Empire is Without Virtue

Poet and antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan wrote in his book The Nightmare of God, “We would like to think that the empire is virtuous. Or that it can be made so, converted, so to speak, by a large dose of civic virtue.” He concludes that it is not virtuous nor can it be made so. I agree with Daniel Berrigan—empire is intrinsically without virtue. In his newest book titled Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe, Sathnam Sanghera considers it at best a mixed bag, with the negatives outweighing the positives. What positives could there be, you wonder. Perhaps literacy or better health systems, clean water or better roads? Any argument that says colonized countries would not have these things if it weren’t for the powers that colonized them ignores the likelihood that these regions of the world could have had all of these and more without colonialism. They could have built them on their own or with the assistance of nations that already had such amenities, without being colonized.

Of course, colonialism is not about helping out the peoples of colonized countries. It’s about extracting the resources of those countries, exploiting their labor and then forcing the product of their labor on the colonized that can afford them. Any potential benefits from the colonial relationship that go to the colonized are usually accidental and never the reason for the colonial power’s presence. Sanghera reveals as much without ever actually clarifying this phenomenon as his book’s thesis. Instead, he walks the reader through chapters on racism, botany, immigration, legal systems, and much more, detailing various endeavors of the colonial powers (with an emphasis on the British empire) and the effects of those endeavors.

Empireworld is not just another political diatribe against colonialism or imperialism. Instead, it is an examination of where the British put their troops and diplomats, intensified class, ethnic, and religious differences in the countries it had colonized, and the effects (obvious and not so obvious) the Empire had on those countries and their people. From the nature of the plant species planted to create monoculture crops for export to the institution of laws against homosexuality, the list of changes to the colonized nations is a long one. Perhaps one of the more interesting discussions of these changes is the one about the plant species. Sanghera devotes a chapter to this conversation beginning with his description of a visit to London’s Kew Gardens; a description which leads to a discussion of tea, from the growing of it to the marketing of it and the resultant exploitation of people and the environment. It’s a somewhat fascinating tale, to say the least.

Then, there’s the movement of people precipitated by colonialism. From the transportation of humans to the New World to be enslaved to the immigration of the formerly colonized to the United Kingdom, there were millions of humans whose locations and lives were changed either directly or indirectly because of British colonialism. In a chapter titled “Phenomenal People Exporters,” the reader is introduced to a wealthy man the author calls Arvin Veerapen. Veerapen’s ancestors included Indians who were transported to the island of Mauritius as indentured servants. Veerapen is now a very wealthy man and part of the class that owns over a third of the island’s land despite their demographic being only two percent of the island’s population. In other words, even though his forefathers were sent as servants to the colony, they are now part of the ruling elite. An even more drastic example of this is the lesson of the British who left England to “settle” the United States; a process which ultimately wiped out the vast majority of the indigenous people already living on the North American continent. Even though many of the original English settlers were religious dissidents and outcasts in Britain, their first role was to colonize North America. In a considerably more modern version of those events, one need only look to Palestine, where a maligned demographic in Britain—the Jewish population—was used by its Zionist adherents to colonize Palestine. One of the points being made in this discussion is that British colonialism forever changed the distribution of the world’s population. Indeed, it continues to do so.

When I was a youngster (1963-1966), our family lived in Peshawar, West Pakistan. My father was in the US military, which had a spy base there. I mention this to introduce a brief story. I used to take day trips with a CIA employee who worked with my father. Once the driver picked me up, the agent and I would go to a hotel situated on what was called the Cantonment in downtown Peshawar. The hotel was a remnant of the colonial period—the time of the Raj. It opened in 1913 and stood among other colonial buildings on the aforementioned Cantonment, an expansive section of town that included broad boulevards, beautiful gardens, and a massive porch across the front of the building. I would sit with my host on that porch in rattan chairs eating pistachios and sipping on mango juice. I imagine my host was sipping on some kind of whiskey. After this pause, we would get back into the car and be driven to different local villages where I would play soccer and other games with the Pakistani boys while the CIA man talked with various village elders. Pakistani military officers were usually involved, as well. It was after one of those Saturday treks that my father’s colleague gave me a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. I found myself fascinated with certain general similarities between the protagonist and myself. Of course, much of that was me wanting my life to be more interesting than I thought it was. It was when I re-read the book in high school (and while I was reading leftist tracts about imperialism) that I realized the US was merely carrying on an ugly tradition of colonialism in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world, the most obvious being Vietnam.

My point in mentioning this here is to emphasize what is the essence of Sanghera’s text: colonialism is insidious, pervasive, positive and negative. Its legacy is inescapable and continues to effect the world. I suppose one can argue about whether or not that legacy is mostly positive or mostly negative. In my experience, those attempting the first are usually somehow beneficiaries of that legacy and with little to no regret or remorse about their situation. I am firmly with those who argue its legacy is mostly negative. Nowadays, that belief is strengthened daily by the news from Palestine, the continent of Africa, and even in the stories of racism and anti-immigrant legislation and actions in the mother countries. In other words, the people whose history includes being colonized continue to be mostly negatively affected by that colonization.

The post Empire is Without Virtue appeared first on CounterPunch.org.