The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire

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Popular anger finally burst onto the streets of Alexandria on 11 June. The assault was provoked by resentment at the privileged position of the Europeans and their racist arrogance, and by fury at the continued intimidatory presence of the Anglo-French war ships. China: The British Empire was the largest drug pusher the world had ever seen. By the 1830s the smuggling of opium into China was a source of huge profits and these profits played a crucial role in the financing of British rule in India. Don’t infer from these remarks that I am a regular nigger-hater, for I am not. But however good they may be, they must, as a people, be ruled by a hand of iron in a velvet glove. In the present instance they have been rash enough to pull off the glove for themselves and were now beginning to find out what the hand was made of.’

Even while the Confrontation was still under way, the British collaborated with the generals in a massacre that cost the lives of over 500,000 men, women and children, many of them slaughtered with the utmost bruality. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was complicit in what has been described as ‘one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century.John Newsinger presents his book The blood never dried: A people’s history of the British Empire, as a riposte to contemporary apologists for imperialism such as Niall Ferguson. His own argument, however, is far more dangerous for the anti-war movement, as it seeks to justify a continued alliance with the Labour Party through its left wing. This is the strategy of the SWP, of which Newsinger is a member. Insane mothers began to eat their young who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’ The neglect is neither accidental nor idiosyncratic, because too many good historians are guilty of the same offence. Rather it derives from the sheer enormity of what happened. It is incompatible with any benign interpretation of the British Empire, whether of the “celebratory” or “realist” kind, because to give it the attention it demands inevitably shifts the centre of gravity of any general history in an anti-imperialist direction. Consequently the Bengal Famine is written out of the record. This neglect is no better than the conduct of those Soviet historians who ignored or denied the terrible Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s, although they at least had the excuse that they were working under the watchful eye of Stalin’s secret police! It seems fair to say that many of the historians who have neglected or ignored the Bengal Famine would not hesitate to condemn as criminal any other twentieth-century regime that presided over the deaths from starvation of so many of the people under its rule. What we confront here obviously goes beyond any notion of individual failings on the part of particular historians. What we are looking at is the systematic repression of one of the British ruling class’s guilty secrets. The BBC Today programme broadcast a report by Andrew Gilligan revealing that Alistair Campbell had ‘sexed up’ the September 2002 dossier. This was the story of the decade. It was to cost Gilligan his job, led to the resignations of both Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC, and Gavyn Davies, the chairs of the BBC’s board of governers, and drove the government scientist David Kelly to suicide.

Post World War I: The most terrible conflict in human history had been fought not for democracy, liberty or freedom, but to protect the British Empire from its powerful German rival. To this end, millions of lives had been sacrificed.Having a written constitution did not protect German civil society from being taken over – and (just about) destroyed by Hitler. The Soviet Union followed up its promulgation of a written constitution in 1936 with the murder of 681,000 of its citizens in the following two years.