Day 350: Churchill's Secret War

Six years after Churchill’s avowal and two days after the Nazis began their blitzkrieg into Poland, on September 3, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. So did the viceroy of India, on behalf of nearly 400 million subjects of the British Empire. The colony was vital to the defense of British interests around the world. It sat in the middle of the supply and communication route that stretched from the United Kingdom, through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Throughout World War II, ships would transport food, armaments, and troops from the colonies and dominions on the periphery of the Indian Ocean to the United Kingdom, as well as to war theaters around the Mediterranean Sea or in Southeast Asia.

The Indian population would play a significant role in the war. Of the colony’s prewar budget, a third went toward defense, and that fraction had increased to two-fifths by 1939. The Indian Army’s primary domestic tasks were to guard the northwestern border against Soviet incursions southward across Afghanistan and to ensure internal security. Just as important, this army was ideally situated to defend British dependencies in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and could be dispatched to diverse theaters under direct orders from London. At the start of the war, it comprised 43,500 British and 131,000 Indian troops, some of whom had already been sent to Egypt and Singapore. Churchill, then a member of the War Cabinet, recommended that a further 60,000 British troops “be sent to India to maintain internal security and complete their training,” while at least 40,000 trained troops be brought back. While being trained, the white soldiers would forestall any uprising among the increasingly restive population of Indians intent on independence.

“I was kept for this job,” Churchill confided to his doctor when he succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940. Over his sixty-five years, Churchill had repeatedly placed himself in danger and had had several narrow escapes, which had bolstered his profound conviction that he was destined for a mighty task. It had taken him most of his life to discover what that something was: to lead The Island Race, as he would entitle his history of the British, in a great struggle. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial,” Churchill wrote of his accession to the most powerful position in the British Empire. Three days after his appointment he addressed the Parliament and the nation, promising nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The aim of the war, he declared, was “victory, victory at all costs . . . for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.” The prime minister would not only defend the British Isles from invasion and subjugation by Hitler’s armies; he would safeguard its vast and sprawling empire. But India, like some of the other colonies and dominions, would sacrifice at least as much as the United Kingdom did in the defense of an empire from which it had long been struggling to break free.

To make sure India obeyed him and did its part to support the war, Churchill needed a lieutenant with a record of firmness in dealing with colonies. The very day he gave his rousing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” peroration, the prime minister summoned the respected elder statesman Leopold S. Amery and asked him to serve as secretary of state for India.

Amery was bitterly disappointed by the request. He was sixty-six, a year older than Churchill, and up to that point his career had broadly paralleled that of the prime minister. Amery had covered the Boer War as a correspondent, had served in World War I, and had subsequently been appointed first Lord of the Admiralty and colonial secretary. At the very least, he had expected a significant role in the War Cabinet helping to direct the war effort. It was even said that if Amery had been “half a head taller and his speeches half an hour shorter” he might have become prime minister himself. Amery had also just played a central role in the Tory Party mutiny that had brought down Chamberlain and installed Churchill. A week earlier, he had denounced Chamberlain from the floor of Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing,” Amery had declaimed, invoking the words of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century British leader who had deposed and killed King Charles I: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Amery protested to Churchill that he was “side tracking me from the real conduct of the war.” Not so, the prime minister responded: it was important to ensure that India contribute as much as possible to the war, which might even move east. Amery was not persuaded, and believed that Chamberlain had urged against his appointment to the War Cabinet. Historian William Roger Louis holds, however, that by giving him a relatively subordinate role Churchill sought to contain a potential rival, one reputed to be “a man of integrity and judgment who had the courage to speak his convictions regardless of consequence.” Eventually the patriot in Amery prevailed—even as he maintained a private hope that a cabinet reshuffle would bring him closer to power. He accepted the position.

