{"id":95939,"date":"2019-12-02T16:00:35","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T23:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=95939"},"modified":"2019-12-02T16:00:35","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T23:00:35","slug":"the-case-for-reparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/12\/02\/the-case-for-reparations\/","title":{"rendered":"THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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JASON HICKEL<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Yesterday I \nstood in the hall of the Durham Union to argue for the proposition: This house \nbelieves Britain owes reparations to its former colonies\u201d. The following is the \ntext of my ten-minute speech, followed by five brief reflections on the \nopposition\u2019s arguments.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still remember the first time I taught colonial history at the \nLSE. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LSE students are among Britain\u2019s finest: they graduate from top \nschools, perform brilliantly on their A-level exams. And yet when I gave a \nlecture about the Indian famines of the late 19th century to a classroom full of \nthird years, I was met with blank stares. As a direct result of British policy, \n30 million Indians died needlessly of hunger between 1875 and 1902.  Laid head \nto foot, their corpses would stretch the length of England, from Dover to the \nScottish borders, 85 times over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one in the classroom had ever heard of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this tragedy was not an isolated incident. There were many \nmore.  The Great Bengal Famine in 1770 killed 10 million people, one third of \nthe region\u2019s population. Here too historians blame British policy: brutal tax \ncollection, enclosure of forests and waterways, forcing farmers to rip up their \nrice to plant crops for export. Similar policies imposed over the following \ndecades claimed the lives of another 22 million people, all while record \nagricultural exports were being siphoned away to London.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Mike Davis has famously likened these famines to the \nholocaust. And yet the corpses that the British left strewn across India have \nbeen almost entirely forgotten. Tell me: would we ever tolerate such amnesia \nwhen it comes to the crimes of Nazi Germany? Never. Any such ignorance is \nrebuked, and rightly so. Yet when it comes to the crimes of the British Empire, \nan insidious form of holocaust denialism vipers right through our culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While he was Prime Minister, David Cameron went on record saying: \nThere\u2019s an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did.\u201d  \nWhy?  Because the British brought development\u201d and whatnot.  Or so the argument \ngoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there isn\u2019t a shred of evidence to back this up. During the \nentire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was zero increase in per \ncapita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century\u2014the heyday of \nBritish intervention\u2014income in India collapsed by half.<\/em> The average life expectancy of Indians \ndropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

India wasn\u2019t developed\u201d under British rule \u2013 it was de-developed.  \nAnd not just in terms of social welfare.  British policy was designed to destroy \nIndia\u2019s domestic industries by imposing asymmetrical tariffs, by dismantling the \ninstitutions that trained up producers, and in some cases even by maiming \nskilled artisans \u2013 all to create captive markets for British goods.  During the \ncourse of British rule, India\u2019s share of the global economy shrank from 27% to \n3%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet despite this litany of violence, a recent YouGov survey found \nthat 80% of Britons do not regret colonialism. 44% are actively proud of it.  \nHow is this possible? I hear it all the time: pundits and politicians arguing \nthat colonialism brought democracy, property rights, rule of law, railroads\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a strange twist of reason this requires. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democracy? British rule was dictatorship!  Africans and Asians \nstruggled and bled for the right to vote in their own countries<\/em>.  Property rights? \nThe whole point of colonialism was dispossession\u2014securing the rights of the \ncolonizers to the property of the \ncolonized<\/em>: land, gold, diamonds, taxes, even the bodies of the colonized \nthemselves. Rule of law? The object of colonial legal codes was to deny equal \nrights to colonial subjects.  And India\u2019s railroads were used to pump \nresources\u2014grain and timber\u2014out of the hinterlands to the ports for British use. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if we accept that useful things were shared during colonialism \n\u2013 universities, for instance \u2013 that is not the same as saying they were a benefit of<\/em> colonization<\/em>. Colonialism is not a \nnecessary vector for the transfer of knowledge or technology. Britain has long \nenjoyed the Arabic numeral system, algorithms, and even algebra itself, without \never submitting to Arab invasion. It takes a warped mind to believe that the \nbest way to share ideas with other humans is to colonize them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we have barely scratched the surface.  Let\u2019s not forget that \nBritain\u2019s first forays into colonialism were linked to the consummate expression \nof barbarism: the Atlantic slave trade. 300 years of state-sponsored human \ntrafficking. 14 million souls shipped across the sea. Countless bodies shackled \nto British plantations and churned into the sugar and cotton that fueled \nBritain\u2019s industrial rise.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet in the book I was made to read to become a British citizen, \nthis long, dark history was reduced to three sentences<\/em>. You can visit Glasgow, \nBristol, London, Liverpool and every other British city that grew rich on the \nslave trade without encountering a single memorial.  