I’ve been reading Empire, How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson.
I already knew, when I started reading the book, that I’d disagree with some of his historical takes, and I’ve gotten about halfway through the book without being particularly inspired to write about it – but some things I simply cannot remain silent about.
He tells us, at length, about the mutinies in Jamaica by the ex-slave blacks against the ruling Whites. He points out that White people, living among the blacks in Jamaica, were racist against the blacks – to the point of staging a bloody crackdown upon those who participated in the Mutiny, and even some who probably had no part in it. Meanwhile, Ferguson notes that the British ruling elite, who lived FAR AWAY from the black ex-slaves, and ruled from afar, were much more liberal; they were not nearly as racist (to use his terminology).
Earlier in the book, we find a similar dichotomy between Whites who lived among the Aboriginals in Australia, and the more liberal ruling elites in England. Ferguson points out that, if not for the imposed restraint from England, many more Aboriginals would have been killed.
Similarly, in India, we find the same dynamic: Local Whites, who lived among the Indian natives, had a fairly dim view of them, deeming them unfit to judge White people in court. Their sensibilities were overruled when a royally appointed bureaucrat was sent from England and immediately allowed native Indians to judge Whites in courts of law. This caused much consternation among local Whites:
This ‘White Mutiny’ was intimately connected with memories of the original Indian Mutiny, just twenty-five years before. Then every white woman in Cawnpore had been killed – and, as we have seen, a legend soon sprang up of rape as well as murder, as if every Indian man only awaited the opportunity to ravish the nearest memsahib. In a strangely similar vein, a recurrent theme of the anti-Ilbert campaign was the threat posed by Indian magistrates to English women. In the words of an anonymous letter to the Englishman: ‘One’s wife may be walked off for an imaginary offence and … what would more please our fellow subjects – than to bully and disgrace a wretched European woman? … The higher her husband’s station and the greater respectability, the greater the delight of her torturer.’ Writing in the same vein to the Madras Mail, a correspondent demanded to know: ‘Are our wives to be torn from our homes on false pretenses [to] be tried by men who do not respect women, and do not understand us, and in many cases hate us? … Fancy, I ask you Britishers, her being taken before a half-clad native, to be tried and perhaps convicted …’ Such language laid bare one of the odder complexes of the Victorian Empire: its sexual insecurity. It is no coincidence that the plots of the Raj’s best-known novels – Forster’s A Passage to India and Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown – begin with an alleged sexual assault by an Indian man against an English woman, followed by a trial presided over by an Indian judge. Such cases did in fact occur. As the anti-Ilbert campaign reached its climax, an Englishwoman named Hume accused her sweeper of raping her and, though the allegation turned out later to be false (they had in fact been lovers), in the febrile atmosphere of the time it seemed somehow to prove the point.
The question is why the threat of Indian judges trying Englishwomen was so often linked to the danger of sexual contact between Indian men and British women. After all, there was no shortage of such contact in the other direction, between British men and Indian women; until 1888 there had even been legalized brothels for British soldiers. Yet somehow the Ilbert Bill seemed to threaten to break down the walls not just of the cantonment but of the bungalow bedroom too. Ninety thousand white people who claimed to rule 350 million brown ones saw equality before the law as the high road to inter-racial rape.** One possible source of sexual anxiety was the awareness that the supposedly clear line between ‘White and Black’ …
Ferguson, had he been an honest man, should have asked himself two very germane questions:
- Since we repeatedly find local Whites, who live in close proximity with these native nonwhite populations, having a different opinion about the natives than those who live far away, shouldn’t we be asking if the locals know more about it than distant elites? Isn’t it possible that there’s a grain of truth to their “racism?”
- Ferguson was familiar with the Indian customs of female infanticide and the burning of widows; he wrote about them earlier in the book. Did he really believe, especially in light of such practices, that Indians show the same respect toward women as English Victorian gentlemen? How could it not occur to him that there might be disparities in this regard, and that this is why local Whites viewed the possibility of such courtships with disgust? Compare Ferguson’s egalitarian view of Indians with current travel advisories on India for women, the rape epidemic there, the Indian corporate nepotism we read about daily and the fact that female infanticide continues to this day.
Unless his books were written by ghost-writers, we can assume that Ferguson is an intelligent man. My conclusion is that, though intelligent, he either suffers from the mental illness called “Leftism/Wokism” or he’s a grifter, intentionally avoiding the tough questions so that he can sell more books and increase his clout in academia.
Is there a better answer? Perhaps; I still have about half the book to read. Wouldn’t it be interesting if he responded to this post? Stranger things have happened.
