In recent years, the subject of the British Empire has increasingly preoccupied historians, politicians and ordinary Britons alike. Discussions of the injustices the country once inflicted on a quarter of the globe have even reached government circles. Ksenia Dyakova-Tinoco, the head editor of Kommersant UK, spoke to the historian Batyr Aynabekov about what made Britain different from other imperial powers, how the home country accumulated vast reserves of capital, and whether the descendants of colonists have a debt to pay for the misdeeds of their enterprising ancestors.
Please tell us about yourself. I know that you have recently given a lecture entitled Nothing More, Just Business, in which you discussed what made Britain one of the most advanced countries in the world. How did your interest in this topic arise?
That’s just one of a long series of lectures I have given in London. Although I’m a historian by training, as I studied history at Moscow State University, I’ve never taught the subject at a school or university. I have always worked in marketing, advertising and the aviation business, as I do now, but history has been my lifelong passion. At some point, I realised that it was possible to fight with ignorance and I decided to make this my personal mission. I'm deeply convinced that ignorance is the mother of all evils as it causes a great deal of harm in the world. My small contribution to the fight against ignorance is to enlighten the people I manage to reach. I began to hold meetings for friends, acquaintances and everyone who wanted to make sense of political, cultural and historical questions. I managed to explain many events in simple words so that people could understand complex issues.
The motto of my project was: “Learn about what you’ve forgotten since school, what you didn’t get at uni and what, as adults, you’re too afraid to ask”. The topics of our talks are very varied; religious and political history and cultural studies. When I moved to Britain in 2018, I decided to continue my mission, so I started to gather small groups of the friends and acquaintances I had made here. Later, it became a large project, which, along with the day job, keeps me constantly busy. I give lectures to my society once or twice a month and several London societies also invite me to be a guest speaker or lecturer.
On top of that, I give private tuition and personalised tours of London, giving my take on the museums and galleries. This really inspires me. I find it satisfying to help people discover important things for themselves and lose their misconceptions.
Which misconceptions about the British Empire do you hear most often?
First of all, people don’t fully understand the role business played; the commercial element of British history. Compared to their continental counterparts, the English aristocracy very quickly accepted the reality that land rent and service to the king wouldn’t get you very far. So they were the first such group to get into trade and business. English lords were not shy of work or commerce, unlike the Europeans. There wasn’t so much land in England, so they had to find other sources of income. Until the discovery of the New World, Britain, like Spain and Portugal, was a backwater on the periphery of Europe. All the main action was going on in the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of France, the Italian states, the Ottoman Empire and other large polities on the Continent. It became clear to the English nobility that they had to make money in a different way. As soon as the window opened to new opportunities such as the European maritime trade, travel to new lands and the creation of a vast, global market, the British nobility quickly got involved in this story. This was the first turning point. The second has to do with religion. A crucial moment in British history was the break with the Roman Catholic Church. I call this the first ‘Brexit’, which occurred during the reign of Henry VIII. It was a real rupture with the Continent, allowing political independence, freeing up resources and enabling both the Crown and the nobility to acquire initial capital. An immense amount of church property was confiscated. Enclosure began; instead of monasterial holdings, the land was divided into fields for the pasture of sheep so that the farmers could produce wool. The Kingdom of England was able to make decisions independently, as it was cut off from Rome and the influence of the rulers who controlled Rome. Of course, it wasn’t all so simple, there was a backsliding attempt to return to the Catholic fold during the reign of Bloody Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII, but fortunately Elizabeth I, the king’s second daughter, decided to resume the path their father had chosen. Overall, it is the Protestant European countries which have achieved the greatest economic success, surpassing their Catholic peers.
But didn’t France flourish at the same time as the British Empire?
No, not France. It has extensive territories and sufficient productive land, but the events of the 18th Century show that the absolutist model of Catholic France lost out to the measured British approach. In Britain, there was a balance of power between the Crown and Parliament. The freedom of business and enterprise was protected by law. The United Kingdom was open to different economic models, and global trade and business initiatives were financed privately, rather than driven by royal decree. France’s dirigiste foundations didn’t bring prosperity. The country went bankrupt during the French Revolution. Economically, militarily and colonially, France lost her race with Britain. The French model proved unviable and doomed to fail, as eventually happened. It was only in the 19th century, after the French Revolution, when an entirely new capitalist model arose in France, that the country began to catch up, but by this time, the British had already created an enormous empire.
When was the British Empire born? Can you describe its lifecycle, from inception to its zenith and subsequent decline? No empire lasts forever, after all…
Yes, all empires eventually fall apart, just like human bodies. The very life of an empire presupposes its ultimate death. The main distinguishing feature of the British Empire from others, such as those of Russia or the Mongols, was the balance of political forces. The British Empire was built on private enterprise and not on the will of a sovereign. Its chief component is the private companies whose shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange in the City. This allowed business processes to be optimised, maximising profits and efficiently exploiting the resources of colonised peoples. Technological progress accelerated to maximise these profits. For instance, in India an extensive railway network was constructed, surpassing that of many European countries of the time. This allowed goods and troops to be transported more rapidly and ensured exporters could meet their contractual requirements to ship cargo on time. So in Britain, it was commerce that built the empire, not the will of an emperor, Caesar or Spanish king.
The first global empire was the Spanish territories of the Habsburgs, as they saw these lands as more than just a source of revenue, recognising an opportunity to spread the Catholic faith. The British never saw this religious element as part of their motivation. Admittedly, English Puritans and Protestants played a leading role in the settlement of the North American countries, but the main basis of all expansion was commercial rationality. While the Spanish Crown was conquering vast territories to spread royal power and the Christian faith, the English aristocracy was counting money. This is the main difference in how the British Empire developed.
All the same, what can we really call an empire?
Theoretically, an empire is any state which controls conquered territory beyond that inhabited by its indigenous population. Of course, a second sign of empire is having access to the ocean and possession of a navy. Peter the Great proclaimed Russia an empire after building his ships and gaining unfettered access to the sea.
Did the Russian Empire have colonies?
At the time, Russia was fighting the Persian War which resulted in the acquisition of several colonies in the North Caucasus.
But for some reason, no one calls these regions former colonies.
It’s all the fault of Marxism, which contended the colonial system was a form of capitalist exploitation. It was precisely in this way that ‘Our’ Soviet historians labelled the imperialist activities of all non-communist countries colonial exploitation, while the Russian Empire was seen as a sort of forerunner of the Empire of the Soviets. They believed Russia was bringing enlightenment and civilisation to new lands. This same concept existed in the British Empire and Imperial Rome. Besides loot, imperial centres also often pursued the ‘civilised’ development of conquered territories. While the Mongol Empire, for instance, sought only expropriation, extortion and domination, without bringing any technological advances to the subjected peoples, the Romans were not only conquered and plundered but also brought civilisation. The Romans essentially built the entire European system of roads and logistical hubs. For example, the city of Londinium was a former Roman fort and depot, from where goods, slaves, legions, legates and emissaries flowed between the province and the metropole. The British Empire also both exploited and developed.
So was the British Empire in some way an heir to Rome?
I wouldn’t say that the British copied Rome. The empire grew to perform commercial logistical tasks. Rome acted a little differently. Of course, they were concerned with resources and territory. Rome soon ran out of new lands for settlement on the Italian Peninsula, and new territories were needed to grant estates to former legionaries. So it was necessary to acquire new land to create new opportunities and markets. This initiative came from the state, from the Caesars. From each Caesar, as this was not a name but a title. Gaius Julius Caesar’s cognomen became a title for all future emperors, each of whom required their own victorious war to demonstrate their contribution to the glorious expansion of the empire. So each new emperor tried to conquer something and defeat someone, often with no thought for economic viability. British kings had no such aims and furthermore, they would not have been allowed to pursue them, as the British Crown was checked by government and parliament. To wage war, you need money and to have this, you need to levy taxes. Parliament often fought with the arbitrariness of English kings and their desire to wage wars. A balance was eventually achieved in the 17th century. Any war an English king fought needed to have some kind of financial justification. By contrast, the Roman Empire seized large areas of land that brought no revenue and consumed significant resources. For example, Britannia was a loss-making province, so when the Roman Empire went into crisis, they drew lots and it was the first to be abandoned. It was found to be very expensive to hold two or three legions on the island and they were needed on the continent, where the barbarians had already broken through the frontier. So at the start of the 5th century, the Roman emperor Honorius simply wished the British settlers all the best, ceased to offer military support and closed down the Roman protectorate. The British Empire would never have become involved in a huge territory that brought no income and required state funding, rather than private capital, to control.
