The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: Colonialism

  • The West Will Fall; Fall It Must: A Moral and Civilisational Analysis of Hegemonic Decline and the Imperative of Justice

    The West Will Fall; Fall It Must: A Moral and Civilisational Analysis of Hegemonic Decline and the Imperative of Justice

    Colonial and Imperial culture of greed for wealth, manifested in exploitative and extractive strategies, and an attitude of racial supremacy-endorsed by the Church,  is so deeply entrenched in the West that it has never gone away but has continued in different forms and structures. It is this culture that needs to fall, to truly lead to a world of equality, values and ethics – reflected by the 2000-year old declaration –

    “Yaadhum Oorey, Yavarum Kelir”  – meaning “To us the world is one, All people are Kin”.

    To say the West will fall is neither prophecy nor vindictiveness but the recognition of a historical necessity. Western global dominance — built across six centuries of slavery, colonial extraction, and neocolonial control — rested on the systematic violation of ethical principles that every major civilisation has independently affirmed. Systems founded on extraction and racial hierarchy carry the mechanisms of their own collapse. The decline now visible across economic, diplomatic, and moral indicators is not an accident of geopolitics but a consequence.

    The Peninsula Foundation reads this moment through humanity’s deepest ethical traditions: Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural, Kaniyan Poongundranar’s declaration that all places are one and all people kin, Confucian governance by virtue, Platonic justice as harmony, and African Ubuntu — a person is a person through other people, in other words – I am because We are. Arising independently across continents and millennia, they converge on the very principles imperialism negates: universal human dignity, compassionate restraint, justice as social order, and communal interdependence.

    By 2026, even Western institutions will concede the turn. The UN Secretary-General calls for accelerating an inclusive multipolarity; the JPMorgan Centre for Geopolitics describes a multi-speed order in which universal rules no longer bind; at Davos, middle powers spoke of permanent rupture rather than transition. Against this backdrop, the United States Secretary of State stood before the world’s premier security forum and called for the restoration of five centuries of colonial empires.

    The Rubio Confession

    On 14 February 2026, at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered what critics across the spectrum called the most openly pro-colonial address by a senior Western official this century. He mourned the loss of five centuries of Western imperial expansion; named anti-colonial uprisings as a cause of Western decline; urged European allies to shed their guilt and shame over colonialism; and summoned the West to a new Western century by competing for market share in the economies of the Global South — framing that South not as sovereign nations but as an economic space to be recaptured, that precise colonial and predatory framing.

    This is not merely reprehensible; it is a confession. Facing structural decline, the imperial culture has abandoned even the pretence of moral authority and reverted openly to the logic of domination. Harvard’s Mathias Risse called the speech civilisational panic dressed as statecraft. The Global South’s response was swift: Indian commentary asked whether an American East India Company was coming; Brahma Chellaney saw the restoration of an exclusionary hierarchy; Sanjaya Baru urged India, as the beacon of anti-colonialism, to condemn it with the contempt it deserves.

    The Architecture of Extraction

    Rubio’s call to shed guilt is not only obscene; it is historically false. Utsa Patnaik’s study for Columbia University Press establishes that Britain drained £9.2 trillion — some $45 trillion — from India between 1765 and 1938, seventeen times Britain’s current annual GDP, by compounding India’s intercepted export-surplus earnings at the ordinary rate of opportunity cost.

    India’s gold and foreign-exchange earnings — among the largest in the world — were permanently diverted to London, funding Britain’s industrial revolution, its wars, and its administration, and consuming between a quarter and a third of the central budget.

    The mechanism was an elegant deception. After 1765, the East India Company taxed Indian producers, then used roughly a third of that revenue to buy their goods for export — paying them with their own taxes while acquiring their produce for nothing. The Council Bills system of 1861 industrialised this: foreign buyers paid London in gold and sterling for bills cashable only in rupees, which the colonial government paid out of its own budget. India’s gold and foreign-exchange earnings — among the largest in the world — were permanently diverted to London, funding Britain’s industrial revolution, its wars, and its administration, and consuming between a quarter and a third of the central budget.

    Jason Hickel calculates that rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960 alone. There is no Western century to restore that was not built on the theft of other civilisations’ wealth — legitimised for six centuries by the Three Cs of civilisation, Christianity, and commerce, and continued after independence through structural-adjustment programmes, an African external debt of $824 billion, and more than 13,000 active US sanctions.

    The result was stark. India held the world’s second-largest export surplus for three decades before 1929, yet per capita income barely moved between 1900 and 1946, because the surplus was siphoned abroad rather than invested at home. Its share of global industrial output collapsed from 25 per cent in 1750 to 2 per cent in 1900. Japan, which kept its earnings, industrialised; India, whose earnings were confiscated, could not. The same logic ran through slavery, which research now confirms accelerated Britain’s industrial revolution — vindicating Marx’s image of capital arriving dripping with blood and dirt. Jason Hickel calculates that rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960 alone. There is no Western century to restore that was not built on the theft of other civilisations’ wealth — legitimised for six centuries by the Three Cs of civilisation, Christianity, and commerce, and continued after independence through structural-adjustment programmes, an African external debt of $824 billion, and more than 13,000 active US sanctions.

    The sanctifying licence was issued long before the Council Bills, in Rome. A sequence of papal bulls — Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera (1493), proclaimed the year after Columbus reached the Americas — granted Catholic monarchs the asserted right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue” non-Christian peoples, reduce them to perpetual slavery, seize their lands, and partition the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. From these decrees grew the Doctrine of Discovery: the claim that lands not inhabited by Christians were free to be “discovered” and their peoples’ sovereignty void. It furnished the racial and civilisational hierarchy — Christian over heathen, European over all others — on which five centuries of conquest were built, dressing the pursuit of gold, land, and labour in the vestments of salvation. The piety was the facade; extraction was the motive. Nor is the point contested by Rome: in 2023 the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine, conceding the bulls were “linked to political questions” and never expressions of the faith — an admission, five centuries late, that the licence to colonise was always politics wearing the mask of God.

    The Civilisational Verdict

    Every tradition the Foundation invokes condemns this architecture. Thiruvalluvar’s Kural 113 warns that gain wrongly acquired must not be retained even for a day — the exact verdict on a Council Bills system that gave Indians rupees while stealing their gold; his Kural 551 holds a ruler who works injustice crueller than a murderer. Kaniyan Poongundranar’s Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Kelir dissolves, at its root, the civilisational tribalism Rubio attempts to revive, for exploitation requires first believing that the exploited are not our kin. Confucius taught that legitimacy flows from virtue, not force; Plato named the tyrant as one who turns governance to private enrichment — the shape of a state that declares it will run another nation and seize its oil; and Ubuntu’s relational personhood is negated wherever a system is built to take from people, unawares, what they have earned.

    Risse’s verdict is sharper still: Rubio’s West has no Indigenous peoples, no colonised subjects, no enslaved Africans, no Buchenwald near Weimar — only heroes and temporary setbacks. Such a West has never existed, and cannot be reinvigorated in 2026.

    The New Theatre of Predation

    The doctrine is not rhetorical. In January 2026, the United States bombed Venezuela, abducted its elected president, and announced that US companies would seize its oil while Washington “ran the country” — a clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the International Commission of Jurists held. The same month, it cut off Cuba’s main oil supplier and, through Executive Order 14380, threatened any country that resupplied it, until the UN warned of humanitarian collapse — collective punishment of a civilian population. And in February 2026, the US and Israel launched a full-scale attack on Iran, killing its Supreme Leader, striking over 42,000 civilian sites, and — at a girls’ school in Minab — at least 167 children; the American Society of International Law named it a crime of aggression, and the UN Secretary-General confirmed it contravened international law. As Britain once dressed theft as commerce, the US now dresses resource seizure as law enforcement — the structural logic is identical.

