Under the impact of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the cause of “humanitarian intervention” was increasingly taken up by more liberal voices across the western world. While the liberal imperialism of the late 19th century had been justified by the need to spread Christian civilisation and trade, now it was to be human rights, markets and good governance. At the height of the Kosovo war, Blair issued what amounted to a call for a new wave of worldwide intervention based on a “subtle blend” of self-interest and moral purpose. Within a year, he put this “doctrine of international community” into practice in the former colony of Sierra Leone, where British troops were sent back after a 39-year absence to intervene in a protracted, bloody civil war.
But it was the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent US-led takeover of the former British imperial zone of Afghanistan that finally outed into the political mainstream the policy that had until then dared not speak its name. By spring 2002 Blair’s foreign policy adviser and Afghan envoy, Robert Cooper published a pamphlet making the case for “a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan views”… (Seumas Milne)
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Such political adventurism has had to be at least temporarily reined as a result of the political and human disaster of the Iraq war and occupation. But the more favourable climate for this retro reactionary chic created by western military interventions has been seized by Britain’s conservative commentators and historians, such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, both to champion the cause of the new imperialism and rewrite the history of the colonial past. Ferguson is an open advocate of a formal US-run global empire. […] Roberts is an open advocate of the recolonisation of Africa and insists that “Africa has never known better times than during British rule”.
It would be interesting to hear how Roberts – or Brown – balances such grotesque claims with the latest research on the huge scale of atrocities committed by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya in the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of villages, electric shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkins’s book Britain’s Gulag – and well over 100,000 deaths. This was a time when British soldiers were paid five shillings (equal to $9 in today’s money) for each Kikuyu male they killed, when they nailed the limbs of African guerrillas to crossroads posts. And when they were photographed holding severed heads of Malayan communist “terrorists” in another war that cost over 10,000 lives.
Even in the late 1960s, as veterans described in a recent television documentary, British soldiers thrashed, tortured and murdered their way through Aden’s Crater City; one former squaddie explained that he couldn’t go into details because of the risk of war crimes prosecutions. All in the name of civilisation. The sense of continuity with today’s Iraq could not be clearer.
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Such evidence is a timely corrective to the comfortable British mythology that, in contrast to France and other European colonial powers, Britain decolonised in a peaceful and humane manner. It’s not as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a glorious record of freedom and good governance, as Ferguson and other contemporary imperial torchbearers would have us believe. Britain’s empire was in reality built on genocide, vast ethnic cleansing, slavery, rigorously enforced racial hierarchy and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: “We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress – the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings”.
Some empire apologists claim that, however brutal the first phase might have been, the 19th- and 20th-century story was one of liberty and economic progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th-century and early 20th-century India up to 30 million died in famines, as British administrators insisted on the export of grain (as they had done during the Irish famine of the 1840s) and courts ordered 80,000 floggings a year. Four million died in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 – there have been no such famines since independence.
What is now Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before the British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When India’s Andaman islands were devastated by December’s tsunami, who recalled that 80,000 political prisoners had been held in camps there in the early 20th-century, routinely experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it’s not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast, describing the British empire as an “inestimable factor of value”, even if it had been acquired with “force and often brutality”. More here.