On the Legacy of British Imperialism

Throughout its four hundred-year existence, the British Empire conquered a fourth of the world. The goal of this expansion was simple: to extract natural resources from foreign lands and utilize native labor for the economic benefit of the mother country. The expansions were often notoriously brutal and destructive. In India, five million died of starvation because of the British policy of forcing Indians to exclusively grow cash crops. In Kenya, 11,000 were killed by the British during the Mau Mau uprising: a Kenyan-led movement aimed at securing equal political and economic rights. However, it would be ignorant to characterize the British Empire as a mere force of pure evil. Despite the inhumanity and carnage that resulted from the British Empire’s attempts to exploit native resources and labor, the British also unintentionally bequeathed gifts to the conquered peoples.

The benefits that the Indian people unwillingly gifted the British Empire earned India the moniker “The Jewel in the Crown of The British Empire.” Having established an effective sphere of influence over the country, the British East India Company commanded a monopoly over India’s trade, importing valuable tea and cotton to the British mainland. The British then wove Indian cotton into textiles and exported those textiles back to India, mandating that Indians buy only British manufactured textiles. In fact, the British traded so much with India that, in 1880, 20% of British exports went to India, and in 1910, £137 million worth of material were exported to India. To help transport the massive amount of extracted raw resources to Britain, the British Empire built the most expansive railroad system in the world across India in the 19th century, in addition to numerous canals and ports. The British also implemented a system of governance for their colony in the Government of India Act of 1858, establishing the Indian Civil Service, a British bureaucratic system of administration, and western style courts created to enforce order. The British also imposed western education on the Indian people, forcing them to learn English as the lingua franca, bringing the 121 ethnic languages of India into one common medium of communication. This was implemented to better enable the British to rule India as one people and done with the hopes of subsequently employing promising young Indians as middlemen to help administer the British colony for generations.

Like all imperial powers, the British Empire acted purely out of self-interest. Any apparent benevolence departed to their colonial minions was coincidental. What the British perhaps could not have known is that many of the exploitative measures put into place to extract wealth from the colonies eventually proved to be beneficial to the very people the British conquered. In the early 20th century, American sociologist Robert Merton expanded the theory of structural-functionalism first proposed by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the 19th century. Merton pointed out that social processes often have many functions. He explained that manifest functions are the intended results of an action or policy, while latent functions are the unintended consequences of the same action or policy.  The manifest function of the British infrastructure in India was to facilitate the transportation of India’s raw resources to Britain in order to enrich the British Empire. However, there were many unanticipated effects, one being the latent function of the British railways in India was a transportation system that the Indians happily inherited. The railroads continue to provide cheap and convenient transportation for both people and resources, and have united many would-be isolated peoples into one, more or less, national Indian identity. Another latent consequence of British domination is the government bureaucracy that the British imposed on India, which did much to help Indians organize themselves following their liberation. The Indian Civil Service the British government installed to rule Indians emulated European-style complex organizations that adhered to the legal-rational theory of bureaucracy first articulated in the 19th century by German sociologist Max Weber. The functions of government operations were divided into numerous offices with strictly hierarchical systems, all of which had their own formalized rules and procedures. Clearly, the imposition of bureaucracy on the Indian people was driven by the British manifest function of needing to rule with maximum effectiveness and efficiency. When the British granted the subcontinent its independence in August 1947, the highly-bureaucratized Indian Civil Service was quickly transformed into an administrative apparatus for the country’s new democracy. Indian Civil Service officials understood the inner workings of British bureaucracy intimately and used their cultural capital to run the fledgling democracy. To this day, the steadfastness of the British-designed bureaucracy is often the only system which prevents India from becoming a failed state in the face of endemic corruption^[1]. Likewise, the British implemented educational system also employed the Weberian model of complex organizations, producing numerous positive effects that were both immediate and long lasting. Although the purpose of this system was to prepare Indians to help rule the British colony for subsequent generations, western education also inadvertently departed the ideas of the enlightenment to Indian intellectuals. Bright Indians sent to Britain to further their educations, like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, returned to India with their heads full of ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and a desire to reform the caste system. Eventually, these well-educated Indians, well-versed in democratic ideas, would lead India to independence and write a constitution that established India as a sovereign secular socialist liberal democracy^[2].

Additionally, colonial courts created to enforce law and order introduced the first ideas of equality under the law, theoretically replacing a legal system which passed judgements based on caste and other extralegal considerations. To this day, Indian courts continue to practice western style law, enforcing order on her 1.3 billion people, albeit not always adhering to the lofty universal platitudes they purport to uphold.

