| British Imperialism
by Great Orion Voyager © 2009 thorkorps “Look well upon me! I am still alive and by the Grace of God I still shall conquer this land!” William at the Battle of Hastings, 1066 British Imperialism is based on Roman Imperialism: The British learned everything from being conquered by the Romans. Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BCE; Claudius expanded Roman Occupation in 43 AD. Hadrian built his stone wall across Northern England in 122 AD, forced to admit fierce Scots Highlander clans could never be subjugated. But Southern England was heavily colonized. London was founded by Rome as Londinium in 43 AD: London served as the fortress where Roman Legions were stationed before walking to northern frontier border wars. English roads were built by Romans as efficient routes for legions to walk north as carts loaded with tax revenue, Celtic gold and grain rolled south to London, where the loot was loaded onto cargo ships bound for Rome. Roman Imperial strategy was simple: Invade regions of unorganized war tribes. Roman Legions would roll over opposition like tanks, in densely-packed units covered in shields, metal and leather armor, impaling Celts on long spears, engaging them in skillful combat with the gladius short sword. Offer survivors a choice: Have your carotid artery severed with a gladius, or be sold into slavery, or agree to be a subjugated “Friend of Rome.” Tough choice: “Friends of Rome” were forced to pay Roman governors an annual “tribute” tax of gold and grain. Failure to pay tax would bring the return of a legion to burn your village and crops. The British Isles consisted of unorganized Celtic war tribes unable to stand up to the efficient legions: Southern England was stripped of its gold and grain. But Irish Celts and Scots Highlanders vowed to fight Rome to the last man in frontier border wars lasting centuries. By 410 AD, the Roman Empire was overextended into Germany and collapsed under its own weight of corruption and injustice: Alaric and the Visigoths sacked and looted Rome in 410, effectively ending the Western Empire. 793 AD: Vikings sacked Lindisfarne Monastery and beheaded every monk they could find. Viking invasions from Sweden, Denmark and Norway plagued the British Isles for the next three centuries. Imperialism did not come from Vikings, but from the Anglo-Saxon response to the Vikings: From 871-899, Wessex Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great fought Vikings, founded the Royal Navy and introduced Feudalism to pay for National Defense: Warlords built castles across the British Isles vowing to protect peasants against Viking invasions, in exchange for tax of grain. Feudalism devolved into imperialism as farmers were rendered powerless surfs. “Warlord” and “Landlord” mean the same thing: Lords oppress the public to turn them into poor sharecropper slaves. The British Empire’s first occupied territory was England: The Norman Conquest was brutal imperialism. William the Conqueror spoke French, not English. In 1066 William murdered English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, declared himself King of England, and launched a campaign of terror to subjugate English, Welsh, Scots and Irish freedom fighters. William wrote laws claiming all profit and land now belonged to his Norman lords, and these laws were written in French, not English. English yeomen could not even comprehend these laws. Washington Irving describes William and the Normans as greedy gangsters, bloodthirsty pirates masquerading as legitimate government: Such regimes are illegitimate because they rule through fear and bloodshed. Norman lords erected castles across the British Isles not as National Defense against Vikings, but as colonial fortresses to protect French-speaking Normans from the British citizens they oppressed: English, Welsh, Scots and Irish clans truly hated the Normans and fought border skirmishes so fierce the Normans had to write off Scotland and Ireland as impossible to conquer. The Enclosure of the Commons was a crime: Elizabethan warlords stole yeoman farmlands, drove yeomen begging onto London streets, then outlawed begging, then imprisoned this beggar class for centuries, until Georgian aristocrats embarked on their Final Solution, chaining and shipping thousands of English and Irish poor to tragic permanent exile in Australia. Talk about being disenfranchised! Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated “The proletariat created by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed as fast as it was thrown upon the world: They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds.... Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal…. Edward VI. 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. All persons have the right to take away the children of vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th…. Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed.... James I: Any one wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and vagabond…. Agricultural people, expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.... The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital.” British East India Company was started by Queen Elizabeth in 1600 to steal the East Indies Spice Trade from Dutch East India Company: British East India Company was a publicly sanctioned private corporation. Company warships would fire cannons at Dutch ships on sight. They were pirates. East India Company men were Real Men, fearlessly sailing the world to brave typhoons in tall ships, die of scurvy and ship fever, fight hostile natives on uncharted islands, fight battles greatly outnumbered against ferocious Muslim and Hindu war tribes throughout India, then cut complex trade deals with warlords who spoke no English and had no interpreters. East