Читать книгу Empire’s Children: Trace Your Family History Across the World - Anton Gill - Страница 9

Not only did it last far longer than any other in modern times, but at its height the British Empire was also the largest the world had ever seen.

THE EMPIRE REACHED ITS GREATEST EXTENT WHEN BRITAIN COMMANDED AROUND 500 MILLION PEOPLE

The British Empire reached its greatest extent, ironically some time after its decline had set in, in the wake of the First World War, when Britain commanded nearly 40 million square kilometres of the earth’s landmass and around 500 million people – about a quarter of the planet’s terrain and about a quarter of the world’s population at the time. Look at any world map published around the turn of the last century, and you will see a huge part of it marked in red, the colour of the Empire. Red stretches in a more-or-less unbroken swathe from the Yukon in the north-west to New Zealand in the south-east. When it is 6.00 a.m. in the extreme north-west of Canada, it is 2.00 p.m. in London and 3.00 a.m. the following day in Auckland. This great sweep of land, with its massive population, comprising scores of different nationalities and races and hundreds of different languages, was truly ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’.

That Empire is gone, but its legacy is immense, and its effects are still felt in almost every corner of the world. Sir Richard Turnbull, among the last governors of Tanganyika and of Aden, once cynically told my mother that the Empire would leave behind only two traces of its existence, the game of football and the expression ‘fuck off’. That is understating the case. To take one other frivolous example (and many would argue with my choice of that adjective immediately), the game of cricket, whose origins in England go back at least as far as the sixteenth century, is only played as a serious professional game in countries across the world which were once part of the Empire. In the case of the Caribbean island states, it is a game they have made their own and at which they famously trounced the mother country first as early as 1950. In more mundane areas, British approaches to civil and military administration, and law, have taken root and continued to develop in countries that were once ruled by Britain, their efficacy underpinned by the fact that, for all their faults, the British were able to run their Empire with relatively small numbers of soldiers and civil servants. Techniques of commerce and banking (adopted from the Dutch and the Italians) evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have continued to influence international trade. And the greatest legacy of the Empire is the English language.

THIS GREAT SWEEP OF LAND WAS TRULY’ THE EMPIRE ON WHICH THE SUN NEVER SETS’.

But what was all this built on? What was the lynchpin for the English (and later the British) to acquire and maintain their Empire? The answer is sea power. With the development of aeroplanes during and after the First World War and rocketry during the Second, the importance of the Royal Navy and its strategic ports across the world declined. Though ships and submarines as missile carriers would still make their contribution, the new craft could stay at sea for long periods. In the case of the submarines their whereabouts could be kept totally secret. They had no need of the old bases. The Empire was originally founded on maritime dominance. When this became a less important factor in world politics, and when other countries began to overtake us industrially, economically and in the development of new military technology, the Empire became far less easy to maintain.

One of the first monarchs to encourage overseas exploration was the Portuguese King Henry, called ‘the Navigator’, under whose sponsorship Portugal took and colonized the Azores as early as 1439. Having a west-facing coastline it was logical that the first line of travel should be westwards, and Henry’s explorers were soon followed by others. The Portuguese were great seafarers, and their development of shipbuilding technology would be closely followed by the two other European seafaring nations.

Exploration in the name of enrichment and the extension of power was what motivated the early navigators. Spain was not slow to follow Portugal in setting forth across the Atlantic, commissioning the (probably) Genoese sailor Cristóbal Colón (Columbus). He made four voyages westwards between 1492 and 1504, making landfall in the Caribbean and on the coast of Central America.

The idea that the earth was a sphere, and not flat, was widely acknowledged, and had been for centuries. As early as the beginning of the Christian era the earth’s spherical shape was accepted by most educated people in the West. The early astronomer Ptolemy based his maps on the idea of a curved globe and also developed the systems of longitude and latitude. Although arguments in favour of a flat earth still persisted, the modern idea that people in the Middle Ages generally believed in it is actually a nineteenth-century confection. A land route to the east had been well established since antiquity, and the Ancient Egyptians were already importing lapis lazuli – a hugely expensive luxury – from Afghanistan. But the development and refinement of the ocean-going ship opened a world of new possibilities. Rumours of great wealth overseas, and of the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, fired the imaginations of kings and explorers alike. Soon after Colón’s voyages, the Spanish realized that the lands he discovered did not belong to Asia as had been expected (his aim had been to find a westward route to the Spice Islands) but to an entirely new continent; and the reports he brought back of it were promising.

