Indian Boots on the Ground

Britain’s exploitation of India up to Partition and ‘independence’ in 1947 went much further than extracting investment and trading revenues and dominating its economy. Just consider the British Indian Army, established under British government control in 1858 after it took over from the East India Company. Manned by colonial Indian subjects, this force was critical for British imperialism’s many battles. In wars large and small, especially those outside Europe, against national liberation movements, uncooperative populations and rival powers, Indian troops greatly boosted the numbers of those who would fight and die for it.[1]

Prior to 1914, British armed forces had largely been used to police the Empire. Since Napoleon early in the 19th century and the Crimean War with Russia in mid-century, there had been little or no direct conflict with other major powers. British policy was to depend upon alliances with others, rather than to maintain a large standing army itself. So it was important to be able to draw upon a force of colonial troops when needed, including for the policing of the British Raj.

Important though they were for British power, Indian troops commonly faced racial discrimination, were looked down upon by white officers and were often used as cannon fodder, while also being given worse grade arms and equipment than regular British troops. Attractive as a cheap military resource for the Brits, these men could nevertheless see enlistment in the army as a reasonable option. There was regular pay and regular food, something not always available in the Indian economy dominated by British Empire interests – as became brutally clear with the Bengal famine in 1943.

Extra battalions

At the start of World War One in 1914, British army regular forces numbered less than 250,000, but they had grown to 3.8 million by 1918, including reserves, helped by conscription after volunteers proved insufficient. Over the same period, the British Indian Army grew from around 150,000 to more than one million, of which some 700,000 served overseas, making it a valuable additional force. This latter army fought in Ypres, Loos, Neuve Chapelle and Gallipoli, and in Mesopotamia (roughly corresponding to Iraq today), Palestine, Egypt and East Africa.

Although troop numbers fell back in the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War and its aftermath saw a further utilisation of Britain’s Indian Army. Battle locations during the war included in North Africa (Tunisia, Libya and Egypt) and Europe (Italy, especially). A good book on this period notes that, in early 1942, “264,000 Indian troops were serving overseas, including 91,000 in Iraq, 20,000 in the Middle East, 56,000 in Malaya and 20,000 in Burma.”[2] By later that year, the Indian army had recruited another 600,000 men, and by the end of 1942 it stood at almost 1.55 million. Another 280,000 were recruited in 1943. By 1945, it had grown to some 2.5 million. This compared to 3.5 million in the British army you will more commonly read about.

Indian troops were, of course, used by the British to push back Japan’s wartime incursions into India itself. But the downside for the Brits in the early 1940s was that many Indian prisoners of war (held by the Axis powers) were ready to switch sides and join versions of the anti-colonial Indian National Army. Japan, in particular, made efforts to attract these forces.

Ahead of India’s independence, the Brits had to be a little cautious, but that did not prevent them from using Indian troops to help put down anti-colonial movements in Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia. These were efforts by the much-lauded ‘socialist’ Labour Government to restore not just the British, but also the French and the Dutch to their former status. To add to the outrage, Britain also used just-defeated Japanese troops for the same purpose!

Despite demobilisation after 1945, by April 1946, “the Indian army still had two brigades in the Middle East; four divisions in Burma; three divisions in Malaya; four divisions in Indonesia; one division in Borneo and Siam (Thailand); a brigade in Hong Kong; and two brigades in Japan.” A division comprised roughly 10-15,000 men, and a brigade roughly 1,500-3,500 men.

Oh well, that’s enough about soldiers.

Tony Norfield, 24 July 2018

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[1] The points below focus on Indian troops, but one should note that the British also used African troops and Chinese labourers in their war efforts. France also made great use of its African colonies. A good book detailing these points for the First World War is David Olusoga’s The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, Head of Zeus, 2014.

[2] This, the later quotation, and most of the information on Indian troop numbers, are taken from Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: the Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945, Penguin, 2017. For the post-1945 period, also see Christopher Bayley and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: the End of Britain’s Asian Empire, Allen Lane, 2007. A good online source for the history is here.

The Good Old Days

With the British ruling elites tearing themselves apart over foreign policy these days (regarding the European Union), I thought I would take a brief look back into happier times. Here are some choice quotations from major politicians and newspapers that stressed how much Britain’s position in the world produced big benefits.

