World War Two
Published 11 Mar 2023The Soviets launch not one, not two, but three offensives in Ukraine this week, designed to destroy the entire southern wing of the German forces. The Japanese counterattack against the Americans on Bougainville finally begins after months of preparations, but there are more Japanese attacks elsewhere that get going: the operation to invade India.
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March 12, 2023
Zhukov hits the Ground Running – WW2 – Week 237 – March 11, 1944
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The young British officer’s attitude toward his men
Dr. Robert Lyman has been working on pulling together various newspaper and magazine articles written by Field Marshal William Slim before the Second World War, to be published later this year. I believe this will include everything he included (in shorter form in some cases) in his 1959 book Unofficial History plus many others. In this excerpt from “Private Richard Chuck, aka The Incorrigible Rogue”, Slim recounts taking command of a company of recent conscripts while recuperating from wounds received earlier in WW1:
“Light duty of a clerical nature,” announced the President of the Medical Board. Not too bad, I thought, as I struggled back into my shirt. “Light duty of a clerical nature” had a nice leisurely sound about it. I remembered a visit I had paid to a friend in one of the new government departments that were springing up all over London at the end of 1915. He had sat at a large desk dictating letters to an attractive young lady. When she got tired of taking down letters, she poured out tea for us. She did it very charmingly. Decidedly, light duty of a clerical nature might prove an agreeable change after a hectic year as a platoon commander and a rather grim six months in hospital. Alas, after a month in charge of the officers’ mess accounts of a reserve battalion, with no more assistant than an adenoidal “C” Class clerk, I had revised my opinion. My one idea was to escape from “light duty of a clerical nature” into something more active. Reserve battalions were like those reservoirs that haunted the arithmetic of our youth — the sort that were filled by two streams and emptied by one. Flowing in came the recovered men from hospitals and convalescent homes and the new enlistments; out went the drafts to battalions overseas. When the stream of voluntary recruits was reduced to a trickle the only way to restore the intake was by conscription, and this was my chance.
It had been decided to segregate the conscripts into a separate company as they arrived. I happened to be the senior subaltern at the moment and I applied for command of the new company. Rather to my surprise, for I was still nominally on light duty, I got it. The conscripts, about a hundred and twenty of them, duly arrived. They looked very much like any other civilians suddenly pushed into uniform, awkward, bewildered, and slightly sheepish, and I regarded them with some misgiving. After all, they were conscripts; I wondered if I should like them.
The young British officer commanding native troops is often asked if he likes his men. An absurd question, for there is only one answer. They are his men. Whether they are jet-black, brown, yellow, or café-au-lait, the young officer will tell you that his particular fellows possess a combination of military virtues denied to any other race. Good soldiers! He is prepared to back them against the Brigade of Guards itself! And not only does the young officer say this, but he most firmly believes it, and that is why, on a thousand battlefields, his men have justified his faith.
In a week I felt like that about my conscripts. I was a certain rise to any remark about one volunteer being worth three pressed men. Slackers? Not a bit of it! They all had good reasons for not joining up. How did I know? I would ask them. And I did. I had them, one by one, into the company office, without even an N.C.O. to see whether military etiquette was observed. They were quite frank. Most of them did have reasons — dependants who would suffer when they went, one-man businesses that would have to shut down. Underlying all the reasons of those who were husbands and fathers was the feeling that the young single men who had escaped into well-paid munitions jobs might have been combed out first.
[…]
We had now advanced far enough in our training to introduce the company to the mysteries of the Mills bomb. There is something about a bomb which is foreign to an Englishman’s nature. Some nations throw bombs as naturally as we kick footballs, but put a bomb into an unschooled Englishman’s hands and all his fingers become thumbs, an ague affects his limbs, and his wits desert him. If he does not fumble the beastly thing and drop it smoking at his — and your — feet, he will probably be so anxious to get rid of it that he will hurl it wildly into the shelter trench where his uneasy comrades cower for safety. It is therefore essential that the recruit should be led gently up to the nerve-racking ordeal of throwing his first live bomb; but as I demonstrated to squad after squad the bomb’s simple mechanism, I grew more and more tired with each until I could no longer resist the temptation to stage a little excitement. I fitted a dummy bomb, containing, of course, neither detonator nor explosive, with a live cap and fuse. Then for the twentieth time I began!
