Note: From time to time various episodes of this wonderful series are taken off YouTube. If you notice that do search YouTube again as they are also restored. Otherwise contact me.
Episode 1 A Taste for Power
Notes from Episode !
- The British Empire was one on which the sun never set or as some said the blood never dried
- Empire built on greed and a lust for power
- The British had a mission to ‘civilise’ the world
- So much that shaped the extraordinary story of the British Empire was born here (South India) where the British learnt the art of Imperial power.
- The Duke of Bedford got India (!) in a treaty signed in Paris in 1763.
- They paid local soldiers to fight for them
- British officers would lead Indian troops, the colonised would provide the fighting force of colonialism for centuries to come.
- Madras Regiment founded in 1758 is the oldest in the Indian Army. It fought for Britain!
- Indian Princes were the political system that kept them in power.
- It was a protection racket.
- Stripped Maharajas of power but let them keep their palaces
- At the heart of British confidence was a gigantic confidence trick. It worked as long as the illusion could be maintained.
- In 1803, there were fewer than 6000 British Officials nominally ruling over 200 million Indians.
- A British Governor General put it : If each black man were to take up a hand full of sand and by united effort throw it upon the white faced intruders, we should be buried alive.
- That’s the reason for the scale, the grandeur, the sheer boastfulness of the place (now the seat of West Bengal Government). The idea being if you look like a ruler, the people will treat you like a ruler.
- In May 1857, in the Indian Mutiny the myth of Imperial power was shaken to the core
- British relief forces showed no mercy. There was savage retaliation. One British Commander alone executed 6000 men, flogged mutineers, made them lick blood from the slaughter house floor and then hanged them. In other cases mutineers were tied to the ground, branded with hot irons, told to run for their lives and when they did so were shot dead.
- When peace returned, British attitudes hardened. Rudyard Kipling called it wearing knuckle dusters under kid gloves.
- British would soon find a way of showing who was boss by holding ‘durbars’ or a meeting between the rulers and the ruled. One Indian called it terror in fancy dress.
- One of the rulers, the Viceroy Curzon understood the power of display better than any other.
- Magnificent events like these (durbars) were meant to dazzle the country into submission.
- In the person of Queen Victoria the British liked to think the Empire had achieved human form. They cooked up the resonant but meaningless title of Empress of India.
- A mixture of enterprise and cunning, brutality and pomp had turned India into the biggest, richest and most significant colony in the Empire.
- Victoria’s diamond Jubilee on the 22 June 1897. The Daily Mail brought out a special edition in gold ink to mark the occasion. Its star reporter wrote ‘We send out a boy, and he takes hold of savages and teaches them to obey him and to believe in him and to die for him and the queen.
- Sir Evelyn Baring an Imperialist British Official regarded foreigners as children.
- Following the liberation of Jerusalem (using among others Indian troops): so was born the dangerous conviction that the interests of the British Empire and the will of God might be one and the same.
- British PM Lloyd George felt the Empire a divine mission.
- The Empire that had lasted 200 tears would be dismantled in scarcely 20.
Episode 2 Making ourselves at Home
Notes on Episode 2
- The offspring of mixed marriages came to be known as Anglo-Indians today there are 150k of them in India. All Christians.
- In Victorian Britain these relationships were seen as subversive, even dangerous.
- British were observing a new, puritanical Christianity
- One Memsahib wrote of Indian holy men as ‘Horrible objects with their wildly rolling eyes, long tangled hair and every bone visible in their wretched bodies.
- The Memsahibs ran for the hills; they had very different ideas of how to make themselves at home in India.
- As soon as they discovered Ooty they began to turn it into a version of Surrey, as a defence against India!
- Rudyard Kipling talked about the bungalows set up as models of shutupness.
- The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook by Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner
- a. The kitchen, the pantry a sink
- b. The only servant who will condescend to tidy up is a skulking savage with a reed broom
- c. The Indian servant is a child in all things save age and should be treated as a child, that is to say kindly but with the greatest firmness.
- They were to be treated as decent, dutiful inferiors.
- The authors were obsessed with the natives’ capacity for uncleanness and they even differentiate between English people’s dirt and native dirt!
- Toffs came to Kenya, my place of birth.
- African dismisses Whites as parasites in paradise living off land they had taken from others
- The Lunatic line (railway). 600 miles all the way to Lake Victoria.
- This remarkable feat was the work of 32000 labourers, craftsmen, engineers brought in by the British from India
Episode 3 Playing the Game
Notes on Episode 3
Prelude: Lawrence School Sanawar wasn’t good enough for Lawrence’s son Alexander: He was sent to Rugby!
In this episode, reference is made to Rugby School which
- Took boys and turned them into the governing class of Empire
- The future prefects of the colonial world
- They couldn’t expect an easy ride
- Life in a Victorian Public School was designed to work against the comforts of family life
- The chief thing to be desired said one headmaster was to remove the child from the noxious influence of home
- ‘To make the boys Christian gentlemen, manly and enlightened finer specimens of human nature than any other country could furnish.’ The words of Rugby’s celebrated Thomas Arnold.
- Ancient Romans who provided the model.
