Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [114]
To be sure, linguistic, cultural, national, and political cleavages always separated the British from the Irish. Yet none of this can explain Britain's loss of Ireland. The English made Britons out of conquered Welshmen. They made London a magnet for long-despised Jews. They embraced and assimilated 50,000 foreign-born, French-speaking Huguenots. They induced formerly scorned and feared Scots to become Britain's most aggressive and effective empire builders. In every one of these cases, the English overcame their prejudices, shrewdly winning the allegiance and profiting from the talents of all these groups.
The contrast with Ireland is stark and tragic. In a sense, Great Britain's loss of Ireland is a story of failed tolerance. Nineteenth-century Britain took real steps toward Catholic equality—although even to this day Catholics are barred from the British throne— but it was too little, too late. Over centuries of warfare and exploitation, British Protestants had reduced Irish Catholics to an impoverished underclass, debasing their culture and religion, expropriating their land, almost extinguishing their language, and, through at best callous indifference, contributing to the death and flight of millions. It is not surprising that the majority of Irish never came to see themselves as British.
Conceivably, things could have been different, although it takes a stretch of the imagination. Had the British treated the Irish with even the same strategic tolerance they had shown the Scots, Ireland today, with its booming economy, might still be part of the United Kingdom. But Britain did not, and probably could not, open itself to Irish Catholics in the same way.
Interestingly, a parallel story unfolded in Britain's nonwhite imperial possessions. As Protestantism became less central to nineteenth-century British identity, and as the empire expanded all over the globe, the British increasingly defined themselves as “white” and “civilized” in contrast to the colonial populations they conquered. This racial and ethnic arrogance created the same limits on British tolerance in its Asian and African dominions that anti-Catholic prejudice had in Ireland. Nowhere was this more apparent than in India, the “jewel of the empire.”
ENLIGHTENMENT AND EMPIRE:
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RAJ
In 1858, when Great Britain was near the zenith of its power, Queen Victoria issued a famous proclamation renouncing Britain's right and desire “to impose [its] convictions on any of [its] subjects” and promising “a perfect equality…between Europeans and Natives.” The queen's rosy assurances were motivated by some not-so-rosy circumstances. Just the year before, mutinous Muslims and Hindus in northwest India slaughtered hundreds of British women and children. In revenge, British soldiers strapped Indians to cannons, blowing them to pieces, and indiscriminately hanged and shot thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of others.
Queen Victoria's proclamation of “perfect equality” proved sadly empty. Britain continued to rule India absolutely, affording the queen's Indian subjects no political representation whatsoever. Not only in India but in all of its nonwhite domains, the British could not live up to the ideals of Enlightenment tolerance it professed. On the other hand, when it came to strategic tolerance— recruiting, rewarding, and utilizing individuals of diverse ethnicities and religions in the furtherance of empire—the British were masters.
As the English East India Company ascended in India, the Mughal Empire began its rapid decline, disintegrating from its own metastasizing intolerance. The directors of the East India Company