When you pull out the safety-pin you must keep your hand on the lever or it will fly off. If it does it will release the striker, which will hit the cap, which will set the fuse burning. Then in five seconds off goes your bomb. So when you pull out the pin don’t hold the bomb like this!’
I lifted my dummy, jerked out the pin, and let the lever fly off. There was a hiss, and a thin trail of smoke quavered upwards. For a second, until they realized its meaning, the squad blankly watched that tell-tale smoke. Then in a wild sauve qui peut they scattered, some into a nearby trench, others, too panic-stricken to remember this refuge, madly across country, I looked round, childishly pleased at my little joke, to find one figure still stolidly planted before me. Private Chuck alone held his ground, placidly regarding me, the smoking bomb, and his fleeing companions with equal nonchalance. This Casablanca act was, I felt, the final proof of mental deficiency — and yet the small eyes that for a moment met mine were perfectly sane and not a little amused.
“Well,” I said, rather piqued, “hy don’t you run with the others?” A slow grin passed over Chuck’s broad face.
“I reckon if it ‘ud been a real bomb you’d ‘ave got rid of it fast enough,” he said. Light dawned on me.
“After this, Chuck,” I answered, “you can give up pretending to be a fool; you won’t get your discharge that way!”
He looked at me rather startled, and then began to laugh. He laughed quietly, but his great shoulders shook, and when the squad came creeping back they found us both laughing. They found, too, although they may not have realized it at first, a new Chuck; not by any means the sergeant-major’s dream of a soldier, but one who accepted philosophically the irksome restrictions of army life and who even did a little more than the legal minimum.
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March 11, 2023
British attitudes to crime differ substantially between average Britons and the ruling elite
Scott Alexander does a monthly roundup of interesting links and this one popped up for his March collection:
Looks like the British population is tough on crime (h/t James Johnson):
… including about 15% who want prison time for not wearing a seatbelt, 47% who want prison time for sexist abuse on social media, and 80% who want prison time for possession of a knife (and 18% think it should be over five years)! Meanwhile, in actual Britain, a guy with multiple previous violence convictions who brutally assaulted a cyclist and then stomped on her head while she lay unconscious was let off with community service. This is an interesting contrast to see in a democracy!
As an illustration of the rift between the people who suffer from the criminal and sub-criminal activities of the “non-law-abiding community” and those who are fully insulated from that same community, this is pretty typical. Very similar rifts would almost certainly be found in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. When you have no skin in the game, you can let your virtue signalling freak flag fly, and our elites have no skin in the game.
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“… when people are sticking warning labels on P.G. Wodehouse, something is seriously wrong”
In The Conservative Woman, Alan Ashworth stands aghast at the very notion of putting a content warning on an adaptation of a P.G. Wodehouse short story:
Dominic Sandbrook in the Mail on Sunday draws attention to BBC Radio 4 Extra and its latest repeat of an adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. It is preceded by an announcement that listeners should steel themselves for “some dated attitudes and language”.
You don’t say. The story was written well over a century ago, appearing first as a serial in The Captain magazine in 1908 and 1909 before being published as a book by A & C Black in 1910.
In it Psmith (the P is silent) and his old school friend Mike Jackson are reunited when they find themselves working for the New Asiatic Bank, a thinly disguised portrait of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (now HSBC) where Wodehouse himself endured a torrid spell before his writing career took off.