First, Winston Churchill in April 1929. He is talking in Parliament about the City’s revenues, and its role as a global broker, as well as the big returns on British foreign investments:

“The income which we derive each year from commissions and services rendered to foreign countries is over £65,000,000, and, in addition, we have a steady revenue from foreign investments of close on £300,000,000 a year, 90 per cent of which is expressed in sterling. Upon this great influx there is levied, as a rule, the highest rates of taxation. In this way we are helped to maintain our social services at a level incomparably higher than that of any European country, or indeed of any country.”

Note that both kinds of revenue do not all come from the colonies, at least not directly, and most will have derived from transactions with and investments in other major countries. Nevertheless, such revenues were important for social services even before the post-1945 ‘welfare state’. I give an updated, contemporary assessment of these in my book, The City.

After 1945, the British Empire was somewhat diminished, as was its investment and dealing revenues. However, these remained important. As Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary, put it to the House of Commons in February 1946, stressing the importance of imperial stability as well as the revenues coming from the Empire:

“When I say I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, what do I mean? I know that if the British Empire fell, the greatest collection of free nations would go into the limbo of the past, and it would be a disaster. I know, further, it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”

This concern about the ‘standard of life’ of British constituents was a key point for Labour’s social imperialism, and tallied with the views of the arch imperialist Churchill.

The importance of the Empire was also stressed in major UK newspapers at the time, for example in noting how US dollar-based earnings from the exports of commodities from Malaya (later Malaysia) were important for keeping Britain’s Sterling Area financial system in place:

“It is Malaya’s dollar earnings which keep the sterling area afloat.” (Manchester Guardian, 13 December 1950)

and

“Malaya is Britain’s biggest source of American dollars.” (The Times, 9 June 1950)

Malaya, of course, did not have access to these dollars, which were deposited in London, and from which, in general, only the UK and the ‘white’ dominions could draw. Malaya saw its funds translated into (depreciating) sterling and had to use this sterling to buy British goods.

Professor W Arthur Lewis summed it up in a Financial Times article, ‘The Colonies and Sterling’ in 1952:

“Many Colonies must sell their produce to Britain at prices below the world price, and, through exchange control, must buy from Britain at prices above the world price, or pay an ever-increasing sum into the Bank of England, because Britain will not deliver goods in return for what she receives.

“Britain talks of colonial development, but on the contrary, it is African and Malayan peasants who are putting capital into Britain. … The British colonial system has become a major means of economic exploitation. …

“The Colonies are exporting far more than they import, and are building up large balances. They cannot get all the imports they need, especially of capital goods, and their development programmes are in consequence retarded. They are in effect paying Britain for goods which she does not deliver.”[1]

His only error in this was to say that the colonial system ‘has become’ a major means of exploitation, whereas it had always been one. Other examples of Britain’s colonial exploitation post-1945 are given in my articles on Labour’s colonial policy and on how the welfare state was funded in 1945.

Tony Norfield, 18 July 2018

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[1] Cited in R Palme Dutt, The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire, Lawrence & Wishart, 1953. The Manchester Guardian and Times quotations are also from Dutt. The remainder are from Hansard.

Labour's Colonial Policy

This article is based on notes prompted by reading an interesting book, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964, by Partha Sarathi Gupta, published in 1975. I find it particularly of interest because it presents some original material from a time when the Labour Party will claim to have been 'socialist' in some sense. So, this article can be seen as an anti-nostalgia exercise! Things never were any good with this pro-imperialist party.

Gupta has extensive documentation of debates in the House of Commons, Labour Party conference speeches and policy recommendations from such bodies as the Fabian Colonial Bureau and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. He also gives examples of the racism of many leaders of the 'labour movement', especially regarding Africa. More important for my current purpose is that he highlights how Britain's plans for colonial development were always presented as being mutually beneficial, but were always based upon Britain's needs and in directions determined by the colonial rulers, not by the local populations.

