Two great articles of the proud history and proud legacy of the British Empire and why no Briton has any need to apologise to anyone for it:
Do stop apologising, Dave: How the PM feels compelled to knock Britain abroad
By Max Hastings
8 April 2011
Daily Mail
"Look around the world today and see the legacy of the British Empire: America, greatest society of all, was a British invention. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, dynamic democracies, were created by British imperialists.
Indians, rejoicing in their new economic success, never cease to acknowledge their gratitude that we bequeathed them the English language, a huge advantage against the Chinese."
For more than 200 years, Britain’s empire was a source of passionate national pride, and also the admiration and envy of foreigners.
In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.’
This was gush, of course, because neither the Greeks nor Britain’s imperialists were as nice as Santayana suggested. It is a trifle embarrassing to glance through a little book published in Malaya in 1928, entitled Malay For Mems — short for ‘Memsahibs’.
Days of the British Raj: Looking back, it is easy to caricature the early empire builders, but their contribution to civilisation was immense
This was designed to teach new arrivals in the colony the sort of phrases they needed to run households with lots of native servants. It was couched almost exclusively in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net’, ‘You must follow the Mem’, ‘Shoot that man’.
But everything in history should be judged by the standards of its time, custom and practice across the rest of the globe. Compared with its French, German, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian counterparts, the British Empire was a model of enlightenment.
The men who governed the Empire, pro-consuls in palaces and district officers travelling vast tracts of wilderness by pony or canoe, are easy to caricature. They believed in God and cold showers, donned evening dress for dinner in the midst of deserts and jungles, and cherished a touching belief in ‘playing up and playing the game’.
Pax Britannica: Imperial Britain achieved much that we can take pride in
But many of them were decent, dedicated, honourable men who devoted their lives to the people among whom they served.
They built marvellous roads, railways and bridges; tended the sick and afflicted; administered justice fairly, in a fashion few corners of the old Empire have known since the British departed.
Look around the world today and see the legacy of the British Empire: America, greatest society of all, was a British invention. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, dynamic democracies, were created by British imperialists.
Indians, rejoicing in their new economic success, never cease to acknowledge their gratitude that we bequeathed them the English language, a huge advantage against the Chinese. And I would suggest that while much of modern Africa is a tragedy, it is a tragedy made by Africans, not by British colonialists.
Their motives were not unselfish, to be sure, but their contribution to global civilisation was extraordinary, and largely benign.
The British Empire fought on the side of freedom and virtue in two world wars, and remains the greatest power of its kind the world has ever seen.
Today it is history, but its heroes still deserve to be our heroes: Drake and Clive, Wellington, Campbell and Napier. You may not have heard of General Sir Charles Napier, but he gave birth to one of the best Victorian jokes. (Having conquered the Indian province of Sind in 1843, he supposedly sent the one-word message to Delhi: ‘Peccavi’ — in that age of Latinists, ‘I have sinned’. I love it.)
As a historian, I can recite plentiful examples of horrors that took place under British rule. But a fundamental reality persists: we did better than anyone else. As an Englishman, I feel a pride in the achievements of Empire not much diminished by knowing that we got some things wrong.
That is why it is dismaying to hear that, during the Prime Minister’s visit to Pakistan this week, he has delivered yet another public apology for the alleged imperial misdeeds of our ancestors. He was asked by an audience of academics and students what Britain might do to help heal the country’s bitter Kashmir dispute with India.
He answered: ‘I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.’
Eager to please: David Cameron, left, shakes hand with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani prior to their meeting in Islamabad earlier this week
Oh dear, oh dear. By saying this, he is venturing where so many Leftist politicians, writers and filmmakers have gone before.
Tony Blair could not disembark from an aircraft in foreign parts without donning sackcloth and ashes for his country’s old sins: the Irish potato famine and slave trade prominent among them.
Richard Attenborough loved making historically fatuous films such as Gandhi, which depicted British imperialists in India as murderous monsters.
We might suggest, in defence of Blair and Attenborough, that they do not know any better. They learned little history at school, and have spent most of their lives in the company of people who, though British, do not think much of Britain.
Proud history: From Waterloo to two world wars, Britain has always stood up for democracy and freedom
But Cameron attended what is probably the best school in the world, Eton, and is a highly educated man. He is also a Tory — indeed, leader of the Conservative Party. Thus, it does not seem too much to hope that he knows something of Britain’s past, and takes pride in it.
