How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years

Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.

This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.

xperts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.

In a recent paper in the journal World Development, we used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.

Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.

While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. 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.

How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life? There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector. Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world, exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete. This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.

According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs, allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.

This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country. As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.

To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free. These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.

READ MORE:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

Kenyan authorities on Monday blocked a news conference meant to air concerns about alleged British Army misconduct in the country, including issues of human rights and environmental abuses, according to Reuters.

The move came just hours before the arrival of Britain’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla for a four-day state visit to the East African country, which celebrates its 60th anniversary of independence from the UK this year. The visit from Tuesday will be used to recognize the “more painful aspects” of shared history, including the Mau Mau rebellion in the former British colony from 1952 to 1960, which killed thousands of Kenyans, the royal family said in an earlier statement.

Locals in the central town of Lolldaiga have accused the British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK) of causing a forest fire in 2021 that destroyed more than 12,000 acres of a nature reserve, and of being involved in the 2012 murder of a woman.

Agnes Wanjiru, 21, was stabbed to death and dumped in a septic tank at a hotel in Nanyuki, allegedly by UK forces, after a night of partying with soldiers. More than a decade after her murder, Wanjiru’s family said justice has yet to be served.

British authorities have promised to investigate the allegations against BATUK, one of the UK’s largest military training bases abroad, with about 100 permanent staff in Nanyuki, 200km north of the capital Nairobi.

The Kenyan government launched an investigation in August in response to a wave of protests from local communities near the army base in Laikipia County and renewed outrage over Wanjiru’s unresolved case, prompted by reports of a British soldier confessing to her murder. The findings of the probe are expected to be submitted to parliament by the end of the year.

However, locals continue to denounce the British Army’s presence, with some recently telling RT that the troops lack respect for Kenyans and believe they have immunity, which is why many of the “crimes” they commit go uninvestigated.

On Monday, James Mwangi, the head of a human rights group supporting victims of alleged environmental damage in Lolldaiga, told Reuters that police had warned the management of a Nairobi hotel booked to host the event against BATUK.

The outlet also claimed that before the news conference could take place, a vehicle carrying at least 20 police officers and two smaller trucks had blocked access to the venue.

Kenyan lawyer Tom Macharia, who represents the Lolldaiga community, is quoted by Reuters as saying the police actions were “bad optics... If the king is genuine about this restart and resetting the relationship with Kenya, he has gotten off on the wrong footing.”

The British High Commission in Nairobi has reportedly said the policing of protests in Kenya is the responsibility of the local authorities.

https://www.rt.com/africa/586237-kenya-uk-army-criticism-blockade/

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

King Charles keeps British colonial legacy mindset alive
The issue of abuses committed by UK troops has been left to civil society and remnants of freedom fighters for decades, while avoiding the focus of the country’s media and elites

By Dr. Westen K. Shilaho

The British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK) in Nanyuki, some 195 kilometers north of Nairobi, has elicited controversy over the years. Britain has permanently stationed about 200 soldiers in Kenya at any given time since Kenya gained independence in 1963. The Kenyan government regards its military cooperation with Britain as strategic to its national security, and the British troops and their Kenyan counterparts hold joint training from the camp. Crucially, BATUK is central to Kenya’s contribution to the ‘global fight’ against terrorism as a reliable Western ally in the East African and the Horn subregion. Kenya, to critics, is a proxy in this counterterrorism campaign and acts at the behest of Western powers.

Historically, Kenya has prized its relationship with Britain. Kenya is the first commonwealth country that the British monarch, King Charles III, visited after coronation. It is testament to Kenya’s longstanding relations with Britain. It is also a dubious distinction that shows that the colonial hangover still runs deep in the country. Diplomatically, the two countries have hardly had frosty relations except on occasions when British envoys abandoned diplomatic niceties and pointedly criticized the Kenyan government for runaway corruption, and other state excesses. Mau Mau, a liberation movement that led an uprising against the British colonialists, was only unbanned recently in 2003. Kenya’s postcolonial political elite, offshoots of collaborators – home guards – naturally inherited British antipathy against the Mau Mau and maintained colonial era legislation that outlawed them. 

The British government has never acknowledged colonial era atrocities in concentration camps in Kenya that included rape, castrations, torture, and murder. The British monarch, during a state visit to Kenya last week, used the words “greatest sorrow and deepest regret” to describe “the heinous and unjustified acts of violence against Kenyans” during the fight for independence. These are vague words that did not include an apology or a pledge for reparations.

