Child in a British concentration camp in South Africa.The British Empire is like the American Empire.
The British Empire was involved in:
The drugs trade (Dope inc),
Slavery,
Concentration camps,
False flag terror,
Torture,
And institutionalised racism.
The Jubilee Plot 1887 was the classic false flag operation. British government ministers, led by Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, decided: (1) to use a double-agent Francis Millen to organise a 'plot' to blow up Westminster Abbey, thus killing Queen Victoria and half the British cabinet. (2) to have the plot discovered and revealed during Queen Victoria's golden jubilee. The Jubilee plot employed two Irish-American patsies, Thomas Callan and Michael Harkins.1. The British Empire was not just the countries painted red on the map.
Professor Linda Colley, of Princeton University (The British Empire ) points out that Argentina, for example, "was substantially run by the British during the 19th century."
And "the US remained economically and culturally dependent on the empire for much of the 19th century."
In Argentina, the British set up railroads and made them "serve British commercial interests" and the British "dominated the banks and investment structure".
In Europe, "naval bases such as Menorca, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Malta allowed the Royal Navy to control the Mediterranean for a very long time."
2. The British Empire was not just 'English'.Professor John MacKenzie, of Lancaster University, points out that the Irish, Welsh and Scots were important. (The British Empire )
The Irish contributed priests, nuns, doctors and generals to the Empire.
"An obvious Irish contribution was Roman Catholicism and... the Irish... were disproportionately powerful within the British army."
Within the Empire, "many of the universities were founded by Scots on the Scottish model.
"In addition, Scotland was an overproducer of graduates so you had very many Scottish doctors, engineers, foresters, botanists and teachers... There were Scots everywhere.
"Whenever you had mines established around the empire, it was often Welsh or Cornish who inhabited them."
Slaves3. Britain's empire was a commercial empire, involving slavery.
Dr Sheryllynne Haggerty, of the University of Nottingham, points out that "some merchants were involved in the slave trade, which was integral to the growing of sugar and tobacco in the colonies." (The British Empire )
Various Hubbert Peaks Illustrate Human Nature4. The American revolution had an impact on the British empire. (The British Empire )
Professor Maya Jasanoff, of Harvard University, points out that when the USA ceased to be part of the empire, "it remained incredibly closely tied to Britain right up to the Civil War, and in some ways even beyond that.
"Economically both countries were dependent on the other and the United States was the main trading partner for Britain.
"It was also the chief destination for British emigrants.
"So when we think of the British empire as a global entity bound together by trade, emigration, and cultural ties, we should remember the ways in which the USA remained involved."
In 1919, at Amritsar in India, Britain's General Edward Dyer ordered his troops to kill unarmed men, women and children. Hundreds were killed. More than 1000 were wounded.5. India was of prime importance to the British economy. (The British Empire )
Professor Denis Judd, of New York University in London, points out that "Britain was the world’s first superpower because of her flying start in the industrial revolution, her financial and manufacturing domination, her enormous wealth, her stable political institutions, the global supremacy of the Royal Navy and her huge worldwide empire."
"Britain’s trade with India by the start of the 20th century responsible for a fifth of the nation’s overseas commerce."
"There was a large annual balance in Britain's favour.
"British loans to India secured a handsome return in interest, and Indian taxes and revenue paid for the salaries and pensions of the British administration there."
India's railways provided "a good minimum percentage return for British investors."
India's soldiers were "a readily available source of manpower for the exercise of British foreign policy, and at no cost to the British taxpayer."
India provided opium.
In the 1850s, opium revenues accounted for more than 20 per cent of British government revenues in India.
David Sassoon, whose grandson Edward Albert Sassoon, married Aline Caroline de Rothschild, the grand-daughter of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild. David Sassoon (1792 - 1864) was the treasurer of Baghdad between 1817 and 1829 and the leader of the Jewish community in Bombay (now Mumbai). The British government gave Sassoon "monopoly rights" to the manufacture of Opium.Sassoon expanded his opium trade into China and Japan. (Hong Kong, the Land Built on Opium )
6. Opium helped bankroll the British empire. (The British Empire )
Dr Julia Lovell, of Birkbeck University of London, points out that the opium trade was "crucial to the running of the British empire."
Opium was grown in India.
The British forced the Chinese to buy the opium.
The 1860 Beijing treaty, after two Opium Wars, forced China to make opium legal.
The profits of the opium were used to buy tea.
The tea was sold in Britain.
The government got its customs duties.
"These duties paid for a large part of the Royal Navy, so opium helped keep the British empire afloat."
Opium also helped fund the British government in India.
The Opium Wars looked like a conspiracy to undermine China.
Sir Stamford Raffles, of the East India Company, brought death and destruction to Java in Indonesia. He sacked and looted cities. He supported slavery. He promoted the trade in Opium.7. Empires exploit people. (The British Empire )
Professor Huw Bowen, of Swansea University, writes that "one would assume that Britain grew richer and the rest of empire got poorer because the whole point of empires is that they are exploitative."
"To assume that everything the British did was damaging is incorrect.
"British enterprise stimulated a large export trade which might otherwise never have come into existence."