The book is a dry read, and with a number of questionable views, for example that by the early 1960s 'social imperialist sentiment had been eliminated' in the UK (p. 393). However, it offers some striking comments and statements that illustrate the 'socialism in words' and 'imperialism in deeds' perspective of the Labour Party in the 1940s and 1950s that I will set out below. A good summary of Labour politics is given in Gupta's conclusion to a chapter on 'Colonial reforms':

"A large body of opinion inside the [labour] movement was representative of 'little Englanders', who were preoccupied with social transformation at home and anxious to avoid military and political engagements abroad. In moments of crisis a social imperial syndrome became active. Though it was originally noticed mainly among those trade unionists who were least affected by socialist ideas, the imperialist bias displayed by Bevin in general [Ernest Bevin, Labour's staunch anti-communist Foreign Secretary, 1945-1951] and by John Strachey over the groundnuts affair [see below] showed that persons with a Marxist background could slide easily into a social-imperialist position once they became pre-occupied with building socialism in their own country only." (pp. 346-347)

Despite the little Englanders being 'anxious to avoid military and political engagements abroad', Gupta does not mention that there was no labour movement opposition to Britain's military efforts to re-establish its own and other European colonies after 1945, possibly because these used Indian and recently defeated Japanese troops against local nationalists in Asia, and hardly any British troops. But, I will turn attention to the more direct British dimension of colonial economic exploitation.

The first example is John Strachey. Named in House of Commons records as Evelyn Strachey, MP for Dundee, and with the more elaborate nomenclature on his birth certificate of Evelyn John St Loe Strachey, he was an outcome of Eton and Oxford and an itinerant politician (see his Wikipedia entry) with successive socialist, Mosley, Communist, anti- and pro-Keynesian views. He was also a Minister of Food and a Secretary of State for War. Despite these dizzying turns, throughout his life he remained a consistent British nationalist. In a January 1948 House of Commons debate on the Colonial Development Corporation bill, he concluded:

"I should like to end this discussion by striking this note, that by one means or another, by hook or by crook, the development of primary production of all sorts, in the Colonial areas, Colonial territories and dependent areas in the Commonwealth, as well as generally throughout the world, in far more abundant quantities than exist today is, it is hardly too much to say, a life and death matter for the economy of this country."

This perspective was behind his support for the infamous groundnut scheme in Tanzania, then called Tanganyika. Britain's plan to plant groundnuts in an unsuitable region with idiotic technology turned into a loss-making fiasco and was abandoned. However, while this is often seen as a dumb development project, the basic notion behind it receives less attention: it was to use cheap labour in the colonies to grow products that would feed the British back home, and so reduce the need to import from outside the Empire. This would avoid paying in US dollars for some food supplies when there was already a shortage of dollars in Britain's reserves. Instead, the producers of Tanzania would receive payment in terms of a devaluing sterling.

The groundnuts scheme was only one case of colonial exploitation, realised or planned. More importantly, Britain had a number of marketing boards that were monopoly buyers of the commodity output of its colonies, and limited the development of any processing operations so that they received at best, and usually below, the world market price for the raw commodity. House of Commons Parliamentary debates always argued that a 'fair price' was being set, and that the buying operation carried risks to Britain's finances. But the buying prices were always set at below what the market price turned out to be. Furthermore, the surpluses from selling these products on the market always ended up in sterling balances based in London banks! This was how the system worked.

In a May 1951 debate on the West African Marketing Boards, one Labour MP, the Rugby and Oxford educated barrister, Richard Acland, made the following comment as part of a longer apologia:

"Firstly, the prices in the long-term contracts made by our Government were perfectly fair prices, there being genuine arguments at the time of the contracts to suggest that world prices for the crops might have fallen. But in fact that has never happened and the opposite has always taken place. To give an example: We are purchasing West African palm oil at £94 a ton, when the same oil on the free market has been fluctuating from £134 to £210 per ton."

What a stroke of luck that no West Africans were listening! Just in case they were, he denied that the amounts concerned were of any significance.

