Tag: missionaries

Empire in the North Country

The legacy of the British Empire is everywhere. Some empires collapse in dramatic fashion, others fade away. At home, we came to terms with its demise. Or did we? Still we argue. And the legacy beyond our shores is vast. China doesn’t remember kindly the Opium Wars, and Narendra Modi has a very different concept of India, as a ‘Hindutva’ nation, to the liberal democracy we attempted via Nehru to bequeath.

My history of Hebden Bridge in the late nineteenth century (see my previous post) describes a village which cotton manufacture turned into a town. It looked over the border to Lancashire for supply and routes to market. Supply came from slave plantations before and after the American Civil War, and as the century progressed more and more from India. Raw cotton in India was shipped to England and it left the vast Indian market open to imports from England, from Lancashire mills, via Manchester. It was in the UK’s interests to keep India impoverished, the better to govern it, as Orwell characterised British policy.

We sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms. That kind of pride in Empire is a false emotion. But it was very real in late Victorian England. Trade was its lifeblood and Empire was the (initially) accidental legacy of trade. In India and the Caribbean, and later in China, trade was a single-minded and ruthless activity. But as Empire put down roots it took on a moral, and a spiritual, aspect. With that went a sense of superiority, and arrogance. And pride. We did rule the waves.

Army and government, and the Church of England, were the backbone of Empire. But while Empire was physically distant from the non-conformist populations of upper Calderdale they too made their contribution, not just through the output of their mills but also in the money, and compassion, they vested in missions to the big cities – and overseas.

Take missionaries as an example. They were hero figures right through to the 1950s. They were part of the imperial as well as Christian ‘mission’. Eric Liddell, hero of the 1924 Olympics, died as missionary in China in the 1940s. Old timers might remember the movie the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, a story of missionaries in China: it seems quaint today. But this was the old Britain, patronising without realising it, exercising an imagined and inbuilt superiority.

I’m resisting the temptation to engage in the current debate about Empire and its legacy. Save to say that I understand the anger. Also the benefits (and disbenefits) of industry and communications that came with Empire. I’ve little time for apologetics. The one lesson we must learn is that we have to look forward.

Implicit in the apparently unstoppable advances of industry and Empire were a confidence and self-belief which don’t come so easily these days. They didn’t look back. That’s the sense I’ve had researching and writing about Hebden Bridge, a small corner of the Empire in which its mighty neighbour Manchester was such an extraordinary player.

And so the Empire lives on….

I visited Daylesford in the Cotswolds yesterday, famous for its farm shop, and explored its vast and well-tended (woodland and pasture and water meadow) estate. How many I wonder connect the estate to Warren Hastings, famous, or infamous, as the 18th century governor-general of India, and subject of remarkable impeachment proceedings (beginning in 1788) when he was labelled by Edmund Burke among other epithets as ‘shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious’.

The East India Company in the 18th century was the forerunner of the Raj. But it was back then in essence a trading company, militarised under Robert Clive, not least to combat French influence on the sub-continent. Trade brooked no rivals. The moral conscience of the nation was stirred, but trade had its own momentum. In Burke’s words, ‘(the Company appears) more like an army going to pillage the people under the pretence of commerce than anything else’.

Ten years later (1799) victory over Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, ensured control of southern India. ‘Scarcely a house in the town [Seringapatam] was left unplundered,’ Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, wrote to his mother. The loot was extraordinary. It overwhelms our museums.

How, I wondered, does trade morph into empire, when the exigencies of trading relationships are replaced by the subjugation of whole populations? Local agreements with Indian merchants required local representation, which in turn required residence, and defence of person and property, and of commercial privileges – which extended so easily into a pretence, and then a reality, of empire.

William Dalrymple’s monumental history of the East India Company (‘The Anarchy’) is marvellous on the subject. Also worth reading is Sathnam Sanghera. He’s the Wolverhampton-born son of Sikh immigrants, and a journalist on The Times. His new book, Empireland, pulls together in one short volume many of the elements of our imperial legacy – loot, immigration (‘we are here because you were there’), identity, legacy, amnesia, trade and slavery.

