Also, it's worth noting that most of the bloodier incidents in the history of the British empire actually took place outside of India (the massacre at Amritsar, while bad, is not of the same order as the suppression of the Mau Mau that Gopal mentions). India entered independence in relatively good shape, and largely adopted the British industrial and legal infrastructure when it established a new state the African states, by contrast, had far less to work with.

I beleive the British Raj in India did have some benefits along with its many negatives, but it's hard to say that the British presence in Africa, from the Slave trade up through formal colonization in the 1870s, had very many positive effects at all. One thought I have in response to this is to point out that Empire operated differently from place to place, and any discussion of its possible benefits ought to take that into account. A thousand peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. Resistance was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between 'tribes' in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England. More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone.

Let's start with Gopal's substantive, factual claims: (Incidentally, there are quite a number of intelligent comments in respone to Gopal's essay at the Guardian site linked to above, as well as a lively discussion at Pickled Politics.) My own goal is to use this discussion as a learning opportunity, rather than a chance to throw around more polemical language there's been quite enough of that as it is.

I think she makes some important points about the current conservative fad for praising British imperialism, but I wanted to supply some quotes from Niall Ferguson's book Empire that might challenge some of Gopal's assertions. A recent editorial she published on neoconservative imperial historians in the Guardian provides lots of food for thought. I know Priyamvada Gopal slightly from Cornell, and I'm always happy to read something she's written.

Late victorian holocausts sparknotes