- Victorian headmasters and politicians didn’t look forward but back to the Classical World in which civilisation was spread at the point of a sword.
- Divinity, classics, classics…..maths classics (main teaching concentrated on classics)
- A particular idea of Christian values; discipline, respect for rules and ritual , these made up the public school’s true mission -the moulding of character.
- The British Public School practised two religions: Christianity and sport
- Sport was the rock on which Britain’s greatness was built
- England owes her sovereignty to her sports
- Values of organised games said to express the values of Empire – physical courage, team spirit, having a go.
- Cricket which gave rise to one of the most famous of all famous Empire poems – Play up, Play up and Play the Game
Wherever in the empire sport was played it was supposed to bind colonial people to their masters but the spirit of fair play and interests of empire would eventually clash head on.
Kiplings poem: So here’s to you fuzzy wuzzy you’re a benighted heathen but a first class fighting man.
Episode 4 Making a Fortune
Notes on Episode 4
- Empire was about money and profit
- Off the coast of China, British traders made fortunes from ships freighted with addictive drugs
- They helped themselves to the riches of ancient India
- Empire trade and Empire theft helped make Britain Capital of money it still is today.
- Black slave women were raped as if by right. The practice was called nutmegging!
- Slaves were treated as property, not human.
- The slave trade was abolished in 1807
- The East India Company raised its own army of local troops.
- In 1744, Clive arrived as a clerk.
- In his own words, Clive’s greatest talent was for politics, chicanery, intrigue and the Lord knows what.
- ‘Loot’ entered the English language.
- Clive: An opulent City lay at my mercy, its bolts were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.
- With wealth came power
- Clive became Governor of Bengal
- What began in plunder ended in Government.
- The real killing to be made in Queen Victoria’s Empire was something far more pernicious …….. made some Britons rich beyond their wildest dreams …… to get the tea they craved the British had one thing the Chinese craved even more …. OPIUM.
- The British grew opium poppies in India – there they processed it on a colossal scale finally shipped to China and sold to smugglers. With the profits the British bought Chinese tea.
- Jardine and Matheson made a handsome profit out of Opium
- In 1859 the Chinese Emperor decided he’d had enough. He ordered more than a thousand tonnes of British Opium ceased and destroyed.
- The British were outraged as Opium accounted for a fifth of the income of the Government of India (to all intents and purposes East India Company which had only recently been nationalised).
- Through war during which the Chinese Navy was destroyed in one afternoon, China was forced to enter the Global economy.
- HSBC (my employers) was set up to service China trade.
- the Jardine and Matheson headquarters building is known as the building of a thousand arseholes.
Episode 5 Final Episode Doing Good
Notes on Episode 5 (Kenya, my country of birth and where my family were well established features, particularly in the last quarter)
- Empire doing good by force
- Work ordained by God
- Note hymn ‘Lead kindly Light’ often sung at LSL and ingrained into our minds that it was Gandhi’s favourite
- David Livingstone was a missionary; slavery was still rife
- Victorian obsessions: Christianity and Free Trade
- Christianity and Commerce: Empires new civilising mission
- 1886- David Livingstone vanished for 3 years
- Livingstone died in Africa, his heart was buried in Africa
- 1874 – Public outpouring of grief
- Empire was more than greed and domination- it was about sacrifice and justice and doing good.
- Christianity to the heathens
- African Lakes Company set up in 1882
- Commerce and Christianity – extremely unhappy bedfellows
- Floggings were high; resentment ran high
- John Chilembwe: All humanity equal before God; Africa for Africans
- Empire significantly predetermined destiny
- 1863 – Scientific Lecture: Speaker Dr James Hunt: the negro’s place in nature – negros and apes
- Britain’s huge success story- genius for Empire
- British had evolved naturally to rule over others – they were in fact a superior race. Helping the unfortunate and inferior meant ruling
- 1871- Cecil Rhodes: We are first race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race
- God’s chosen instrument in carrying out divine idea
- Duty to take Africa
- Idea – bringing the whole uncivilised world under British rule
- Mapped out rail route fit for white men. Told by Palmerston- take what you can and ask me later
- Duty of white race to civilize the Earth
- 1200 officials administered 40 million Africans – Britain’s entire position depends on bluff
- British Official: If you could survive a British public school you could survive anything; I was head of my house, I was deputy Head of School, I was captain of rugger, I was Sargent Major in the Officer Training Corps. So when I found myself alone in the bush, I wasn’t afraid in the slightest.
- Never since the days of ancient Greece has the world been ruled by such sweet just boyish masters.
- For safety of trade, Government needed.
- Bitter struggle in Kenya (my country of Birth).
- Kenyan: When somebody steals your ox, it is killed, roasted and eaten. You can forget. But when someone steals your land you can never forget, it’s always there, it’s lakes , it’s streams, it’s a bitter presence. In Kenya 3000 White farmers possessed 12000 square miles of prime land; 1 million Kenyans lived on 2000 square miles.
- Mau Mau uprising in Kenya eventually led to Independence.
My origins in Kenya
My grandfather was one of the first Indians to arrive in Kenya. This is why: