In some countries, the religious and cultural activities started by missionaries have been maintained following independence, such as the 20 Orange Order lodges active in the West African countries of Togo and Ghana, a legacy of past Irish Protestant missionaries. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care. An illustration of British soldiers capturing Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, in 1857. n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. There was a belief tha. Following the Allied victory, Europeans were firmly entrenched in Africa, as the Allies had already won. Some positives historians have pointed out are medicine, education, improved infrastructure . As a result of colonialism, there were fewer able-bodied men in Africa. It turns out that assessing the truth of the claim that a balance-sheet approach to empire is good for critical thinking is itself an opportunity to flex our critical thinking skills: Does such an approach actually hone our analytical skills, or does it whitewash empire? Occasionally, conflict between the European powers spilled over into Africa; during World War I, German and British forces fought each other in southwest and eastern Africa, involving an estimated 2 million Africans. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doulas army and convincingly defeated it. The British ruled their African colonies in a variety of ways. Please enable javascript to sign up for newsletters. Because of colonialism, an orderly form of government was developed in Africa. In addition to trading companies, indirect rules, settler rules, and a unique joint rule with the Egyptians known as condominium governments, these were used to establish colonial rule. Rita Kennedy - Updated May 10, 2019 Britain was not the only European power to actively colonize Africa. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Answer (1 of 6): There are some definite positives. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire. The fact that we have not arrived at such a consensus on the British Empire testifies to the success with which our pedagogy allows it to be continually re-legitimized, despite the anti-colonial struggles of the last century. The African Union was established to promote unity and cooperation among African countries, and the continent is now awash in resources. How did Britains relationship with its colonies in Africa and Asia differ from that with its colonies in Europe? But that's not terribly common. Pros of Imperialism Industrialization Despite, other European countries also colonized Africa ( French assimilation policy), I will limit it to the British. Many Africans still self-identify as Christians today, including an estimated 82.5 percent of the Kenyan population, 71.2 percent of Ghanaians and 71.6 percent of people in Botswana. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check. The British strategy of indirect rule meant local leaders were under the control of a British governor, removing their previous authority and encouraging some leaders to act as tyrants because they were no longer answerable to their people. Our research focuses on chiefs because they remain influential on a wide range of governance issues in contemporary Africa. This sort of thinking reproduces the legitimizing racist narratives of European empirethe idea that India would have no history without the British presence, that it would have stood still in time. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore as many Indian super-nationalists fear the great achievements in Indias past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. Problems have arisen in the former colonies as a result of British intervention in their affairs on a constant basis. Our very focus on imperialisms worst excesses, such as Nazism and slavery, has kept us from condemning the enabling context of these atrocitiesimperialism itself, which we continue to redeem with lists of pros, enabling new bouts of imperialist adventure like the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. Colonialism, like everything else, has a racist connotation. When it came to choosing their ethnic group, the British preferred to do so in the countries they conquered. As I describe in my recent book Times Monster, historians within the British political elite long used the balance sheet concept to justify imperialism. Churchill Downs and the Debate on Banning Drugs for Horses. How did Britain rule Africa? During that time the country witnessed changes in economics, politics, and many other parts of life. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand? As my child observed in her school newspaper, the book draws up its concluding balance sheet by way of a cast of white male scholars (some with shaky claims to expertise). It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. In some colonies, such as Ghana and Nigeria, the British established direct rule, whereby the colony was governed by British officials. Winston Churchills Encounter: Unveiling the Mystery of His Conversation After the Underground, Churchills Famous Quote: The Power of Free Speech, Negotiating the Atlantic Charter: Unveiling FDR and Winston Churchills Historic Agreement, Winston Churchills Cabinet Policies: Shaping an Era, Churchills Praise: Unraveling the Greek Spirit of Heroic Warfare, The Overall Message Churchill Left His Audience. The British attempted to conquer Africa from all sides with the goal of dominating the continent with absolute power. Scholars of African history have long noted that the legacy of Britains system of colonial occupation (as compared to, for example, that of the French) contributed to strengthening the power of chiefs in anglophone countries. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died. Most of the capital raised for railroad construction was spent in Britain; workers came from Britain and were paid twice the home rate plus passage and other allowances. British rule began when the Mughals power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about Indias past, imperialism and history itself. And we dont weigh the pros and cons of racist European despotismsfor instance, fascist regimesas if they were legitimate. (Indeed, equivocation on imperialism has, arguably, kept the door cracked open for people who seek to undermine the unambiguous condemnation of Nazism and slavery, in our own time.) We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. 1899-1902: The Boer War. One of their targets that they want to imperialized was India. Negative: Exploitation, destruction of local industry, deforestation, and famine. Positive and Negative Effects of Imperialization on South Africa. Educating, health, and medicine, taking land by force, and starting unnecessary wars are some of the positive and negative effects of imperialism in Africa. As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s, I was taken by my parents to see Zafars grave in Rangoon, which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence. Irrigation scheme 5. The very structure of textbooks like the one my daughters school uses impedes such alternate-history thinking. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula's army and convincingly defeated it. Rita Kennedy is a writer and researcher based in the United Kingdom. The European powers have gradually left Africa over the last few decades, and the continent is now largely free of their influence. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Syracuse University, USA. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions There were also ambitious claims from France, Spain, Portugal, and Russia as part of the continents expansion. Morel, a critic of colonial violence who was nevertheless as invested as the arch-imperialist Kipling in the government of Africa by white men. Left off the table are the voices of the colonized and the counterfactual histories such colonial thinkers could not conceive: Africa ruled by Africans, a West Indies in which ex-slaves rather than exslave owners had received reparations, South Asian states left to sort out their own destinies and development. Criticism like Morels mattered, but also helped sustain the notion that empire was redeemable, extending its life and enabling ever more abuses. The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The British established their first colony in Africa in 1663, when they captured the island of Bermuda. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho are just a few of the countries that were once part of the British Empire. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. Pro: she has no real power, but saves us from the sheer annoyance of having to deal with presidential elections every four or five years. The British colonization of the Cape Colony, which lasted from 1802 to 1806, was important in the context of its imperial interests in India. Furthermore, France was given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, which it used to protect. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell and what it managed to do. This is called political imperialism. The European powers were firmly entrenched in Africa, and the continent would be a source of conflict and tension for the next two decades. Is Calla Walsh right that forcing students into the mental exercise of justifying/rationalizing genocide because of its supposed positive effects itself perpetuates genocide and indoctrinates them into supporting an imperial war machine? Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. Adaily email update of the stories you need to read right now. After nearly averting a war with France, the British moved south into the Sudan to take control of it. For these reasons the British established colonies there. Indian taxpayers massively subsidized these corporate profits. Our sample consists of more than 40,000 observations from 21 African countries, of which nine are francophone countries and 12 are anglophone countries, from two survey waves (2008 and 2015). When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The Banning of Suttee. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as the Rich Kingdom of Bengal experienced a gigantic famine during 176970. And Britain did indeed serve as Indias primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The Slate Group LLC. India had many resources and spices Europeans sought. Slave trade was widely promoted as a result of colonial rule. 1. British control led to relatively honest and efficient government that operated to the benefit of the average Indian (a claim that flies in the face of scholarship since at least the 19th century). Con: it costs a lot of money when she visits. African countries were even more devastated during the second world war. In the 1840s and 1850s, they were supported only when they promised to either mitigate revenue loss caused by famine or strengthen the British military position. ? and the tweet went viral. The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India democracy and an independent media came directly from Britain. Rails, locomotiveseverything came from abroad, despite the capacity to make locomotives in India. The accountability of chiefs is also an important source of concern in the equitable distribution of mining royalties, where chiefs may enter into deals with mining companies on behalf of rural communities, and often face serious corruption allegations. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies. Positive Impact of British Rule In India New Job Opportunities British rule did introduce new job opportunities to India. European powers scrambled to gain control of Africas resources, while the British and French competed for control of the Middle East. Leaders who failed to follow colonial master rules were sometimes executed or deported. George Diebold/The Image Bank/GettyImages, Copyright 2023 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Education, Explore state by state cost analysis of US colleges in an interactive article, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture: The Colonization of Africa, The Geographical Journal; The Scramble for Africa; Ieuan Griffiths, Fathom Archive: Mapping Africa, Problems of Regional Definition and Colonial/National Boundaries, BBC World Service: The Story of Africa, The First World War, University of Ulster: Still Marching Africas Orange Order. Finally, the British government believed that controlling Africa would help to protect the British Empire from attack by other European powers. This is, indeed, an ethical vision that makes sense to childrenand should speak to us, too. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited? the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. As a result of the rise of British colonization, an era of scientific racism was born, as depicted by social Darwinism. Though the impact was mostly negative, there were some positive effects. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all? South African apartheid, for instance, is also not the same thing as Nazism. The existing empirical literature in economics often emphasises association between British colonial rule and lower levels of corruption. Literature in the Indian languages took some inspiration and borrowed genres from English literature, including the flourishing tradition of writing in English. It was a result of British and Egyptian joint rule that Britain and Egypt renamed the Sudan as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Though the negative impacts underpin the positive ones, it is important to recognize that some benefits have been achieved for African countries. (Show more) See all related content British raj, period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. distinguish between a positive causal impact of British rule (perhaps due to . The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other that is non-English European languages that became known in India through the British. The British government ran various forms of government in their African colonies. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. They hold in the sample of all observations in our data, as well as from the regression discontinuity analysis that focuses on observations near the borders, where ethnic homelands were split between anglophone and francophone countries. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. We encountered an issue signing you up. What was the most important factor that led to the weakening of the British Empire in the interwar years? What British pupils should know about Britain's rule of India: a history teacher's view Tom Allen says that teachers need to offer more than a list of its positive and negative effects What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish? The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. We loved that evocative and undoubtedly apocryphal anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions. There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marxs thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. The British Empire in particular was characterized as a dictatorship in the form of violence used to quell the colonial subjects. Teacher recommended History - the British empire in India Kaiser Wilhelm II's aims in foreign policy In a note below the empty column, she explained that asking us to identify positives of imperialism, something that killed thousands and contributed to slavery, is extremely disrespectful to people whose ancestors were murdered because of colonization. Her sister Calla Walsh, a senior, shared an image of the homework on Twitter, outraged that her little sister was being asked to list POSITIVE EFFECTS OF IMPERIALISM????? Abdulaziz B. Shifa is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Syracuse University, USA. In turn, India became more dependent on British industry, settling into the role of raw material supplier for world markets. Last week, a high school freshmans history homework made the news. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the worlds leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.. It is true that the colonial masters ignored African culture, changed anything that was unfavorable to them, and made African believe that the new culture was superior to the old one. Africa was a key part of the British Empire, with the majority of the continent being under British control by 1900. In 1912, the British introduced their first silver coin, and the West African Currency Board was established. This reading lesson was followed by an in-class debate on the pros and cons of empire. Africa was a source of raw materials, including gold and diamonds, that were essential to the British economy. An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. My name is Patricia Smithand Im an amateur historian with a passion for medieval affairs.
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