The two chums have several run-ins with management and Mike is eventually fired before Psmith solves all his problems and has him reinstated. Of course, as always in Wodehouse’s world, there is no sex, no angst, nothing to frighten the horses.
So why the BBC announcement? Sandbrook writes: “At first I wondered if this must be some mistake. Perhaps the warning had been transposed from some more dangerous programme, such as a stand-up show by Bernard Manning?
“But the warning was meant for Psmith. So what were these toxic and potentially traumatising attitudes? For the life of me, I still don’t really know.
“At one point, Psmith talks of going ‘out East’, where you have ‘a dozen native clerks under you, all looking up to you as the Last Word in magnificence’. But was that it? Did that merit a warning?
“As it happens, this radio adaptation was made in 2008. Did the actors realise they were participating in something steeped in sick imperialistic assumptions? I doubt it.
“Venturing into the cesspit of social media, I often find Left-wing pundits insisting there is no such thing as cancel culture and that the whole thing is an evil Tory myth.
“But when people are sticking warning labels on P G Wodehouse, something is seriously wrong. Indeed, you could hardly find a more ludicrous target, because he was one of most tolerant, generous-spirited writers imaginable. So generous-spirited that he’d probably have laughed this off. ‘I never was interested in politics,’ Wodehouse once remarked. ‘I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling.’
“Being cut from a meaner cloth, however, I do feel worked up about it. When I think of these finger-wagging commissars sitting in judgment on a writer who has given so much pleasure to so many readers, I feel like Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, gearing herself up before a titanic tirade.
“Do we really need a warning that P G Wodehouse is ‘dated’? What next? A lecture before Hamlet, to warn us that poisoning your wife or killing your uncle is now considered poor form? A warning before Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming?
“But, of course, Dahl and Fleming don’t need warnings now, for they have been posthumously updated.”
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March 10, 2023
The evolution of a slur
Scott Alexander traces the reasons that we can comfortably call British people “Brits” but avoid using the similar contraction “Japs” for Japanese people:
Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern — World War II — is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
He also explains how and when (and how quickly) the use of the word “Negro” became extremely politically incorrect:
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said — in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him — that “Negro” was a slur — and because people believed him it became true.
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Tank Chats #168 | Vixen & Fox | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 18 Nov 2022Join David Fletcher as he takes a look at the Vixen and Fox armoured cars.
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March 9, 2023
“… the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance”
Chris Bray notices what we’re not supposed to be noticing:
French women accused of collaborating with the Germans are paraded through the streets by members of the French Resistance after liberation, Summer 1944.
Original photo from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost two years ago, with a moral panic still consuming the world and the narrative shift far in the future, the journalist Laura Dodsworth published a tough, concise, well-argued book describing the very deliberate efforts of the British government to create a widespread state of fear — that’s the title of the book, by the way — that would paralyze ordinary people and compel them to comply with harsh and repressive public health measures. You’ll be shocked to hear that she was attacked and vilified; one prominent review called State of Fear “an outrageously dumb book selling conspiracy hooey”.
Then, in 2023, Isabel Oakeshott gave us the halfwit government minister Matt Hancock’s pathetic whatsapp messages — in which he clumsily babbles about creating a state of fear to get the public to obey the government — and the rest is history. Laura Dodsworth was demeaned and defamed, and then she was vindicated.
Moral panics always fade. Manufactured crises always crack and collapse. Propaganda always has a “sell by” date, and then it turns rancid. The effect is comparable to what Warren Buffett says about a recession: When the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked.
This is where we are with the January 6 narrative, as the most horrible attack on Our Democracy™ since the Civil War collides with the image of a dork in Viking horns calmly wandering the hallways with a police escort. The political class is taking it well.
This image speaks:
That’s violent insurrectionist Jacob Chansley walking calmly through a crowd of police officers who aren’t making the slightest effort to stop him. That’s what happened. Other things also happened, and some of them involved violence and broken windows, but this is the act in the center ring of the circus. Now, the lawyer who represented this violent insurrectionist says plainly that Jacob Chansley was the victim of Brady violations, and other January 6 defendants are racing to raise the same point in court. The tide is going out.