Although the Portuguese Vasco da Gama established a passage around the coast of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope to reach the south-eastern tip of India at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the main thrust of exploration by sea concentrated on the faster westward route, the theory being that one would reach lands of great wealth ‘somewhere off the west coast of Ireland’. The rivalry between Portugal and Spain needed some formal regulation, and Pope Innocent VIII presided over the negotiations which led to the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It declared that all the undiscovered world to the west of a north – south meridian established about 1,550 kilometres west of the Cape Verde Islands should be the domain of Spain, and all of it to the east should be Portugal’s. The line, about 39° 50’ West, was not rigidly respected, and Spain did not oppose Portugal’s westward expansion into Brazil, which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese and the rest of South America speaks Spanish, but a demarcation was established.

It was far from the last time Western European countries would loftily carve up the rest of the world by treaties and edicts with no reference either to the people who lived there, or, often, to each other. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, and native inhabitants, whom they quickly found relatively easy to crush, the more so since they had no gunpowder, were there to be exploited or evicted. The first explorer to show real sympathy for or interest in local peoples was William Dampier in the latter half of the seventeenth century. (He was quite a man: pirate turned explorer-zoologist-hydrographer, he identified, plotted and traced the trade winds and published a book on them which stayed in use until the 1930s. No wonder Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn invited him to dinner.) The first circumnavigation of the globe was accomplished between 1519 and 1522 by the ships of another Portuguese, Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan), though he himself died in the Philippines and so did not complete the voyage. A new route, though a perilous one, cutting through what is now called the Magellan Strait, in Tierra del Fuego just to the north of Cape Horn, was thus established, and a new ocean opened up, which Magalhães named Mare Pacifico – the Pacific Ocean – because of the apparent calmness of its surface. The impact of this discovery on human history (together with the stories Magalhães’s surviving crew brought back when they finally returned home) was probably the greatest since that of fire or the wheel.

THE SPANISH REALIZED THAT THE LANDS COLON DISCOVERED BELONGED TO AN ENTIRELY NEW CONTINENT, AND REPORTS WERE PROMISING.

Meanwhile England, the other emergent maritime power of the time, had not been slow to pick up on the activities of Portugal and Spain. King Henry VII engaged another Genoese (some say he was Venetian), Giovanni (also known as Zuan) Caboto, to undertake a westward-bound voyage of discovery on his behalf, famously giving him:

full and free authoritie, leave, and power, to sayle to all partes, countreys… of the East, of the West, and of the North, under our banners and ensignes, with five ships… and as many mariners or men as they will have in saide ships, upon their own proper costes and charges, to seeke out, discover, and finde, whatsoever iles, countreys, regions or provinces of the heathen and infideles, whatsoever they bee, and in what part of the world soever they be, whiche before this time have beene unknowen to all Christians.

John Cabot, as we call him, set off in 1497, after a false start the year before, and became perhaps the first European to set foot on Newfoundland since the semi-legendary Viking voyagers of about 500 years before (we only know for sure that Erik the Red reached Greenland, but he or his successors may have got further, and there is evidence to suggest it).

Henry had sent Cabot, hot on the heels of the Portuguese and the Spanish, in search of something more than a large northern offshore island – and Cabot himself had meant to make landfall further south. The myth of El Dorado did not become current until thirty years later or so, but people’s imaginations had been fired by the possibilities of great wealth in the brand new continent that they suspected lay beyond the coastline they had hit. Cabot, it later turned out, had discovered wealth of another kind: the most fecund stocks of codfish in the world. In any case, he claimed Newfoundland for England. She had a foothold.

Henry VII was an extremely shrewd, financially alert monarch, and quick to realize that an investment in sea power would be a wise one. He accordingly started to build up his navy, a task which his son, Henry VIII, who succeeded him in 1509, took over with enthusiasm.

During the first half of the sixteenth century the Spanish developed colonies in the Caribbean, conquered Mexico, and began to make inroads into the continent of South America. Spanish galleons soon began to bring back gold and other treasures from the New World, and King Carlos V became a rich man, aiming at world power. At the same time, Henry VIII instituted the English Reformation and withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church. Envious of Spanish success, and also worried by the threat of overweening Spanish power, the English now began to see themselves as the potential champions of a Protestant Europe.

ENGLAND HAD BEEN GROWING EVER MORE CONFIDENT AS A NAVAL POWER AND THERE CAME A FLOWERING OF BRILLIANT ENGLISH SEAFARERS.

This ambition was checked by Henry’s ultra-Catholic daughter, Mary, whose reign saw England in danger of becoming a vassal of Spain, and it was not until Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 that the Church of England finally became properly established.

During this time, however, England had been growing ever more confident as a naval power and in response, perhaps by one of those accidents of history, perhaps because so great an opportunity was there, came a flowering of brilliant English seafarers. Many of them – and the politicians who backed them – were also staunchly anti-Catholic and anti-Spain. Elizabeth had no desire to see Spain remain in the ascendant unchallenged, but she had inherited a weak exchequer. In order to fill her coffers and undermine Spanish power, she condoned, semi-officially, what amounted to a campaign of piracy. If Spain had stolen a march on England and colonized lands which were a source of gold, then England would take her gold from her when and where she could. The propagandist and chronicler for all this activity was Richard Hakluyt, whose Voyages remain essential reading for any serious student of this period. And pirates did not only take gold. Where they could, they relieved the Spanish of their charts, which were worth more, since they traced coastlines and showed harbours, which the English had no knowledge of.