He and I come from different generations, but we both grew up in a culture in which British history was perceived as a splendid procession of battlefield triumphs — Crecy and Agincourt, Blenheim and Ramillies, Trafalgar and Waterloo — over such lesser races as the French. I am teasing a little, but you know what I mean.
As an admirer of Cameron, I was saddened that in Washington last summer he chose to flatter Americans by asserting that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ in the 1940 struggle against Hitler. In truth, of course, at that date the United States was still neutral.
A brutally tough wartime U.S. administration required Britain to pay cash on the nail for every ton of arms shipped across the Atlantic to assist our lonely struggle for survival.
It is still uncertain whether the Americans would ever have joined the German war, had Hitler not declared war on the United States after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
And so to Cameron’s gaffe — for it certainly was a gaffe — in Pakistan this week. It is easy to see how it happened. The Prime Minister is a man of natural good manners, which include modesty and a willingness to apologise.
Most of us, in a collision with a third party running for a train, instinctively blurt ‘sorry’ before stopping to consider that it was actually the other person’s fault.
But this is a very dangerous habit for national leaders, whose every word is weighed by millions of people.
They must never forget that, even as they address an audience in a hall, there is another much larger one around the world outside.
Cameron made an emollient remark which certainly pleased the Pakistani students in front of him. But back home are over 60 million British people, many of whom will be much less impressed by their prime minister’s casual acceptance of blame for something that happened 64 years ago, on the far side of the world.
The history of the sub-continent remains a focus of fierce controversy, as much in India and Pakistan as among Western historians.
The British, French and Portuguese established settlements there in the 17th century, when this vast region was ruled by local emperors, kings and princes who warred and killed with endemic cruelty. The great Hindu and Muslim civilisations seldom lived at peace.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, the British progressively extended their hegemony, mostly through war, until they controlled the entire sub-continent. But substantial areas remained under the rule of local grandees, albeit under the wider authority of the Queen-Emperor.
Empress of India: Queen Victoria was head of the largest Empire the world has ever seen
Kashmir was one of these ‘princely states’. By a quirk of fortune, its people were overwhelmingly Muslim, while its ruler was a Hindu.
When Lord Mountbatten (Prince
Philip's uncle, who was murdered by the IRA at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in 1979), the last Viceroy, presided over the partition of India at its independence on August 15, 1947, he left the Kashmiris to choose allegiance between their two neighbours — Muslim Pakistan or Hindu India.
The ruler opted for India, in defiance of the wishes of his people. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised the Kashmiri people the right to decide their destiny by referendum.
But to this day none of his successors has fulfilled the pledge. The consequence is that Kashmir remained the contested symbol of bitter hatred between India and Pakistan. Pakistanis foment terrorism in the state, fortified by knowledge that most Kashmiris, given a free choice, would join their country. The Indians, meanwhile, rely on force majeure to keep what they hold.
Of course, there was a fragment of truth in what Cameron told his Pakistani audience this week: Britain presided over the partition of India.
But it is hard to see how Mountbatten or anyone else could have made choices and decisions which would have saved its people from the murderous sectarian passions of Muslims and Hindus which prompted the massacres of at least half a million, probably many more.
Six million Hindus and Sikhs fled from the new Pakistan, while six-and-a-half million Muslims quit India in the largest mass migration in human history.
For almost a century, the Pax Britannica had sustained a peace and stability such as the sub-continent had never known, but independence rent this asunder.
The last Viceroy: Lord Mountbatten presided over the partition of India
To be sure, in the last years before 1947 and especially during World War II, the British ruled with considerable harshness.
The 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least one million and perhaps three million people died, remains a lasting blot on the imperial record.
Churchill’s entrenched attitude to the Raj was determined by his experience there as a Victorian cavalry subaltern. Leo Amery, his wartime Cabinet colleague, wrote that ‘Winston is not quite normal on the subject of India’.
But all this is a very long day’s march from saying that Britain bears responsibility for what happened to India in 1947 — and afterwards.
For all India’s economic success, the sub-continent remains riven by hatreds, strife, famines, miseries inflicted by the caste system.
No grown-up person, or indeed historian, should be so simplistic as to blame much of this on the old imperial power.
David Cameron observed that many of the world’s other problems were likewise our fault, and maybe he was thinking of Ireland.
