Why was colonialism bad?
One simple question triggers an avalanche of propaganda.
There seems little point to social media these days other than to provoke rage. Even so, a recent clip of TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewing the “Marxist political economist” Ashok Kumar about colonialism is guaranteed to send your blood pressure through the roof.
In a clip that has attracted millions of views, Julia bluntly asks the associate professor at Birkbeck University: “Why is colonialism bad?” It is one of those deceptively simple questions that smokes out unexamined assumptions.
Kumar’s answer was as clear as it was partial. “When Britain, for example, began its colonisation of India in the 1700s,” he began, choosing inevitably to focus on the British empire rather than those of the Mongols, Russians, Qing Dynasty, Spanish or French, or indeed the Abbasids or Umayyad caliphates, “India had 27 per cent of the world’s GDP.
“By the time Britain left 200 years later, after millions had been starved to death in colonial-driven famines like in Bengal and Madras and other places, in 1947, India had three per cent of global GDP. Ninety per cent of people were living below the poverty line, with an illiteracy rate of 70 per cent and a life expectancy of 47.”
Really?
I ran the claims past Lord Biggar, Oxford academic and author of the seminal Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Andrew Fox and I interviewed him on our podcast, The Brink, last week, in an episode entitled Slavery, Empire and the Tyranny of Guilt. (Watch the trailer below and the whole episode here.)