It was not simple piracy, of course – only Spain was officially targeted – and the men who carried out the campaigns ranged from bold adventurers and explorers like Sir Francis Drake, through Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir John Hawkins, to the cultivated and sophisticated Sir Walter Ralegh, whose last disastrous venture to South America in search of Eldorado, for the unpleasant King James I, was to cost him his life, as a sop to the King of Spain. In the course of his adventures, Drake became one of the earliest circumnavigators of the globe (1577–80) and the first to complete the voyage as commander of his own expedition from start to finish. Hawkins contributed many technical improvements to warships, and is now credited with introducing both tobacco and the potato to England. On a less noble note, he was also the first English mariner to become involved in the nascent slave trade. Ralegh founded the first British colony in North America on Roanoke Island, just off the coast of what was then the putative colony of Virginia (named in honour of Elizabeth, who had granted Ralegh a charter to claim land in the New World in her name). It was not a success at first, but it established what would become a permanent British settlement in the Americas. However, for all their efforts, the English never did find gold of their own in the Americas. Even the potato did not become popular for two centuries, though tobacco did. It was the first money-making product to come to the Old World.

Spain found herself plagued by English ships in the Pacific, in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, and decided in the end to punish the unruly northerners once and for all. There were other political and religious matters which forced the issue. Elizabeth was a nimble diplomat, managing to string Spain along for years with the possibility of an alliance by marriage, and keeping Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin and Catholic rival, and a Frenchwoman in all but name, alive as long as she could. But the plots against Elizabeth which centred on Mary could not be ignored or foiled for ever, and Elizabeth finally, reluctantly, had her executed in 1587. A strong response from Spain was inevitable, but the ill-advised and unlucky venture of the Grand Armada against England came to grief spectacularly in 1588. It confirmed the superiority of English seamanship, and from 1588 on England began to establish itself as the leading maritime power of the world, a position Britain was to maintain for three centuries.

The Elizabethans sowed the seeds of colonization, and by the 1620s Virginia was beginning to boom on the back of successful tobacco exports, just as, in a more modest way, a colony established in Newfoundland thrived on the cod fishery business. But in 1620 a new kind of settler arrived in what is now Massachusetts.

Puritans, who sought a plainer form of worship than the Church of England, which still maintained many of the trappings of the Catholic faith, began to feel the weight of religious prejudice on account of their nonconformist attitudes. As a result a group of them sought refuge in Holland, where they enjoyed greater freedom, but not the full autonomy they desired. After a decade or so they returned to England and, having obtained a grant of land from the Virginia Company which ran the colony there, set sail for the New World on the tiny Mayflower, along with a number of other immigrants. The Mayflower was blown off course and made landfall far to the north of Virginia, and the Pilgrim Fathers, as they came to be known, founded a colony where they landed. They were the first Europeans to settle on that coast, and had a hard time of it at first, but they stuck it out and eventually prospered, establishing farms and gradually spreading inland. About fifteen years later, Catholic religious exiles would form a colony which they called Maryland, in honour of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria. The English were now firmly established on the east coast of North America.

JUDGED BY EUROPEAN STANDARDS, THE LOCALS WERE ‘BRUTE BEASTS’, AN INCONVENIENT THORN IN THE COLONIZERS’ SIDE.

Contact with the local inhabitants – the Native Americans – was limited and generally unfriendly. The Spanish had managed to destroy huge numbers of the local populations they encountered with guns and – less deliberately but more effectively – with imported European diseases against which the locals had no natural resistance. Judged by European standards, and it would be a long time before anyone took an anthropological interest in the peoples of the colonized countries, the locals were ‘brute beasts’, who needed to be converted to Christianity and/or destroyed as an inconvenient thorn in the colonizers’ side. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest – itself in part a reflection on colonization – shows a sympathetic (for its time) take on the ‘native’. And when emotional and personal contact was made, it was rare enough to enter into modern myth. The Native American princess Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, born about 1595, married an Englishman, John Rolfe, and returned to England with him and their son, Thomas, where she lived in Brentford. She was presented at Court, but later fell ill, and died at the beginning of her return voyage to Virginia in 1617. A few more exotic outsiders arrived here in the course of the century, prompting such literary responses as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Defoe’s Man Friday – who, however, kept his place.