How was profitability assessed? Now we have immense volumes of economic data about new markets at our disposal, but then there was no information at all about Terra Incognita. The British must have an exceptionally high tolerance of risk.
The formation of the British Empire began in the 17th century. It reached its apogee at the turn of the 20th century and this stage persisted until the First World War. The results of the war led to the acquisition of substantial mandated territories, but this wasn’t really an achievement of the British Empire itself.
The 17th century, like the 16th, truly was a time for risk-takers, adventurers and explorers. By trial and error, they searched out the most profitable routes for delivering goods and reaching the coasts where the spices grew. They combed the world for places suitable for silver mining, sugarcane cultivation and the procurement of slaves. This vigorous reconnaissance was driven by private money. Who were Francis Drake and John Hawkins? Adventures and pirates. They essentially only gained knighthoods, and recognition of their achievements after they had succeeded in opening up new routes for trade and colonisation, identified their adversaries’ shipping lanes, which could be plundered, and discovered areas still available for colonisation. Only after this did entrepreneurs, at their own risk, invest money and create a joint stock company.
There were many risks. Some people got burnt, but those who bought shares in the East India Company made fabulous profits. Incidentally, the 17th century was also very difficult for the East India Company. The turning point only came in the 18th century when the company drove the French out of India as a result of the Seven Years’ War, giving the British virtually a free hand. It was then that the power of the Great Mughals began to wane, whose dynasty had come from Central Asia and united a significant portion of the country. When the Mughals began to weaken and India fragmented into Muslim and Hindu princely states, they were easy prey for the East India Company. By the 19th century, the Company had swallowed up all of India. This predatory exploitation of the Subcontinent led to countless excesses such as the protracted famine in Bengal in which tens of millions perished. These events led the British government, headed by Queen Victoria, to nationalise and dissolve the East India Company in 1874.
But it was a private company. What happened to the protection of private property?
There was a hearing on this matter in the British parliament with the following conclusion: the East India Company was running its colonies inefficiently and detrimentally, causing death, crises and famines. But this was no communist seizure; the shareholders were paid substantial compensation to the order of £3,000,000, an enormous sum in today’s money.
And who were the shareholders?
The English establishment; the royal family and members of the House of Lords and Commons. So the Company always had a very strong lobby which helped it to receive preferential treatment, troops and state support. Essentially, it was this lobbying that lost Britain the American colonies. At one point the Company had problems with the export, sale and production of tea. Because of their lobbying, American colonists were obliged to buy tea only from the Company, but they were buying contraband Dutch tea instead. Already tried by an unreasonable taxation system that didn’t take local interests into account, the patience of British settlers in North America was stretched to breaking point by the East India Company’s attempts to force their tea on them. This sparked a rebellion, starting with the Boston Tea Party when the Americans threw tea into the harbour from the holds of Company ships. Soon the Thirteen Colonies were transformed into the independent United States.
How did American independence affect the prosperity of the British Empire? Was it the beginning of the end?
The effect wasn’t too great. The North American states which had been the Thirteen Colonies were not a crucial source of revenue for the Crown. By revenue, I mean private profit, from which taxes were subsequently paid, filling the British treasury. The most profitable colony was India as it was a huge market for British goods, although it was completely ridiculous to force India to buy English textiles! The East India Company destroyed local textile production in order to market imported cloth in India. The profit was used to ship opium from India to China, where this drug was sold or bartered for tea, which was brought to Britain. This is how the tradition of afternoon tea came about; the British sedately sipped tea from Chinese porcelain sweetened with cane sugar produced in the Caribbean with the labour of slaves the British themselves had brought from West Africa. This elegant English tradition necessitated the large-scale violence and predatory business practices Britain pursued in the ‘West Indies’, as the Americas were then called, and in British East India, in what is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma. So the East and West Indies were in fact the British Empire’s main markets. But Britain achieved the greatest success in East India as that’s where there were more markets, goods and resources. Fortunes were made on the backs of the colonised peoples. For instance, Indians could only buy salt from representatives of the East India Company, who procured salt cheaply from local producers and sold it for ten times the price. Millions of Indians simply had no choice.
Is it possible to compare the lives of the poor in Britain and India at that time? Did only a small group at the top of the social hierarchy benefit from this profit? Or did ordinary Britons live better than conquered peoples?
Britain gained excessive profits from her colonies, but this income was by no means equally distributed in society. The British poor, workers, servants and even qualified professionals lived modestly. But they still had better conditions than the Indians, as many areas of business were open to them due to the revolutionary technological progress that was driving businesses to optimise their income and costs.
