Few of the horrors which the British visited upon the captive
peoples of empire had not already been tried and tested at home;
or at least within the British Isles. Indeed, much of the
imperial adventure was a projection abroad of policies and practices
of which the people of Britain were the first victims. The British
global extractive mission later benefited the poor of Britain,
but not before the people had been the object of social and economic
experiments, the 'success' of which caused them to be carried
eventually into the remote corners of empire.
Whether it was evictions of the poor, the enclosure of common
resources, the political uses of famine in Ireland, the destruction
of cultures ( the clan system in Scotland), the outlawing of dissent
(the bloody penal code, the Six Acts and the Combination Laws),
the criminalizing of dissidents, and the use of the gallows, or
transportation as deterrents or forms of social cleansing, a story
emerges that was to be repeated across the world with the passing
of time.
In 1746, after the Jacobite rising (the last attempt to restore
the House of Stuart to the English and Scottish throne) was crushed
at Culloden in Scotland, the English soldiery set out across the
Highlands, looting and killing, leaving a trail of devastation
wherever they went. Not content with removing the threat to the
throne, they laid waste the landscape, scattered the people and
prepared the way for the total destruction of the old Highland
clan system. In other words, they destroyed a culture which they
perceived as barbaric, backward and brutal. In order to ensure
the annihilation of the way of life, the government in London
enacted vengeful legislation which struck at the heart of the
vanquished culture. A law was passed against the wearing of Highland
dress, the tartan plaid and kilt were banned. The skills of weaving
the patterns and making dyes from the herbs on the hills fell
into disuse. John Prebble states 'The clans were no longer, their
true identity had gone with the broadsword and their chiefs…The
banning of their dress took from the clans their pride and their
sense of belonging to a unique people. The abolition of the hereditary
jurisdictions of their chiefs, which followed, destroyed the political
and social system that had held them together.' The Act of Proscription
of 1747 banned the wearing of the tartan, the teaching of Gaelic,
the right of Highlanders to their ceremonial gatherings and the
playing of bagpipes in Scotland.
In the late 18th and early 19th century,
the Highlands were subjected to further violence. The landlords
of the lands and estates in the Highlands systematically drove
out the local people from their homes in order to replace them
with more profitable sheep. These 'clearances' drove people from
their ancestral lands to emigration ships bound for the colonies,
or sent them to settle into rocky coastal areas. The 'crofters',
of the Highlands were small cultivators, with a little arable
land and pastures with cows. They were proud of their independence.
The most brutal evictions occurred in Sutherland in the northernmost
part of Scotland. Ships of emigrants sailed to North America.
Many of the reluctant migrants suffered from typhus and cholera,
and never reached their destination.
Since Elizabethan times, former common and 'waste' land had been
enclosed (privatised), and in the late 18th and early
19th centuries, this process accelerated. Although
its ostensible purpose was improvements in agriculture, it also
applied to the creation of parks and hunting lands for the aristocracy.
In the process, many poor villagers who had subsisted as labourers,
ekeing out a living by keeping a cow or some pigs and using common
lands for grazing, gathering wild fruits and nuts and hunting
rabbits and birds, lost access to resources which made the difference
between bare sufficiency and hunger.
I have a book of memoirs of rural poverty published in 1904, which
is an account of the life of rural labourers in the early 19th
century: but for the difference in climate and nature of the crops,
it could well be a vivid evocation of the condition of the poor
in India or Brazil 200 years on. 'I was born in 1804, and worked
early as a ploughboy, with my mother's boots tied to my feet with
string. My first engagement was with a farmer, who, in return
for my labour, gave me free food and no wages.' 'I've done all
sorts of work in my time, moving about from place to place, just
where I could get most. I used to go cow-minding and bird-minding
for threepence a day. I used to go digging stones; that was when
I was married and had three children. I was working for the parish
then, and all they allowed me was five shillings a week. My wife
used to go out in the fields, weeding and stone-picking; or she'd
go gleaning in harvest time and pick up perhaps a bushel of corn
and take it to the mill where they'd change it for a little flour.
We were nigh starved sometimes, and if it wasn't for the rabbits
and hares running about the hills, and a rabbit now and again,
I don't know where we'd 've been. We didn't see tea in them days.
We couldn't afford it. We used to toast a bit of bread at the
fire till it was black as coal, and put it in the teapot and pour
water on it, that was all the tea we got.' 'Seven till five in
the night I worked as a lad, and lived mostly on crammings (flour
mixed with the husks of corn). I went to work for a penny a day,
and that rose to twopence when I was ten years old. When I got
to twelve they gave me one shilling and fourpence a week'. 'I'd
very little schooling, and when I first went out to work I'd get
a penny for carrying water..I worked for threepence a day spreading
the manure and picking stones.' 'You'd see the children come out
in the streets and pick up a bit of bread, and even potato peelings'.
