How ‘evil’ was the British Empire? Centuries of theft and destruction

A viral clip renews the headlined question for me. Jameela Jamil, a British actress of Pakistani and Indian descent, caused a public row in the UK for her interview last month on Yestergays, a pop culture podcast. She said: “Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy because British people are truly the most evil people in history. Like, they are Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India … We colonised the world.”A similar figure came from Indian economist Utsa Patnaik. Based on her examination of historical tax and trade records, as well as a total export surplus with a 5 per cent compound interest rate from 1765 to 1938, she calculated that Britain drained around US$45 trillion from India in that time.The conservative British press reacted with fury at Jamil. While I don’t think British people are evil, the British Empire definitely was.Consider the British colonisation of India. Pakistan came into existence because of the extremely reckless and bloody British partition of newly independent India. Also consider the exploitation of China under the Qing dynasty. The two events were intimately connected in the late 18th and 19th centuries.Today, talk about man-made famines and many people immediately think of Mao Zedong and the Great Famine. However, British imperialists practically invented such famines, causing the death of millions in India and Ireland.“The British oversaw – and contributed through inaction to – dozens of famines during two centuries of colonial rule, culminating in the 1943 famine (also in Bengal) that cost 2 million Indians their lives,” historian Audrey Truschke wrote in her book India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent.