Suck on this, Niall Ferguson

I look forward to reading Gott's book.

Is it a first of its kind though? Eg compared with Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts or the studies of Kenya of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins (with their revealing titles - Histories of the Hanged and Britain's Gulag)?

Why stop there?

Violence isn't just an essential part of Empire but also the nation state, in fact it's the only consistent aspect of governance, throughout the world and throughout the ages.

The book does seem interesting, too often its thought that Britain only conquered backward savages. It's useful to show the strength and intelligence of Britain and her enemies, if only to demonstrate how brilliant this tiny island and it's people must have been to rule the planet.

Talk about stating the obvious. Has any empire not been established by violence and held together by violence? It's a non-question.
I don't understand why I would feel guilty about what has happened in the past, it has nothing to do with me and I don't need anyone to make excuses on my behalf for the actions of my country. On that basis, should everyone living in most countries in the world feel guilty about the actions of their distant ancestors or some more than others? How do we apportion the guilt? Should there be a league table?

Ok we have a bit of form but the Germans were worse.

The question of collaboration is interesting. The role of collaboration in all relationships of domination and exploitation is something most people shrink from exploring. We need to understand it better. The long history and continuing phenomenon, for example, of female collaboration with patriarchal and even openly misogynistic structures and concepts needs to be understood if feminism is to make progress.

I think most people from the former colonies will disagree.

What's missing here is any sense of comparison. Was the British Empire particularly brutal? How did it compare with other empires? Is the notion of empire wholly abhorrent, and the self-determining nation state (or rather, local oligarchy) so much better? Lots of assumptions, here, about right and wrong.

The question of collaboration is well-put, however. Not simply "collaborating" with the occupier, but also recognizing the advantages that the occupier can bring; and sometimes choosing the present occupier because the alternative would be worse (and on rare occasion, as we've seen in the twentieth century, that includes home rule).

I am up for a guilt league table, at least we would win something.

Ok we have a bit of form but the Germans were worse.

And let's not start talking about them Russians.

theevilthatmendo: league table.

Or maybe it's time to have a game of Imperialist Atrocity Top Trumps?

What a shame to see no mention here of Leopold's Ghost, detailing certain practices current in the Belgian Congo from the 1870s up to say, after the Great War.

That would allow us tho start a real Colonial League Table, with tradable cards and the whole kaboodle. Shame.

Knowing many English, Belgians and French, it never ceases to amaze me how many of them will admit that violence happens in colonies but mostly in other people's colonies...

Go figure.

The Germans only had empire for 40-50 years or so (1871-1919)
Britain had hers for a couple of hundred.

The German Empire consisted of about 15 colonies, many of them just city-outposts.
The British empire was more than 30 colonies (+cities/outposts) covering every continent (~450m people)

The British Empire was responsible for around 25-30% of the African slave trade (~3,00,000 people),
The German Empire was established after abolition (and the pre-empire states had not much participation in slavery anyways)

So, I must disagree that the Germans were worse. The Spanish maybe, but not the Germans.

I am so ashamedto be British. I wish I were Ugandan or something.

And violence is still our greatest export. just look at the disproportionate government support given to the arms industry; though shipments are now sent with a post it note: ' try not to hurt anyone with this stuff; it upsets our viewers'

"It is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past."

Yet it's not a privilege that many serious English historians indulge. Quite the reverse. The way to get ahead in history today is to write about imperial atrocities, pretend that the English are thoroughly evil, treat non-English people as noble innocents, and try to establish that the red thread of English history is racist violence. Based on this review, Gott does not seem to be an exception. He's a cork bobbing along on the mainstream. His sort of work is too often written in a single and simplistic register of outrage, valuable and brave 30 or 40 years ago, but after the millionth example tedious, formulaic, and unhelpful to understanding the complexity of history. In many cases, though not necessarily Gott's, it's also depressingly self-congratulatory, a sort of holier-than-thou self-flagellation meant to mark the writer as standing morally above a straw version of Middle England. Yet, unlike monks who actually hurt themselves in their self-flagellations, this sort of self-flagellation is easy; it does nothing but abuse the dead and, indirectly, anyone alive who isn't similarly obsessed with doing so.

It's vital that we are open about the nastiness of empire. So far, so Gott. And I'm sure this is a fine book in its way. But obsession with guilt at some point becomes a hindrance to looking other evils in the eye and renders attempts to stand up to other evils problematic (We're all familiar with versions of the internal narrative: "As a man/woman of an evil nation, what right do I have to complain about massacres committed by others in the here and now?") And the point at which guilt may be a hindran ce to moral clarity may be the one at which books like Gott's seem, as they do now, like a cultural tic, a predictable and recurring site in the bookstore, and don't appear anything remotely like news. If this book is news to the reviewer, perhaps he hasn't been paying attention.

Jason Knightly writes: "I am so ashamed to be British. I wish I were Ugandan or something."

I think this proves the point I was just trying to make. Uganda is the country of Idi Amin. When guilt and shame about our past photoshops Idi Amin's butchery out of the picture you know you're not in a frame of mind to think about what Britain can do to stand up to tyrants abroad. And if you pretend that Idi Amin was simply Britain's fault, and not a legitimate target of British moral outrage, you're making my point again.

if only to demonstrate how brilliant this tiny island and it's people must have been to rule the planet.

Not at all - as I'm sure Gott points out in his very balanced book, the rest of the world before the British Empire arrived was populated only by stoned, pacifist hippies, who were shocked - shocked I tell you - when the uniquely evil, warmongering British invented those hitherto unknown phenomena called war and conquest...

Well - obviously it's important to point out the hideous things which were done in the name of Empire, but how oppressive can we have been when the Empire numbered perhaps 500 million people, and we had a standing army of about 125,000? When we administered India with 20,000 British people?

And if the collaborators massively outnumber the 'oppressors', then maybe your conception of what an 'Empire' is really about is what's flawed.

New Anglican: I challenge you to come up with the names of any historians in the UK whose careers have been based on writing about "imperial atrocities". Not the author of this review whose book was on science and empire, not even David Anderson who didn't start out writing on Mau Mau. Caroline Elkins might fit the bill but she is American and works in America. You are talking through your bottom here.

If you read the article carefully you might discover that the point was that it is the first of its kind to make a claim about violence across a very broad span of British imperial history.... and not about one or two episodes.

If you read the article carefully you might discover that the point was that it is the first of its kind to make a claim about violence across a very broad span of British imperial history.... and not about one or two episodes.

That seems to me to be a distinction without a difference, or maybe a distinction that only a specialist would care about. Once any "taboo" about discussing British imperial violence had been broken by exposing particular episodes, the step to discussing violence over a broad span of history is surely an easy step to make. I'm not saying that the book is worthless -- it's probably a useful addition to the discussion. What I am saying is that the yeoman's work of exposing nefarious British imperial practices, including violence, has already been done.

three words for you "central, constant, and ubiquitous":
central-- meaning not just a marginal exceptional thing but central to the enterprise
constant- meaning all the time, not just episodic
ubiquitious - meaning everywhere, not just in one or two colonies

put central + constant + ubiquitous together these represent a claim, a perspective, which is fundamentally different from that which comes out of one or two or three or more narratives of Malaya or Kenya etc. That is a distinction with a difference, if you reflect upon it.

Ok we have a bit of form but the Germans were worse.

No true Scotsman...rinse, and repeat.

Mmm - I have not had the opportunity to read the book, but commenting on the review and based on other modern histories of Empire, I am always struck by how few atrocities were perpetrated over 250 years of British colonial expansion.

Particularly when you consider the vast areas of land, millions of people and the duration of Empire. It is completely unreasonable to apply the same standards of behavior to 1700 as pertained in 1950

And one must also be clear that in discussing brutal behavior one must keep in mind the levels of punishment regularly meted out by British courts in the same periods. It must be recalled that, for example, transportation for life was considered to be great leniency.

There is also a world of difference between sins of incompetence and unintended consequences that did cause great suffering and death (such as the Irish and Indian famines) and the holocausts of say Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin where millions were intentionally slaughtered. Certainly the actions of our ancestors caused those deaths. But was it their intention so to do? For example, partitioning India was done with the intention of making a difficult situation better - not with the intention of killing an unknown (but very, very large) number of people.

And little heed is taken of the dire and arbitrary conditions indigenous people existed in before Empire. The mfecane was no picnic.

The Empire was bad, but not necessarily worse that what the world would have been without it.

Lastly (not having read the book) I assume that the following sentiment is due to the ignorance of the reviewer rather than the author:

While most rebellions ended in defeat, North Americans in 1776-83 won their independence,

At the time the colonists considered themselves to be British, not an oppressed population. The Rebellion/Independence was a civil war, between to locally almost balanced forces. It would be more appropriate to discuss the almost eradication of its indigenous population by 'post-empire' America in its westward expansion. No mercy there then, or now.

Which former colonies?

violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.

And violence wasn't a central, constant and ubiquitous part of human history?

put central + constant + ubiquitous together these represent a claim, a perspective, which is fundamentally different from that which comes out of one or two or three or more narratives of Malaya or Kenya etc.

I think you're trying to argue against a straw man who doesn't really exist -- a straw man who really believes in the "Whig piety" referred to in the article. What rational observer, once having found out about Malaya and Kenya, would assume that everywhere else British authorities acted like angels? Or that one quarter of the world's land area eager to subject itself to imperial rule? No one thinks that. Therefore the author can defend the claims that violence is constant and ubiquitous. Showing it is central is harder, not least because one would first have to define "central" (central to the purpose of empire? central to the practice of empire?). But I'm sure a definition can be found which can be defended using whatever evidence the author was able to collect.

I understand the qualitative conceptual difference you're pointing out but I don't think it's very useful outside of writing books or theses. At best the book may add to the negative side of the ledger when one does an accounting of the positive and negative aspects of the Empire, if it brings to light a heretofore ingored atrocity. But that's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

I suggest you actually read a little bit in the subject before so generously sharing your views --- take a look at Niall Ferguson's Empire (easily the best selling book on the history of the British empire, and the one which a whole generation of school children have been raised on), David Cannadine's Orientalism, Kwesi Kwarteng and Jeremy Paxton's books of this year, Andrew Roberts, Lawrence James --- take a look and see if there is a single book which makes violence into its central subject or even brings to the foreground the brutally non-consensual nature of empire, or generalises from the cases of Malaya or Kenya. Ferguson manages not to discuss the brutal suppression of Mau Mau altogether, but to tell us of how wonderful it was as a little boy to live in some segregated pocket of Kenya.

You seem not to understand why this matter, "qualitatively". Well have a look at the foreign policy of New Labour, Blair and Brown, and you see in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, how the British political class continues to assume that when you use power abroad it must be a good thing. A certain idea of the British Empire underlay that post 1997 grandiose foreign policy, which evolved from an 'ethical foreign policy' to the support for torture and the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. The moment you face directly the systematic atrocity which is imperial rule, and its basis in daily and repeated brutality, you become a little less sanguine that the application of force abroad can yield anything other than horror and destruction.

The moment you face directly the systematic atrocity which is imperial rule, and its basis in daily and repeated brutality, you become a little less sanguine that the application of force abroad can yield anything other than horror and destruction.

What happens when the worst horror and destruction visited upon a people was systematically perpetrated by domestic rulers? By which yardstick do you want to judge an empire then?

In my last post I was going to identify myself as an American, but for some reason didn't. I haven't read any of the books* you list, but I do think I have a pretty decent grasp of British history (especially for an American layman). You seem to assume that you're more informed about the details of the British Empire than I am, which may very well be true. But you also assume that anyone who sees the information that you see will come to the same conclusions as you do. This is a common assumption, but in my experience it's generally false.

As an American, moreover as an American whose parents came from eastern Europe, I'm actually predisposed to view the Brits as the "bad guys." So I thought that books such as Ferguson's which point out the positive contributions of the British Empire to be a useful corrective to the standard narrative. After all, we in America have a very similar debate to you in the UK about our "empire." And I don't see a real discontinuity in foreign policy after 1997; after all, the UK had joined the US in enforcing a No Fly Zone and an embargo on Iraq for years by that point (to bring up just one example).

But the parallels between UK and US imperial narratives aside, it's really the domestic tyrants all over the world that invalidate the argument that empires are bad as such.** When you watch a country that you care about being driven into the ground by domestic rulers, you become a little less sanguine about the idea that getting rid of an empire will lead to an improvement.

* Niall Ferguson's Empire was published less than ten years ago, hardly enough time for it to raise a "whole generation of school children."
** To make this point, one has to stop viewing the nation-state as somehow the natural political unit; but since you're happy to attack the pieties of empire I don't think you'll have too much trouble picking apart the idea of the nation-state.

While I am not a pessimist about the potential for humanity to build less violent societies. If Gott is arguing that the British Empire was uniquely violent, then he is wrong. If he argues that the colonialism was violent and non-consensual, he is right.

But, the vast majority of all governmental systems prior to the rise of popular democracy were often violent and non-consensual. The empire took violent and non-consensual governments and replaced them with violent and non-consensual governments.
Did a farmer in Cornwall prior to the popular franchise, have any more influence on the people who ruled him than those in India? both are ruled by the same people. Does the nationality of the ruler matter, did an Indian peasant care that he was being killed by the Mughals or the British?

Comparisons are fascinating things, what is Gott comparing the violence of colonial rule to?
To the alternative domestic rulers had colonisation not occurred?
To the rulers had those places been colonised by other European powers?
To the level of violence in domestic rule at the time?
or to the level of violence in a modern democracy?

Congratulations, weren't the people in the past horrible.

To quote Werner Herzog "I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."

But, the vast majority of all governmental systems prior to the rise of popular democracy were often violent and non-consensual.

I agree with the main thrust of your post. But I'm really starting to wonder about violence in modern democracies (or at least in the USA, where I live). It certainly seems that if you step out of line, the state has no compunction about using violence to get you back in line. Is it simply that modern democracies have gotten better at non-violent control, so that there is less need to use violence? Or is there really a greater aversion to violence?

'You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.'

Richard writes in his article:

Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.

But I would recommend the following recently published book, written by an Indian writer with a background in the natural sciences:

Madhusree Mukerjee, "Churchill's secret war. The British empire and the raving of India during WW 2." (2011)

It is also a response to the inanely naive comment above from Panyampickle: "I am always struck by how few atrocities were perpetrated over 250 years of British colonial expansion."

A series of decisions by Churchill between 1939 and 1944 directly and knowingly resulted in the death by hunger of some four million Indians.

"But this is not a book to make any British person feel guilty. For guilt could arise only if the reader made a narcissistic identification with the past of the British empire."

You've obviously never seen the readers' comments on the Telegraph website.

Ah, but I don't subscribe to Mukerjee's thesis.

In my OP I did not deny the effect, but for it to be an 'atrocity' there must be intent.

And a dispassionate review of the facts does not support that.

To philstyle:

Please read some history and mug up the Hereros massacres. There's a book entitled "Kaiser Wilhelm's Holocaust" or some such.

Then you'll appreciate how the Germans beat us hollow in the brutality stakes.

Britons can, if they dare, choose to identify with the rebels rather than the conquerors, and to claim Lakshmi Bai and Gandhi, rather than Victoria and Churchill, as spiritual ancestors.

Gandhi would have been just wonderful in 1940. "We shall passively resist them on the beaches........"

www.stupidwars.com

Gott has to be right that the violence perpetrated by British imperialists has been under-exposed in Britain and is right to make a corrective to that failing. But looking at imperialism globally, it does seem that the British, given the vast areas they controlled and the vast numbers of people they governed, committed relatively less violence per square kilometre than other European imperialists. Just look at the actions of the Belgians in the Congo, the Spanish in the Americas, the Germans in Southwest Africa (now Namibia), the French in Vietnam and the Dutch in Bali for some egregious examples. Every European nation capable of playing the imperialist game did so; it was the nature of the times. Whilst the victims of the violence couldn't have cared less which country was doing more of it or doing it worse, caring only how much pain they themselves were suffering, the comparisons are a proper thing to study historically.

As to guilt, it's not just a matter of the past in which we today took no part. The pre-eminence which Britain still enjoys as sixth biggest economy in the world comes out of the days of the British Empire, and therefore some of the wealth and privilege (e.g. a permanent seat in the UN Security Council) that Britons enjoy today devolves from the actions of the British Empire. That makes guilt reasonable.

One stubborn colonialism mythology that has not yet been adequately debunked is the notion that British rule elevated the quality of life for the Empire's 'unwashed hordes'. It's still the favourite canard for staunch defenders of the British Empire. But the evidence is clear that British rule did not bring human progress.

For example, In 1800, India's share of the world's imported manufactured products was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favour.

In 1789, the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable; a century later, Europeans and Americans were much better off.
Per capita income in India stayed the same from 1759 to 1947.

Before 1800, Indian and Chinese rulers had a quite good record of mitigating famines: whereas for the previous two millennia there was one major famine a century, under British rule there was one every four years!

In 1876, Lord Lytton and his bureaucrats in India were obsessed with the idea that relief would just encourage Indian shirking. So they imposed a calorie/work regimen that was worse than that imposed by the Nazis at Buchenwald concentration camp. Yet despite that, the Famine inquiries in the 1880s concluded that the main cause of the millions of starved dead was that 'too much money was spent on relief'!