    The Measured Decline

    The economic premise of the Rubio doctrine is fiction. Asia’s share of global GDP reached 55 per cent in 2024, years ahead of projection, and BRICS economies now exceed the G7 at purchasing-power parity. The Global South’s ascent is no Western beneficence but a return to the norm colonialism interrupted — China and India together held half of world income in 1700 before colonialism drove their share below a tenth. A declining West, in truth, needs the Global South to survive.

    Moral authority has collapsed in tandem. Only 39 per cent of Americans now believe the United States is the world’s moral leader, down from 60 per cent in 2017; across Europe, support for Israel has fallen to between 13 and 21 per cent. Above all, Gaza has erased Western moral pretension: independent research estimates roughly 75,200 violent deaths and the displacement of about 90 per cent of the population, as governments that once lectured the world on human rights moved to justify mass killing — not an aberration, as one analysis put it, but an unveiling.

    The Oligarchy Behind the Flag

    Analysing nearly 1,800 US policy decisions, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business groups exert substantial independent influence on policy while ordinary citizens have little or none — a pattern they termed economic-elite domination rather than democracy.

    There is a sharper way to name what must fall. “The West” is not its peoples; it is a structure of concentrated power that governs in their name while serving far narrower interests. Analysing nearly 1,800 US policy decisions, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business groups exert substantial independent influence on policy while ordinary citizens have little or none — a pattern they termed economic-elite domination rather than democracy. Their method has been contested, but elite-skewed influence is widely corroborated.

    The architecture is visible and legal. Since Citizens United (2010), outside US election spending has risen more than twenty-eight-fold — from $144 million in 2008 to over $4.2 billion in 2024 — roughly $1.9 billion of it untraceable “dark money,” a few hundred mega-donors providing the bulk. Oxfam records billionaire wealth at a record $18.3 trillion in 2026, up 81 per cent since 2020; the twelve richest now hold more than the poorest four billion people, and billionaires are four thousand times likelier than ordinary citizens to hold office. Across 66 countries, nearly half of those surveyed say the rich simply buy elections.

    The same convergence runs through the war and information economies. Some $191 million was spent lobbying the US defence sector in 2025, and more than 315 senior officers passed through the revolving door into the top weapons firms between 1995 and 2021 — Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” at industrial scale. At the 2025 presidential inauguration, the heads of Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Tesla stood arrayed behind the president — a tableau of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, in which control over information becomes a lever over democracy itself, as a Stanford working group chaired by Francis Fukuyama warned.

    None of this requires a secret cabal — only aligned interests, legalised influence, and a public whose consent is manufactured rather than freely given. The decisive point is this: the structure that drains the Global South is the same one that hollows out wages, democracy, and dignity within the West. The dividing line is not West against the rest but concentrated extractive power against the world’s peoples — the Western working majority among them, conscripted to fight its wars and absorb its costs. When we say the West must fall, it is this structure that must fall, and democratic power that must be restored, at home as much as abroad. That is not the elimination of a people; it is the end of their domination by an oligarchy that has long claimed to speak in their name.

    The Self-Defeating Logic of Overreach

    Like the Council Bills before it, the Rubio doctrine carries the mechanism of its own defeat, for each intervention rebounds structurally. The seizure of Russian assets accelerated de-dollarisation; the bombing of Iran united a region against the US–Israel alliance; the abduction of Venezuela’s president hastened Latin America’s diversification away from Washington; the oil siege of Cuba drew unprecedented condemnation. An order that must abduct, blockade, and bomb to assert itself is not ascendant — it is exhausting the legitimacy on which power finally depends.

    The Imperative of Justice

    The fall of Western hegemony opens the possibility of justice but does not guarantee it; the outcome depends on whether rising powers build the multipolar order on genuine ethical foundations rather than replicating what they inherit. That demands sovereign equality without exception — Article 2(4) applied universally, and a Security Council reformed so that no state acts as judge, party, and executor at once. It demands historical accountability: reparative justice through climate finance, debt cancellation, technology transfer, and restitution is not charity but the minimum acknowledgement of documented theft. It demands that the ICJ, ICC, and UN human-rights bodies function without great-power interference; civilisational pluralism against civilisational supremacism; and, finally, democratic renewal within the Western societies themselves, whose peoples are not the authors of empire but among its subjects.

    India is uniquely placed to articulate that alternative. Its inheritance — Thiruvalluvar’s justice, Kaniyan Poongundranar’s universal kinship, and the Gandhian tradition of non-violent resistance to precisely the domination Rubio seeks to revive — is the moral tradition colonialism suppressed but could never extinguish. Against a new Western century of restored hierarchy, the Peninsula Foundation offers the Tamil poet’s ancient answer, as relevant in Munich today as on the banks of the Kaveri two millennia ago:

    Yaadhum Oore, Yaavarum Kelir — to us all towns are one, all people are our kin.

    The West will fall. Fall it must. From its ruins, may justice arise.

    Sources

    THE MULTIPOLAR TRANSITION

    • JPMorgan Centre for Geopolitics — World Rewired: Navigating a Multi-Speed, Multipolar Order
    • United Nations — Secretary-General’s press conference on his 2026 priorities
    • World Economic Forum — Davos 2026: How middle powers are reading the global moment

    THE RUBIO MUNICH SPEECH AND RESPONSES

    • US Department of State — Secretary Rubio at the Munich Security Conference (14 February 2026)
    • The New York Times — In Munich, Rubio Stresses Shared History to Europeans
    • Mathias Risse, Harvard Kennedy School (Carr Center) — A Human-Rights-Based Reply to Marco Rubio’s Munich Speech
    • China-US Focus — American Neo-Colonialism and the Confessional State
    • Chatham House — The West vs the West at the Munich Security Conference
    • India Today — Rubio’s Munich speech signals US colonial competition for the Global South
    • The Wire — Marco Rubio’s Defence of Colonialism Demands a Response from India
    • Firstpost — Rubio’s claim of a Western century is a myth

    COLONIAL EXTRACTION: THE DRAIN AND THE COUNCIL BILLS

    • Utsa Patnaik (Columbia University Press), via Al Jazeera — How Britain stole $45 trillion from India
    • NDTV — How the British Empire robbed India of $45 trillion
    • self_study_history — Drain of Wealth: the Council Bills mechanism
    • COLLECTIVE India — ‘Drain of Wealth’, today
    • Wikipedia — Economy of India under the British Raj (global GDP share)
    • CEPR / VoxEU — Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution
    • Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
    • Jason Hickel, via Al Jazeera — Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

    THE LICENCE TO COLONISE: PAPAL BULLS, CHRISTIANITY, AND NEOCOLONIALISM

    • Vatican News (2023) — Church defends Indigenous peoples: ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ was never Catholic — the formal repudiation
    • Canadian Museum for Human Rights — The Doctrine of Discovery (papal bulls and their language)
    • Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame — Papal Condemnation of the Doctrine of Discovery
    • Emory University — The Philosophy of Colonialism: Civilization, Christianity and Commerce
    • Church Mission Society — Mission after George Floyd: on white supremacy, colonialism and world Christianity
    • Catalyst (McGill) — The IMF and World Bank: Neocolonial Domination, Debt Trap and Resistance

    THE CIVILISATIONAL FRAMEWORK

    • Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural (G.U. Pope translation) — Project Madurai
    • Kaniyan Poongundranar, Purananuru 192 — Kaniyan Pungundranar
    • Confucius, The Analects — LibreTexts, Compact Anthology of World Literature
    • Plato, Republic — Plato’s Theory of Justice
    • Mogobe B. Ramose — African Philosophy Through Ubuntu

    THE OLIGARCHY BEHIND THE FLAG: CONCENTRATED POWER IN THE WEST

    • Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page — Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)
    • Omar S. Bashir (Research & Politics, 2015) — A Review of the ‘Oligarchy’ Result — methodological critique
    • Oxfam International (January 2026) — Resisting the Rule of the Rich: billionaire wealth and political inequality
    • Brennan Center for Justice — Dark Money Hit a Record High of $1.9 Billion in 2024 Federal Races
    • Center for American Progress — Undoing Citizens United and Reining In Super PACs (28-fold rise in outside spending)
    • OpenSecrets — Defense Lobbying Profile ($191m in 2025)
    • Quincy Institute, via Jacobin — The Publicly Funded Defense Contractor Revolving Door (315+ officers)
    • ProMarket (Stigler Center) — The Trends That Defined US Antitrust in 2025 (platform power and modern oligarchy)
    • Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019)

    VENEZUELA

    • International Commission of Jurists — Territorial sovereignty, the rule of law and human rights must be respected
    • Le Monde — The US intervention in Venezuela violates foundational principles of international law
    • UN Security Council — US action in Venezuela puts sovereignty of states, international law at stake

    CUBA

    • Al Jazeera — US sanctions reshaping life in Cuba: UN rapporteur
    • Baker McKenzie — US declares national emergency on Cuba; Executive Order 14380
    • UN News — Cuba: UN warns of possible humanitarian ‘collapse’ as oil supplies cut

    IRAN

    • American Society of International Law — Statement Regarding the Use of Force Against Iran (2 March 2026)
    • Reuters — Iran’s UN envoy says 1,332 civilians killed in the war
    • Al Jazeera — Iranian government reveals scale of civilian casualties (42,000+ sites damaged)
    • Associated Press — International legal order tested by war in Iran (‘crime of aggression’)

    DECLINE METRICS AND MORAL AUTHORITY

    • Atlantic Council — Piece by piece, the BRICS really are building a multipolar world
    • Mastercard — Welcome to the nuanced reality of the Asian Century
    • Forbes — Americans think the US is losing its moral authority, new poll shows
    • The New Humanitarian — The end of Western values

    GAZA

    • Al Jazeera — Gaza death toll exceeds 75,000 as independent data verify loss
    • OHCHR — End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts
  • Was Colonialism a Crime? Algerian Parliament Criminalizes 130 Years of French Rule

    Was Colonialism a Crime? Algerian Parliament Criminalizes 130 Years of French Rule

    The history of the modern period, particularly for the Global South, is still a version written by the dominant powers – the West or colonial powers. Colonial history is now being researched more thoroughly and reveals the horrendous impact of colonialism. The Algerian parliament takes the lead in calling out colonialism for what it truly was – crimes against humanity, racism, religious intolerance, and war crimes. More countries are sure to follow the Algerian example.

     

    The Algerian newspaper al-Masa’ reports that on December 24, the Algerian parliament passed a law recognising French colonialism in that country, 1830-1962, as having been a crime that involved mass killing, rape, displacement of populations, usurpation of land, and marginalisation of people. The law also makes claims on France for reparations.

    The great Algerian historian Mahfoud Bennoune had made the case for the economic benefits to France of the exploitation of Algerian natural resources (metals, oil), the expansion of French vineyards on expropriated Algerian land, trade monopolies, and the creation of Algeria as a captive market for French goods.

    He wrote not only of countless massacres by French commanders of local populations but also of a vast transfer of landed wealth: “Using innumerable arbitrary measures — sequestration, confiscation, expropriation, cantonment . . . an increasing number of hectares were accumulated for the purposes of colonisation. . . The subsequent booty was distributed among the colonists [French colonisers]. By 1954, these 3,028,000 expropriated hectares [~116,000 sq. mi.] comprised 2,828,000 hectares of ploughland and 210,000 hectares of forest, all privately owned by the French colonials. The colonial state still possessed 7,200,000 hectares, including forest, unproductive land, and pastureland.” As for the land the Algerians were crowded onto, ” two-thirds of the land assigned to the peasants was minimal pasture and unproductive plots.”

    Ibrahim Boughali, the speaker of the Algerian parliament, underlined that the objective of this law is not to deploy history for the purposes of revenge, but to restate historical truth and preserve national memory from all efforts to erase or falsify it. At the same time, the law emphasised the necessity for the Occupying state to accept responsibility for the “systematic crimes committed against persons, land and Algerian identity.

    The Algerian and French governments have had increasingly strained relations in recent years. Algeria is furious that France recognised Morocco’s claim to the Spanish Sahara; Algeria supports the Polisario Liberation Front and its claim that Western Sahara should be independent. It was a territory ruled by medieval Moroccan governments that had been detached and made a colony by Spain, which relinquished it in the 1970s. Morocco immediately claimed it, insisting it was only reclaiming it.

    France recognised Morocco’s claim, as did the US, as a quid pro quo under the Biden administration for Morocco’s recognition of Israel and signing on to the so-called “Abraham Accords.”

    Algeria is also not happy about the increase in French racism toward the large expatriate Algerian community in France. Further, Algerians have been annoyed by the rise online of French atrocity-denialism, in which commentators dispute that France committed massacres in that country or at least excuse them. In the early 21st century, some French parliamentarians strove to outlaw any depreciation of what they termed the glories of the French empire, but then President Jacques Chirac refused to go along.

    European colonialism, a historically distinct amalgam of barracuda capitalism, racism, settler expansionism, and economic exploitation, killed millions of people in the global south and directed profits to the metropole, even from desperately poor countries in places like Africa. That it was a set of crimes is hard to dispute.

    One of the things I was surprised to discover during the Iraq War was that when I called it a colonial war, some people in Washington couldn’t get that it was a bad thing. The critique of colonialism had not reached the halls of Congress! Or, indeed, many people in middle America. Historians in the past 50 years have excavated masses of documents proving the massacres and exploitation engaged in by colonial authorities. There was actually a cover-up in the archives of the British atrocities committed in Kenya in the 1950s, which only hard historical digging managed ultimately to thwart. I’m told by colleagues who work on Libya in the Italian archives that documents on massacres committed by Italian troops in that country appear sometimes to be hidden by the staff.

    That is, there is a lot of denialism out there.

    But even though it is easy to demonstrate colonialism’s evils, few post-colonial countries have done what Algeria just did. In part, this is because they often still have vital economic or security relationships with the former coloniser and so cannot afford to alienate them.

    While, in the twentieth century, the Algerian elite depended on France (and sometimes even seemed to think they were French), in 2025, things have changed. In the past two decades, Algeria has greatly diversified its import and export markets. It imports more goods from China than from France. It mainly imports wheat from Russia, not France. It is doing more trade with Turkey and Qatar. Few Algerian firms operate in France, and the number of French firms in Algeria has fallen dramatically.

    Having thrown off economic neo-imperialism, Algerian politicians are free to say what they think.

    They are even introducing English in Algerian schools this year, with an eye toward gradually making it the country’s second language, after Arabic, rather than French, which educated Algerians have mainly used since the mid-nineteenth century.

    Photo of Algiers by Sid Ahmed SAOUD on Unsplash

    Le Monde notes that Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has never actually presented a formal, specific request to France for reparations. It reports that the French Foreign Ministry — “the Quay d’Orsay” — denounced the new law as “manifestly hostile” and as an impediment to the ongoing dialogue between the two countries.

    Algeria, a country of some 47 million, is about as populous as Spain. It has an annual nominal GDP of roughly $190 billion, placing it in the company of Greece, New Zealand, and Iraq; it is the world’s 52nd-largest economy.