India Company men faced enormous odds against returning to England alive. Why did they risk almost certain death on global misadventures? For the money: If they won the battle and conquered the tribes, they could steal all the treasure they could carry and retire rich. Many East India Company men would fight battles, loot India, cash their fortune in London, blow the fortune gambling, return to India to fight some more. East India Company men ranged from London aristocrats to penniless peasants, but they all shared insatiable thirst for adventure, lust for treasure, and fearless stoicism in the face of certain death: Tough guys. Robert Clive was one of these Fearless Mad-dog Englishmen: He arrived to India as a teenage mercenary for East India Company. For the next few decades he battled war tribes using “Divide and Conquer” strategy: Get Muslim and Hindu war tribes to fight each other, offer military support to both sides, after they decimate each other, force them into lucrative partnerships to claim land, resources and profits. With each battle victory Clive won vast fortunes. Muslim and Hindu war tribes, Nizam of Deccan, Nawab of Bengal, Nizam of Hyderabad, the Carnatic Nawab, Muslim Mughals, Maratha cavalry, all fought each other yet the victor always seemed to be East India Company! “The less said about our professions, the better, for we have been most things in our time. We’ve been all over India, and decided it ain’t big enough for such as we: We’re going to Kaffiristan to be kings. It’s a place of war tribes, which is to say, it’s a land of opportunity for such as we, who know how to train men and lead them into battle. We’ll say to any chief we can find, ‘do you want to vanquish your foes?’ He’ll say ‘Of course!’ We’ll fight for him, make him king, then we’ll subvert that king. We’ll seize his royal throne and loot the country four ways from Sunday!” Michael Caine as Peachy, Sean Connery as Danny, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING The Seven Years War of 1756-1763 was the First World War: British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese warships would attack each other on sight in countless naval skirmishes across the planet, from Brazil to Canada, from Calcutta to Tahiti, and all the islands between. The 1763 Treaty of Paris awarded Britain much of the French Empire including Canada and India. You may have seen in pirate movies the treasure East India Company looted from India: Big wooden chests full of gold coins, royal jewelry, dazzling gems and pearls: Warlords pillaged local royalty, then trade deals awarded treasure chests to East India Company, to sail back to London, unless storms or pirates got the loot and killed the crew. Clive himself lost a chest of gold coins worth £33,000 (worth millions today) when HMS Dodington sank. Robert Clive fought war tribes for Madras, Calcutta and Bengal. For battle victories Clive was made Governor of Bengal. In 1757 Clive was victorious at the Battle of Plassey and demanded from warlords £1 million for East India Company, another £500,000 for white colonists, £200,000 for native mercenaries. Clive claimed for himself £160,000 (worth millions today). East India Company forced Indians to pay rent for their own land, bringing over £100,000 per year: Bengal Governor Clive personally took £27,000 per year, a vast fortune in rent and tax taken from starving farmers. At 35 years old Clive sailed to London with £300,000: As one of Britain’s richest aristocrats, he bought huge English manor estates designed by Lancelot Capability Brown. Famines from 1770-1773 killed millions in India and a third of Bengal, as the British looted the tax base. India was drained of wealth: East India Company conquest of India created a Gold Rush as immoral mercenaries of every rank joined the feeding frenzy: Crony contractor corruption ran amok. One warlord handed Clive £70,000. Greedy contractors got rich off bribes. It was like Halliburton and Blackwater stealing billions of American tax dollars accountable to no one. Envious of his vast unearned fortune, Parliament lords accused Clive of massive corruption. Parliament hounded Clive until he committed suicide, stabbing himself to death at age 49. Warren Hastings followed Clive and became Governor of India from 1773-1785: Hastings brought reforms, modernized the court system, and attempted to rein in corruption. Yet crony contractor corruption remained ubiquitous and unstoppable. Parliament impeached Hastings in the Trial of the Century from 1787 to 1795: Hastings was acquitted: If Hastings was guilty of corruption, so were all the Parliament lords bribed by East India Company lobbyists. Crony contractor corruption was simply how British Imperialism worked. Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 31: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.... The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as the Chinese trade in general.... Monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employees themselves fixed the price and plundered at will. The Trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases: A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000.... The Company and its employees from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.” “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” In the Georgian Era, much of this empire belonged to East India Company, as it seized all profit from cotton, tea, silk, opium and spices. Company monopoly of Indian cotton was typical: Pay starving farmers to grow and pick cotton, ship the cotton to London to sell at dumping prices, hire English tailors to make clothes, ship the clothes back to India and force the natives to buy English clothes at sharp import markup. The Company even had the nerve to outlaw locally-made