"However, there is no doubt that in the long run specific sectors of the Indian economy did suffer under the yoke of imperialism – the cotton industry was profoundly damaged by cheap imports from Lancashire and Scotland from the 1830s onwards."
William Jardine, together with James Matheson, went into the opium business in China.8. To some extent the people of Britain and the empire saw themselves as being part of a single British people (The British Empire )
According to Professor Peter Marshall, of King's College London, "a sense of a common British identity was very strong in the later 19th century, particularly among people of British origin in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and English-speaking South Africa."
These countries contributed soldiers in two world wars.
"People in the Caribbean as well as mixed-race people in southern Africa or the elites in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka could have a strong sense of British values."
Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island refers to Jamaicans who thought of themselves as British.
These Jamaicans "were dismayed by what they regarded as the un-British standards that they encountered in Britain."
In Britain, "attitudes of condescension towards all imperial peoples and downright racism towards non-Europeans were very common."
9. How the end of empire affected Britain.Dr Sarah Stockwell, of King's College London, points out that "continued attachment to empire through the 1940s and 50s may have had an adverse effect on the British economy.
"It contributed to Britain's initial decision not to join the European Economic Community at its foundation in 1957, while some British businesses also remained focused on traditional markets that were increasingly less important to the country than those in Europe."
Mark Curtis says that in 1971 an official British investigation found that the British army's torture techniques "played an important part in counter-insurgency operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and the British Cameroons (1960-1), Brunei (1963), British Guiana (1964), Aden (1964-7), Borneo/Malaysia (1965-6), the Persian Gulf (1970-1) and in Northern Ireland (1971)".
Leo Amery, former UK Secretary of State for India, could see a similarity between Churchill's attitude to Indians and Hitler's attitude to Jews. (Churchill's Secret War.)
In 1943, millions of people were dying of starvation in Bengal, in India.
The UK prime minister Winston Churchill could easily have stopped the famine by arranging a few shipments of food.
But, but he refused.
He also prevented others from helping.
Winston Churchill described the Indians as "a beastly people with a beastly religion." (Churchill's Secret War.)
He said they "bred like rabbits."
Famine in India - Website for this imageIn KENYA, the British used beatings, sexual humiliation, hooding, sleep deprivation, and bombarding with white noise.
32 Whites were killed by the Mau Mau during the five-year state of emergency. More whites died in traffic accidents in the capital city, Nairobi.
Kenyans were forced into concentration camps and routinely tortured. Some 150,000 Africans died as a direct result of the British policy.
There was a "constant stream of reports of brutalities by police, military and home guards", wrote Canon Bewes, a British missionary. "Some of the people had been using castration instruments and two men had died under castration."
Other brutalities included slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging people to death, pouring paraffin over suspects and setting them alight and burning eardrums with cigarettes.
A British district officer admitted, "There was outright abuse of power and some of the crimes committed were horrific. One day six Mau Mau suspects were brought into a police station in the neighbouring district to mine. The British police inspector in charge lined them up against a wall and shot them."
A mobile gallows travelled the country. Over 1,000 were hanged, their bodies displayed at crossroads and market places.
British concentration camp in Kenya.MALAYSIA
The British used terror in Malaya.
This involved aerial bombing, massacres of villagers, dictatorial police measures and the "resettlement" of hundreds of thousands of people.
CYPRUS
During the state of emergency, from 1952 to 1957, the British army used torture.
Cypriot Nicos Koshies:
"They took me to the Special Branch and they started beating me. They took off all my clothes, they tied my hands and feet. They asked somebody to come in. He was taking a stick to put up my bottom, he was putting cloths in water and putting them on my face so I could not breathe, he threw me down and danced on my stomach when he was wearing boots. After 12 days I could not recognise myself."
James Callaghan in the House of Commons:
"On 29 June 1957 an inquest was held into the death of Nicos Georghiou. Dr Clearkin said in evidence that bruises in the head were sufficiently severe to have caused the injuries to the brain, perhaps bumping the head against a hard object."
British concentration camp in South AfricaADEN/SOUTH YEMEN
In Aden, later known as South Yemen, SAS squads used terror against local villages.
An official investigation found that from 1964 to 1967 detainees at a British interrogation centre were routinely tortured. Their eardrums were burst.
Others were forced to lean against walls with their fingertips for day and subjected to white noise for hours.
British concentration camp in South AfricaBAHRAIN
Former detainees in Bahrain have described being beaten, electrocuted, whipped, tied in excruciating positions for days on end, kept awake, starved and having their toenails torn out.
NORTHERN IRELAND
The Compton official inquiry acknowledged that the army hooded suspects, fed them on just bread and water and blasted them with noise.
An Amnesty International report said, "It is because we regard the deliberate destruction of a man's ability to control his own mind with revulsion that we reserve a special place in our catalogue of moral crimes for techniques of thought control and brainwashing. Any interrogation procedure which has the purpose or effect of causing a malfunction or breakdown of a man's mental processes constitutes as grave an assault on the inherent dignity of the human person as more traditional techniques of physical torture."
A European human rights report found that British army techniques amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment" causing "at least intense physical and mental suffering".
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