    The United States could be presented with a similar bill by the Philippines, where US troops killed or unleashed the conditions that killed some 400,000 people in the early 20th century. But that is unlikely at the moment, since the Philippines remains deeply intertwined with the US and increasingly needs the US Navy as China seeks hegemony in the region and makes claims on maritime territory that the Philippines also claims. The US is the country’s largest trading partner with $12 billion in bilateral trade, though Japan, China, Hong Kong and South Korea are also major trading partners.

    The kind of trade diversification undertaken by Algeria with regard to France is unusual among post-colonial countries, which may help explain why its criminalisation of colonialism is so unprecedented. But as China rises as a major trading partner for postcolonial countries, and as South-South global trade more generally burgeons, we could see more such claims.

    The Congo, where Belgium is estimated to have killed 8 million of 16 million residents, is a likely plaintiff. These disputes will likely go to the International Court of Justice at the UN, the judges of which, however, have traditionally been drawn more from the Colonial North than the colonised South.

    This article was published earlier in ‘Informed Comment‘  and in Scheerpost.com

     

  • Did Colonisation ever End?

    Did Colonisation ever End?

    Let us all unite and toil together

    To give the best we have to Africa

    The cradle of mankind and fount of culture

    Our pride and hope at break of dawn

    From the African Union anthem

    Consider this scenario, courtesy of Supreme Africa Breaking News: Since 2022, representatives of the African Union have been meeting at the organisation’s headquarters in Addis Ababa to draw up a living constitution for the continent and establish a single African government. The constitution itself will be promulgated in 2026, whereupon national lawmaking bodies will begin aligning domestic laws within the continental framework and African governments will sign that one African sovereign agreement. Between then and 2028, citizens will receive dual IDs, a unified army will be created, and countries will begin using a common digital currency—Afrigold—alongside their local ones. The third stage, harmonization, will culminate in 2035, when the newly formed African parliament will gain real powers.

    After that, Africans will be free to move around the continent to live and work where they please. They will be able to appeal to AU courts if their government violates their rights, and they will be able to vote in the elections of whichever country they happen to find themselves. Democracy will be the default system of government for all member states, even though monarchies will participate in an advisory capacity in a council of sovereigns, alongside chiefs and spiritual leaders. In the words of Mama Pan Africa, an invented muse of sorts, “This constitution respects the soil it walks on. We’re not killing traditions; we’re aligning them with the dream.”

    Alas, a dream it is indeed. Supreme Africa Breaking News is a YouTube channel of true believers. And the reality of the AU could hardly be harsher.

    The first and most obvious problem is the historical legacy of colonialism, which, by the end of the nineteenth century had divided the continent into several dozen territories under the control and administration of mostly the UK and France, but also Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and, for a time, Germany. Following World War II—which had been fought in the name of saving the world from tyranny—these states all gained what they were pleased to call independence, with their own flags, anthems, and UN seats. But what did that amount to in practice?

    In July 1960, Michel Debré, then the prime minister of France, stated to the leader of Gabon: “Independence is granted on the condition that the State, once independent, undertakes to respect the cooperation agreements signed previously. There are two systems which come into force at the same time: independence and cooperation agreements. One does not go without the other.”

    In short, as the historian Tony Chafer has put it, “decolonisation did not mark an end, but rather a restructuring of the imperial relationship.”

    The French didn’t fudge the answer. In July 1960, Michel Debré, then the prime minister of France, stated to the leader of Gabon: “Independence is granted on the condition that the State, once independent, undertakes to respect the cooperation agreements signed previously. There are two systems which come into force at the same time: independence and cooperation agreements. One does not go without the other.” In short, as the historian Tony Chafer has put it, “decolonisation did not mark an end, but rather a restructuring of the imperial relationship.” The cooperation agreements had a number of components. One was the issue of what was known as the colonial debt—which, however counterintuitive this may seem today, obliged the newly independent countries to pay for the infrastructure supposedly built by France during colonisation. There was also the obligation for them to continue using French as the national language. And there were the security pacts under which they would have to support the mother country in any future wars.

    Even more telling was the right of first refusal on the purchase of all natural resources (including those yet to be discovered) in ex-colonial territories that France reserved for itself, irrespective of whether the new countries’ governments could secure better deals elsewhere. And there was the imposition of the CFA franc on fourteen West and Central African states (including Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony) at a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (and subsequently, the euro). This setup enabled France to pay for imports in its own currency and thereby save on any currency exchanges in a world otherwise dominated by the US dollar. The French economy benefitted greatly from the ensuing trade surplus, which fed reserves to pay for the country’s debts. Some African leaders profited as well: they could more easily loot their respective treasuries, with the active encouragement of their French masters, who also guaranteed their grip on power by keeping French troops stationed near the capital cities. Those who attempted to skirt any of the requirements were quickly disposed of.

    Such was the case with Togo. In 1963, barely two years into his tenure as the country’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated by a squad of soldiers led by Gnassingbé Eyadéma, an army sergeant and former French Foreign Legionnaire. Olympio’s crime, in the eyes of the French authorities, was to have insisted that Togo should have its own currency. Eyadéma soon handed power over to a new president, only to overthrow him four years later, in 1967. Subsequently, he morphed into a civilian president, and following growing unrest after a decade in power in that capacity, he agreed to a democratic constitution—and then easily won multiparty elections in 1993 and again in 1998, both times amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud. Term limits should have forced him to finally step down in 2002, but he had the constitution amended to abolish them, and he won elections again in 2003, and again was accused of fraud. He died in office two years later. In all of this, he was fully supported by successive French governments—much like his son Faure Gnassingbé has been since.

    Gnassingbé, who had served as a minister under his father, in 2005 promptly took over the mantle in what was effectively a military coup. Like his father, he served two terms, the new constitution’s stipulated maximum, and then, also like his father, he rewrote the constitution—this time converting the presidential system to a parliamentary one. As the new prime minister, Gnassingbé was named president of the council of ministers, with most of the previous powers of the president devolving to him. He could stay in this post until at least 2030.

    As it happens, a similar path is currently being trod by Alassane Ouattara, since 2010 the president of Côte d’Ivoire, the jewel in the Françafrique crown. Ouattara is now proposing to stand for re-election for a fourth term, arguing that term limits were reset to zero with a new constitution in 2016. As I write, protestors are being shot on the streets in both countries. President Emmanuel Macron of France recently denied that he had asked Gnassingbé to resign, despite reports to the contrary; where Ouattara is concerned, Macron had said, in 2020, “France does not have to give lessons.” France is anxious to maintain a neocolonial relationship, but Macron understands very well that it cannot be sustained, and so he hedges.

    By contrast, the best that can be said for the British during decolonisation is that they were more circumspect than the French. The new native rulers weren’t required to sign a piece of paper: They had already been co-opted into service, most glaringly in the case of Nigeria. According to the historian Olakunle Lawal, in the runup to independence in 1960, a draft paper from the British Foreign Office sought to investigate how “we can sustain our position as a world power, particularly in the economic and strategic fields, against the dangers inherent in the present upsurge of nationalism,” in order that the UK might “maintain specific British interests on which our existence as a trading country depends.” It concluded that the challenge “was to forestall nationalist demands which threaten our vital interests” by creating “a class with a vested interest in co-operation.” But then the British authorities knew with whom they were dealing.

    Following independence, this class proceeded to loot the Nigerian treasury to the tune of $20 trillion between 1960 and 2005, storing many of the proceeds in safe havens abroad. Nigeria still ranks among the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. Such behaviour is a sign of these people’s contempt for the masses they lord it over—and sometimes, indeed, are allowed to lord it over by those masses themselves.