The new secretary of state for India rapidly put mechanisms in place “to utilize Indian supplies to the utmost,” as he described in his diary, and moved to impart to the marquess of Linlithgow, the viceroy in New Delhi, emergency powers of arrest and detention, control of the press, prohibition of seditious groups, and so on. “My whole conception is that of India humming from end to end with activity in munitions and supply production and at the same time with the bustle of men training for active service of one sort or another, the first operation largely paying for the cost of the second,” Amery explained to Linlithgow.

The Indian Army was slated to play a crucial role in the war, and in June 1940 the prime minister directed Amery to ensure that additional divisions were shipped westward. “The fact that we are somewhat reducing the quality of our British garrisons [in India], makes it all the more desirable that a larger number of Indian troops should also be employed outside India,” Churchill explained. That is, because recent recruits from the United Kingdom, who were in need of training, were replacing more experienced white troops in India (the latter were either returning home to defend Britain or moving to the war theaters), any mutiny by the native soldiers would be all the more difficult to quell. So India’s internal security required that as many of the sepoys as possible should also be abroad. Moreover, Churchill continued, it appeared that the war would “spread to the Middle East, and the climate of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt are well suited to Indian troops.” The prime minister’s greater apprehension of a mutiny than of an external attack would mean that when Japanese forces suddenly and ominously arrived at India’s eastern border in March 1942, the colony’s most highly trained and best-equipped divisions would be on another continent.

Apart from supplying soldiers for some of the toughest combat in countries around the Mediterranean Sea, India was designated to provide the bulk of supplies for those theaters. Starting in May, Amery oversaw the effort to ship from India around 40,000 tons of grain per month, a tenth of its railway engines and carriages, and even railway tracks uprooted from less important train lines. The colony’s entire commercial production of timber, woolen textiles, and leather goods, and three-quarters of its steel and cement production, would be required for the war. Factories near Calcutta were soon turning out ammunition, grenades, bombs, guns, and other weaponry; Bombay’s mills were producing uniforms and parachutes, while plants all over the country were contributing boots, jeep bodies and chassis, machine parts, and hundreds of ancillary items such as binoculars for which the need had suddenly swelled. Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India would become the largest contributor to the empire’s war—providing goods and services worth more than £2 billion.

~~Churchill's Secret War -by- Madhusree Mukerjee

Day 250: Debt- The First 5000 Years

Two years ago, by a series of strange coincidences, I found myself attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey. I was a bit uncomfortable. It’s not that other guests weren’t pleasant and amicable, and Father Graeme, who had organized the party, was nothing if not a gracious and charming host. But I felt more than a little out of place. At one point, Father Graeme intervened, saying that there was someone by a nearby fountain whom I would certainly want to meet. She turned out to be a trim, well-appointed young woman who, he explained, was an attorney—“but more of the activist kind. She works for a foundation that provides legal support for anti-poverty groups in London. You’ll probably have a lot to talk about.”

We chatted. She told me about her job. I told her I had been involved for many years with the global justice movement—“anti-globalization movement,” as it was usually called in the media. She was curious: she’d of course read a lot about Seattle, Genoa, the tear gas and street battles, but … well, had we really accomplished anything by all of that?

“Actually,” I said, “I think it’s kind of amazing how much we did manage to accomplish in those first couple of years.”

“For example?”

“Well, for example, we managed to almost completely destroy the IMF.”

As it happened, she didn’t actually know what the IMF was, so I offered that the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ‘80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on basic foodstuffs, or even policies of keeping strategic food reserves, and abandon free health care and free education; how all of this had led to the collapse of all the most basic supports for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. I spoke of poverty, of the looting of public resources, the collapse of societies, endemic violence, malnutrition, hopelessness, and broken lives.

“But what was your position?” the lawyer asked.

“About the IMF? We wanted to abolish it.”

“No, I mean, about the Third World debt.”

“Oh, we wanted to abolish that too. The immediate demand was to stop the IMF from imposing structural adjustment policies, which were doing all the direct damage, but we managed to accomplish that surprisingly quickly. The more long-term aim was debt amnesty. Something along the lines of the biblical Jubilee. As far as we were concerned,” I told her, “thirty years of money flowing from the poorest countries to the richest was quite enough.”

