9/5/2023 0 Comments Empire liquidationBut Churchill’s characteristically provocative interventions – scrupulously recorded at the time – have fuelled accusations that this was little less than British-inspired genocide.įour million people died in the Bengal famine.Īs conditions worsened, he mused that “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks” and that Indians were, in any case, “breeding like rabbits”. The latter, which claimed up to four million lives, is likely to remain one of the most bitterly contested episodes in Churchill’s controversial career.Ĭertainly, its causes were multifaceted, including the loss of rice supplies from Burma following its fall to the Japanese, the cyclone which hit East Bengal in October 1942 and the reactions of local politicians and traders. In Asia in particular, sweeping Japanese victories and the Bengal famine of 1943-4 shattered the illusions of British military and moral superiority. Yet while the resources of Empire were mobilised to an unprecedented extent, war placed an intolerable strain on the rickety structures that had maintained imperial control. He boldly proclaimed in November 1942 that he had “not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”. Ironically, it was the conflict in which Churchill led his nation to victory that saw the fantasy of empire colliding catastrophically with its reality. But it was essentially always an empire of imagination: four parts fantasy to one part reality. “Empire” then, as for many of his class and generation, was for Churchill a mixture of nostalgic and distant memories, crudely racist and orientalist projections of particular traits and values onto colonised people, and a powerful rhetoric inextricably bound up with notions of Britain’s greatness and its supposed “civilising mission”. The contempt he regularly expressed for India’s Hindu population over subsequent decades was little more than an echo of the casual racism of the late-Victorian officers’ mess.Īt the same time, as the research of Warren Docktor has recently revealed, during his military career in north-west India and north Africa, Churchill developed a romantic admiration for Islamic culture. It was administered by its own separate Whitehall department, and Churchill’s actual experience of India was limited to his time there as a young subaltern in the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign. PA archiveįor Churchill, however, the British Empire was above all India – although an India largely of his own imagining. Second Lieutenant Winston Spencer Churchill outside his house in Bangalore in 1897. His opposition to constitutional reform in India in the interwar period, which ultimately failed to prevent the passing of the 1935 Government of India Act, owed much to a self-interested attempt to rally support within the Conservative Party against the leadership of Stanley Baldwin. His dealings with India, where the 50th anniversary of his death is likely to attract more criticism than praise, demonstrated all these features in abundance. Indeed, for all his other faults, Churchill tends to be at his least attractive to a 21st-century audience when involved in issues of race and empire: prejudiced, jingoistic, opportunistic and sometimes callous. Running through it, like some bitter-tasting lettering in a stick of rock was a strain of extreme imperial chauvinism. ![]() ![]() ![]() The phrase “flawed hero” could almost have been invented to characterise his long, wilfully erratic career. For those who enjoy debunking the reputations of national heroes, there can be few softer targets than Winston Churchill.
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