This is not to say that Labour MPs were being too truthful, and not forward-looking enough. How forward-looking, to see the way in which British imperialism's economic stresses could be solved so that we could have a 'Jerusalem builded here', on the backs of the colonies, is shown in the next quotation. Harold Wilson, a future Labour Prime Minister, had this to say in the House of Commons when Labour was in opposition in February 1953:

"There are very many schemes that can earn and save dollars and we want to know about them. There is copper in Rhodesia and Uganda; zinc and lead in Nigeria and tin in Uganda and British Honduras. We have to face the working out of the tin reserves in Malaya, before many years are over. There is, too, bauxite in Jamaica, manganese in India and South Africa, tungsten in Uganda, beryllium in India and columbium in Uganda. I am sure that these things are being considered by the Foreign Secretary, and what we should like to know at some convenient time—I would not press him to answer in detail tonight—is what is being done to press on with these schemes.

"Perhaps the most important step in the Commonwealth development [sic!] would be for the Government to work out now a wide-ranging geological survey of Colonial Territories ... I do not think that anyone in the House would deny that the answer to all our dollar problems may well be found 200 or 1,000 feet below the soil in the Colonial areas, and a really imaginative geological survey might possibly solve a lot of our problems over rather a long time."

The economic policy in the colonies, now given the honeyed description of 'Commonwealth' rather than Empire, was to meet British imperialism's requirements. That is not a surprise for critics of imperialism, but let me leave you with a sickening Labour socialist conclusion. Recognising that the Empire, sorry, Commonwealth, may not persist on the same footing, noting the colonies' contribution to the Sterling Area balances and expressing a desire that colonial peoples have a better future, Jennie Lee, wife of Aneurin Bevan, the Labour left saint, had this to say at Labour's Annual Conference in October 1956:

"We have to work for the day when there will be a higher standard of living here, a higher standard of living in the colonies, and when as free and friendly nations they will want us to be their bankers." (p. 376)

She was ahead of her time. The City of London today is the biggest centre of global banking, despite Britain having a much worse current account deficit than when she was speaking. British imperialism found other ways of appropriating the value of what others produce.

Tony Norfield, 7 December 2014

Pirates of the Caribbean: Sugar & Slavery

Book review: Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War, London: Hutchinson, 2011, 446 pages

Britain was once the world’s biggest slave trader, transporting African slaves to colonies in the Americas. Two-thirds of the slaves worked on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and this book gives the history of the British families who owned them: the ‘sugar barons’. Parker’s account of the mercantile entrepreneurs who developed plantations in the West Indies is interesting, and he shows that their colossal wealth made the King of England look like he was down on his luck. But more enlightening is his tale of the colonial escapades of Britain and the other European powers in the West Indies of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. He shows how events were shaped by the growth of the world market, the economics of slave labour on the plantations and the changing balance of power between the dominant countries.

The huge wealth of the sugar barons came from low costs and high revenues. The low costs were based on slave labour imported from Africa to work on the plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, etc, and on a climate that was very fertile for the rapid growth of sugar cane. High revenues were helped by sugar being a new luxury product beginning to get a mass market in Europe, and also by the restricted competition in the British empire, enforced by Britain’s naval strength and mercantile trading rules. It was not all easy for the barons, however. Heat, humidity, hurricanes, mosquitoes, disease and disasters took their toll, and a significant proportion of these willing emigrants to the West Indies died within a few years. Another big health hazard for Europeans was their debauchery and drunkenness. Plantation owners would even be plastered at breakfast on claret, Madeira and hock.

The profitable sugar plantations made 18^th century Jamaica the ‘best jewel in the British Diadem’, in the words of Admiral George Rodney. This was the period before India had become the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British empire. Not surprisingly, the economic status of the West Indian islands meant that there were persistent naval clashes, seizures of land and re-annexations between Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands. Both before and after the 1776 American Declaration of Independence from Britain, America’s Thirteen Colonies also played a key role in these wars. Parker notes how, during America’s war of independence, Britain’s ‘defence of Jamaica was given priority over the war with America’. Jamaica was the more valuable asset.

One fact that strikes the reader who may know little about this period is that unbridled aggression between the major powers was common. Within the boundaries of Europe and the surrounding seas there was more of an attempt to regulate conflict; outside, no holds were barred. In the Caribbean, merchant ships were frequently attacked and looted, but not only by pirates. There were also many ‘privateers’ given explicit endorsement by their states to bring back the booty. Parker notes how 1000 buccaneers operated out of Port Royal in Jamaica in the mid-1600s, working under official sanction from the British authorities to attack the Spanish settlements and ships in the region. Far from Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow being one of the outlaw ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, he was just as likely to be operating under government licence. Even the Royal Navy got involved in the theft. In 1780, the previously mentioned Admiral Rodney looted St Eustatius, an island colonised by the Dutch, and spent three months selling the captured goods!