Trade is to the forefront today. Literally today. The commission appointed by Oxford’s Oriel College to review the college’s decision to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes has decided against its removal, and the college has concurred in that decision. The protest group ‘Rhodes must go’ is up in arms. But the ground has shifted even in the last year. The government’s proposed legislation would have had all plans to remove statues called in, and probably overturned.

The growth of Empire was linked to specific products. Rhodes is associated with southern Africa and diamond mining. He founded De Beers. The slave trade and the sugar plantations of the West Indies were synonymous. Cotton textiles were one of the mainstays of 18th century East India Company trade.  The Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 prohibited their importation, but not raw cotton, opening up later in the century to the import of raw cotton from slave plantations in the southern USA, and creating the conditions for the rapid development of the cotton industry in late 18th and 19th century Lancashire. India became a major market for Lancashire cotton. Indians had no choice in the matter. The connection between slavery, trade, and the industrial revolution is direct.

I speak as a Manchester man, proud of his city. Do I feel guilt? No, that’s not a helpful emotion. And if we apologise – who would do the apologising? And who to? Look over the Channel and see the quandary the French have over North Africa. Macron described the Algerian War as a crime against humanity. But no apology as such has been – or I guess will be – forthcoming. You could argue that those who should be apologising are those of us who still maintain some kind of ‘imperial mindset’. Who still have some notion of British exceptionalism. Look across the pond to America, where ‘exceptionalism’ is also rife.

Brexit evoked comparisons with 19th century free trade and revoking the Corn Laws. But back then we controlled our markets, controlled the seas, and enforced tariff-free trade, always to our advantage. We crushed domestic production in India to create a vast market there for our own goods. I’m researching my great-grandfather’s business in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire – cotton country despite being over the boundary from Lancashire. Did his business, as a merchant tailor with a wide reach, extend beyond Manchester to overseas markets?

There is a curious reverse colonial mentality among some well-known supporters of Brexit. The EU is turned into a surrogate empire, and the only way we can reassert our status is by turning back the clock. And so the British Empire lives on….

The subject, as Sanghera found, is vast, and I’ll limit myself here to one further comment, on the subject of religion, and muscular Christianity, and the role of the missionary. I recently read Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. It’s a short, and remarkable novel, drawing on Achebe’s own family’s direct experience, which, despite having sold twenty million copies worldwide, had passed me by. Missionaries find their way to a Nigerian village, and the old customs of generations are undermined. The old gods don’t stand a chance. One missionary employs a softly softly approach, another brings in the might of the district commissioner, and you realise how imperial power married to a religious conviction re-casts a proud people as inferiors.

Nigeria was still a colony in my early childhood, and we collected for the work, as a teacher, of a local lady who’d been a missionary in Nigeria all her life. I claim to be a Christian. Can I apportion right and wrong here? Can I have any sympathy for a tribal society in which superstition and shamans called the tune? One God better than multiple gods? Of course. But hand in hand with mission work went subjugation. Subjugation dehumanises.  That is a terrible consequence of empire. It also took root, after more open-minded beginnings, in 19th century India.

We were by that time, in the UK, moving beyond the slave trade. The campaign for its abolition was led by William Wilberforce. But Wilberforce was deeply religious and Indian religions were for him no more than superstition. Conversion was a Christian duty, and implicit is the sense of superiority which characterises the missionary. ‘They’ lack something that ‘you’ have. An attitude in the Raj that had terrible consequences, not least the Indian Mutiny, and more than sixty years later the Amritsar massacre.

I’m a child of empire, and I’d love to think that my children’s generation could see the last of them. But old attitudes live on, and America and China are sharpening up their spheres of influence. How empires of the future might differ, are already differing, from the empires of the past, is another story.