THE debate over the benefits and the destruction caused by the colonial experience has been going on for a long time. Nationalists in colonized countries generally insist that the impact on their societies has been overwhelmingly negative.

Last year, this debate was conducted in the august surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Sponsored by Intelligence Squared, a private organization dedicated to promoting informed discussion, the speakers included journalists, economists and historians. The proposition was along the lines of “The colonial experience generally benefited the colonized.”

Among those who spoke for the motion was Niall Ferguson, the historian who produced the British TV series “Empire”, and wrote a book under the same title. The somewhat immodest subtitle of the book is: “How Britain made the modern world.” I quoted from this book last week, and will use it as a peg for the following discussion.

For generations now, the lives of the millions of people around the world (a quarter of the globe’s population at the height of the British Empire) have been shaped by the colonial experience. Even today, many of our laws, institutions and customs are the direct outcome of our contact with Britannia. Other countries have their own colonial experience, some good, some bad.

Contrary to the popular myth of some grand master plan to rule the world, the initial impulse to control territories overseas was purely mercantile. The spice trade set the scene for the early exploration and circumnavigation of the globe as first Arab, and later Venetian traders established a monopoly over the supply of rare spices like nutmeg and cinnamon from the Spice Isles in what is today Indonesia.

Forced to buy at extortionate prices, other maritime powers scrambled to find alternate routes to the fabled Indies. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the British East India Company to trade with East Asia. Other European countries did likewise, setting up early versions of multinational corporations.

In a sense, the British almost stumbled into India, seeking to make a profit there to pay for their addiction to tea and spices from China and Indonesia. There, they discovered a power vacuum, and proceeded to fill it with skill, daring and a great degree of opportunism. Counting their presence in the subcontinent from the Battle of Plassey (1757), we continue to argue over the benefits of their long rule.

In the conclusion to his book, Ferguson argues that among the blessings of the British Empire were liberal capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the English language:

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many economies... Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today.

“India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today, 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.”

While freely acknowledging (and dwelling on) the many iniquities and unnecessary hardships imposed on colonized people by British rulers across the world, Ferguson argues: “... Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since...”

It is the author’s thesis that the British Empire was finally dismantled not because of the many nationalist movements that took shape in the colonies, but because of rivalry and wars with other empires. He traces the causes of the First and Second World Wars to the frustrated ambitions of lesser European powers, as well as Japanese aggression. And he makes the point that compared to the track record of the other colonial empires, the British were far better.

Condemning the brutal suppression of civic disorder at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar by General Dyer when nearly 400 unarmed civilians were killed, Ferguson also mentions the ‘Rape of Nanking’. In this single incident, the Japanese slaughtered nearly 300,000 civilians in the Chinese city under ‘kill all captives’ orders. Up to 80,000 women were raped. “[Japanese] Imperial troops competed in prisoner-killing competitions; one officer challenged another to see who would be first to dispatch a hundred Chinese PoWs...”

One fervent admirer of the British Empire was Adolf Hitler. Curiously, a large number of Indians and Pakistanis still look up to the German dictator, despite his clear exposition of his racist views. Ferguson quotes a conversation Hitler had with Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary in 1937 in which the German Chancellor advised the British on how to deal with Indian resistance to their rule: “Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established”.

It was the Germans and the Japanese who finally brought about the collapse of the British Empire, not on the battlefield, but by bankrupting the economy. Once banker to the world, the City of London could no longer sustain the cost of maintaining a military presence around the world. In 1900, for example, it took five dollars to buy a pound; now it takes slightly less than two dollars.

The Americans had loaned billions to Britain to finance its vast military building and procurement programme before and during the wars, and insisted on full repayment later. Certain post-Second World War loans were made conditional on decolonization.

So how did the audience vote on motion for the colonization debate in London? The motion was carried by a handy majority, and I was one of those who voted in favour.