<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Merchant adventurer
Tristram Hunt
...
When it came to selling Britain, there was little shift from the Blair years. Maybe less militarism and neo-Christian liberal interventionism, but the same kind of post-imperial, post-industrial identity that has been forged over the past decade. A hundred and fifty years ago, of course, it was all very different. As the British empire accelerated towards its apogee, Whitehall was beginning to take over the running of India in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny and a brief truce had been called in the Second Opium War. British policy then was about hammering open the interiors of India and China for cotton and drugs and, in the words of Queen Victoria, "to protect the poor natives and to advance civilisation". The Royal Navy shelled a passage along China's ports to fend off French competition and secure the East India Company's opium monopoly. Whereas today British ministers pay their dutiful respects to China's ancient civilisation, in the 1850s our army was happy to burn and loot its way through Beijing.
The money from the opium sales helped to pay for Britain's fiendishly expensive outlay at Brown's next port of call, India. <b>Rather than vying for foreign investment in the UK, Britain, by the 1880s, had ploughed £270m into Indian infrastructure - near one-fifth of its entire investment overseas. </b>But none of that found its way into the Indian export sector. As even the staunchly pro-imperial Niall Fergsuon admits, "The free trade imposed on India in the 19th century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition."
Barbarians capitulate
Always attentive to the contradiction, Marx and Engels thought the ultimate benefits of capitalist imperialism - the forcible introduction of backward, Asiatic peoples into the revolutionary slipstream of history - far outweighed any temporary brutalities by British troops in Beijing or Lucknow. As the Communist Manifesto put it, "The cheap prices of its [capitalism's] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." Engels, the Manchester mill-owner, spoke with positive relish of India's "native handicrafts . . . finally being crushed by English competition" as his own company benefited from the elimination of Indian calico exports and the forcible opening up of south Asian markets. India and China were there to be plundered by the British commercial-imperial complex.
Times have certainly changed when British prime ministers hurtle through Beijing and Delhi trying to lure sovereign funds into the UK. In one sense, this is an obvious story of the rise and fall of great powers: a salutary readjustment to Britain's pre-imperial marginality and, with it, something of an appeal to a mercantile, buccaneering Elizabethan identity. That age of Drake, Frobisher and Gresham, with its Court and City, was pleased to strike any bargain and happy to entertain the most unethical money-making ventures.
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Tristram Hunt
...
When it came to selling Britain, there was little shift from the Blair years. Maybe less militarism and neo-Christian liberal interventionism, but the same kind of post-imperial, post-industrial identity that has been forged over the past decade. A hundred and fifty years ago, of course, it was all very different. As the British empire accelerated towards its apogee, Whitehall was beginning to take over the running of India in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny and a brief truce had been called in the Second Opium War. British policy then was about hammering open the interiors of India and China for cotton and drugs and, in the words of Queen Victoria, "to protect the poor natives and to advance civilisation". The Royal Navy shelled a passage along China's ports to fend off French competition and secure the East India Company's opium monopoly. Whereas today British ministers pay their dutiful respects to China's ancient civilisation, in the 1850s our army was happy to burn and loot its way through Beijing.
The money from the opium sales helped to pay for Britain's fiendishly expensive outlay at Brown's next port of call, India. <b>Rather than vying for foreign investment in the UK, Britain, by the 1880s, had ploughed £270m into Indian infrastructure - near one-fifth of its entire investment overseas. </b>But none of that found its way into the Indian export sector. As even the staunchly pro-imperial Niall Fergsuon admits, "The free trade imposed on India in the 19th century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition."
Barbarians capitulate
Always attentive to the contradiction, Marx and Engels thought the ultimate benefits of capitalist imperialism - the forcible introduction of backward, Asiatic peoples into the revolutionary slipstream of history - far outweighed any temporary brutalities by British troops in Beijing or Lucknow. As the Communist Manifesto put it, "The cheap prices of its [capitalism's] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." Engels, the Manchester mill-owner, spoke with positive relish of India's "native handicrafts . . . finally being crushed by English competition" as his own company benefited from the elimination of Indian calico exports and the forcible opening up of south Asian markets. India and China were there to be plundered by the British commercial-imperial complex.
Times have certainly changed when British prime ministers hurtle through Beijing and Delhi trying to lure sovereign funds into the UK. In one sense, this is an obvious story of the rise and fall of great powers: a salutary readjustment to Britain's pre-imperial marginality and, with it, something of an appeal to a mercantile, buccaneering Elizabethan identity. That age of Drake, Frobisher and Gresham, with its Court and City, was pleased to strike any bargain and happy to entertain the most unethical money-making ventures.
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