Denialism vipers through \nour culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We could spend all night listing off Britain\u2019s crimes against \nhumanity.  But that is not the point I want to make. This is not just about a \nlist of crimes. The denialism runs much deeper than that.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, we have this story we tell ourselves, that Britain\u2019s \ncrowning moment of greatness, the Industrial Revolution, emerged sui generis <\/em>from within Britain\u2019s \nborders \u2013 robust institutions, good markets, advanced science and technology.  \nThis is the story that\u2019s written into our children\u2019s textbooks: we must all be \nproud of Mr. James Watt and his inventions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But scholars remind us that there is much more to the story than we \nare normally told.  From historians like Sven Beckert, Kenneth Pomeranz, Ellen \nWood, Parthasarathi and Karl Polanyi, the evidence is clear: the Industrial \nRevolution was built on state violence, slavery and colonization. Britain\u2019s \neconomic rise depended on cotton, sown and harvested by enslaved Africans on \nland expropriated from indigenous Americans; depended on the theft of \nagricultural products from Indian farmers; and depended on the forced \nde-industrialization of Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, I can hear you say, that was all in the past.  It ended more \nthan 70 years ago. Things are different now.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are they?  Only if you\u2019re willing to forget what happened \nafterward.  Only if you\u2019re willing to forget the British-backed coup that \ndeposed Mohammed Mossadegh, the first elected leader of Iran, when he tried to \nregain control of the country\u2019s oil reserves from Britain.  Only if you\u2019re \nwilling to forget the British-backed coup that deposed Kwame Nkrumah, the first \nelected leader of Ghana, when he sought to reduce his country\u2019s dependence on \nBritish imports.  Only if you\u2019re willing to forget the structural adjustment \nprograms that Britain helped impose across its former colonies in the 80s and \n90s, one after the other, reversing the progressive policies of the postcolonial \nera to restore British access to cheap labour, raw materials and markets, \ndevastating the livelihoods of ordinary people in the process, adding hundreds \nof millions to the ranks of the poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we\u2019ve forgotten all that.  And we\u2019ve forgotten much more \nbesides, including things that are happening right now.  We\u2019ve forgotten that \nthe City of London operates at the center of the world\u2019s tax haven network, \nwhich helps facilitate illicit financial flows that cost the South more than $1 \ntrillion per year.  Colonialism may be over, but the system that it created \u2013 a \nsystem designed to siphon wealth from South to North \u2013 remains very much in \nplace.  The word reparations\u201d suggests that the problem is in the past.  It is \nnot.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frantz Fanon had it right when he wrote, in Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, that Colonialism \nand imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn from \nour territories. The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. \nEurope is literally the creation of the Third World.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So go ahead \u2013 I challenge you: chalk up the billions of hours that \nenslaved Africans worked on British plantations, pay it at a living wage.  Tally \nup compensation for the 60 million souls sacrificed to famine for the sake of \nBritish surplus.  Boost it all by 200 years of compound interest, and add that \nto the trillions lost during structural adjustment and the trillions more in \nstolen cash that flows through Guildhall.  Try it.  The numbers begin to swell.  \nThey rise like a chorus of voices from the forgotten corners of our past. They \nmarch like an army of ghosts who demand a reckoning.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then it strikes you\u2026. Then it strikes you that there is not \nenough money in all of Britain to compensate for these injustices.  And you \nrealize, that if Britain paid reparations \u2013 real, honest, courageous reparations \n\u2013 there would be nothing left.  Britain would not exist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is exactly <\/em>what \npeople find so terrifying about the question of reparations.  It\u2019s not that they \nfear the actual prospect of paying.  It is that even just thinking <\/em>about what is owed reveals the \nhard truth: that what is owed, is everything.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But really, this is not about the money.  This is about something \nfar more important\u2026 this is about the story.  The real reparations we need are \nnarrative<\/em> reparations.  So this is \nwhat I ask of this house tonight \u2013 that we demand, at minimum, repair of the \nbroken story we tell ourselves: an end to the denial that has festered among us \nfor too long.  Let us demand the truth be told in our schools and in our town \nhalls. Let us demand that alongside every statue celebrating Victoria and \nChurchill there be memorials to their victims. Let us demand that the real story \nof Britain\u2019s rise be worn like poppies upon our breasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Aime Cesaire put it, A nation which colonizes, a civilization which justifies colonization, is a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased.\u201d \u00a0So what is at stake here, in the end, is not only justice for the dispossessed, but Britain\u2019s own healing.\u00a0 Britain\u2019s own humanity.\u00a0 To repair this broken story will cost you nothing, and yet you have everything to gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.jasonhickel.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/13\/the-case-for-reparations<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JASON HICKEL Yesterday I stood in the hall of the Durham Union to argue for the proposition: This house believes Britain owes reparations to its former colonies\u201d. The following is the text of my ten-minute speech, followed by five brief reflections on the opposition\u2019s arguments. I still remember the first time I taught colonial history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}