British liberal values and ideology did convert growing sections of the indigenous elite, firstly in India and then elsewhere: it was precisely in the name of these values that self-government and independence from Britain were demanded. But in this as in so much else formal empire was only one element in a much broader process of change and Westernization…”⁹²