    Consider the case of Ike Ekweremadu, a former long-time senator and former deputy president of the Senate, who is serving a prison sentence in the U.K. after being convicted of an organ-trafficking plot, the first such case to be tried under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act. It turns out that he had arranged for a 21-year-old street hawker in Lagos to travel to the UK so that one of the vendor’s kidneys could be harvested to save the life of Ekweremadu’s ailing daughter. The operation would have cost Ekweremadu £80,000—small change for someone with two homes in London, three in Florida, and seven in Dubai. The intended victim, who was to receive just £7,000 for his organ, only realised what was about to be done to him when doctors informed him of the medical risks he faced and the subsequent lifelong care he would require. Ekweremadu clearly didn’t think much of the fellow’s life; after all, the man had only been selling phone accessories out of a wheelbarrow in Lagos.

    That young man has now improved his lot, having inadvertently been gifted a one-way ticket to the so-called developed world, which mercifully granted him asylum for his travails. Tellingly, however, Ekweremadu’s wife, who was convicted alongside her husband but has since been released, was enthusiastically received when she returned home to Nigeria early this year. In the words of a local community leader: “Our prayers are with the Ekweremadu family, and we hope Senator Ike will also be reunited with us soon.” No mention of their target.

    So here we are, all these decades after so-called independence, and what is the role of the African Union in all of this? Originally known as the Organization of African Unity, the body was launched in 1963 with five objectives: to promote unity and solidarity among African states; to defend their sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence; to coordinate and intensify their efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa; to eradicate all forms of colonialism; and to promote international cooperation, with due regard to the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Of these goals, the first was by far the most important. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first head of state, spelt this out in an impassioned speech to the OAU in 1963: “Unite we must. Without necessarily sacrificing our sovereignties, big or small, we can here and now forge a political union based on defence, foreign affairs and diplomacy, and a common citizenship, an African currency, an African monetary zone, and an African central bank. We must unite in order to achieve the full liberation of our continent.”

    Yet little or no progress was made on this front. In time, the OAU became known as an old men’s club, because of elderly African leaders who were more concerned with oppressing their subjects in the artificial fiefs they had inherited than with uplifting their lot. And many of those fiefs, though many are also actual countries, are still too insignificant in the larger scheme of things: six contain fewer than one million people, four fewer than two million, and another five fewer than three million. Which is one reason the heads of state or government of the OAU issued the Sirte Declaration in 1999 calling for the establishment of the AU: they wanted to accelerate the integration of Africa so that, according to one commentator on the site of the Nasser Youth Movement, the continent could “play its rightful role in the global economy while addressing multifaceted social, economic and political problems compounded as they were by certain negative aspects of globalization.” All well and good.

    And this wish was reiterated by Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the AU’s ambassador to the U.S. in 2016–19: “Until Africa comes together as a continent to speak with one voice as a people, nothing will change for the good of her people.” Failing that, she pointed out—obviously enough—that a plethora of small, unviable countries with “the same sovereignty as China, as India,” were deliberately designed “to see to it that they will never make it on their own—and in the event those countries do make it, they are easy to destabilise.”

    “The dismissal of Arikana Chihombori-Quao, AU ambassador to the United States, raises serious questions about the independence of the AU. For someone who spoke her mind about the detrimental effects of colonisation and the huge cost of French control in several parts of Africa, this is an act that can best be described as coming from French-controlled colonised minds.”   – Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana

    Shortly after, her term was abruptly cut short without explanation. The chair of the AU at the time, Moussa Faki Mahamat, a former foreign minister of Chad, wrote her a letter that read, in part: “I have the honor to inform you that, in line with the terms and conditions of the service governing your appointment as Permanent Representative of the African Union Mission to the United States in Washington, DC, I have decided to terminate your contract in that capacity with effect from Nov. 1, 2019.” To many, this was proof of the AU’s spinelessness in the face of the West. Jerry John Rawlings, the former (and now late) president of Ghana, tweeted at the time: “The dismissal of Arikana Chihombori-Quao, AU ambassador to the United States, raises serious questions about the independence of the AU. For someone who spoke her mind about the detrimental effects of colonisation and the huge cost of French control in several parts of Africa, this is an act that can best be described as coming from French-controlled colonised minds.”

    The colonised mind was also clearly on display in the case of Ouattara’s election for an illegal third term in late 2020, when he was 78. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the security forces perpetrated the widespread violence in opposition strongholds, in league with local thugs. Here is the account of one eyewitness in the Yopougon Kouté area of Abidjan:

    I saw a group coming into the neighbourhood in two Gbakas (minivans), blue taxis, and scooters. … They were armed with machetes, knives, and guns. I went out with what I could to defend my village. The neighbourhood youth started throwing stones, and there were so many of us that they fled. One of the government supporters couldn’t escape in time, and he was beaten to death by our young people.

    Even as the European Union—the West—expressed “deep concerns about the tensions, provocations and incitement to hatred that have prevailed and continue to persist in the country around this election,” the AU claimed that the vote had “proceeded in a generally satisfactory manner.” But that was no surprise. As one human rights activist from Mozambique said: “the African Union is an organisation that primarily represents the interests of the powerful. It is toothless and ineffective, and it repeatedly proves itself incapable of ensuring prosperity, security, and peace for all Africans.”

    In fact, the AU is not different enough from the OAU: it, too, is an old men’s club. Africa counts both some of the world’s oldest male presidents (their female counterparts are few and far between). It also counts some of the youngest demographics of any continent, and these older men jealously guard their privileges. Watch the 92-year-old Paul Biya currently planning to run in the forthcoming elections in Cameroon; he has been in power in one form or another since 1982. He isn’t even the longest-standing leader on the continent. That honour goes to the 83-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, in power since 1979. Two decades ago, the state-operated radio station declared him “the country’s god” with “all power over men and things,” adding that he was “in permanent contact with the almighty” and “can decide to kill anyone without calling him to account and without going to hell.”

    It is hardly surprising that such men would be wary of an AU that, as they see matters, is seeking to usurp their power; they are tardy in funding it. Many member states don’t bother to pay their annual contributions, which is why external sources funded two-thirds of its 2023 budget (and China built the new headquarters in Addis Ababa at its own expense). An attempt was made to rectify this anomaly in a decision adopted by the various governments at a Retreat on Financing of the Union during the 27th African Union Summit in Kigali, Rwanda, in July 2016. It directed all AU members to apply a 0.2% levy on eligible imports to finance the organisation. We are all allowed our dreams; nothing ever came of this one.

    The pity of it all is that a united Africa, whose population is expected to hit 2.5 billion by 2050—and account for one in four people in the world—stands to become the most populous continent by the end of the century: it should automatically command at least one permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and with full veto power. Addressing the annual session of the UN General Assembly in 2023, Joe Biden, then the US president, seemed to make an indirect case for Africa’s inclusion at the top: “We need to be able to break the gridlock that too often stymies progress and blocks consensus on the Council. We need more voices and more perspectives at the table.” His call was repeated in 2024 by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, his Black ambassador to the UN, who waxed lyrical about being Uncle Sam’s emissary in her mother continent. Having “travelled extensively across Africa,” she said, she knew “firsthand the diversity and the talent, the depth and breadth of experience.” And so the US government would support granting the continent two permanent seats on the Security Council—but without veto power, otherwise the council would become “dysfunctional.” Chihombori-Quao rightly said that the proposal “is an insult, not only to the African leaders, but it is an insult to 1.4 billion people.” What else is new?

    This article was published earlier on www.theideasletter.org and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivatives license.