Did technology stimulate business, or was it the other way around?
They grew in parallel, each somehow stimulating the other. For example, telegraphy gained an enormous boost as the empire needed efficient communications with the colonies. It was Britain that pioneered the laying of underwater cables. British maps of the 19th century showed the continents linked by an underwater network. There were ships with gigantic reels from which fat telegraph cables were thrown down onto the ocean floor so that Britain and its stock exchange could receive the latest news and updates on the shipment of goods from all continents where British interests were present. This was both an aspect of business and imperial policy. The first steam engines improved communication between colonies, allowing wool and textiles to be produced and transported more effectively. It also became easier to transport troops. While in Russia the Tsarskoye Selo Railway [the first in the country, connecting the capital to a royal country residence], was a mere entertainment, the British saw how rail transport could turn a profit. In Britain generally, each successive new technology was launched and scaled up very quickly.
The other side of the coin was the harm this technology caused. The chemical industry that was leaps and bounds ahead of anything on the Continent caused debilitating illness and killed thousands of Britons. No one suspected that the arsenic used to manufacture the wallpaper decorating the walls of Victorian homes was a silent killer. Similar unforeseen consequences also occurred in pharmacology and other areas of business. Sometime later, British society researched these issues and concluded that technological breakthroughs had their price. But the locamotive of progress went on and money and business carried Britain far ahead of her competitors.
When did this locomotive start to falter? And why did this moment come?
This happened in the 20th century, when rapacious exploitation ceased to be profitable. There were changes in economic models, laws and markets, some of which were found to be saturated. The appearance of a vigorous competitor in the form of the United States was another factor. The US essentially took advantage of the world wars to knock Britain off her perch as world hegemon, seizing her markets and even replacing the pound with the dollar as the world currency. The world wars deprived Britain of the resources she needed to retain her colonies. The process of decolonisation began. Britain did not seek to hold on to her colonies, unlike France, Portugal and other countries which fought wars with local freedom fighters. In 1997, Hong Kong, the last colony, was handed over to the People’s Republic of China. But Britain has kept a respectable territory for herself; the Falklands, a large number of islands and areas controlling straits, such as Gibraltar. Britannia still clings on to a substantial slice of the world’s oceans; she does indeed rule the waves. Of course, the larger colonies, such as India and the African countries have had to be let go, but strategically important points remain. Military bases on these islands help Britain to continue to play an important role in global maritime communications.
Isn’t the spread of English also a form of imperial expansion?
Of course, all empires make their language that of the bureaucracy, government, administration and so on. The Roman Empire spread Latin across all of Europe except for the Germanic and Slavic lands, which Rome did not conquer. The language became vulgar Latin, from which the Romance languages developed (French, Spanish and Italian, amongst others). Britain did the same; the teaching of English was compulsory in colonial schools. For example, the sepoys, or professional Indian soldiers serving in the British army, also studied English as it was needed for their work, as it was for many Indian officials. So Britain's language became a tool of soft power after the fall of the empire, allowing the country to retain a degree of influence to this day. The USA, replacing Britain's economic might, found this dominance of the English language had prepared the ground well for them. Britain had also built the legal and financial system that formed the framework for US dominance. One player replaced the other. The US didn’t need to teach half the world a new language.
Despite the risk-taking, and entrepreneurial enthusiasm typical of the English, in the US, a less Anglo-Saxon country, the investment climate is far more favourable than in the former home country. Where have the investors gone? Why is the financial market in Britain not growing at such a frenetic pace as in the US?
Britain is no longer such an attractive market for investors. But it essentially never was, even during the imperial period. The British domestic market is very small, and British money chiefly made profits on investments outside the country. Only the financial control centre was here. England remains a centre of international investment as there is a well-worked-out system here, with regulations and well-established rules of the game. In The US the market is bigger and there is more of a culture of consumption than here, as from their inception, the United States were formed by people of a new mould. The English and other Europeans who emigrated to the New World, to North America, were people of an entrepreneurial bent. Why is the cult of money and success so powerful in America? The nation itself was built by people who had taken risks to earn themselves a second chance. They were already equipped with an understanding of how money was made in the old world. The development of the US was founded on European capitalism, without the baggage of feudalism. After America had accomplished the genocide of the indigenous population, they had an easy start as they benefited from the knowledge, experience and principles that had been tried and tested in Europe.