“But,” she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”
...
Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement “one has to pay one’s debts” is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn’t true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable—if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance—the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?

“Well, I know that sounds like common sense,” I said, “but the funny thing is, economically, that’s not how loans are actually supposed to work. Financial institutions are supposed to be ways of directing resources toward profitable investments. If a bank were guaranteed to get its money back, plus interest, no matter what it did, the whole system wouldn’t work. Say I were to walk into the nearest branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and say ‘You know, I just got a really great tip on the horses. Think you could lend me a couple million quid?’ Obviously they’d just laugh at me. But that’s just because they know if my horse didn’t come in, there’d be no way for them to get the money back. But, imagine there was some law that said they were guaranteed to get their money back no matter what happens, even if that meant, I don’t know, selling my daughter into slavery or harvesting my organs or something. Well, in that case, why not? Why bother waiting for someone to walk in who has a viable plan to set up a laundromat or some such? Basically, that’s the situation the IMF created on a global level—which is how you could have all those banks willing to fork over billions of dollars to a bunch of obvious crooks in the first place.”
...
Still, for several days afterward, that phrase kept resonating in my head.
“Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”

The reason it’s so powerful is that it’s not actually an economic statement: it’s a moral statement. After all, isn’t paying one’s debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one’s responsibilities. Fulfilling one’s obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one’s responsibilities than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?

It was that very apparent self-evidence, I realized, that made the statement so insidious. This was the kind of line that could make terrible things appear utterly bland and unremarkable. This may sound strong, but it’s hard not to feel strongly about such matters once you’ve witnessed the effects. I had. For almost two years, I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that, after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem was, it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren’t starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were. Not a lot of money. But owing to IMF-imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn’t have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn’t particularly important to its balance sheet anyway. But here was a perfectly decent woman—one who worked for a charitable organization, no less—who took it as self-evident that it was. After all, they owed the money, and surely one has to pay one’s debts.
...
The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed.

Nowadays, for example, military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity, and international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that aggressors pay compensation. Germany had to pay massive reparations after World War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1990. Yet the Third World debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, and the Philippines, seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries—often, the very countries to whom they now owe money. In 1895, for example, France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of then–Queen Ranavalona III, and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Gallieni did after “pacification,” as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, plantations, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, highways, bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built. To the contrary: over the next half century, the French army and police slaughtered quite a number of Malagasy who objected too strongly to the arrangement (upwards of half a million, by some reports, during one revolt in 1947). It’s not as if Madagascar has ever done any comparable damage to France. Despite this, from the beginning, the Malagasy people were told they owed France money, and to this day, the Malagasy people are still held to owe France money, and the rest of the world accepts the justice of this arrangement. When the “international community” does perceive a moral issue, it’s usually when they feel the Malagasy government is being slow to pay their debts.

But debt is not just victor’s justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren’t supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti—the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon’s armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo ensured that the name “Haiti” has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since.

Sometimes, though, debt seems to mean the very opposite. Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the repayment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined—mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much—even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.

~~Debt- The First 5000 Years -by- David Graeber

Day 224: Private Island

Wrightington Hospital, in the countryside near Wigan, grew in fits and starts around an eighteenth-century mansion that Lancashire County Council bought in 1920 after the death of its last resident, a spendthrift with a fanatical attachment to blood sports. The hospital promotes itself as ‘a centre of orthopaedic excellence’. National Health Service hospitals have to promote themselves these days. In 2011 it survived a brush with closure. It’s neat and scrubbed and slightly worn at the edges, unable to justify to itself that few per cent private firms set aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, invented a reliable way to replace human hips with artificial ones, creating a benchmark by which the success and failure of the NHS would always be judged.

They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too tricky for general hospitals. There’s a sort of blazer and brogues testosterone in the corridors, where the surgeons have a habit of cuffing one another’s faces affectionately. At the end of a hallway lined with untidy stacks of case notes in wrinkled cardboard folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He offered me his intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he declared. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the NHS,” they’d be kicked out the next day.’