I am among those who believe that the 1922 partition at Irish independence (when the island of Ireland was divided into protestant Northern Ireland and the catholic Irish Free State, with the Irish Free State, now the Irish Republic, seceding from the UK) was a mistake. But it derived from hatreds between Protestants and Catholics as bitter as those between Muslims and Hindus.
The British, in admittedly clumsy fashion, sought to separate the warring parties, to prevent the two from slaughtering each other, as they had so often done in the past — and would do again in our own times.
Successive British governments who addressed the ‘Irish problem’ which haunted these islands for centuries did not do very well. But they acknowledged a basic truth which David Cameron will learn to recognise from his own experience as prime minister.
There are seldom, if ever, ‘solutions’ to great problems — whether in the Middle East, Ireland, Africa, India, the Balkans. Politicians can only strive to manage them, to identify the least bad expedients available to protect human lives and avert outright catastrophe.
So it was for the British politicians struggling with the fate of Ireland in the closing days of 1921, and of India in 1947. They were decent men, faced with vast difficulties and violent passions, who did their best.
For 21st-century politicians to make ‘apologies’ for past blunders or failures is inherently absurd, for we have no power over the past.
Of course we would have done things differently, because we are different people.
We would never say, as did Winston Churchill during World War II, that he would not permit British soldiers to salute Indian officers, because it would represent an intolerable humiliation to make them defer to ‘a brown man’.
But that is not because we are good people and Churchill was a bad one, it is because we live in another age.
I admire David Cameron, and believe that he has qualities that might make him a great prime minister. He diminishes himself, nonetheless, when he speaks ill of Britain abroad.
If our Prime Minister is not proud of his country, its past as well as its present, then it becomes all the harder to make the rest of its citizens honour our heritage as we should
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Britain has no need to make an apology to India for Empire...
By
Nirpal Dhaliwal
30 July 2010
Daily Mail
"All that is best about India - its tolerance, freedom and engagement with the world - has flourished due to the structures and ideas it inherited from British rule."
Many have interpreted David Cameron's statement that he is visiting India in a 'spirit of humility' as a shame-faced apology for Britain's imperial rule there. But Indians require no apology for Empire and seek none, and nor do Britons need to feel especially guilty for it.
India is the world's second-largest growing economy, producing more English-speaking graduates than the rest of the world combined.
The use of English is the most enduring and profitable legacy of the British Raj; without it, the boom in Indian call-centre and software industries could not have happened.
We need close ties with India to increase our own prosperity, but India needs us, too.
Industrial boom: The rapid rise in India-based call centres and software industries has made the country the second-largest growing economy
Close ties with Britain give India better access to the rest of Europe. Just as Empire opened the doors of modernity to India, a good relationship between Britain and India will be a mark of how prominent both countries are in the modern world.
It is a subject that particularly interests me as, although I was born and raised in Britain, my parents migrated here from India.
In recent years, I have spent much time travelling and working in the sub-continent, wanting to understand what it means to me; that journey surprisingly led me to also realise just how much more Britain means to both me and India.
Proof: St Thomas Cathedral in Mumbai shows a quiet acknowledgment that British rule left a helpful legacy
All that is best about India - its tolerance, freedom and engagement with the world - has flourished due to the structures and ideas it inherited from British rule.
Last Christmas, I attended midnight mass at St Thomas's Cathedral in Mumbai. Built by the British in 1718, it is the oldest colonial building in the city, pre-dating the Raj by over a century, and is a monument to Empire.
As the Church of India priest lead a service that any British Anglican would recognise, I read the plaques covering the walls, which commemorated officers of the British East India Company (which ruled India before rule was transferred to the British Crown in the 1850s) who fell in the various battles through which Britain defeated and subjugated India.
The fact that Christianity is very much accepted in India (the next day, the neon sign outside the Mahalakshmi Temple proclaimed 'Merry Christmas' to its Hindu worshippers), is proof of the country's quiet acknowledgement that British rule in India left a legacy that unified its disparate peoples and enabled them to emerge as a power in the world.
Despite the often callous profiteering of Empire, the modern Indian state simply would not exist without it.
Like the U.S., India is a nation fostered into being by Britain, and one which derives its romantic national identity from its struggle for independence. And just as Americans don't publicly admit that George Washington was an abysmal general who lost almost every battle, Indians don't explicitly recognise Britain's contribution to their country's present success.
But emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the fact that since 1947, Indians have built upon much of what Britain introduced them to - the English language, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and the protection of individual rights - is an admission of the crucial role this country played in their history.
Of course, Empire was not a purely altruistic enterprise. Britain reaped enormous profits from India at the expense of its growth.
It prohibited industrialisation and kept the vast bulk of Indians in a state of abject poverty, growing cotton or mining metals that would then be sent to the factories and mills of northern England.
British Raj: The life of a British Army officer during the early days of direct British rule in India, which was between 1858 and 1947
India's first post-independence census showed the population to be 80 per cent illiterate, with a typical life expectancy not exceeding 40.
But these bleak facts should not obscure the fact that British rule in India was a joint effort, impossible without the widespread co- operation of Indians themselves.
Despite the country's vast population, there were never more than 70,000 British troops in India; the running of the country required an enormous infrastructure of native troops, police and bureaucrats. As Hitler observed, Indians merely had to spit all at once and every Briton in India would have drowned.
Indians assisted with Empire because it brought them unprecedented order and civility. Indians were no strangers to outside rulers; for eight centuries before the Raj, the sub-continent had been subjected to the plunder and depravity of the Mughals - Muslim rulers who came from as far west as Turkey.
Delhi was razed eight times in that period and great pyramids were constructed with the skulls of its inhabitants.
Because Islam permits the enslavement of non-Muslims, Indians were sold across the Islamic world in such quantities that the international price of slaves collapsed.
The Afghan mountain range of the Hindu Khush (which translates as the 'Hindu Slaughter') is named after the huge numbers who died there while being marched to the markets of Arabia and Central Asia.
Honour guard: David Cameron at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi this week
For all the artistic refinement and opulence of India's past rulers - and their poetry, music, and the magnificence of the Taj Mahal are testament to that - they oversaw a period of general barbarism in which the ordinary Indian was no more than a starving chattel.
The rebellions which eventually arose against the Mughals - such as the Sikhs in Punjab and the Marathas in the south - fractured the rulers' power, and enabled the British to get their own foot in the door.
At this point, it's important to remember that the British did not arrive in an idyllic sub-continent full of happy, contented Indians, but in one in extreme turmoil.
And, though primarily motivated by profit, they sought to apply humane values - even if at gunpoint.
In 1846, the British commissioner, John Lawrence, told the local elite that Punjabis could no longer burn their widows, commit female infanticide, nor bury their lepers alive.
When they protested, saying that he had promised there would be no interference in their religious customs, Lawrence steadfastly replied that it was British religious custom to hang anyone who did such things.
In addition to combating these barbaric practices, the British also outlawed slavery in 1843 at a time when an estimated 10 million Indians were slaves - up to 15 per cent of the population in some regions.
Volunteers: When the call came, two million Indians, such as those of the 15th India Corps, joined the Second World War to fight for the British Empire - the largest volunteer force in history
Yes, British rule was exploitative and took away more than it provided, but compared to what Indians had known previously, there was much to be thankful for.
This gratitude expressed itself in 1939 when, at the height of the independence movement led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, two million Indians nonetheless enlisted in the fight against fascism - the largest volunteer army in history.
It's no overstatement to say that, without the British, Indians would not even know what it is to be Indian.
After 800 years of Mughal Islamic rule, Hindu culture was in terminal decline and it was the likes of Warren Hastings and William Jones, the founders of the Asiatic Society, who began the collection and renewed study of India's ancient texts, educating Indians about their own rich and unique past.
And it was a Briton, Allan Octavian Hume, who helped found the Indian national Congress - the political party that would eventually lead the country to independence.
Thousands of Indians died building the railways of the Raj, but countless more died building the Taj Mahal and other useless baubles for their earlier rulers.
For all they extracted from India, the British left behind a practical network of transportation, governance and values without which India would not be the dynamic democracy it is today.
It is a mark of India's quiet appreciation as well as its great self-confidence that it asks for no apology for the past.
Out of respect, no Briton should be condescending enough to offer one.
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Come to think of it that is why the US came into being. Freedom from repressive taxes imposed by a foreign dictatorship.
The colonists couldn't have got their independence had the British not gone there and set up the American colonies in the first place.
As for "dictatorship" - I think you should consult a history book. Not an American or Canadian one, but an accurate one.