Britain in the late 19th century was able to maintain its balance of payments and its complex system of free trade because surpluses in Asia balanced its increasing trade deficits with Germany and the United States.

India had to bear the military costs of empire, and deal with British irrigation schemes which were often poorly funded, inappropriate for local conditions and had pernicious ecological effects. China, by contrast faced a severe ecological crisis which it could not escape, as the Europeans did, by colonizing the Western hemisphere.

Moreover, the West forced China to keep up the opium trade, and forced it into inequitable trading arrangements. This encouraged the Chinese government to concentrate on protecting the ports and its sovereignty while underfunding the collapsing irrigation system. Ecological and political crisis fed off each other, leading to revolution and continued ecological crisis to the present day.

Reading this thread, the following points occur to me:

1) In broad terms, readers fall into two categories, those who have some knowledge of the academic literature - which is vast and ever-expanding - and those that are familiar with a handful of popular histories, of which Ferguson's is the most prominent. Academic historians of empire will be familiar with much of what Gott has written but it has not been presented in a systematic way to general readers before. Its originality should be judged according to the exposure of the non-academic reader to this ideas. A parallel can be found in the reception of Tim Synder's Bloodlands: parts of Richard Evans' savage critique in the LRB was predicated on the notion that 'we' already know all this: who is the 'we', academic specialists or the general reader? Snyder's book is clearly aimed at the mass market and as this it works. The same, I suspect, can be said of Gott. Some people might be offended by this as elitism, but unless you are familiar with the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History et al then you really are not in a position to judge.

2) These discussions so often become relativist: we were not as bad as the Germans. On the one hand, this takes us into Fergusonian realpolitik, and, on the other, it just reveals how defensive 'we' (that problematic 'we' again) are about the Empire. British culture has not begun to come to terms with the violent realities of its past, of the fact that some of our finest cities (and so many of those National Trust houses) were built on the slave trade (see the architectural legacy of slavery in Liverpool or Bristol), of that fact that much of our social, political and economic elite are the inheritors of imperial profit - the City of London was built on Empire; for the triumphalist version of Empire, see the Albert Memorial or, indeed, the extraordinary working environment of the Foreign Secretary...

3) Following on from this, is the problem 'we' have in accommodating the ways in which the enlightenment ideals by which we live provided much of the ideological justification of Empire (along with evangelical Christianity): ideologies of improvement look different in Bengal than they might in the Midlands (though, pace John Clare, the distinction might be less stark than we suppose). Much post-colonial writing explicitly - and sometimes far too sweepingly - exposes the violence done to non-European cultures in the name of enlightenment (Kipling's 'White Man's Burden')...

Whatever. It's still infinitely preferable to oleaginous works such as Tim Jeal's recent love-letter to Lord Stanley. in which Jeal blithely defends Stanley's murders, sexual child abuse, racism, etc. Too many English historians seem incapable of objectivity; rather than the "obsession of guilt" you accused Gott of, they manifest an obsession of innocence which cloaks the carnage.

I learned about Stanley as a boy. But it was decades later that I learned that "Stanley shoots negroes as if they were monkeys.", as Sir Richard Francis Burton, his contemporary, reported. The reason that wasn't taught in class when I was a boy was because of my English history teacher 'obsession of innocence'. Gott's blood-dripping narrative of British colonialism does much to expose just how draped in the Union Jack our classrooms and history books really are.

Jeal's defence of Stanley hunting down and murdering teenage African civilian porters for desertion is even more unfathomable when one considers the fact, well known to Jeal, that while Stanley was in military uniform during the American Civil War he had himself deserted, TWICE - once from each side.

Even Stanley's alleged sexual relationship with under-aged boys is not enough to dull Jeal's boyish admiration for Stanley: Jeal dismissed it all in an online exchange with me as 'no big deal'. When I asked himif it was intellectually bankrupt to excuse Stanley's brutality towards Africans as 'par for the course' during Victorian times but then defend his homosexual relationships with under-aged boy - that were criminal acts during Victorian times - he accused me of being nutty and exited the exchange.

The next I heard of Jeal was when he wrote a piece in the Telegraph piece vigorously endorsing efforts to build a statue in honour of Stanley - and dismissing opposition to it as "high-minded grapeshot.."

I suppose cultural myopia that severe should be expected from an English historian whose grandfather was the 13th Earl of Huntingdon, and one who was educated at Westminster School, London, and Christ Church, Oxford. But I prefer my history served al dente - like Gott served it.