The patient Porter was about to operate on was a sixty-year-old woman from the Wirral with a complex prosthesis in one leg, running from her knee to her hip. She had a fracture and Porter had got a special device made for her at a workshop in another part of the NHS, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore in Middlesex. The idea was for the device to slide over the femoral spur of the knee joint, essentially replacing her whole leg down to the ankle. ‘The case we’re doing this morning, we’re going to make a loss of about £5,000. The private sector wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘How do we deal with that? Some procedures the ebitda is about 8 per cent. If you make an ebitda of 12 per cent you’re making a real profit.’ You expect medical jargon from surgeons, but I was surprised to hear the word ebitda from Porter. It’s an accountancy term meaning ‘earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation’.

‘Last year we did about 1,400 hip replacements,’ he said. ‘The worrying thing for us is we lost a million pounds doing that. What we worked out is that our length of stay’ – the time patients spend in hospital after an operation – ‘was six days. If we can get it down to five days we break even and if it’s four, we make a million pound profit.’

I felt I’d somehow jumped forward in time. A year had passed since the 2010 election that brought the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to power. The Coalition’s programme promised: ‘We are stopping the top-down reconfigurations of NHS services, imposed from Whitehall.’ A few weeks after they gained power, a new health secretary, the Conservative Andrew Lansley, announced his plans for a top-down reconfiguration of England’s NHS services, imposed from Whitehall. When I talked to Porter, Lansley had barely been in his job a year, and hadn’t yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about profit and loss, as if he’d been living in Lansleyworld for years. Had the NHS been privatised one day while I was sleeping?

When the NHS was created in 1948, it had three core principles. It would be universal: everyone would get medical treatment whenever they needed it. It would be comprehensive, covering all forms of healthcare, from dentistry to cancer. And it would be free to use. No matter how much the system cost to run, no matter how much or how little any individual had contributed to those costs, no matter how expensive their treatment or how many times they went to the doctor, they’d never be billed for it. Through dozens of reorganisations since then, these principles have remained, along with another: that it’s never a bad time for a fresh reorganisation. Otherwise, much has changed.

The main source of the money that funds the NHS is still, as it was in 1948, general taxation. For the first thirty years of the health service’s existence, civil servants in Whitehall and the regions doled out annual budgets to hospitals and GPs according to the populations they served. Money flowed down from the Treasury, but it didn’t flow horizontally between the different parts of the NHS. Each element got its overall allowance, paid its staff, obtained its equipment and supplies, and co-operated, sometimes well, sometimes not, with the other elements, according to an overarching plan. The aim was fairness, an even spread of care across the country. In a monopoly healthcare system, competition has no place; on the contrary, it seemed sensible to the planners to avoid duplication of services. It was patriarchal and democratic, innovative and hidebound, cumbersome and cheap. For the majority without private insurance, if you were ill, you knew you’d always be cared for; if you were cared for carelessly, you had nowhere else to go.

Trying to describe in generally comprehensible terms how money flows through the NHS today would be hard enough without the shifting channels of policy. In England – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have gone along divergent health paths – the various parts of the NHS had already begun altering or abolishing themselves in response to the reorganisation announced in 2010 when the reorganisation itself was reorganised. In 2012, the Coalition responded to the clamour against Lansley’s reorganisation by sacking Lansley and keeping the reorganisation. Truly you can’t step in the same NHS river twice. The last period of relative stability was just before Lansley came along, when, crudely speaking, the money flowed like this. Every so often – perhaps every year, or every two or three – the Department of Health made its pitch to the Treasury for the amount of money it thought it should get from the overall tax pot, and was then told how much it would actually get. Most of the money came from general taxation – income tax, VAT, corporation tax, duties on booze and tobacco – but a proportion came directly from national insurance, a vitiated form of the link between that levy and the welfare state its architects intended. In the last pre-Lansley allocation, Health got £101.5 billion for the following year, a slight increase. Most of it – £89 billion – was divided up between about 150 local agencies called Primary Care Trusts, or PCTs, spread around the country. PCTs acted as the ‘commissioners’ of health services, ordering a community’s medical care from hospitals, GPs and mental health professionals and paying them accordingly.