England, still at loggerheads with Spain, had had an eye on the Caribbean islands since John Hawkins first took captured Africans there from Guinea and sold them to the Spanish as slaves to work the land (the native populations having largely been killed off). In 1627, Charles I granted a charter to settle the uninhabited island of Barbados and establish tobacco plantations there. They did not work, but tobacco was replaced with sugar cane and the sugar industry boomed. Then, in 1655, an army sent by Oliver Cromwell took Jamaica from Spain. Ravaged by dysentery and malaria, the first settlers held out on account of the money to be made, and the sugar plantations established there soon demanded an immense workforce, not least because life for the workers was hard and short. Initially, a system of indentured servants was introduced, generally poor people from the homeland who undertook to work for a fixed term – three to five years – on a very modest wage, in return for their passage out and their keep. These people endured extremely harsh conditions and were treated no better than serfs. Some went voluntarily to escape even grimmer or hopeless conditions at home; others were kidnapped – ‘bar-badosed’. Many Irishmen and women suffered this fate after Cromwell’s crushing campaigns in their country, one of England’s first and most abused colonies. Few lived long.

It was not a system that worked well, and it became harder and harder to fill places left vacant by the high mortality rate. Increasingly, Spanish and English planters in the Caribbean looked for a new source of labour, and in that search a new international trade was truly born.

The slave trade was so successful that it lasted from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, formed the basis for the prosperity of such towns as Liverpool and Bristol, and made the fortunes of large numbers of individuals. Slavers were proud of their trade, saw nothing wrong in it, and one even had the figure of a slave incorporated in his coat of arms.

It was so profitable because the ships which plied it were never out of use. A ship would leave England for the coast of West Africa loaded with finished goods such as firearms, stoves, pans, kettles and nails, along with iron bars and brass ingots. These would be traded for slaves rounded up in the interior by local, often Arab, traders, but also provided by local chiefs from the prisoners taken in local wars. The slaves were densely packed into the holds of the ships in dismal conditions, but enough of them survived the crossing to make a profit for the traders, who, having sold their cargoes in such places as Barbados and Jamaica, but also trading with the Spanish since political enmity and religious difference have never cut much ice with profit, then loaded their ships with refined sugar or tobacco to take back home. This was known as the triangular trade, and may be responsible for the fact that the British sailor employed to sail the ship had an even greater likelihood of death en route (usually from yellow fever, malaria or scurvy) than the slave. By 1700, it was estimated to be worth £2 million in contemporary terms – perhaps a hundred times that or more in modern money. Because the death rate was high, and because even when slaves bred the rate of infant mortality was high, demand for replacements was inexhaustible. Eric Williams, a former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and a historian of the Caribbean, gives an example from Barbados which is worth quoting: ‘In 1764 there were 70,706 slaves in the island. Importations to 1783, with no figures available for the years 1779 and 1780, totalled 41,840. The total population, allowing for neither deaths nor births, should, therefore, have been 112,546 in 1783. Actually it was 62,258.’ The slave population therefore was smaller by 8,448 people than it had been nineteen years earlier.

Chillingly, the slaves were referred to as ‘product’, in rather the same way as the Nazis later referred to the Jews. Rebellious slaves (and there were several rebellions) suffered vicious punishments, and those who stole sugar cane to eat themselves could, if caught, look forward to being flogged, to having their teeth pulled out, and to other cruel humiliations, as one Jamaican estate owner noted in his diary in May 1756, having caught two slaves ‘eating canes’: ‘Had [one] well flogged and pickled, then made [the other] shit in his mouth.’ Slaves who escaped headed for the hills where they formed their own communities, governed by a system of laws developed by themselves. The British, borrowing a word from the Spanish cimarrones (peak-dwellers), called them ‘Maroons’. So successful and independent did these communities become that the British, despairing of destroying them, eventually concluded treaties with them, and, ironically, engaged them to hunt down other escaped slaves.

THE SLAVE TRADE CONSTITUTED ONE OF THE GREATEST MIGRATIONS IN RECORDED HISTORY.

In the course of the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, more than 1,650,000 people were uprooted, shipped and sold. The slave trade constituted one of the greatest migrations in recorded history. In England itself, and especially in London, there was a sizeable black population – Simon Schama tells us that there were between 5,000 and 7,000 in mid-eighteenth-century London alone. All of them were technically free, while resident in Britain, under the law, but many, despite the intervention of early activists such as Granville Sharp on their behalf, were cruelly abused by their employers. Some, like Dr Johnson’s servant, Francis Barber, enjoyed the benefits of education and became minor celebrities. Others, especially young men and boys, were often employed in aristocratic houses as pages – the modern equivalent of fashion accessories, dressed in exotic costumes believed suitable to their backgrounds. Yet others eked out a precarious living as musicians or waiters. There were a few soldiers and sailors. For women, the choice was stark: most only had recourse to either begging or prostitution.

ABUSE OF COLONIZED PEOPLES AND OF FORMER SLAVES CONTINUED EVEN LONGER. IN SOME PLACES, IT CONTINUES TODAY.

By the end of the eighteenth century, an abolition movement gathered momentum in Britain. A medallion was struck by the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood in the 1790s showing a kneeling, chained slave, and bearing the legend ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, which did much to popularize the cause; and its supporters succeeded in bringing about an end to the slave trade and then slavery itself by Acts of Parliament passed in 1807 and 1833. The institution itself did not die out instantly. It lingered long in India, and in the former British colonies in America it would survive for another thirty years at least. And abuse of colonized peoples and of former slaves continued even longer. In some places, it continues today. The descendants of slaves, of course, form the majority of the populations of the Caribbean states today.

England was not only expanding in the western hemisphere. Coffee – its name derives from the Arabic qahwah – spread to Europe from the Muslim world (its origins in antiquity are in Ethiopia), and towards the end of the seventeenth century it became an immensely chic, and expensive, drink in London, where coffee houses blossomed almost as fast as chains like Starbucks do today. Tea – even pricier – followed, imported from China. Chocolate, much drunk in the eighteenth century, quickly followed. These new and popular tastes for the exotic suggested new markets. The Dutch had established trading links with the Spice Islands of south-west Asia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and colonized them under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company. Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to the Royal East India Company in 1600, according it the usual high-handed carte blanche, irrespective of any other nation. Rivalry between the Dutch and the English concerns simmered throughout the 1600s, leading to a string of Anglo-Dutch wars towards the end of the century, but resolved by the accession of William of Orange to the British throne in 1689. The French East India Company established a base at Pondicherry (now Puducherry) in 1673, creating further rivalry as the trading possibilities opened up in India began to promise rich rewards.

The English established trading stations in Surat, in what was to become Madras (now Chennai) and in what was to become Calcutta. In 1661 Charles II of England received Bombay (now Mumbai) as part of the dowry due on his marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza. The Portuguese had colonized the Goan coastal strip over one hundred years earlier. ‘Bombay’ derives from the Portuguese bom baia – ‘good bay’. Much of the rest of India at the time was under the control of the fading Mughal empire (one of the last great emperors, Shah Jahan, created the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife in the middle of the seventeenth century), but the subcontinent was also divided into petty kingdoms whose warlike rivalries worked to the advantage of the European interlopers.

Trade dominated here initially, not colonization, and far from encountering unsophisticated tribes who could easily be dominated, the local peoples here were organized and powerful. Initially, the Europeans stuck to their coastal trading stations and bickered among themselves. The sea voyage east had to be made via the Cape of Good Hope (where Britain also established coastal bases) and was considerably longer (six months) than that to the Americas (about eight weeks), so East India Company officials enjoyed a great degree of latitude and independence, often making private fortunes on their own account.

The process by which India gradually fell under exclusively British control is long and complex, but, briefly, the Dutch were outmanoeuvred because they had a less versatile range of goods to trade with. The French, whose main centre was at Pondicherry, just south of Madras, ultimately foundered when the ambitious governor of the Compagnie des Indes, the Marquis Dupleix, fell foul of one of the first great heroes of the British Empire, Robert Clive. Clive, a severely flawed and pugnacious character who was to commit suicide (succeeding at the third attempt) at the age of forty-nine in 1774, was nevertheless a brilliant soldier and an able and astute administrator and negotiator. When the equally truculent Dupleix, with the aid of Indian allies, took Madras (then called Fort St George) in 1746, Clive recaptured it, and went on to take Pondicherry from the French, effectively neutralizing their influence. Not long after this campaign (1751–3), Clive, after a brief interval in England, returned to India to crush another enemy.

In 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah, became disaffected with the East India Company’s interference in the internal affairs of his country, and sensed (correctly) a threat to his independence. In June 1756, he ordered an immediate stop to improvements in the fortifications of Fort William in Calcutta. The Company ignored him. Thereupon the Nawab laid siege to the fort and took it after a bloody battle. His troops imprisoned about 120 British and Indian survivors – men, women and children – in a barrack which measured only about 4.5 by 5.5 metres, and left them there without food or water overnight. The air to breathe was limited among such a large number, the heat was atrocious, and when the prisoners were released the next morning it was found that only twenty-three were still alive. This was the famous Black Hole of Calcutta.

Apart from the need to nip this rebellion in the bud, for the British were indeed planning to use Bengal as a base for greater expansion in India, the affront demanded vengeance. Clive acted swiftly, moving north from Madras, and took Calcutta with relative ease on 2 January 1757. Siraj continued his fight, but the British forces had superior discipline and weaponry, and he was defeated finally at the Battle of Plassey towards the end of June. Titular control of Bengal passed to Siraj’s former commander-in-chief, who was already in Clive’s pocket. The hegemony of the East India Company was assured, and, incidentally, once Bengal was surely in its grasp, the Company took over the lucrative opium trade, formerly the preserve of the Dutch, and exported the drug to China.

