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The CBC of course uses the death of Queen Elizabeth as an opportunity to slam the British and the monarchy. Just as Easter is always an occasion to question the divinity of Christ.
Both speakers simply assert without argument that empire was a matter of “looting and plundering” the colonies. ”Forty-five trillion dollars of wealth stolen just from the Asian subcontinent.” Even defenders of the monarchy and the British are inclined to argue only that the indecencies of the Empire were long ago.
Yet this is a point that needs to be established. Was government by the British more costly to the colonials than local government? There is no reason to assume so. In fact, historians often suggest that the reason the British, and other European, empires broke up after the Second World War was that the European countries could no longer afford them. They were being subsidized, then.
Were local industries suppressed? India commanded a larger portion of world GDP under the Raj than it did for many decades after independence. That does not sound like a suppression of local industry.
Of course, the issue of slavery is raised. Yet, as Don Lemon learned in a recent interview, if slavery is the premise, it is probably the British who deserve reparations. Slavery was universal. Britain was among the first nations to abolish it, they ended it in all their possessions, and they spent a great deal to end the practice everywhere.
The CBC interviewee actually blames Britain for ending the slave trade, on the grounds that they paid for the slaves’ freedom, instead of paying the slaves.
We have probably all had ancestors who were slaves, and ancestors who were slavers. Who pays whom? The one group who seem more deserving than the rest of us are the British, who ended slavery, fought the slave trade worldwide, and were still paying to end slavery as recently as 2015. That means most Britons still living today.
Surely it is they who deserve reparations.
The interviewer suggests the Koh-I-Noor diamond should be returned “either to India or to South Africa.” But a half-dozen countries in total claim the diamond. They all say it was stolen from them by one of the others. So whom to “give it back” to? England obtained it by a peace treaty, in return for other concessions. If it is returned to India, other elements of that treaty must properly also be renegotiated. In effect, then, it must be bought back. And what if some other country wants to offer Britain more for it?
The interviewee even blames the British Empire for the Caribbean’s sovereign debts, and for climate change.
I doubt any of that sovereign debt was racked up by the colonial authorities. I doubt the British Empire had much effect on greenhouse gases today.
It all reminds me of an old Yiddish joke. A couple of Nazis stop a Jew in the street, and challenge him.
“Who is responsible for Germany’s problems?”
The Jew knows they want an excuse for a beating.
“The Jews,” he answers. “And the bicycle riders.”
“Why the bicycle riders?”
“Why the Jews?”
The answer is simple: because, like the British, they are envied.