[…]
And it seems possible to me, or rather it seems likely to me, that the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance. As narratives shift, and the moral meaning of an act during a moral panic is recoded, people may begin to remember their choices differently. We’ll see.
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Then: “Never be the first to stop clapping”. Now: “In our culture of exhibitionism, silence is suspect”
Chris Bray cross-posted this article by Christopher Gage, who had a painful realization while waiting on hold for a human customer service rep at British Gas:
British Gas has traded the lovely Ludwig van (much too excellent for these advanced times) for a two-chord earwig we once glorified as polyphonic ringtones. Whilst captive to the receiver, British Gas snatches the opportunity to douse you, an innocent and increasingly frozen bystander, in the warm soup of its right-on philosophy.
“British Gas is an inclusive company”, it purrs. “We believe all people, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or background, should be treated with dignity and respect.”
This divination, reader, was news to me. You see, I signed up to British Gas not for warm radiators and gas-lit stoves, but for the surreptitious fascism of a company with “British” in the name.
I assumed British Gas was firmly jackboots, shaved heads, and lumpy knuckles. On hold, I expected not a polyphonic ringtone but the greatest hits of Skrewdriver, with jaunty anthems such as “Keep Britain White” and “It’s All Because of The Jews”.
To my incomprehension, British Gas does not believe that Auschwitz was a holiday camp, nor, like Kanye West, that Hitler had his good points.
The horror. The horror.
Once you notice this culture of Obviousness, this modern theatre in which the captive audience is force-fed a diet of entirely humdrum beliefs shared by absolutely everyone save a few whack-jobs, you cannot unsee it.
A coffee shop I recently and regrettably frequented offered not only espresso and cortado and obscenely priced cheesecake but a syrupy treatise of that coffee shop’s founding beliefs. You’d think a coffee shop’s founding beliefs would be: “Buy coffee. Sell coffee.” No. This coffee shop was against all forms of discrimination.
Relentless is this modern culture of making the most obvious, universal statements and painting them as revolutionary.
When I decide I’d like gas piped into my home, or coffee piped into my stomach, my motivations hover around the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Will this gas warm my home? Will this coffee induce a mild, somewhat enjoyable panic attack?
To reveal, like British Gas did, that one thinks all people should be treated with dignity and with respect is like revealing one doesn’t shit on a bus seat in full view of other passengers. That one is anti-shitting-in-public.
Much of the modern world is that episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer joins an AIDS march but refuses to wear the ribbon proclaiming his opposition to AIDS.
In our culture of exhibitionism, silence is suspect.
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Look at Life – The Cherry Pickers (1965)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018Following the 11th Hussars from Hanover to Coburg.
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March 8, 2023
Feeding a Medieval Outlaw
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Mar 2023
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March 6, 2023
Britain’s Free Speech Union at three
Earlier this month, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union celebrated its third birthday:
Toby Young founded the Free Speech Union in early 2020, and on Wednesday, 1 March a party was thrown to celebrate the organisation’s third birthday. The delicate baby born just before the Covid-19 lockdowns has grown into a boisterous, disruptive toddler that stomps about the political scene breaking things.
Over 100 people came to the In and Out on St James’s Square to enjoy the FSU’s success, including Professor Nigel Biggar, whose book Colonialism was effectively cancelled by Bloomsbury when the publisher’s executives decided that “public feeling” was against its publication. The legal profession was well-represented — Francis Hoar acted as counsel in various legal challenges for those damaged by the government’s lockdowns. He was heard to complain that the Covid-19 inquiry under Lady Hallett had granted core participant status to various bereaved family groups and those suffering from long Covid, but had denied it to the hospitality and other businesses which had been pushed into bankruptcy. Other attendees included Matthew Elliott, who led Vote Leave; Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist; and Adam Afriye MP. The FSU has been remarkably successful in raising funds, and there was a good turn out of donors like Lady Bell, the widow of Bell Pottinger founder Lord Bell of Belgravia.