Previous Kenyan presidents had shied away from calling for reparations from Britain. So has the Kenyan media, ever unwilling to sharply frame public interest issues. For decades, this issue has been left to civil society and remnants of freedom fighters. However, President William Ruto unprecedently called for reparations during his meeting with the monarch for egregious atrocities committed against the Mau Mau and various other liberation movements and civilians during colonialism. 

The Kenyan government often describes its relations with Britain as warm and cordial despite an atrocious colonial legacy and the postcolonial atrocities by the British troops training from Nanyuki. The monarch described these relations as a “modern partnership of equals.” Critics do not see how a colonial power and its former colony can have such a relationship. They fault the military treaty between Kenya and Britain as a symbol of enduring neocolonialism, imperialism, and erosion of Kenya’s sovereignty. In 2021, the treaty was up for renewal and some voices called for it to be scrapped, but expectedly, it was extended for five more years. This, however, did not dampen calls for reparations and an end to the treaty. Kenya’s political elite is anglophile in orientation. This is why for decades the problematic relations with Britain have not received due attention.

To some residents of Nanyuki, BATUK is a boost to the local economy. Besides employment opportunities to some Kenyans from the area and other parts of the country, this military base has injected $40 million into the local economy since 2016. Whenever the British soldiers come, they spend generously, particularly on entertainment. It is a windfall to some businesspeople and workers. Once they leave, however, the town turns forlorn until the next batch of soldiers arrive. This financial gain is what, to critics, made successive Kenyan governments unable to rein in rogue British soldiers or end this treaty altogether. It is not all glamour with BATUK, however.

This camp is a metaphor of gross human rights violations. Uncleared munitions at the training camp have caused untold suffering to children and adults over the years, but the victims have not had justice. Residents lost lives at the hands of the British soldiers, but no one has been held to account. The military treaty does not explicitly accord the British troops immunity against criminal prosecution, but has a caveat that effectively does. Law-breaking British soldiers can only be tried in Kenya with the agreement of the UK government. It explains why the Kenyan authorities have not held errant British soldiers criminally accountable and the UK government liable for the atrocities associated with its troops. Insidiously, the treaty ringfences British military interests and personnel in Kenya against accountability.

Cases of people being maimed by unexploded ordnance are common in Archer’s Post, an area not too far from Nanyuki. The victims have lost limbs, eyes, hearing, and even life owing to uncleared training grounds. Some of the victims have been compensated, but many more have not, or never will be. Some of the victims lost their cases on technicalities. When injured, disputes sometimes arise as to whose unexploded munition it was since Kenyan and British troops train in the same area.

British troops have also been accused of raping Kenyan women with impunity over the decades. The plight of these victims is never taken seriously, owing to the lack of political will to stand up to the British. The balance of power between Britain and Kenya is lopsided, weighted heavily towards Britain. Ordinary Kenyans’ lives are trivialized by the government’s unwillingness to fight for them.

One of the most egregious cases of impunity by the British troops in Nanyuki is the murder of a young Kenyan woman, Agnes Wanjiru, whose body was dumped in a hotel septic tank close to the camp in 2012. She had been seen alive in the company of a British soldier. The suspect showed other soldiers the body and the murder was reported to senior British officers, but no action was taken. The suspect was allowed to leave Kenya and while in Britain, allegedly casually confessed to colleagues that he murdered the woman. This story was broken by the British media and half-heartedly amplified by the Kenyan press. Authorities in Nairobi showed a nominal interest in the case to save face. The government and media’s first priority appeared to be damage control, not concern for justice for Wanjiru – or for others who have been maimed and died over the years courtesy of British troops. 

Once the story fell off the front pages of newspapers and prime time headlines, the government went back to default settings. They could not afford to associate BATUK with atrocities and jeopardize their relationship with Britain. The murder of Wanjiru was as much an indictment on the Kenyan government as it was on a military treaty that enables the commission of gross human rights violations in Nanyuki and its surroundings without accountability. It highlights racial undertones in the relations between the two countries. Whiteness shields these British troops from justice and the authorities of Kenya and Britain seem to converge on this recalcitrant legacy of impunity.

Despite lone voices from social media and civil society who question the relevance of BATUK 60 years after independence, the military pact is likely to exist far into the future and its supposed benefits overplayed. The British monarch was obsequiously accorded red-carpet treatment throughout his four-day state visit to Kenya. Consciousness about the disturbing relationship between Kenya and Britain is yet to take hold in the imagination of a critical mass of Kenyans. Until that happens, troops associated with BATUK will continue to hurt Kenyans without any recourse to justice.

https://www.rt.com/africa/586671-kenya-uk-army-criticism-colonialism/

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....