Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (37 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

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True, the average Indian had not got much richer under British rule. Between 1757 and 1947 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent. A substantial share of the profits which accrued as the Indian economy industrialized went to British managing agencies, banks or shareholders; this despite the fact that there was no shortage of capable Indian investors and entrepreneurs. The free trade imposed on India in the nineteenth century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition at a time when the independent United States of America sheltered its infant industries behind high tariff walls. In 1896 Indian mills supplied just 8 per cent of Indian cloth consumption.
⁶¹It should also be remembered that Indian indentured labourers supplied much of the cheap labour on which the later British imperial economy depended. Between the 1820s and the 1920s, close to 1.6 million Indians left India to work in a variety of Caribbean, African, Indian Ocean and Pacific colonies, ranging from the rubber plantations of Malaya to the sugar mills of Fiji. The conditions in which they travelled and worked were often little better than those which had been inflicted on African slaves in the century before. Nor could the best efforts of civil servants like Machonochie avert terrible famines in 1876 – 8 and 1899 – 1900. Indeed, in the former the British predilection for
laissez-faire
economics actually made matters worse.
⁶²But would Indians have been better off under the Mughals? Or, for that matter, under the Dutch – or the Russians?

It might seem self-evident that they would have been better off under Indian rulers. That was certainly true from the point of view of the ruling elites the British had overthrown and whose share of national income, something like 5 per cent, they then appropriated for their own consumption. But for the majority of Indians it was far less clear that their lot would improve under independence. Under British rule, the village economy’s share of total after-tax income actually rose from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. Since that sector represented around three-quarters of the entire population, there can therefore be little doubt that British rule reduced inequality in India. And even if the British did not greatly increase Indian incomes, things might conceivably have been worse under a restored Mughal regime had the Mutiny succeeded. China did not prosper under Chinese rulers.

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. In the age of Macaulay, the British had called into being an English-speaking, English-educated elite of Indians, a class of civil service auxiliaries on whom their system of administration had come to depend. In time, these people naturally aspired to have some share in the government of the country, just as Macaulay had predicted.
⁶³But in the age of Curzon, they were spurned in favour of decorative but largely defunct Maharajas.

The result was that by the Empress-Queen’s twilight years, British rule in India was like one of those palaces Curzon so adored. It looked simply splendid on the outside. But downstairs the servants were busy turning the floorboards into firewood.

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Kipling wrote his doleful ‘Recessional’ in 1897, sending a shiver of apprehension down the spines of his countrymen as they celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Sure enough, like the proud citadels of Nineveh and Tyre, most of Curzon’s works have not endured. As Viceroy he had striven with all his self-assured zeal to make the British government of India more efficient. He believed passionately that without India Britain would drop from being ‘the greatest power in the world’ to being ‘third rate’. But it was British rule he wanted to modernize, not India. Like its ancient monuments, he wanted to slap a preservation order on the Indian princes; to fill the listed buildings with a reliable aristocracy of ‘listed’ people. It was never a realistic undertaking.

Curzon himself would go on to be Lord Privy Seal in 1915 and Foreign Secretary in 1919. Yet he never attained the highest office he so desired. He was passed over for the Tory leadership after a confidential memorandum dismissed him as ‘representing that section of privileged conservatism’ which no longer had a place ‘in this democratic age’. That may also suffice as an epitaph for the entire Tory-entalist project.

The MP Arthur Lee once encountered Lord Curzon in Madame Tussaud’s, ‘gazing with concentrated attention, but a trace of disappointment at his own effigy in wax’. How much more disappointed he would have been to see the statues of the Queen-Empress and sundry imperial proconsuls which stand today in the neglected back yard of Lucknow Zoo, where they were dumped after Indian independence. There can be few more vivid emblems of the transience of imperial achievement than the immense marble Victoria that dominates this shabby little spot. Simply transporting such a vast lump of carved stone from London to Lucknow had been a remarkable feat, only possible with the cranes, steamships and trains that were the true engines of Victorian power. Yet today the idea that this lugubrious-looking old lady once ruled India seems almost preposterous. Removed from her plinth in whichever public place she once occupied, the great white Queen-Empress has forfeited her totemic power.
⁶⁴

Then again, by the turn of the century it could be argued –
pace
Curzon – that India had ceased to be the indispensable jewel it had been back in the 1860s, the be all and end all of British imperial power. Elsewhere in the world, a new generation of imperialists was coming of age, men who believed that if the Empire was to survive – if it was to adapt to the challenges of a new century – it had to expand in new directions.

In their view, the Empire had to drop the pomp and return to its pre-Victorian roots: to penetrate new markets, to settle new colonies and – if necessary – to wage new wars.