APART FROM THE NEED TO NIP THIS REBELLION IN THE BUD, THE AFFRONT OF THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA DEMANDED VENGEANCE.

Siraj was not the only Indian ruler to try to assert his independence against the British. Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore (1750–99), was the eldest son of Haider Ali. He succeeded his father as ruler of Mysore in 1782. Tipu was a cultivated man, a poet and a linguist, as well as an able soldier. He is one of the heroes of Indian independence. An early opponent of the British, and quick to see the danger of giving them too much rope, he fought alongside his father, then an ally of the French, and defeated the British in the Mysore War of 1780–4. He continued to resist the British for the rest of his reign, and died bravely, defending his capital, Seringapatam, when Mysore’s resistance came to an end.

The most famous relic of his reign is his Tiger-Organ, a life-sized model of a Bengal tiger mauling a prostrate British redcoat. The organ is fitted with a number of pipes, and when operated, the tiger roared and growled and the soldier cried and groaned. After Tipu’s fall, it was seized and sent for display to the East India Company Museum in London, where it created a great stir. Keats even alluded to it (rather foolishly) in his ‘Cap and Bells’. It can now be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, but it is no longer played.

During its ascendancy, from the time of Clive’s victories in the mid-eighteenth century to its demise in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British East India Company, or ‘John Company’ as it was nicknamed, through a policy of shrewd trade-offs with local rulers, and of playing them off against each other; through the placement of British ‘advisers’ in the various courts of the rajahs and maharajahs, and the development of a highly efficient private army, ran the subcontinent for the British with a minimum of fuss and a great deal of profit.

Another aspect is of interest. It was not until the nineteenth century that fraternizing with the local people began to be discouraged as a general rule. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, miscegenation was actively encouraged, and many a prominent ‘British’ officer was born as a result. James Skinner (1778–1841), the founder of ‘Skinner’s Horse’ cavalry regiment, had an English father, but a Rajput mother.

Such events, tragic as they are, and whatever the truth behind them, are the very last twitchings of a dead age. More serious are the possible repercussions. There has been talk in Kenya of following Zimbabwe’s lead in forcible repossession of farms owned by whites. Over all this falls the shadow of Empire.

In Britain, and much more positively, belonging as it were to a different age, perhaps the greatest recent flowering of ‘immigrant’ talent has been in the arts. Not only does Britain have established sculptors and painters of the calibre of Anish Kapoor (born in Bombay in 1954 but now living in England) and Chris Ofili (born in Manchester in 1968) as well as rising stars such as Raqib Shaw (born in 1974 in Calcutta, now living and working in London), but in the last decade or two she has been privileged to see a great wave of new novelists from the non-white ethnic minority community. Apart from established, eminent, even venerable writers such as R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie and the Nobel prizewinners Sir V. S. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka, recent years have seen a flood of novels from the pens of such (predominantly female) writers as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Andrea Levi, Zadie Smith and Arundhati Roy. Not all of these, of course, live in Britain, but their work has exercised profound influence here and enriched her cultural heritage immeasurably, as well as having been influenced to a greater or lesser degree but always irresistibly by the old Empire. And so the complicated, colourful story continues. But to understand the true roots of the Children of Empire, we must first look at the origins of that Empire itself, at the men and women who shaped it, and how it, in the course of three centuries, shaped them.

CHRIS BISSON TRINIDAD

Chris Bisson is a familiar face on British television. He is probably best known for playing shopkeeper Vikram Desai for three years, when Coronation Street introduced its first South Asian family. He has also starred as Saleem Khan, the son of a Pakistani fish-and-chip shop owner in the 1999 film East is East, and as Kash, owner of the local mini-mart in the Channel 4 hit series Shameless.

Despite playing so many Asian roles, a lot of them as a shopkeeper or shopkeeper’s son, Chris doesn’t see himself as Asian. His paternal family’s roots are in India but over the last century the family’s history has been so changed by the British Empire that they have lost all connection with the subcontinent. Chris’s grandfather and father were born in Trinidad and he has grown up feeling British West Indian, not Indian. It’s a family history that made him question what it really means to be British in the twenty-first century.

Chris was born in Manchester in 1975. His mother, Sheila, who is white, grew up in a small family in Wythenshawe, a suburb of Manchester. Her relationship with Chris’s father, Mickey, was the first she had had with someone who was not white. Mickey’s lively household, with his nine brothers and sisters in Moss Side, was a culture shock. Sheila’s parents found their daughter’s relationship difficult initially but things changed when their grandson, Christopher, was born.