    Feature Image Credit: The Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Source: Illustrierte Zeitung via Wikimedia Commons and  thecollector.com

     

  • Lessons for today? Why did Europeans conquer the world while other civilisations did not?

    Lessons for today? Why did Europeans conquer the world while other civilisations did not?

    There is no question that India, China, Egypt, and Persia, in particular, produced flourishing civilisations long before the Europeans. The axial period around which world history revolves, as constructed by Jaspers, between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C., does not refer to Europeans but to the three great civilisations of China, India, and Persia.

    There is no question that India, China, Egypt, and Persia, in particular, produced flourishing civilisations long before the Europeans. The axial period around which world history revolves, as constructed by Jaspers, between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C., does not refer to Europeans but to the three great civilisations of China, India, and Persia (see also Katzenstein). Nevertheless, Europeans conquered and colonised the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, not the other way around. There are essentially four explanatory approaches, which are not only mutually exclusive but also determine the self-image of large parts of the world to this day. Put simply, the twentieth century saw a political and, in large parts of the world, an economic decolonisation, but by no means a decolonisation of thought and self-understanding. Moreover, there is a danger that the Eurocentrism that needs to be overcome will only be replaced by ethnocentrism (as is currently the case in Russia and, to some extent, in Israel) or even a civilisational-cultural centrism that is no less problematic than Eurocentrism. China, in particular, is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the West.

    the twentieth century saw a political and, in large parts of the world, an economic decolonisation, but by no means a decolonisation of thought and self-understanding

    So, what are the four explanatory approaches mentioned above? There are two Eurocentric approaches: an Asia-centric approach and a globalist approach. The first Eurocentric approach explains the worldwide colonisation of Europeans in terms of an intellectual superiority that began either in the development of Greek thought or in the Middle Ages. However, since the European Middle Ages were extremely “dark,” there is no direct connection between Greek rationality and the supposed intellectual superiority of the Europeans. Rather, this connection was made possible only by the translations into Arabic of the most important Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, and by further translations into Latin. From my point of view – and a little local patriotism is allowed here, as I live near Fulda – the rise of the Europeans began with a letter from Charlemagne to the monastery in Fulda, in which he praised the religious zeal of the monks, but harshly criticised their intellectual understanding of religion. This gave rise to the so-called Carolingian Renaissance of work, which for the first time saw physical and manual labour as equal value to spiritual development – although it is debatable whether this was the first time this happened. Still, the facts remain undisputed in this explanatory approach. As a result, inventions were made in ever-new waves, the sciences developed, and this ultimately led to spurts of individualisation, the struggle for freedom and human rights that characterised the entire 18th and 19th centuries in the European-American world. This intellectual advantage led to a military superiority that enabled the Europeans to colonise the world despite being vastly outnumbered. To this day, Euro-American civilisation considers itself superior to all others. As for violent colonisation, it is admitted that Europeans are “sorry” for it but that it has nothing to do with the essence of Euro-American civilisation, which is characterised by human rights, democracy, and freedom (see Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber: for an overview see Stark).

    The second Eurocentric position also assumes European superiority but places it not in the intellectual but in the purely military sphere. The consequence is that Europeans owe their relative prosperity, democracy, and human rights not to themselves but to the violent exploitation of the entire world. Here, too, there are two variants, referring to the Spanish-Portuguese conquests and the Orange army reform in Holland. Since the Muslim armies’ extensive conquest of the Mediterranean region, the Iberian Peninsula had been engaged in a defensive struggle for almost seven hundred years, which ended with their conquest. This created a caste of highly skilled warriors who sought a new vocation after defeating the Muslim armies, which they found in the conquest of Central and South America. The reform of the Orange army, in turn, made modern warfare possible. Based on both, the Europeans first plundered the gold and silver in both Americas.

    Still, they soon introduced enslaved Africans, as they were more likely to survive the plantation work on the Caribbean islands than the indigenous peoples, who were nearly wiped out. The gold and silver shipped to Europe and the products of slave labour created a demand in Europe that was not met by Spain and Portugal but by England and the Netherlands – the Industrial Revolution was thus triggered by a demand created by the exploitation of large parts of the world, precious metals and the “black gold” of slave labour. “Incidentally, the discovery of the sea route to China and India also caused the decline of the Muslim empires and civilisations, as they were no longer the link between Europe and South and East Asia but stood isolated. Political decolonisation was eventually replaced by mostly indirect rule, in which the respective elites were supported militarily and economically to continue exploiting the population.

    In most cases, partial military intervention was sufficient for the industrialised states to maintain this system. In the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin, this practice was conceptualised by dividing the world into centres, semi-peripheries, and peripheries and defining it as a continuous influx of raw materials, goods, and people (brain drain) from the periphery to the mostly Western centres (Amin and Wallerstein).

     

                                                                                                                            

    A third explanation, however, is Asia-centric. In this view, the dominance of the Europeans and the hegemony of the United States are nothing more than an accident of world history. In this view, East and South Asia have always been the centre of the world economy and intellectual and civilisational development. More precisely, on the shores of the North Pacific and the Indian Ocean (including the Arabian Sea), a power shift has been taking place for thousands of years between China, India, and the Arab-Persian powers. Coincidentally, the retreat of China from about 1500 created a power vacuum in this area, into which the Europeans were gradually able to move. However, they could not compete with these civilisations. The current rise of the great empires and civilisations that were destroyed by European colonisation and Euro-American hegemony is nothing more than a return to the centre of the world, to the countries on the shores of the North Pacific and both parts of the Indian Ocean. In this view, the Europeans and the great powers that emerged from them are in no way superior, but rather the barbarians who caused an unprecedented bloodbath in colonisation and two world wars, including the Holocaust. Now, the centre of the world is returning to where it has always been (Abu-Lughod)

    Another approach is the globalisation approach. It assumes that every five hundred years or so, there has been a shift from one global political centre to the next, i.e., hegemonic empires’ rise, peak, and decline. For the late Andre Gunder Frank, we need to review the last 5000 years, not just the previous 500). At times, individual civilisations succeeded in becoming such hegemonic empires twice. Examples include the Egyptian society, the Chinese Empire of the Han dynasty, the Roman Empire, the Sassanid Empire (Persia), the Muslim Empire until its destruction by the Mongols, and finally European colonisation from about 1500.

    we need a floating balance and mutual recognition of the world’s civilisations

    The crucial question for today is whether globalisation will override this succession of great powers and civilisations or whether there will be a renewed, now genuinely global, struggle for world domination. In my view, we need a floating balance and mutual recognition of the world’s civilisations (Herberg-Rotzhe/Son). The rising civilisations are again faced with whether they will merely repeat the past mistakes and the ethnocentrism of the Europeans under different auspices or contribute to an equal coexistence of the world’s civilisations. And conversely, will the Europeans and the settler colonies they founded also learn to regard other civilisations as equals? Both perspectives will determine the fate of the 21st century if we do not want to experience yet another “bloody century”!

    References:

    Abu-Lughod, Janet: Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Reprint edition. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 1991.

    Amin, Samir: Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. (2 Volumes). Monthly Review Press: New York. 1974.

    Frank, Andre Gunder, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? Routledge: New York. 1996.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas and Son, Key-young: Order wars and floating balance. How the rising powers are reshaping our worldview in the twenty-first century. Routledge: New York. 2018.

    Jaspers, Karl: The Origin and Goal of History. Routledge: New York 2021 (original in German 1949).

    Katzenstein, Peter J.” Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives. Routlöedge: New York 2009.

    Stark, Rodney: How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. ‎ ISI Books: NewYork. 2015.

    Wallerstein, Immanuel: World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press: Durham. 2004.