~~Private Island: Why England Now Belongs to Someone Else -by- James Meek

Day 221: The Honourable Company

Although for much of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English were bitter rivals throughout the East, on the long voyage to and from Europe hostilities were usually suspended. At the Cape and at St Helena ships of the London Company amicably exchanged news and provisions with those of the V.O.C. Hadah was postman for both Companies; and occasionally Dutch and English ships actually sailed together.

This was not the case with the Portuguese. Anywhere outside European waters Spain/Portugal continued to regard the ships of the Protestant powers as little better than pirates and, peace treaties notwithstanding, they jealously maintained the exclusive character of their eastern bases. In the Arabian Sea further English endeavours at Surat and Swalley between 1612 and 1620 were seen as a direct challenge to Portugal’s maritime supremacy on the very threshold of its eastern metropolis at Goa. The Portuguese would respond vigorously. But once again a purely Indo-centric reading of these engagements is misleading. At stake was a dominant role not just in India’s external trade but in that of all the trading coasts of the Arabian Sea including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Naval battles in the Gulf of Cambay would have counted for little had not the Portuguese also been challenged at Hormuz, Goa, and a host of lesser ports from the coast of Mozambique to that of Malabar. Hostilities would last for twenty years; and they would embrace the whole trading world between Africa and India.

In 1612, blissfully ignorant of Sir Henry Middleton’s débâcles at Mocha and Surat, the Company had despatched two more ships for Surat, the Twelfth Voyage, under the command of Thomas Best, a highly experienced master mariner. The commander, or ‘General’, of an East India Company fleet controlled two distinct establishments, the one nautical and headed by his subordinate captains and masters and the other commercial and headed by one or more chief merchants. Almost invariably commanders were appointed on the strength of their performances during a previous voyage; and usually they were merchants who had thus acquired some knowledge of navigation. Hence the ideal commander should be part sailor, part merchant and, if possible, part ‘man of fashion and good respect’. But Thomas Best was just a sailor. Presumably the loss of the Ascension had convinced the directors that amongst Gujarat’s treacherous mud banks navigational skills were more important than social graces. The difference is evident in Best’s journal which triumphantly belies the idea that seventeenth-century travelogues were necessarily discursive and entertaining. True to his calling, Best merely kept a log.

Terse and laconic as it is, it is nevertheless odd that this document contains no mention of the fleet’s first contact with the Portuguese which occurred in the Mozambique channel north of Madagascar. In what may be a reference to it, Best elsewhere refers to ‘the goodliest ship thatt ever I sawe’ as being a Portuguese carrack ‘with a tower of ordnance beseeming a castell’. From the journal of one of his subordinates it appears that there were in fact two such ships off Madagascar, each of over 1500 tons and each intent on putting its tower of ordnance to good use. Broadsides were exchanged and at least three Portuguese killed before Best ‘steered away his course’. ‘For yt was contrarie to commission to meddle with them in respecte of peace we have with their king.’ But the English crews were ‘prepared to feight’ and if they felt somewhat cheated by Best’s delicacy, their rancour would be short-lived.

Best reached the mouth of the Tapti river in September 1612, only six months after Middleton had been ordered to sea by Mukarrab Khan. The news that all the English factors had been withdrawn was depressing enough but when word arrived of Middleton’s retaliatory activities in the Red Sea, Best despaired. The news affected him ‘like a drinke of cold water to a man on a cold and frostie morning’. Already two of his factors had been captured by the Portuguese. As soon as he could secure their release he was all for beating a hasty retreat towards Bantam.