Chris wanted to find out how the British Empire has shaped his family’s history. His father, Mickey, arrived in Britain in 1965. Chris went to talk to his father about his memories of that time. Mickey recalls how cold it felt in Britain in August. He also remembers the affluent lifestyle that the family left behind and showed Chris photographs of the large house they had owned in Trinidad. Mickey wondered why his father left that life and the successful businesses he had built up. It was clear that Chris needed to go to Trinidad to find out more. He had never been to the island before.

Although Chris’s father was born in Trinidad he is ethnically Indian, like 40 per cent of the island’s population. Chris knew that the key to unlocking the family story was his great-grandfather, whom he knew simply as ‘Bap’. No one in the family had any idea of Bap’s full name and no pictures existed of him. All they knew was that he came to Trinidad from India. When Chris arrived in Trinidad, his first stop was to visit his second cousin, Rajiv, whom he had never met before. Bap was Rajiv’s grandfather so he is a generation closer than Chris. Rajiv was able to provide Chris with two vital pieces of information. The first was that Bap’s full name was Bishnia Singh and the second was that he came from Jaipur in Rajasthan. This was unusual for a labourer – firstly to come from Jaipur and secondly because he was a warrior cast.

IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 2.5 MILLION INDIAN PEASANTS LEFT THEIR VILLAGES AND WERE SHIPPED AROUND THE EMPIRE TO WORK AS CHEAP LABOUR.

Chris suspected that, like most of Trinidad’s original Indian population, Bishnia came to the island as an indentured labourer. In the early nineteenth century Trinidad’s economy thrived on its sugar, cotton and cocoa plantations, which were worked by African slaves. When slavery was abolished in the 1830s the British, who had ruled the island since 1797, needed a new source of cheap, plentiful labour. They began importing Indian peasants under the indentured labour scheme to replace the freed slaves, but refused people of a higher cast, which is why Bishnia’s situation is unusual.

In order to confirm his suspicion, Chris enlisted the help of Shamshu Deen, an historian and genealogist. To his astonishment, Shamshu traced Bishnia to a book in the Trinidadian National Archives containing a register of Indian immigrants to Trinidad between 1901 and 1906. Among the 10,000 names in the book, Shamshu found Bishnia’s. Bishnia’s ‘number’ was recorded as 121,347, revealing that he was among the last of the indentured labourers to come to the island. In total, 147,592 labourers made the journey between the start of the scheme in Trinidad in 1845 and its abolition in 1917. But Shamshu had uncovered even more information for Chris. Each immigrant was issued with an Emigration Pass, signed by the ‘Protector of Emigrants’ in India. Bishnia’s pass recorded that he was 5’ 4”, had a ‘scar on left shin’ and was only seventeen years old when he emigrated. He arrived in Trinidad in January 1905, after a three-month voyage with 620 others, on a purpose-built ship called the Rhine. Chris was amazed by the level of detail contained in the document, which included the village (Kownarwas) that Bishnia came from. The pass held another surprise and showed just how much his great-grandfather gave up when he went to Trinidad: it records the name of Bishnia’s wife, whom he left behind in India.

Chris’s next stop was Nelson Island, off the coast of Trinidad. Nelson Island was the disembarkation point and quarantine station for the new indentured labourers, who were kept there for ten days. Chris visited the barracks, originally built by slaves in 1802, which were created to house the Indians, like Chris’s grandfather. The barracks were the first solid structure to be erected on Trinidad or Tobago. He found it an eerie and unsettling place, now inhabited by vultures and adorned with graffiti saying ‘Fock da British’. Once they had been certified at the barracks as fit and well, the labourers would be sent from Nelson Island to work on one of Trinidad’s 300 plantations.

In total, it is estimated that 2.5 million Indian peasants left their villages and were shipped around the Empire under the scheme to work as cheap labour in places they had never even heard of, including Mauritius, British Guiana and East Africa as well as Trinidad. Half a million of these so-called ‘coolies’ were brought to work on the sugar, coffee and cocoa plantations of the Caribbean. Although these labourers were not slaves and had signed contracts of employment, many were illiterate and could not read these contracts. It was not uncommon for people to be tricked into becoming labourers. Chris met ninety-six-year-old Nazir Mohammed who was brought to Trinidad as a baby by his mother, an indentured labourer. She was tricked by Indian recruiters who told her they were taking her to find her missing husband but instead took her and her baby to the labour depot. Nazir then grew up on a Trinidad plantation as a child labourer. He described conditions on the estate where he spent twelve years as being akin to slavery. The workers were forced to work and were whipped by the foreman.

