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Alex Lo

A viral clip renews the headlined question for me. Jameela Jamil, a British actress of Pakistani and Indian descent, caused a public row in the UK for her interview last month on Yestergays, a pop culture podcast. She said: “Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy because British people are truly the most evil people in history. Like, they are Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India … We colonised the world.”
A similar figure came from Indian economist Utsa Patnaik. Based on her examination of historical tax and trade records, as well as a total export surplus with a 5 per cent compound interest rate from 1765 to 1938, she calculated that Britain drained around US$45 trillion from India in that time.
The conservative British press reacted with fury at Jamil. While I don’t think British people are evil, the British Empire definitely was.
Consider the British colonisation of India. Pakistan came into existence because of the extremely reckless and bloody British partition of newly independent India. Also consider the exploitation of China under the Qing dynasty. The two events were intimately connected in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Today, talk about man-made famines and many people immediately think of Mao Zedong and the Great Famine. However, British imperialists practically invented such famines, causing the death of millions in India and Ireland.
“The British oversaw – and contributed through inaction to – dozens of famines during two centuries of colonial rule, culminating in the 1943 famine (also in Bengal) that cost 2 million Indians their lives,” historian Audrey Truschke wrote in her book India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent.

Why and how? By the middle of the 18th century, the East India Company – chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 and which grew to become one of the world’s pre-eminent trading firms, with many features of a modern state, including its own army and navy – became a victim of its own success.
Its trade with India and China was taking off. However, its income was booked in pounds sterling, which couldn’t be used in the Asian trade. Silver was the international currency. In the early part of the century, the Spanish empire amassed massive gold and silver from South America but needed African slaves to work there. The British used the special status of their ports for the transatlantic slave trade to balance payments, exchanging British pounds for Spanish silver, but wars and trade conflicts with Spain dismantled this arrangement.
In 1757, the East India Company hatched a scheme to take over Bihar and Orissa (now Odisha) in Bengal by force. That was the beginning of the end for the world-beating Indian cotton and textile manufacturing.
The East India Company had a windfall for a short time. It also took over tax collection but assumed none of the responsibilities exercised by the previous indigenous rulers. With the failed monsoon in 1769, local farmers and workmen were left destitute, but the British relentlessly kept up with tax collection. Millions perished.
It was also a financial debacle with far-reaching consequences for the British Empire. To bail out the East India Company, in which many British MPs were shareholders, Parliament granted it a monopoly in the tea trade in North America, along with some of the tax receipts.
That undercut the American colonist-merchants, leading to the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773. This amplified the then decade-old slogan, “No taxation without representation” and led to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Now comes the China connection. The trade was a one-way street: tea out of China, silver in return. That trade deficit with the Qing dynasty was as intolerable to the British Empire as it is with the United States today. It was made worse by the loss of the American colonies. Opium was the magic bullet. The East India Company escalated and commercialised the illicit trade by forcing Indian farmers to grow poppies. It sold the drug to wealthy Chinese addicts, smugglers and traders, who paid with silver.
The trade deficit reversed. Meanwhile, India’s textile manufacturing was decimated, not least by mechanised weaving and spinning during the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Across two centuries, Britain impoverished, dispossessed and killed tens of millions of Indians, sickened millions of Chinese and dismembered their country and provoked a revolution in North America. But there is karma in history.
The Americans rebelled and eventually formed their own, even more powerful empire. India is now a major power, and China today has the world’s second-largest economy. The UK? Well, we all know how it is today.


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How ‘evil’ was the British Empire? Centuries of theft and destruction

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A painting depicts a scene from the First Opium War between Britain and China. Photo: Shutterstock

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World

From Indian colonisation to the opium trade, an empire of avarice and brutality was powered by the East India Company


From Indian colonisation to the opium trade, an empire of avarice and brutality was powered by the East India Company.


China-UK relations

Chinese history

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Ireland

United States

China

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Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


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As I see it

How ‘evil’ was the British Empire? Centuries of theft and destruction

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From Indian colonisation to the opium trade, an empire of avarice and brutality was powered by the East India Company

From Indian colonisation to the opium trade, an empire of avarice and brutality was powered by the East India Company