But his remaining factors were more sanguine and Best, reckoning they knew their own business best, sensibly deferred to them. It seemed that for once the Moghul officials were being positively obliging. Perhaps they were worried that Best might follow Middleton’s example and blockade their shipping in the Red Sea. Perhaps they had simply reevaluated the advantages of a new trading partner and a new source of largesse. At all events a farman granting interim trading rights was immediately forthcoming, a promise was made that within forty days it would be ratified by Jehangir, and the English were invited to send another representative to Agra to negotiate a permanent agreement. It was as if the dismissals of Hawkins and Middleton had all been a terrible mistake. Within days of the fleet’s arrival new emissaries and a new letter from King James were on their way to Court. So were some of the presents known to please the dilettante emperor. There were paintings ‘espetially such as discover Venus’ and Cupid’s actes’ and there were various musical instruments in the care of Lancelot Canning, a virtuoso on the virginals, and Robert Trully, a cornettist. The latter found high favour with Jehangir. He converted to Islam and eventually blew his cornet in half the courts of India. Not so Lancelot Canning. The virginals proved too insipid for Moghul tastes and the mortified Canning, a distant kinsman of India’s future Viceroy, is described as having ‘dyed of conceitt’.

Best meanwhile repaired to Swalley to await Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman. As usual during any period in port the crews took to drinking and gambling. Even at ill-appointed Swalley Hole two men were ducked from the yard-arm for swimming ashore on the Sabbath and getting ‘drinking drunke with whores ashore’. Instructions issued to the commanders of all Company fleets proscribed such conduct in the most vigorous terms. But as with the injunctions against private trade, those against blasphemy, gaming and drunkenness were habitually ignored. They may be seen as implying not that the English seafarer of the seventeenth century was a God-fearing paragon of Puritan virtues but exactly the opposite.

It took the arrival of an impressive Portuguese fleet to bring the Swalley revellers to their senses. There were four galleons (warships, smaller than the cargo-carrying carracks but larger than any of the English vessels) and twenty-five inshore frigates. They had been dispatched from Goa and their instructions were to disperse the new English challenge by force of arms.

In the engagements that followed – and in those fought by ships of Richard Downton’s fleet two years later – the Portuguese were apparently the stronger. They had more ships and their ships had more men. They were also larger and, under full sail, faster. But they were of deeper draught, less manoeuvrable, poorly crewed, and under-gunned. Portuguese tactics still relied heavily on grappling-irons and fire-ships, the idea being to panic the enemy and then get alongside him for a full-blooded boarding in which higher superstructures and numerical superiority must prove decisive.

But all this assumed that men-of-war were just floating castles and that their defenders would always heave to and fight it out. This was not how the English had frustrated the Armada and, according to a disgruntled Portuguese account, it was not how Best chose to conduct his battles in the Gulf of Cambay.

~~The Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company -by- John Keay

Day 173: Book Excerpt: India’s Princely States

During British colonial rule, the map of India had two colours representing two Indias, known as the ‘British India’ and the ‘Indian’ India. The latter consisted of two-fifths of the territory – one-quarter of the population of the entire country was outside the direct jurisdiction of the colonial state. Expediency, ethnocentrism, lack of understanding of an alien and complex society on the part of the colonizers, simplistic models of evolutionary and functionalist anthropology, along with the ideology of Orientalism, all made their contribution to the development of a conceptual framework and vantage point in which India was identified with ‘British India’ alone. Hence, in the historiography of colonial India, inferences drawn from British India are applied to the whole of India. I have previously characterized this tendency as the colonial mode of historiography. I have further argued that in order to correct this distortion, agrarian relations, power structures and ideologies of the princely states during the period of British colonial rule deserve to be studied in their own right