Chris then travelled to the Bien Venue Estate where his great-grandfather had laboured in the early twentieth century. Bishnia spent five years there, unable to miss a day’s work and forbidden from leaving the estate. Professor Kusha Haraksingh showed Chris round the plantation. He painted a picture of life on the estate but also explained the wider historical context. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries India had had a booming cotton and textile industry but the British had plans to make Manchester the textiles capital of the Empire. By imposing increasingly heavier tariffs on Indian imported cotton goods they made it impossible by the nineteenth century for India to compete with untaxed British goods. The poverty this gave rise to may well have forced Bishnia into becoming an indentured labourer. As Chris concluded, his fellow Mancunians managed to displace his great-grandfather. History had come full circle.

Having discovered how his great-grandfather came to Trinidad as an impoverished labourer, Chris was curious to know how, in just one generation, his grandfather, Harry, achieved the wealth and success he has heard so much about. He decided to enlist the help of his eldest uncle, Jameel. He arranged to meet him at the family’s old house in Stone Street in Port of Spain. Chris was amazed by how grand the house is and even more surprised to find out there are servants’ quarters at the back.

Harry had always been ambitious. He had joined the British Customs Service but in 1959 decided to leave and see if he could make a living out of his favourite pastime: gambling. Jameel took Chris to one of the racetracks where Harry made his money and raced some of his own horses, some imported from England and Ireland. Jameel recalled that while Harry made sure his horses enjoyed air-conditioning on hot days, the family had no such luxury! Despite the grand house, two betting shops and owning his own race horses Harry had ambitions to move to Britain. Jameel revealed that Harry was motivated by two reasons: his children’s education and a desire to be at the heart of the racing empire in Britain. Chris’s ancestors were all Hindu and Harry’s brother Lal in particular was a devout Hindu. Chris pondered that with the same fervour Lal embraced his religion, Harry had embraced capitalism.

Chris wanted to find out more about Harry. The impression he was getting was of a very determined and strong-willed patriarch who decided his family’s future. He went to see his eldest aunts, Farida and Shaira, and great-aunt Dulcie, who remember Harry well. They agreed that Harry was an intelligent, disciplined and authoritarian figure. Failure to do homework properly earn ‘licks with the belt’. Harry’s iron grip extended beyond his children’s education. His aunt Farida told Chris how she had married a Calypsonian singer called The Mighty Robin. But Chris was shocked when Farida revealed that Harry refused to meet Farida’s fiancé. He didn’t want one of his children marrying someone who was black. His aunts pointed out that there had always been racial tension between the Blacks and the Indians in Trinidad which still exists today. It made Chris wonder if there was more to Harry’s plans to emigrate to Britain as Harry moved the family in 1965, three years after independence when a predominantly black government took over from the British.

In order to place this in context Chris went to see Professor Brinsley Samaroo from the University of the West Indies. Professor Samaroo explained to Chris that the island’s ethnic tensions originated from the time when the British replaced the freed African slaves with Indian indentured labourers. It was another example of the British policy, which they practised throughout the Empire, of Divide et Impera, or Divide and Rule. These ancient antagonisms came to a head at independence and a considerable number of Indo-Trinidadians left at that time.

At the end of his journey Chris can see how his family’s history has been shaped by the British Empire, causing his great-grandfather to leave India and his grandfather to leave Trinidad. But he still has one more question. How did the family end up in Manchester and what sort of welcome did they receive in Britain?

Back in Preston Chris went to see his aunt Patsy. She was the eldest of Harry’s daughters to emigrate and was thirteen when she arrived in Britain. She had been excited about moving but was bitterly disappointed by the reality. Patsy faced enormous prejudice and found herself friendless. Chris’s grandfather also found Britain unforgiving. He had hoped to open a betting shop in London but, before he could achieve his ambition, almost certainly hindered by the obvious racism there, had gambled all his money away. After three years in London the family had to rely on the Catholic Church, who helped immigrants find cheaper housing in other parts of England. The family made its final move, to Moss Side.

With his dreams of opening a betting shop gone, Harry put all his energy into his next great love, cricket. In 1972, with kit paid for from his winnings on the horses, Harry founded the Moss Side cricket team, the first black side in the area. The team was made up of blacks, Indians, and one white man. Chris’s dad, Mickey, who played on the team, gathered together the former members for the first time in twenty years. The players reminisced about their games as well as the racism they encountered from both umpires and other players, and life in 1970s Britain. Leroy Hanley recalled how he and his friends were denied entry to clubs because of their Afros, which were claimed to be a fire hazard.

For Chris the journey into his family’s past was illuminating. He now felt that he knew where he came from, something he never really understood before. As he concluded, ‘whether my dad and my family were welcome here or not, I’m distinctly British and this is my country… If people still have racist attitudes, whether they like it or not, the Empire has affected this country in such a way that I am British and this is my home, and that’s not going to change. It is now the responsibility of my generation to run the Empire!