clothing. Indian cotton thus kept Indians poor as Company middlemen got rich. Edmund Burke and the Whigs fought the Company, but Tories bribed by Company lobbyists convinced Parliament that the Company was vital for British Foreign Policy: Let Company men risk death in battle and steal resources: Their loot enriches London and extends British power. East India Company claimed India, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Manila, dozens of islands throughout the planet. East India Company tried to claim America and Canada, but it didn’t quite work out as planned: The 1773 Boston Tea Party was both a tax rebellion against King George and Lord North, and a revolt against the Company. Parliament awarded the Company an American colonial tea monopoly in the 1773 Tea Act. American colonists and local merchants refused to be driven out of business. East India Company greed directly inspired the American Revolution. When China banned opium sales to curb Chinese opium addiction, East India Company declared war on China, smuggling vast amounts of opium into black markets: The Company convinced the Royal Navy to fire warship cannons at Chinese ports. In the Opium War of 1840, the Royal Navy crushed China, destroying southern ports, and in ruinous treaty, stole China’s prize port of Hong Kong, which remained under British rule for the next 150 years. This treaty forced China to buy vast amounts of Company opium, perhaps the only treaty in history to force a nation into mandatory drug addiction: LA crack-slinga gangstas got nuthin on East India Company, Da Big Pimp Daddy of global drug pushers! The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was horribly bloody and violent, terrorizing India for a full year: It began when British officers forced Muslim mercenaries to load rifles lubricated with pork grease. Muslims had enough of British disrespect for religion and culture. They killed dozens of British officers, burned British colonies and raped officer’s wives. In response the Royal Navy blew to pieces entire native villages, rounding up local men and boys, executing them without trial, beheading them, cutting some into pieces, dangling heads as a warning to rebels. British terror backfired, expanding the uprising, inspiring Hindus to join Muslims declaring war to drive the British back into the sea: In 1857, women and children cowered in terror as men on both sides committed countless atrocities and terrorism. Parliament blamed the Company for the 1857 Rebellion. It was the last straw: Parliament dismantled East India Company in 1858, replacing it with direct British rule of India for the next century. In 1874 the last remnants of East India Company were dissolved altogether. “Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.” Rudyard Kipling America was a result of British Imperialism: Georgia was founded as a British penal colony where convicts were sold as Indentured Servants: From 1732-1777, over 60,000 whites were sold as servants in Georgia. They became the Socioeconomic Competitor of African slaves imported by cotton, tobacco and sugar cane plantation capitalists. Ten million Africans were enslaved in the New World: British colonies banned slavery in 1834, but it continued in America until President Lincoln banned it in 1863. Once freed, African slaves became sharecroppers who competed with poor white descendants of convicts throughout the Deep South. Klu Klux Klan terrorists were progeny of British prison convicts: Racist Warmonger Immoral Jesus Cultist character flaws of the Southern Man today are due to the fact that he is descended from white trash prison convicts. Australia was a result of British Imperialism: Captain James Cook charted the East Coast of Australia in 1770. King George soon approved plans to use Australia as a dumping ground for London’s poor: Severe and unjust laws caused the poor to flood British prisons. In the Georgian Era, the poor were sentenced to decades in prison, even death sentences, for shoplifting bread and clothes. Dungeons forced together young girls and teenage shoplifters with old rapists and homicidal psychotics. Just weeks before Captain Cook’s Third Voyage, Captain Charlie Clerke was thrown into a London debtor’s prison for his brother’s gambling debt; while in this filthy dungeon he caught tuberculosis and died of it before he could finish Third Voyage. Tuberculosis caught in prison cells killed countless poor folk. Due to unjust sentences, every prison was overwhelmed. In desperation, King George approved retired Royal Navy warships as “prison-hulks” where American Revolution Prisoners of War, Irish Freedom Fighters, and the starving poor were chained like African slaves in dark lower decks. So many hulks were soon anchored on the Thames crowding shipping lanes that King George announced it was time for The Final Solution: Ship poor folk to tragic permanent exile in Australia. As Robert Hughes documents in THE FATAL SHORE, King George ordered Captain Arthur Phillip to ship hundreds of convicts to Australia in 1788. After Captain Phillip’s First Transport, subsequent transport contracts fell into the hands of the most despicable slavers: Sometimes half the convicts starved and died of scurvy before reaching Australia, chained in lower decks of the same slave ships used to bring Africans across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. Slavers still got paid even if half their cargo died. A teenager given life for shoplifting bread, commuted to hard labor in Australia, would die of scurvy chained in the dark lower deck of a slave ship before reaching Australia. From 1788-1848, over 160,000 convicts were sent to hard labor in Australia: Once they earned their “Ticket of Leave,” parolees were allowed to own land. Paroled convicts founded half the population of