     

    Feature Photo Credit: Photo of ‘Monument of Discoveries’ in Lisbon. Photo by M Matheswaran. The Monument depicts Henry the Navigator followed by 33 pioneers, including Vasco-da-Gama whose exploration voyages were instrumental in establishing the Portuguese colonial empire, and thus begin the age of colonialism and imperialism.

    Image 1-Map: Asian empires and trade routes – the collector.com

    Image 2: Columbus reaching the Americas (actually the Caribbean) in 1492 – Wikimedia Commons

    Image 3: The story of the colonial looting of Africa – Photo of exhibit in African American Museum, Washington D.C. (Photo – M Matheswaran).

    Image 4: Robert Clive meeting Mir Jaffer in Battle of Plassey 1757 – the beginnings of the British Indian Empire – Wikimedia Commons.

     

     

     

  • Colonial exploitation included heritage theft, and that continues to this day

    Colonial exploitation included heritage theft, and that continues to this day

    Museums and private collectors in the West have prided themselves on the vast collections of heritage treasures, antiquities, and archaeological and epigraphic treasures from across the world. In truth, these are stolen treasures from the non-western world enabled by colonialism and imperialism. It is time the victim nations work towards global policies to ensure these treasures are returned to their original owners. This is truly a massive public policy challenge in global governance and for a fair, equitable, multi-polar world. Professor M A Kalam looks at the continuing theft of India’s heritage treasures.

     

     

     

    The whole idea of establishing a colony was to exploit the resources there and enrich the home coffers. And all colonials—irrespective of whether they were British, Danes, Dutch, Italians, Belgians, Portuguese, Spanish, or American—indulged in this exercise and over a period turned it into a fine art. As ill luck would have it, a host of countries in many parts of the world were less developed than these colonials, particularly in terms of technology, but were very rich and well-endowed in terms of resources of various kinds. Though they possessed natural wealth, they lacked adequate technology and hence were not in a position to resist the onslaught and machinations of different kinds of the technologically-advanced colonials. The resource-rich countries were, in the main, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Highly developed naval vessels and a state-driven overpowering desire to explore resources in different regions of the world enabled the colonials to adopt different strategies for befriending and subsequently subjugating the peoples of the resource-rich areas.

    Genesis Of Exploitation

    Because of her tremendous naval power, Britain spread its net of exploration quite wide in South Asia and Africa. In India, the British came in as traders established the East India Company and then gradually started flexing their arms and took control of administration and became the rulers of the country. Though they allowed some pockets to be “ruled” by rajas, maharajas, nizams and nawabs, these provinces were not independent in the real sense of the term but were virtually servile to the British, if not their minions, in many ways. That is how the genesis of exploitation took shape in India. Subsequently, there were myriad ways in which colonial exploitation occurred—physical exploitation of the people including sexual abuse and exploitation of labour was one of the forms of that

    Other ways of exploitation were the draining of different kinds of agricultural and forest resources; these included: jute, cotton, sugar, tea, coffee and wheat. The goods developed in British factories were sold back in India for rich benefits. Also, commercial crops like tea, coffee, indigo, opium, cotton, jute, sugarcane and oilseed were introduced and these had impacted their profits tremendously but had different environmental implications in different regions of the country, as plantations always do, due the exercise of clear felling of the forests in almost all cases of extensive plantation activities.

    Repatriating The Kohinoor

    To top it all, regarding exploitation, was the brazen way in which India’s heritage wealth, antiquities and artefacts, were exported to their home bases, by the colonials, to unabashedly adorn their own museums and galleries. Many of these artefacts were stolen without any hesitation. Today it is being argued that one of the most famous diamonds in the world, the Kohinoor, was not necessarily snatched from the people of India but was offered on a platter to the British as part of the peace treaty of Lahore by the king of Punjab Maharaja Dalip Singh. Arm-twisting gets another name in diplomatic parlance—offer. And the British have the temerity to continue to adorn their crown with the Kohinoor though they refrained from its display on the head of the recently crowned queen, the wife of King Charles III during the latter’s coronation, in a rare diplomatic courtesy, apparently not to provoke the sensibility of the Indian delegation attending the coronation.

    As Rishi Sunak is more loyal than the queen, there is no chance of him taking the initiative in repatriating to India the Kohinoor or the innumerable other artefacts that were stolen/snatched from India and today adorn the British Museum and many other of their galleries.

    Last week the Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture headed by YSR Congress MP Vijay Sai Reddy, adopted the Report ‘Heritage Theft – The Illegal Trade in Indian Antiquities and the Challenges of Retrieving and Safeguarding Our Tangible Cultural Heritage’. The Committee conferred with the Culture Ministry officials who apparently think that while efforts were being made to bring back the stolen antiquities from different foreign locations, the case of Kohinoor diamond is “contentious since it was surrendered by Maharaja Dalip Singh as part of the 1849 peace treaty with the British”.

    Reversing Colonial Exploitation

    To recapitulate and also to highlight the way in which different forms of exploitation occurred, we can argue that in the first instance, it was human exploitation wherein there was sexual abuse, killings and decimation of populations. The second way was the exploitation of the agricultural and natural resources which can be conceived of as resources that were “consumables” and “non-durables”. The third was the exploitation of the heritage wealth that falls in the realm of non-consumables and durables.

    So, today, when we explore measures that could be thought of in terms of “getting back” things and reversing the impact that colonial exploitation had on India, we can think of some strategies: in the case of the first two, that is human exploitation and the draining of consumables, there can only be reparations if the Britishers’ conscience pricks them enough; or at least unqualified apologies. But in the case of the third, that is the loss of heritage wealth, there can, and should indeed be repatriation of the stolen antiquities.

    A host of “art dealers” in different parts of the country are smuggling out artefacts and antiquities from India, particularly from ancient temples, and at times from museums, on a large scale. Only a fraction of this comes to light.

    Now, talking about the loss of heritage wealth, we also have to bring into the picture the fact that it is happening, quite rampantly, even today though the colonials left the shores years back on India becoming independent. A host of “art dealers” (read thieves) in different parts of the country are smuggling out artefacts and antiquities from India, particularly from ancient temples, and at times from museums, on a large scale. Only a fraction of this comes to light when these items are exhibited in galleries and museums in different parts of the world; often times these are hidden in private collections. India is trying to regain some of this heritage wealth but there seem to be obstacles, at times quite unsurmountable, of the diplomatic and other kinds. Let us hope the Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture succeeds in its exertions.

     

    A version of this article was published earlier in moneycontrol.com

    Feature Image Credit: Kohinoor Diamond in Queen’s Crown, now safely kept in the Tower of London. smithsonianmag.com 

    Picture of Idols: The three 15th century ‘panchaloga’ idols of Shri Rama, Sita, and Laxman were stolen in 1978 from a Vijaynagara era temple (15th Century) in Anandamangalam village in Tamilnadu, India. These were identified and finally restored to India by the UK government in 2020. www.bbc.com

     

  • Colonial taxes built Britain. That must be taught in lessons on Empire

    Colonial taxes built Britain. That must be taught in lessons on Empire

    UK government ministers want the British Empire’s benefits taught in schools. Don’t let them ignore the death and destruction it inflicted says Professor Gurminder K Bhambra. Her observation is equally if not more important for India and other erstwhile colonies. Britain and other European colonial powers not only looted and decimated Indian economy over three centuries of colonial interaction but their ruthless exploitation led to much of the poverty that has afflicted the global south ever since. This fact of history must be taught extensively in Indian schools. There are many who propagate the fallacy that the British empire was beneficial but the truth that it was ruthlessly exploitative must be taught and researched in a big way. The wealth of the West was built on built on exploitation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The West continues to dominate the global economic system and it is inherently exploitative. History teaching and research, from policy and science perspectives, are in dire need for elimination of Western bias.