Young told the room what his creation had achieved in its short life so far — a paying membership of 11,000; more than 2,000 cases taken on; a staff of 16 including eight full time employees — and talked about his political campaigns. Currently in his crosshairs is the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Bill, which has been tabled by Vera Hobhouse MP and is supported by the government. The Equality Act already imposes a duty on employers to stop their workers from being harassed by other employees in relation to a protected characteristic such as sexual orientation, disability or age. Hobhouse’s bill will extend that duty so companies can be liable for third parties’ harassing actions, unless the employer has taken “all reasonable steps” to protect them.
It is almost certain to have a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace, as well as creating additional costs which will have to be passed on to consumers — perhaps good news for HR departments, probably bad news for everyone else. The FSU hopes to see amendments proposed to the bill which will need to have public consultation, thereby delaying its parliamentary progress. It is hoped that the delay will prove fatal.
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How the powers-that-be got drunk on (practically unlimited) power with the pandemic lockdowns
Brendan O’Neill on the revelations from the release of British government officials’ informal chats on WhatsApp as the initial lockdowns were imposed:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: “Hilarious“.
It was Simon Case, the UK’s top mandarin. In February 2021 he had a breezy virtual chat with Matt Hancock, the then health secretary. A policy had just been introduced stipulating that any Briton returning from a “red list” country – which eventually included 50 states around the world, including India and vast swathes of Africa – would have to quarantine in a hotel at a cost of £1,750 per person, later rising to £2,285. A total of 200,000 British citizens and residents endured this painful, expensive quarantine. To Hancock and his civil-service pals it was all a big laugh. “I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box”, chortled Mr Case. He later asked Hancock: “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?” Locked up in hotels. Hancock replied that 149 people “are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”. “Hilarious”, said Case.
Hilarious? Tell that to the people whose lives were ruined by this policy. The idea that it was just reckless rich folk jetting off to exotic destinations that were on the “red list” is ridiculous, as academic Aleksandra Jolkina has explained. Consider the NHS worker who travelled to Ethiopia to visit his dying uncle and look after his sick mother. While he was there Ethiopia was added to the “red list”, meaning he could not return to the UK; he couldn’t afford to. Or the Briton who travelled to Pakistan to visit his terminally ill father. He was forced to raid the family savings to pay the return quarantine fee. As a result, his “family’s ability to survive financially” was put “at risk”. Or think about the many Brits who did not go abroad, to one of those supposedly toxic countries, because they didn’t have the funds for that stay in a “premier inn shoe box”. People who, as Jolkina describes it, could not “visit their ill relatives or wish them a final farewell”. Hilarious, right?
The sinister cruelty of lockdown is laid bare in this grotesque vision of officials laughing over a policy that caused so much heartache and hardship among often low-earning Brits whose only crime is that their families live overseas. You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the feudalistic authoritarianism that underpinned the ideology of lockdown. Civil servants working from their plush homes having a giggle about a policy that inflicted severe financial pain on the diverse working classes. A health secretary breaking his own guidelines to snog his mistress while sending snide WhatsApp messages about a policy that prevented poorer citizens from kissing the cheek of a dying relative. For me, this is the most important thing about the Lockdown Files – their revelation of just how morally cavalier and even inhuman the political elites can become when they are drunk on power, when they are liberated from democratic accountability to pursue whatever extreme policies they like.