Australia, including many Irish Freedom Fighters. Convict transports finally stopped in the 1848 Revolution that swept Europe demanding populist reforms. Australia’s 1851 Gold Rush drew gold miners from across the planet, and suddenly the young nation had all the free labor it needed. London’s starving poor jumped at the chance to win a sentence in Australia, where they could get paroled then strike it rich panning gold: Australia was no longer seen as punishment or exile. European diseases wiped out native populations: Millions of American Indians and Australian Aborigines died from small pox; many were killed by whites in brutal frontier wars. The entire Aborigine population of Tasmania was driven extinct. Whole American Indian tribes disappeared. British Imperialists fought Zulus and Dutch Boers for South Africa: The Zulu Wars of 1878-1879 killed hundreds of British soldiers and thousands of Zulus. Defending his kingdom against an invading British Imperial Army, King Cetshwayo killed 1,200 British soldiers and allies at the Battle of Isandlwana. Lord Chelmsford paid him back by shooting thousands of Zulus in intense battles, finally capturing Cetshwayo and shipping him to London. British Imperialists battled the Dutch to a stalemate in the Boer Wars, declaring South Africa a colony of the British Crown. Apartheid, total separation of blacks from whites, was enforced in South Africa from 1948-1994. Apartheid finally ended when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and declared President of South Africa, effectively ending British rule. British Imperialists used the Royal Navy, Imperial troops and native mercenaries to establish colonies throughout the planet, seizing dozens of African nations and Pacific Islands. Britain at one point even owned Hawaii until American Imperialists seized and took over. The 1918 Treaty of Versailles ended World War I and allowed Britain to claim many new colonies throughout Africa and the Middle East: The Treaty imposed hyperinflation and ruinous terms on Germany, inspiring Hitler’s vow of vengeance. Border wars, Muslim extremism, genocide and terrorism across the Middle East today are a direct result of the unjust Treaty of Versailles: The Treaty drew artificial borders across the Arab world regardless of tribal boundaries. Britain made things worse by superimposing the new state of Israel onto Palestine in the 1947 United Nations Partition that forced Palestinians onto West Bank and Gaza Reservations like American Indians: Jews who were terrorized and oppressed and displaced in Northern Europe fled to Israel to terrorize and oppress and displace Palestinians. Western Imperialists use Israel as a Colonial Fortress within the Muslim World to secure oil reserves. There will be terror in the Middle East until Jews and Muslims give up their religions and embrace Atheism, unlikely for another decade, however inevitable. After three centuries of British occupation, Mohandas Gandhi ordered Britain: “You must quit India.” Gandhi rallied Indians to sit in streets in a series of crippling General Strikes based on his nonviolent principles of Civil Disobedience, inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay. Gandhi was imprisoned and went on hunger strikes. British soldiers shot protestors. Strike leaders complained: “Surely we cannot just passively sit and let the British shoot us down!” Gandhi replied: “I have never advocated passive anything!” "Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength.... If we were to drive out the English with the weapons with which they enslaved us, our slavery would still be with us.... An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." Mohandas Gandhi Gandhi openly defied the British by making his own clothes with Indian cotton and his own salt from the Indian Ocean: By law Indians were required to buy English clothing and salt. Gandhi’s symbol of resistance was the tailor’s spinning wheel as he ordered everyone to make their own clothes and boycott all things English. Boycotts crippled profit. Without shooting any British soldier, Gandhi’s consumer boycotts and labor strikes brought down the Empire. “First they ignore you, then they attack you, then you win.” Mohandas Gandhi Muslim fighters against American Imperialism can learn much from Gandhi’s Nonviolent Civil Disobedience that works better than any form of violence: Lord Mountbatten recognized Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience and General Strikes as victorious, returned to Parliament and concluded: Gandhi is right. We must quit India. In 1947, India won freedom and Nehru became first Prime Minister of the Republic of India: Britain quit India. "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall, think of it, always." Mohandas Gandhi As it lost India, Britain gave up a dozen African nations and a dozen Pacific Islands in the 1960’s as natives demanded Independence. When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the British Empire had ceased to be. DANNY: Out of bloody ammo! PEACHY: Me too! DANNY: Peachy, I’m right sorry for getting you killed instead of going home rich like ya deserve! Can ya forgive me? PEACHY: That I do, Danny, that I do. You are forgiven in full and without hindrance. DANNY: Then everything’s all right now. Death Scene, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING O but those were the days! Jump on a warship at Portsmouth, sail round the world, brave typhoons and scurvy, invade the East armed with nothing but a map, a rifle and a pocketful of bullets…. Fearless Mad-dog Englishmen, some dying miserably in pointless battles on uncharted wastelands, some looting a king’s ransom to retire as landed gentry on manor estates…. To quote Shakespeare’s Shallow laughing to Falstaff: “O Jesus the days that we have seen!” Salaam. |