During the 18th century draconian laws, mostly relating
to property, made more and more offences punishable by death.
Robert Hughes, in his account of the convict colonies in Australia,
states 'The most notorious of these laws, passed in the 1720s,
and known as the Waltham black Act, 'passed by the Commons without
a murmur of dissent, prescribed the gallows for over two hundred
possible offences in various permutations. One could be hanged
for burning a house or a hut, a standing rick of corn, or an insignificant
pile of straw; for poaching a rabbit, for braking down the 'head
or mound' of a fishpond, or even cutting down an ornamental shrub;
or for appearing on a high road with a sooty face.' Public hangings
were festivals of death, which the ruling classes believed would
serve as deterrent spectacle to potential wrongdoers, even though
the ceremonial route from Newgate prison to Tyburn gallows often
turned into a macabre fair, where the crowds expressed their sympathies
with the condemned. However repressive the legislation, crime
continued to increase; and criminals were detained in 'the hulks',
disused ships lying off-shore near the great seaports. Even these
became inadequate to hold their cargo of misery, and it was this
that led to the introduction of transportation: between 1788 and
1868 at least 160,000 'felons' were consigned to the dungeons
of memory at the other end of the world.
Transportation encompassed a wide range of political 'criminals'.
The first convict ship to carry political prisoners was from Ireland
in 1795, members of the Society of United Irishmen, and many more
in the wake of the Rebellion of 1798. Hundreds arrested during
the agricultural riots of the 1830s, including the Dorsetshire
'Tolpuddle Martyrs', guilty of an attempt to set up an agricultural
trade union in 1834, were also part of the enforced exile. Agricultural
unrest was in part a response to mechanisation, but it was also
created by the slump in agriculture in the 1830s. 481 people involved
in what came to be known as the last Agricultural Labourers' Revolt
were shipped to Australia. Transportation failed to abate crime
or to suppress radicalism - facts which did not interfere with
the imperial way with exiling, criminalizing or jailing dissenters,
freedom-fighters and other threats to British rule in the wider
world.
When Cobbett undertook his Rural Rides in the 1820s, and described
the condition of the labouring poor, he might also have been describing
the Adivasis of India, who found themselves excluded from the
forests upon which they had depended on for sustenance even longer
than the peasantry of England. Cobbett denounced the enclosures
of common lands, 'from the skirts of which the labourers have
been banished.' 'In this beautiful island every inch of land is
appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no
grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees
surround the great farmhouse. All the rest is bare of trees; and
the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place
for a pig or cow to graze or even to lie down upon.'
Cobbett describes a fertile valley in Wiltshire, and calculates
the value of its annual produce, which, he estimates, is ten times
what is available to the producers. 'The infernal system causes
it all to be carried away. Not a bit of good beef, or mutton or
veal, and scarcely a bit of bacon is left for those who raise
all this food and wool. The labourers here look as if they were
half-starved…I really am ashamed to ride a fat horse, to
have a full belly, and to have a clean shirt upon my back, while
I look at these wretched countrymen of mine; while I actually
see them reeling with weakness; when I see their poor faces present
me with nothing but skin and bone, while they are toiling to get
the wheat and meat ready to be carried away and devoured by the
tax-eaters.'
During the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s, Cecil Woodham-Smith
writes 'The influence of laissez-faire on the treatment of Ireland
during the famine is impossible to exaggerate. Almost without
exception the high officials and politicians responsible for Ireland
were fervent believers in non-interference by Government, and
the behaviour of the British authorities only becomes explicable
when their fanatical belief in private enterprise and their suspicions
of any action which might be considered Government intervention
are borne in mind.
'The loss of the potato crop was therefore to be made good, without
Government interference, by the operations of private enterprise
and private firms, using the normal channels of commerce. The
Government was not to appear in food markets as a buyer, there
was to be 'no disturbance' of the ordinary course of trade' and
'no complaint from private traders' on account of Government competition.
This ferocious commitment to an ideology of non-interference by
government in economic activity led to or unnecessarily exacerbated
the successive famines in India; while even as late as the 1980s,
during the time of the Ethiopian famine, fresh vegetables grown
in Ethiopia were still being exported to the supermarkets of Europe.