The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files are based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent and received by Matt Hancock in the pandemic years. Hancock gave the messages to Isabel Oakeshott when she was co-writing his book, Pandemic Diaries, and now Ms Oakeshott has given them to the Telegraph. They provide only a partial insight into the machinations of lockdown, of course. Hancock is not the centre of the universe, whatever he might think to the contrary. And he says some of the messages are being taken out of context. Perhaps. Nonetheless, the Lockdown Files represent our first serious reckoning with lockdown, our first glimpse at what was happening behind the scenes of this unprecedented exercise in social control. And it’s not a pretty picture.
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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March 4, 2023
Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
In The Critic, Robert Lyman reviews a recent book offering a rather more nuanced view of the British empire:
The book is a careful analysis of empire from an ethical perspective, examining a set of moral questions. This includes whether the British Empire was driven by lust or greed; whether it was racist and condoned, supported or encouraged slavery; whether it was based on the conquest of land; whether it entailed genocide and or economic exploitation; whether its lack of democracy made it illegitimate; and whether it was intrinsically or systemically violent.
Biggar’s proposition is simple: that we look at Britain’s history without assuming the zero-sum position that imperialism and colonialism were inherently bad, that motives and agency need to be considered and that good did flow from bad, as well as bad from good.
Whether he succeeds depends on the reader’s willingness to appreciate these moral or ethical propositions, and to re-evaluate accordingly. In my view, he has mounted a coolly dispassionate defence of his proposition, challenging the hysteria of those who suggest that the British Empire was the apotheosis of evil. Biggar’s calm dissection of these inflated claims allows us to see that they say much more about the motivations, assumptions and political ideologies of those who hold these views than they do about what history presents to us as the realities of a morally imperfect past.
He reminds us that British imperialism had no single wellspring. Most of us can easily dismiss the notion that it was a product of an aggressive, buccaneering state keen to enrich itself at the expense of peoples less able to defend themselves. Equally, it is untrue that economic motives drove all imperialist or colonial endeavour, or that economics (business, trade and commerce) was the primary force sustaining the colonial regimes that followed.
As Biggar asserts, both imperialism and colonialism were driven from different motivations at different times. Each ran different journeys, with different outcomes depending on circumstances. The assertion that there is a single defining imperative for each instance of imperial initiative or colonial endeavour simply does not accord with the facts.
Whilst other issues played a part, it was social, religious and political motives which drove the colonial endeavour in the New World from the 1620s: security and religion drove the subjugation of Catholic (and therefore Royalist) Ireland in the 1650s; social and administrative factors led to the settlement in Australia from 1788; and social and religious imperatives drove the colonisation of New Zealand in the 1840s.
In circumstances where trade and the security of trade was the primary motive for imperialism — think of Clive in the 1750s, for example — a wide variety of outcomes ensued. Some occurred as a natural consequence of imperialism. In India, Clive’s defeat of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah in 1757 was in support of a palace coup that put Siraj’s uncle Mir Jafar on the throne of Bengal, thus allowing the East India Company the favoured trading status that Siraj had previously rejected.
This led in time to the Company taking over the administrative functions of the Bengal state (zamindars collected both rents for themselves and taxes for the government). Seeking to protect its new prerogatives, it provided security from both internal (civil disorder and lawlessness) and external threats (the Mahratta raiders, for example). The incremental, almost accidental, accrual of power that began in the early 1600s stepped into colonial administration 150 years later, leading to the transfer of power across a swathe of the sub-continent to the British Crown in 1858.
Biggar’s argument is that, running in parallel with this expansion came a host of other consequences, not all of which can be judged “bad”. We may not like what prompted the colonial enterprise at the outset (not all of which was morally contentious, such as the need to trade), but we cannot deny that good things, as well as bad, followed thereafter.
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March 3, 2023
African Opinion in the War, Minor Axis Partners, and Foreign Ships in the British Navy – OOTF 30
World War Two
Published 2 Mar 2023How did the British manage their multinational Merchant Navy who are the non-American operators of Liberty ships? How did Kenyans, South Africans, and others from Britain’s Sub-Saharan empire view the war? And what is going on in Slovakia and Hungary right now? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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