This was a more obvious link between military power and economic plunder than appears to be the case today. However, the evidence that Shell and BP met the UK Labour trade minister Baroness Symons ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[1] and the latest British adventures in Libya to control its energy resources, show that there is now just a clearer division of labour between the state and the corporations.

The West Indian sugar barons eventually became absentee owners, preferring to live back in the comfort and safety of Britain on the profits of empire and slavery. They wasted much of their riches building extravagant country estates, but also put a lot of cash into more speculative ventures – some of which turned out to be Britain’s industrial revolution in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries! By contrast, the West Indian colonies saw no development. Instead the islands were vulnerable to the problems that came from a monoculture economy determined by the needs of the ‘mother country’. The sugar plantations went into decline as soil fertility diminished and cheaper sources of supply were found elsewhere to supply the growing world sugar market. Only the turmoil in the more productive French sugar producing colonies that followed the French revolution in 1789 – including the later slave revolts led by Toussaint L’Ouverture - gave Britain’s sugar colonies a breathing space as prices rose again.

Parker’s book briefly covers the long period of agitation in Britain against the slave trade, ahead of the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1808. As one antidote to British hypocrisy and smugness on this issue (although he does not call it so), he notes that individual US states had already begun banning the slave trade more than 20 years earlier than Britain. However, he does not pay enough attention to the economic factors behind this British decision, and the much later move to abolish slavery itself in the British empire in 1838 (with generous compensation to the slave owners, of course). His account does provide interesting details of the impact on the sugar baron families and their political connections - the main subject of his book. But a more fundamental analysis of the role of slavery in the mercantile form of capitalism and its decline with the growth of industrial capitalism is given by Eric Williams’s classic text, Capitalism and Slavery.[2] Williams shows how the progressively less attractive economics of slavery for British capitalism was behind parliament’s move to ban the trade and, only later, the institution itself. It was because the economic changes took many years to work themselves out that the moral arguments of the anti-slavery movement were irrelevant for so long.[3]

One feature of the book that concerns me is that it is prone to include phrases of regret when discussing Britain’s colonial adventures. This is despite its detailed documentation of the many crimes committed by Britain and other powers, including ‘the invention of ever more brutal tortures’ of disobedient or unruly slaves.[4] For example, Parker says ‘the unhappy precedent of Hispaniola [a previous failed offensive] asserted itself’ when the British had to abandon an attack on a Spanish colonial city (p253).[5] Why use the phrase ‘unhappy precedent’, unless one hoped that it had not been a defeat for the British? It would make more sense just to explain what happened. Perhaps Parker is just being sarcastic. But this kind of phrase is found in the writings of many who look upon their country’s depredations as casting a bad light on what, at heart, is a decent country worth defending. Nevertheless, The Sugar Barons is well worth reading to get a good idea of the state of the world before the emergence of industrial capitalism and imperialism.

Tony Norfield, 4 August 2011

Addendum, 24 September 2013: A reader of the above review points out that many Irish slaves (or 'indentured labourers') were also sent from Ireland to the Caribbean by British 'transportation' policies. This was not covered in my review, nor in the book, but the numbers involved were significant. For further information, check out Wikipedia or an article here.

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[1] Paul Bignell, ‘Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq’, The Independent, 19 April 2011.

[2] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (originally published in 1944).

[3] For a useful review of the modern version of slavery, see Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery, University of California Press, 2005. Today’s slavery is bound up with the news stories of ‘human trafficking’ and is principally a result of bonded labour, resulting from debts owed to landlords and moneylenders in poor countries. Today there are reported to be around 27 million bonded labourers and other forms of slave working in countries all over the world, including in the richer countries.

[4] Karl Marx was referring to such behaviour when he wrote that “Jamaican history is characteristic of the beastliness of the true Englishman”, a comment that Parker notes in his book.

[5] Hispaniola was the name of the major island in the Caribbean now containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The island had been fought over by major European powers, and was divided up mainly between France and Spain.