In a different context, Perlin points to a similar distortion in Indian historiography of the pre-colonial period. He calls it ‘Mughal-centrism’, that is, a tendency to treat the economic and political institutions of Mughal India as representative of the whole of India. He rightly argues that Mughal-centrism is a serious impediment to any recognition of regional diversity in pre-colonial agrarian relations and power structures. He emphasizes the urgent need to investigate the regional systems of landholding, class structures and ideologies in order to overcome the limitations of a Mughal-centric history of India. While Perlin’s critique of Mughal-centrism is well taken, his explanation for this tendency is rather misplaced. According to him, it is a result of a conscious choice on the part of historians based in Aligarh to paint Mughal India in a positive light in order to counter the distortions by obscurantist (communalist) historians. However, this tendency is not confined to the historians of the Aligarh school alone. It is far more pervasive and is found in the Orientalist, colonial, nationalist, as well as the Marxist schools of historiography. Indeed, the tendency to focus on Mughal India, by peripheralizing the rest of the subcontinent, is common to both the pre-colonial and colonial history of India, with the only difference that in the latter, Mughal India is replaced with British India.

De-colonizing colonial historiography: discarding the notion of ‘indirect rule’
Why were there ‘two Indias’ during British colonial rule? This is a serious question from a theoretical and historical point of view that has not received the attention it deserves. ‘Indirect rule’, the most commonly used notion in conventional historiography to describe the relations between the paramount power and the princely states, has been partly responsible for the marginalization of princely India in the historical discourse on India’s colonization. It is in fact a conceptual tool of the colonial mode of historiography and misrepresents the history of colonial rule and resistance. According to the notion of ‘indirect rule’, the landed aristocracy in India was ‘preserved’ by the colonial state as a means to its functional requirements. However, the alliance between the colonial state and the landed aristocracy in India was a two-way process of compromise and accommodation, which the colonial state entered in the face of resistance by the latter. The notion of ‘indirect rule’ eschews the element of resistance, negotiation and mutual accommodation, making it a one-way process in which the colonial state reigned supreme. While privileging the metropolis, it denies Indian subjects their agency, excepting as instruments or ‘puppets’ of the supreme power. Moreover, it ignores the complexities of the alliance between supreme power and Indian landed aristocracy. The repudiation of the notion of ‘indirect rule’ is a necessary step towards decolonizing the historiography of colonial and princely India.

De-objectifying the princely states

In order to appreciate the critical importance of indigenous resistance and agency, it is important to consider the legacy of earlier theories of colonial rule and social change. In addition to celebratory accounts, we can identify three main strands of historiography of colonialism, which influenced critical debate since India’s Independence in 1947: the liberal approach (represented here by Barrington Moore), critiques of political economy in the Marxist tradition, and populist perspectives such as the Subaltern Studies school. The most serious limitation of Moore’s approach is his attempt to analyse the transition from tradition to modernity both in the metropolis and the colony exclusively within a national context, whereas historically the context of this transition has been transnational in character. Moore, for instance, treats the ‘success’ of England to modernize, and India’s ‘failure’ to do so, in isolation from each other. In reality, however, as Hamza Alavi points out, the changes in England and India were shaped by each other.

The critical Marxist theories of the 1960s and 1970s in particular recog- nized the intrinsic connection between colony and metropolis in the process of transition to modernity. However, the central thesis was that colonial capitalism destroyed all elements of pre-capitalist economy and polity and turned them into capitalist political economy. Furthermore, economic changes in the colony were seen to have been accompanied by changes in the political formations. It was, for instance, argued that the imperialist bourgeoisie and the colonial state completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the colonies, by creating a bourgeois state, bourgeois property and a bourgeois legal and institutional apparatus as a necessary condition for its economic domination.6 Contrary to these claims, the evidence from specific states (such as the princely states in Rajasthan), showed that the land was not commodified. Nor was the peasantry expropriated from the land. There was no ‘new mode of surplus extraction’ in which the use of extra-economic coercion was neither required nor provided for, that is, the system of land tenure was not characterized by a ‘de-fusion’ of economic and political power. Like the economic system, the political structure of the princely states was characterized, above all, by the personal authority of the princely rulers (the darbars) and the landlords (thikanedars). As I have discussed elsewhere, until the 1880s, there was no formal procedure for the implementation of civil or criminal justice in the princely states of Rajasthan, for example. Instead, the rulers and the landlords adjudi- cated justice within their respective jurisdictions according to religious precepts and local customs. As a norm, justice was administered in the name of God. In other words, the economic-political system and the juridical structure of the princely states remained essentially pre-modern/ pre-capitalist.

