The Moral Responsibility in Foreign Aid
Does the United Kingdom have a moral responsibility to give foreign aid to its former colonial possessions?
The issue (and expense) of foreign aid is often discussed with reference to the United Kingdom’s erstwhile days as an imperial superpower. One argument that is consistently debated is whether or not Britain has a special moral obligation to give foreign aid to its former colonial possessions, as some sort of compensation for the time that they had to endure British rule. The purpose of this essay is therefore to determine the validity of this claim. It seemed appropriate to chose India as a case study: Britain’s empire was far too large to warrant anything other than an analysis of one fragment of it, and its prominence within the Empire and the British national psyche (i.e. India was the “Jewel in the Crown” of Britain’s empire) meant that India was a natural choice. Whilst this does mean that conclusions of this essay cannot necessarily be extrapolated, it certainly appears that there is no moral imperative demanding that Britain give exceptionally generously to states within its old empire. This is not to undermine the case for giving foreign aid, but merely to say that Britain’s former subjects (in this case, India) should not be subject to special treatment.
British rule in India commenced with the passing into law of the 1858 Government of India Act, which liquidated the British East India Company, bestowed all Company property, assets, and responsibilities to the Crown, and ended Company Rule in India. The new British Raj would rule India until 1947. This period of Indian history has caused much debate, with opinion polarised on whether the subcontinent benefitted from or was exploited by the British Empire and each conclusion leads to different thoughts on the moral aspect to Britain’s foreign aid. India was undoubtedly changed forever by the British Raj but, to my mind, I think to assess whether Crown Rule either benefitted or harmed India is ultimately an exercise in futility. The history of Direct Rule in India is complex, and the immense amount of evidence that we have does not lend itself to reductive or crude labelling as it indicates that the British both demonstrably hurt and helped India. Therefore, I think that to definitively prove that British colonial rule in India did more harm than good (or vice versa) is fundamentally impossible, and therefore there is no moral necessity in the United Kingdom’s foreign aid to India.
There is, however, a case to be made that British Imperialism inhibited the growth of the Indian economy and prosperity on the subcontinent. Britain’s attitude towards Indian industrial development was lukewarm, and largely left to locals. Any development was dictated by Britain’s own interests, and as such economic growth under the Raj was essentially stagnant, rarely exceeding 1% a year, and negative growth was not uncommon. Britain wished to protect their own manufacturing interests and encourage their own industrial revolution, and thus India experienced large-scale deindustrialisation under the Raj, with India’s industrial output collapsing from a 25% share of global output in 1700 to less than 3% in 1880. The number of Indians employed in manufacturing also greatly declined under British rule, as the share of Indians working in manufacturing, mining, and construction fell from 28.4% of the workforce in 1881 to just 12.4 in 1911, again implying that the British presided over steep industrialisation in India. And, not only this, but economist Angus Maddison estimated that India’s share of global GDP sharply declined from 24.4% in 1700 to a mere 4.2% in 1950. Jawaharlal Nehru thought that India’s economic decline was solely a result of British colonial policy, citing tariffs, protectionism, and the fact that the British did nothing to help nurture Indian industry. It would seem, then, that the British Raj oversaw a period of great economic decline in India, did nothing to abate it, and may have even worked to cause it. If this were the whole case, it would seem self-evident that Britain owed India money in foreign aid.
However, there is ample evidence to suggest that British colonial rule benefited India economically. Firstly, whilst statistics are useful, they cannot tell us everything, and certainly tell us nothing of the economic life of most Indians. For example, India’s large share of global GDP in 1700 does not necessarily mean that everyone in India was immensely wealthy or had a high standard of living. In fact, the British provided the good governance, law, and order over the whole subcontinent that enabled Indian trade to grow and facilitated modern economic development, as “were [The British] to leave India or Ceylon, they would have no customers at all; for, falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to export their goods to us and to consume our manufactures.” The economic history of the Raj is further complicated by the fact that the village economy (the sector that represented three quarters of the entire population) saw their after-tax income increase from 27% to 54%, and that by 1914 the British had invested £400 million into Indian infrastructure, irrigation, and industry. Further, the British has increased the area of irrigated land eight fold. In fact, by the 1920s, India was ranked sixth in a table of industrial nations, and industrial titans like Jamsetji Tata proved that the British were not opposed to Indian industrial development. Thus, the economic legacy of the Raj is unclear, and divining the ‘truth’ of India’s economy impractical. India’s economy both benefitted from British rule and was harmed by it, and the evidence does not definitively point either way. Therefore, there can be no moral imperative behind any money Britain decides to give to India now.
