18.4: The British Empire

According to one phrase, "the sun never set" over the British empire. That was, quite literally, true. Roughly 25% of the surface of the globe was directly or indirectly controlled by the British in the aftermath of World War I (1918). Enormous bureaucracies of "natives" worked under white British officials from the South Pacific to North Africa. The ultimate expression of British imperialism was in India, where just under 100,000 British officials governed a population of some 300 million Indians.

Until 1857, India was governed the British East India Company (the EIC), the state-sponsored monopoly established in the seventeenth century to profit from overseas trade and which controlled a monopoly on Indian imports and exports. The EIC used long, slow creep of territorial expansion and one-sided treaties with Indian princes, tto extend its rule over the subcontinent by 1840. India produced huge quantities of precious commodities, including cotton, spices, and narcotics. In fact, the EIC was the single largest drug cartel in world history, with the explicit approval of the British government. Most of those narcotics consisted of opium exported to China.

By the 1830s, 40% of the total value of Indian exports took the form of opium. In 1840, Chinese officials tried to stop the ongoing shipments of opium from India and open war broke out between the EIC, supported by the British navy, and China. A single British gunboat, the Nemesis, arrived after inconclusive fighting had gone on for five months. In short order, the Nemesis began an ongoing rout of the Chinese forces. The Chinese navy and imperial fortresses were nearly helpless before gunboats with cannons, and steamships were able to penetrate Chinese rivers and the Chinese Grand Canal, often towing sailing vessels with full cannon batteries behind them.

Figure 18.3.1: A British commemoration of victory in the Opium War. The Nemesis is in the background on the right.

In the end, the Royal Navy forced the Chinese state to re-open their ports to the Indian opium trade, and the British obtained Hong Kong as part of the British Empire itself. Other European states secured the legal right to carry on trade in China, administer their own taxes and laws in designated port cities, and support Christian missionary work. The authority of the ruling Chinese dynasty, the Qing, was seriously undermined in the process. (A second Opium War occurred in the late 1850s, with the British joined by the French against China. This war also resulted in a European victory.)

Trouble continued to brew for the British was brewing in India. In 1857, according to rumors, sepoys (Indian soldiers employed by the EIC), were issued new rifles whose bullet cartridges were lubricated with both pig and cow fat. Loading the gun involved biting the cartridge open, meaning the soldiers would come into direct contact with the fat, which was totally forbidden in Islam and Hinduism. (Note that there is no evidence that the cartridges were greased with the fat of either animal). Simultaneously, European Christian missionaries were trying to convert both Muslims and Hindus to Christianity, sometimes very aggressively. These actions culminated in an explosion of anti-Christian and anti-British violence that temporarily plunged India into a civil war. The British responded to the uprising, dubbed “The Mutiny”, by massacring whole villages. Meanwhile, sepoy rebels targeted any British they could find, including the families of British officials. Eventually, troops from Britain and loyal Sepoy forces routed the rebels and restored order.

Figure 18.3.2: A British depiction of the Sepoy Rebellion, attributing the uprising to greed rather than its actual causes. Note the use of racial caricatures in depicting the sepoys.

After Sepoy Rebellion, the British Parliament disbanded the East India Company, and India was placed under direct rule from London. Henceforth, India was referred to as the "British Raj," meaning British Rulership, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India in addition to Queen of Great Britain. Indian subjects could take the civil service examinations that entitled men to positions of authority in the Indian government, and elite Indians quickly enrolled their sons in British boarding schools. The first Indian to pass the exam (in 1863) was Satyendranath Tagore. But, white officials consistently refused to take orders from an Indian. As a result, elite Indians often hit a "glass ceiling" in the Raj, able to rise to positions of importance but not real leadership. In turn, resentful elite Indians became the first Indian nationalists, organizing what later became the Indian Independence movement.