The most serious limitation of the critical theories based on Marxist critiques of political economy was privileging the metropolitan capital and the colonial state, treating pre-colonial structures as essentially passive, always at the receiving end. However, colonialism was a contested terrain. The history of continuity and change in the agrarian relations and power structures of colonial India is in fact a history of resistance, struggle, accommodation and compromise between the colonizer and the colonized.

~~India’s Princely States -ed- Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati

Day 89 : Book Excerpt : Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD

From 1820 to 1980, African per capita income rose more than 3.7-fold. Colonialism introduced some dynamism, but there was a big difference in performance between black Africa and the white settler countries where average per capita income rose nearly fourfold. By the 1950's, population of European origin had risen to 6 million (1.7 in the Maghreb, 3.5 million in South Africa, about 800,000 elsewhere). There were about half a million people of Indian origin in East and South Africa.

 Virtually all the European colonies were abandoned by 1963. White settler interests retarded the transition in Zimbabwe and Namibia, and in South Africa the indigenous population did not get political rights until 1994. Independence brought serious challenges. Very few countries, except Egypt, Morocco, and Ethiopia, had ever functioned as nation states. Most were multi-ethnic and political leadership had to create elements of national solidarity from scratch. There was a great scarcity of people with education or administrative experience. The new political elites frequently created one-party states or were involved in armed struggle. Cold war rivalry made donors less fastidious in allocating aid. As a result Africa accumulated large foreign debts which had a meagre developmental pay-off. It is the world’s poorest region. Education and health standards are low, 40 per cent of the population is below 15 years of age compared to 16 per cent in western Europe. In 2005, average life expectation was 51 years, annual population growth 2.2 per cent— nine times faster than in western Europe. Between 1980 and 2003 African per capita income stagnated, whilst it rose by half in the rest of the world. In spite of the large increase in foreign aid which has recently been pledged, the outlook for significant increases in African income remains bleaker than in other parts of the world.
...
In 1665, Petty presented the first estimates of income, expenditure, stock of land, other physical assets, and human capital in an integrated set of accounts for the whole economy of England and Wales. His accounts were brilliantly original. They provided a quantitative framework for effective implementation of fiscal policy and mobilization of resources in time of war. They foreshadowed techniques of growth accounting developed by Edward Denison 300 years later.

 Graunt was the first serious demographer. He derived vital statistics, survival tables, and the population of London by processing and analysing christenings and burials recorded in the bills of mortality from 1603 to 1662. His work inspired Halley (1693) to publish the first rigorous mathematical analysis of life tables, which provided an actuarial basis for life insurance. After a lengthy hiatus, historical demography has gained new vigour in the last half-century and provides important clues on per capita income development, particularly for distant periods where evidence on output is poor.

 Gregory King built on the work of Petty and Graunt. He constructed much more accurate and consistent estimates of income and expenditure for England and Wales. He was able to improve population estimates by exploiting information from hearth and poll taxes, a new tax on births, marriages, and burials, and his own mini-censuses for a few towns. He estimated world population by major region. He quantified and compared the economic performance of England, France, and Holland, and their capacity to finance the war of the League of Augsburg in which most of western Europe was engaged from 1689 to 1697. His income account delineated the social hierarchy in a dramatic way, showing the income of 26 types of household from lords to vagrants. His quantitative depiction of the social panorama in 1688 had no precursors. His most valuable contribution was to provide detailed evidence to estimate GDP broken down by 43 categories of expenditure for 1688. This provides an invaluable inter-temporal link to the estimates for the Roman world and to modern national accounts.

~~Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD -by- Angus Maddison