Hong Kong, although small in size compared to India, was another of Britain’s most valuable colonies, earning itself the nickname the “Pearl of the Orient.” It served as a thriving middleman between Britain and China, allowing for the trade of British opium for Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk. Before colonization, Hong Kong was a small fishing village with fewer than 1,500 people on rocky terrain with no previous history as a port. However humble the village may have seemed was of little concern to the British agenda. They immediately built ports for British companies to trade with the mainland, returning valuable resources to the mother country. Additionally, a British culture of education was implemented in Hong Kong by Christian missionaries who wanted to spread their faith. It was also the case that, in many ways, British rule was liberal, mandating freedom of speech and expression, and even responding to violent anti-imperialism riots in 1967 in a fair and even-handed manner.

Much like they did in India, the British administered Hong Kong with only self interest in mind. In the terms of structural functionalism, the British manifest function of pursuing self-interests in Hong Kong also had unintended latent functions, i.e., the benefits of British rule that Hong Kong enjoyed. British trade activity, with the purpose of providing Chinese goods to the empire, also brought much trading activity to the people of Hong Kong. Local wealth was accumulated, and the colony experienced great economic growth, turning the once tiny fishing village into a thriving metropolis of 6.489 million people with a GDP of US $177.4 billion.^[3] Schools built by British missionaries in Hong Kong with the express purpose of spreading Christianity also had their fair share of latent functions. Hong Kong families began to see the value of British education, and many began to embrace the system by sending both boys and girls to western schools. Furthermore, the British, hoping to spread western values, decided to increase funding for all schools that taught western thought, and even established new engineering, science, and business evening classes at these schools. By spreading ideas of Christianity and western thought, the British established one of the most effective educational systems in Asia and unintentionally created a demand for education which resulted in more children receiving a western education. Finally, the British gift of free speech had many latent functions, benefitting both the colony and many mainland Chinese peoples. Even though British free speech existed on paper for many of its colonies, unlike other British colonies, Hong Kongers were allowed to protest and express themselves even against imperial rule. In the case of the 1967 communist anti-imperialism protests, many Hong Kongers fomented violence, planting bombs and conducting assassinations. However, rather than suppressing the riots heavy handedly, as was done in many of its other colonies in similar situations, the British delegated the authority to suppress the riot to the Hong Kong police and introduced policies that solicited public opinion. The purpose of these maneuvers was not motivated by a British desire to be morally righteous, but to prevent rioters from using imperial brutality as an excuse to justify their violence. In the end, the riot was quelled in the court of public opinion. The latent effect of the manner in which the British responded to the 1967 uprising was the continuation of Hong Kong as an outpost of western culture in the far east. During the cultural revolution, struggling Chinese who looked to this image of Hong Kong as a glimmering beacon of freedom and hope escaped to the colony. It is estimated that two million Chinese illegally immigrated to Hong Kong, potentially saving them from starvation and poverty and giving them a chance at a better and more successful life. The British manifest desire to maintain order in Hong Kong had the latent function of preserving the colony’s image as a beacon of western, liberal democracy, thus opening it to the millions of Chinese refugees fleeing starvation and tyranny.

There is no doubt that the British Empire committed an untold number of crimes against humanity in its colonies. It is not the intention of this essay to either ignore or whitewash those atrocities. However, the purpose herewith is to suggest that if we merely take account of the heinous iniquities that the British Empire meted out, we will miss the many enduring benefits which the British Empire brought to its subjects. In the empire’s pursuit of bringing wealth to Britain, keeping order in the colonies, and spreading European ideas, the people of the colonies experienced a boon of latent effects: inheriting a modern infrastructure, a national identity, a better education system, and more effective and efficient institutions of government. Moreover, the latent effects of the British Empire are still being realized today. In July of 2019, five hundred fifty thousand Hong Kongers, standing up for values initially introduced by the empire, protested infringements of their freedom of speech and expression by the Chinese Communist Party. Former British colonies like India continue to struggle with rampant corruption but, today, young individuals to whom colonialism is a history lesson advocate and fight for a vision, laid out by the British, of a centralized government meant to serve its constituents. While the Union Jack no longer flies over a quarter of the globe, the legacy of the empire, both good and bad, continues to make a mark on an international scale. Perhaps the sun has not set, nor will it ever set on the British Empire.

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