In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P.Thompson describes
how the condition of the handloom weavers reduced them from prosperity
to extremes of destitution within a generation. Attracted by machine-spun
yarn, weavers prospered in Lancashire in the last years of the
18th century, and many small farmers turned to a livelihood
from weaving. From the early 19th century, and weaving
became - together with general labouring - the resource of the
northern unemployed. The existence of spinning-mills attracted
thousands of outworkers. Their isolation and lack of organisation
led to declining income and the need to work longer hours for
less money. The handloom weavers were not just a residual group:
E.P. Thompson states that for hundreds of years, they had been
the largest single group of industrial workers in Britain. With
the growth of the factory system and development of power-looms,
the condition of the handloom weavers deteriorated further. They
- or their children - were starved into entering the factory system.
Thompson quotes evidence from the Select Committee on Emigration
(1827) of conditions in some parts of Lancashire 'Mrs Hulton and
myself, in visiting the poor, were asked by a person almost starving
to go into a house. We there found on one side of the fire a very
old man, apparently dying, on the other side, a young man about
eighteen with a child on his knee whose mother had just died and
been buried. We were going away from that house, when the woman
said 'Sir, you have not seen all.' We went up stairs, and, under
some rags, we found another young man, the widower; and on turning
down the rags, which he was unable to remove himself, we found
another man who was dying, and who did die in the course of the
day. I have no doubt that the family were actually starving art
the time.'
The colonisation of the people of these islands preceded what
was inflicted upon the wider empire. These practices served as
model and inspiration to those who subsequently controlled large
tracts of the earth. Many of the acts of cruelty inflicted on
the people in the British Isles were inflicted in their turn on
others by their victims - the people who had served their time
in the carceral lands of Australia and Tasmania set upon the indigenous
peoples there, with the same kind of vindictive fury with which
they themselves had been pursued.
The story of imperialism began at home. It is a great historical
irony that the way in which the beaten and brutalised people of
industrial society became reconciled to a system that had dispossessed
them was by the export of that system to the countries and peoples
of empire. This ought, in theory, to have created great sympathy
between the poor of Britain and the subject peoples abroad; and
indeed, there was considerable talk in the radical movements of
19th century Britain of the 'white slaves' of the industrial
system, who saw their fate mirrored in the wider practice of slavery
and subordination in the world. But on the whole, the experience
of the poor at home and their counterparts abroad increasingly
diverged, as the people in Britain came to identify their interests
within industrial society.
The reason for this is scarcely a mystery. The small consolations
of the poor of Britain were won precisely at the expense of the
subjugation of the people abroad, forced and indentured and bonded
labour, the annexation of their fruitful lands, the theft of their
wealth. From the early years of empire, the victims of slavery
and colonialism supplied sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, cloves, rice,
nutmeg, tobacco, snuff, laudanum (an opium derivative) which dulled
pain and sent infants to sleep; later, canned tropical fruit and
chilled meat. These modest comforts were wrested from the peoples
of empire on an even greater scale than the security, common land
and freedom of the people of Britain had been alienated from them.
In the process, cultures were destroyed, peoples uprooted, the
free gifts of nature enclosed, ancient ways of life were laid
waste and sustainable societies ruined. If that was the price
of the betterment of the hungry and wanting at home, so be it.
They felt they had served their time in the exile of poverty and
insufficiency. It was there turn to enjoy some of the fruits of
empire which had been repatriated in such spectacular but unfair
abundance.
So the people of the islands did indeed, benefit at last from
the plunder and exploitation of empire; and this is how they came
to identify with their rulers who brought them these 'benefits'.
Their acquiescence was gained: they became complicit in processes
which had dispossessed them. Ironically, this impoverishment was
visited upon distant others; and it permitted over time the restoration
to a life of more or less sufficiency, from which they had themselves
originally been evicted; but it was an industrialised sufficiency,
created by violence, piracy and the rape of the riches and raw
materials of the whole world.
Nothing that was done in the most distant corners of empire was
not practised at home first; and the reconciliation of the people
of Britain came from the export of this model of expropriation,
perhaps the most productive export ever known.
That the processes initiated then continue today scarcely needs
to be restated. The dismantling of empire, and its perpetuation
by economic as well as military instruments is well-known. But
that it was constructed on a thoroughgoing colonisation of the
people of Britain is less readily acknowledged. It is important
to do so. It isn't only those who aspire to the liberation of
their countries in the South who have still to reclaim their history,
it is also - possibly even more so - the captive of imperial privilege.
That is a long and arduous journey, and it has scarcely begun.
Jeremy Seabrook
3 Springfield Avenue
Muswell Hill
London n10 3SU
July 2003