     

    Recent weeks have seen a variety of UK government ministers – fromOliver Dowden to Kemi Badenoch to, most recently, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi – both extol the benefits of British Empire and urge the teaching of those benefits. This follows on from the government’s response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which set out the need for a new model curriculum for history which would advise schools on how best to teach these issues. This is all part of the government’s Inclusive Britain strategy which calls on us to acknowledge the rich and complex history of ‘global Britain’.

    In the spirit of this call, I offer one account of the complex, entangled histories of colonial taxation and national welfare that continue to shape modern Britain. Few people know that colonial subjects from the Indian subcontinent paid taxation, including income tax, to the British government in Westminster. Or that that taxation was used to alleviate the conditions of poorer people within Britain at a time when the working class and middle class here were exempt from paying income tax.

    Taxation – and the ways in which it is returned to citizens through welfare – is one of the main ways in which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation comes into being. That is, the relationship between taxes and welfare is part of the process of constructing institutions and the idea of the nation. If we were to recognise that this ‘imagined community’ was built not only through national taxes, but also colonial ones, then how might that change our understanding of what it is to be British today?

    My grandfather, Mohan Singh, was born in 1913 in a small village in the Punjab, in what was then British India. He was four years old when his father, Gurdit Singh, died and 17 when his uncle, Harnam Singh, who had been supporting him, also passed away. My grandfather had planned on attending the Government College in Lahore, but – needing to support his mother and younger sister – he instead spent six months training as a boilermaker. He then got married to Pritam Kaur and travelled to Calcutta to work in a variety of factories, engineering works and rolling mills.

    In 1942, he travelled to the British colony of Kenya – bringing his family over later – and worked for 18 years at the East African Railways and Harbour Company. He spent the last two decades of his life in the UK, working at Chalvey Engineering in Slough as a sheet metal worker before retiring at the age of 65 in Southall, west London.

    Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s

    Mohan Singh criss-crossed three continents during his lifetime, but he never left the jurisdiction of the British Empire. In his application for registration as a citizen of the UK and Colonies – in the aftermath of the British Nationality Act of 1948 – he wrote: “I was born in British India.” He further noted that he lived and worked in India and Kenya, two countries that were colonies of Britain. It was these connections that confirmed his citizenship and gave him the right to travel to and live in Britain. He duly exercised those rights but, on arrival, he had them called into question by the local population, who were either unaware of them or indifferent.

    Calls to ‘go home’ have been the refrain of right-wing opponents of immigration from at least the 1970s – as well as having been plastered on the sides of vans as part of the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’policies of recent years. They are also implicit in an influential body of scholarly work oriented to questions of belonging and entitlement that argue for priority in public policy to be given to the ‘white working class.’ This is on the basis of them being ‘insiders’ who have contributed through their taxes to the wealth that is disbursed through welfare.

    Former colonial subjects, like my grandfather, are regarded as immigrant outsiders even when they come to the metropole carrying passports of British citizenship. They are not seen to have contributed to the wealth of Britain by paying taxes and they are regarded as unfairly gaining access to the national patrimony. As Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Youngwrite in ‘The new East End’: “As newcomers, their families cannot have put much into the system, so they should not be expecting yet to take so much out.”

    Britain established direct rule over India after suppressing the 1857 Indian Mutiny (also known as the First War of Independence). In 1860, it implemented an income tax upon colonial subjects, in part to pay for the costs associated with those revolts. Initially, a 2% rate was imposed on those earning between 200 rupees and 500 rupees a year and a 4% rate on those earning above 500 rupees annually.

    Famine Genocide 1876-1879 in British Raj Madras, India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

    The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent

    When my grandfather started work in the 1930s, the average wage for a skilled worker in British India was about 40 rupees a month. He was very unlikely to have paid income tax, however, as he would not have earned enough to meet the threshold, which by then was 2,000 rupees a year. Of the amount that was collected, around three-quarters went to the imperial treasury, with only one rupee in a hundred for local purposes. Local purposes included the building of canals and roads, but not the alleviation of poverty, not even in times of catastrophic famine.

    The arrival of the British in India – first via the English East India Company and then through direct rule – had brought endemic famine across the subcontinent. The 50 years after the implementation of the income tax saw one of the most intense such periods of famine, in which it is estimated over 14 million people died of starvation. This was in the context of grain being exported by rail from the famine regions (including to Britain) and colonial taxes continuing to be collected even in the worst-affected areas.

    In all cases, the demands of ‘sound finance’ trumped those of public health and the primary thing to be avoided was any idea that the poor in India should be maintained at public expense. Ensuring sufficient funds for the ensuing military campaign in Afghanistan – from the taxes paid by colonial subjects for local purposes – was of more importance than using those taxes to alleviate severe hunger and avert the deaths of millions.

    Here, we see quite clearly that the idea of the ‘imagined community’ created through taxation and its redistribution did not include colonial subjects. The taxes that Indians paid to the imperial treasury and to local provinces did not give them any entitlement to the redistribution of that income. Worse, any relief provided during famines was often dependent on undertaking hard labour in camps at a distance from a claimant’s locality.

    The most extreme instance was where the rations provided in return for heavy labour were scarcely above the level required for basic subsistence. The ‘Temple wage’ – named after the lieutenant-governor, Richard Temple, who brought it in – produced lethal results and, as Mike Davis notes in ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, turned the work camps into extermination camps.

    The death and destruction brought about by the Empire were known at the time. In 1925, Harry Pollitt, the leader of the Boilermakers Union in the UK, stated that the British Empire was drenched in blood. This was in the context of debates at the Trades Union Congress in Scarborough, where a resolution was eventually adopted – by three million votes to 79,000 – against imperialism and in support of the right of self-determination of those who were colonised.

    Such sentiments, however, came up against more hard-nosed understandings concerning the utility of the Empire to those in Britain. As Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin proclaimed in Parliament in 1946, “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, because I know that if the British Empire fell … it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”

    Here, Bevin acknowledged that the life of all within Britain was enhanced as a consequence of Empire. However, Empire was overwhelmingly disastrous for the majority of people subject to it. Their standard of life fell considerably as a consequence of colonialism and the famines it produced and, in many, many cases, they lost their lives to it.

    One mode of survival was to move. This is why my grandfather moved from a village in the Punjab to train as a boilermaker in Lahore, before working in Calcutta, Nairobi and London. This is likely why his grandfather before him moved from famine-struck Orissa to Rajasthan to Punjab. These movements tend not to be seen to be part of the histories of Britain, global or otherwise, or of any consequence to understanding Britain or Britishness in the present.

    The forgetting of the Empire involves also the forgetting of the political community – colonial and postcolonial – that was constructed through taxation. Few in Britain today understand the extent to which national projects – from social welfare to cultural institutions such as country houses, museums, and galleries – have been enabled through the taxes paid by former colonial subjects. There is an urgent need for us to recognise our shared histories and account for them.

    One aspect of the ‘culture wars’ is the call to take the views of taxpayers into account when discussing ‘contested histories’. Samir Shah, the chair of London’s Museum of the Home, for example, argued that as heritage bodies are funded by taxpayers’ money, then the views of taxpayers – those he considers the silent majority – ought to be taken more explicitly into account. Given that both colonial subjects and their descendants paid taxes to the government in Westminster, then they/we also have a legitimate stake, in the government’s own terms, in how our shared history is represented. There is a benefit to the teaching of British Empire, but the reality is different from what these ministers suppose.

     

    This essay was published earlier in openDemocracy and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial 4.0 International License.

     

    Feature Image Credit: The Irish Times