What is to come for modern Britain?
If Britain takes advantage of the new opportunities opened up by Brexit and becomes a new, independent state, geared toward new technology, new possibilities and the investment climate, we will have a chance. Otherwise, she will become yet another old European tourist destination, subsisting on its traditions, monuments and monarchs. Like many others, she will trade on her past and the whole country will become a museum. But I believe in Britain, she is still capable of becoming a special place in the global market. One opportunity that may arise is the possible, though not inevitable, major domestic socio-political crisis that is brewing in the US; it may shift the attention of world markets back to Britain again. But the UK will have to make a lot of changes to become an attractive country for investment once more, specifically, the tax system which must give significant incentives for innovative tech. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any perceptible steps in this direction so far.
Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch recently cited research to claim imperial colonialism had been a loss-making enterprise for which there can be no question of the UK paying reparations. Apparently, the Empire didn’t enrich itself back then, it only brought enlightenment, went bust and then faded away.
Of course there can be no question of reparations. Britain simply doesn’t have the cash. It’s a precedent no one’s prepared to set. As for the poor unfortunate impoverished victims of British colonial policy, their claims are duplicitous. They are switching concepts. What is a state? You see, the British State was made up of private interests, as the political system presupposed the power of a few hundred of the richest and most influential families who ran the state through Parliament. Britain in the imperial period was essentially a state with private interests. These private interests enriched themselves through their direction of the state. All that money went into private pockets. A quick look at London or other cities which grew on colonial business leaves little doubt of the amount of money brought to the country from different colonies, or what funds were used to build all this. London is a monument to colossal colonial profits. Most buildings in Central London, even private houses, weren’t built by those who had sold grain in Yorkshire and the like, these were people who had made massive profits on global markets. The city of Bath was built in the 18th Century in the Georgian style using money from the transatlantic trade in tobacco, sugar cane and African slaves, amongst other goods. The cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol were all built on this trade. All the imposing architecture of these cities is born of colonial exploitation. I repeat; the British state was a state of private capital where the King was just another shareholder. Elizabeth I was the first to receive shares in the British East India Company. All the most profitable companies that built the Empire gave shares to English kings and queens, symbolically or otherwise. Charles II had a good share package in the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves. He earned well from it.
Can we call the current king, Charles III, a businessman?
Of course he’s a businessman, he’s one of the largest landlords in Britain. The royal family receives a substantial income from their landholdings and from tourism. So we might say they are one of the greatest beneficiaries of Britannia plc as a historical brand. The royal family makes money from this. I don’t know what shares he currently holds, but the amount of land belonging to the royal family allows us to say they also are making an income from land and capital which their ancestors once expropriated from the monasteries after the ‘Brexit’ of the 16th century.
Why did the British trade slaves, but not bring them to work their own fields?
Prosaically, they simply didn’t need them, those that were brought here became exotic domestic servants. To begin with, the local population also needed to be provided with work. Secondly, local manufacturing already had a sufficient labour force at the time. African slaves were needed for work in the colonies as they were the only ones suitable for hard work in the tropics. When the Europeans saw that the local Indians were unsuited to this work, they started to import African slaves. The Portuguese and Dutch did this, the English weren’t the first to get into the business, but from the 18th century, it was they who virtually monopolised the slave trade, shipping slaves from the west coast of Africa. When Britain abolished slavery, this business ceased to exist, which was a stimulus for the subsequent colonisation of the African interior in the search for new resources.
Why are respected institutions now attempting to revise history to prove colonialism was unprofitable?
Because we live in an age of resentment and score setting. The same goes for the Black Lives Matter movement. The colonial past is being revisited and there is a growing belief that former colonial powers owe a debt to the people they once oppressed and exploited. The descendants of former slaves are asking political questions such as: “Guys, what were you doing all the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries? How did you get so rich? What was the source of your capital and who is responsible for the crimes committed to acquire it?”
This sounds like a promising trend.
Morally it is, but economically speaking I’m unconvinced it will lead to anything. Still, any reflection on personal narratives in history allows the past to be reassessed. Many countries, especially former dictatorships, have not reflected on certain historical processes, so they keep going around in circles, stepping into the same pitfalls again and again. In this respect, of course, Britain is trying to cleanse herself of old sins. From a moral perspective, this is great, but there is no point in expecting reparations.
