The Sharp Side

John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (Bookmarks Publications, 2006). 286 pages, paperback, £11.99 ISBN 1905192126

Newsinger has three basic propositions:

Firstly, he identifies the history of the British Empire in these terms:

Whereas Britain after 1918 was a ‘satisfied’ empire, concerned to hold what it had rather than seize more, in the 19th century the British Empire, despite the liberalism of its metropolitan rulers, was a predatory empire engaged in continuous warfare. (p. 67)

Secondly, he diagnoses extreme violence as an inherent component of imperialism. Colonialism always requires police officers and soldiers, whose brutality towards the colonized is a fundamental condition of governance. There is no imperialism without repression and violence.

Thirdly, politicians and journalists have, historically, generally failed to confront the barbarism which formed an essential feature of British imperial rule, and this has been replicated by academics. Historians shy away from acknowledging the stupendous brutality of empire; often they ignore it completely. In so doing they fail to provide an adequate or reasonably objective account of Britain’s past. Newsinger’s book corrects this blind spot with a revisionist history of the British empire which focuses on native resistance to it and the extreme violence used by a supposedly civilized state to suppress it. His title echoes the words of the Chartist and socialist Ernest Jones, who in 1851 wrote of Britain, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.”

Newsinger develops these three arguments over twelve chapters which analyze, in chronological order, key episodes in the history of the British Empire. These are (1) slavery in the Caribbean (2) the Irish famine (3) China and the opium wars (4) the Indian mutiny (5) the invasion of Egypt (6) global insurgencies against the Empire in the wake of the First World War (7) the Palestinian uprising 1936-9 (8) the struggle for Indian independence (9) Suez (10) insurgency in Kenya (11) insurgency in the Far East (12) the subordination of the British Empire to US imperialism.

I think it’s a brilliant book. Newsinger is prodigiously well read and writes with absolute lucidity and clarity. His book is full of shocking examples of terror and atrocity. It’s a great resource and my copy will go on the same shelf as Mark Curtis’s Web of Deceit and Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation. I’ll probably return to this book in a future post, but for the moment let me just briefly mention Newsinger’s account of the great Indian rebellion 1857-8, an insurrection which is memorialized in Trafalgar Square by the monument to Major General Sir Henry Havelock, who was in charge of the army which suppressed it.

Newsinger argues that torture was a fundamental aspect of the financial operations of British colonialism in India. Having cited the evidence for this he remarks,

What is remarkable is how little this regime of torture has figured in accounts of British rule in India. It is a hidden history that has been unremarked on and almost completely unexplored. Book after book remains silent on the subject. This most surely calls into question the whole historiography of the Raj. (p. 70)

The revolt which erupted in 1857 against British rule was, he asserts, “without doubt, one of the largest revolutionary outbreaks of the 19th century.” And it was put down with massive force and extreme violence. The mass media of the day played a crucial role in mobilising British public opinion in support of the repression. Firstly, it ran bogus horror stories, which cast the rebels as barbarians: “It was widely reported that British women had been cooked alive, forced to eat their children, horribly mutilated with noses and ears cut off and eyes put out, and stripped naked and publicly raped. These stories were untrue.” (p. 74)

Conversely, the barbarism and atrocities carried out by the British army went unreported. The horrors matched those perpetrated by the Third Reich when it rampaged through eastern Europe. Sergeant William Forbes recorded witnessing 130 men hanged from a giant banyan tree. And the intelligentsia played its part, too. Charles Dickens raged that he desired “to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.”

The great rebellion was crushed. But it led to the termination of the power of the East India Company and marked the beginning of the long struggle for Indian independence, proving an inspiration to later generations.