However, we should not solely examine economics: British colonial rule in India could also be said to have harmed Indian society as a whole. The British presided over some of the worst human tragedies in Indian history, including numerous famines that claimed millions of people’s lives, different episodes of military suppression and massacre, and, perhaps most famously, the partition of India in 1947. The Great Famine of 1876-78, by way of example, claimed the lives of some estimated over four million people across British India. The British, amazingly, exported grain from Bombay during this period, resulting in a ‘grain drain’ in the region, and thus greatly exacerbating the famine. The Amritsar Massacre in 1919 also provides a clear example of British colonial rule harming India, as Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open fire of an enclosed crowd of twenty thousand peaceful demonstrators, killing up to a thousand people, and only ordering them to stop when they ran out of ammunition. Not only this, but the British, seeking a quick exit from India, hastily partitioned their Indian Empire, and in the process caused a refugee crisis unparalleled in history, with communal violence claiming the lives of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people. This communal violence was compounded by the long-standing British policy of ‘divide and rule’, in which Muslims and Hindus were pitted against each other in order to make India easier to control and govern. All of these atrocities occurred under the Raj, and so British colonial rule definitely harmed Indian society.
However, whilst these events were undoubtedly horrible, I think it is too crude to say that they were the direct result of British Imperial policy, and so the question of whether British colonial rule harmed India remains unclear. Partition, for example, was not a simple expression of colonial policy, rather the only way that Louis Mountbatten could ensure Indian independence without sparking an Indian civil war (which would have killed far more people). There were other forces that brought about partition, such as Jinnah’s absolute refusal to consider the possibility of a united India. The Amritsar massacre was similarly complex, and owes more to the thoughtless actions of Reginald Dyer than any coherent or planned colonial policy. Winston Churchill, hardly India’s champion, called the Amritsar massacre “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event that stands in singular and sinister isolation”, and Asquith condemned it as “one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history.” The complexity of these tragedies and the incredible variety of factors that caused them makes it very difficult to apportion blame (to the Raj or otherwise) and again demonstrates that assessing the harm of British colonial rule is incredibly difficult. This seems to undermine the moral case for Britain giving foreign aid to India in the modern era.
To complicate the issue further, there is clear evidence that British rule benefitted Indian society. An 1895 government report on the situation in the North-West frontier of India noted that the local population hailed the British as liberators that brought wealth and justice to a region that had previously been ruled by tyrants. Resolutions of the Indian National Congress show that the British, far from wanting to completely oppress and disenfranchise Indians, were happy to give them political representation. Indeed, Congress had the blessing of the British. The rediscovery and reinvention of Indian history and culture was also the direct result of British scholars, who wanted to unearth India’s rich and hidden past. It was also the British colonial government that broke down the archaic barriers of caste, religion, and race, which undoubtedly benefitted millions of Indians. Paradoxically, Indian nationalism and the unified Indian state could not have existed without the Raj; under British rule Indians ceased to be merely Bengali, Punjabi, or Tamil, and began to identify as Indian. The yearning for freedom and self-determination was based on the acceptance of British liberal values, and thus the modern, unified, and democratic state of India was created under British auspices. So, whilst Indian society undoubtedly suffered at the hands of the British, it benefitted as well, and British colonial rule in India is again reduced to a crass balance sheet, with the evidence not pointing decidedly either way.
We have an incredible wealth of information about the British Raj, and much ink has been spilt on the topic of the British Empire in India. However, the evidence is so variegated that it is impossible to make a meaningful judgement as to whether British colonial rule either harmed or benefited India. Britain didn’t even have jurisdiction over a third of India (which remained in the hands of the Maharajas) and this exemplifies the difficulty in assessing the harm of colonial rule. Identifying all of the effects of British rule and attributing them an appropriate weight in a cost-benefit analysis of the British Raj is just impossible to do.
Thus, anyone stressing the moral necessity of British foreign aid to India is ignoring the complexity of history: there is simply no solid base on which to build a ‘moral’ case for foreign aid to India. To reiterate points made at the beginning, this is not a case against foreign aid as a whole, and this certainly was not an attempt to exempt Britain from giving foreign aid. Rather, it was an attempt to demonstrate that India and other former colonies do not represent special cases on the world stage and that, when considering where the foreign aid budget should go, Britain should not prioritise countries it once ruled, but should continue look to other objectives such as need, efficacy, and consistency with current foreign policy.
Primary sources
An Act for the Better Government of India, 21 & 22 Vict. c. 106, 1858.
H.C. Fanshawe to the Cabinet in 1895, (The National Archives, Catalogue Ref: CAB 37/39/30.)
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