New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MOOERS: Nostalgia for Empire 121
ratchet up land revenue. But squeezing the Indian states for tribute
and the dependent territories for land revenue merely gave a spurt
to internal revolt and impaired the ability of India’s peasant
economy to generate new resources for itself. Between 1820 and
1857 therefore, Company government lurched from expansion to
retrenchment and back and efforts at reform were implemented
painfully slowly. 51
Indeed this same, essentially non-capitalist, pattern of development
would be repeated even after the British government took over the job of
direct rule from the Company. Despite attempts to separate economic
from political and military forms of wealth production and to promote
private property, the threat of rebellion and territorial expansion
constantly undermined efforts to create a capitalist economy in India.
Ironically, the strength of Britain’s own economy tended to exert cost/
price pressures on Indian goods, forcing prices downward and inhibiting
economic growth. This in turn encouraged a retreat to the earlier
imperial practices based on revenues extracted through extra-economic
means:
But capitalist imperialism required property forms different from
those of a revenue-extracting non-capitalist empire and conditions
that would allow market imperatives to regulate the economy.
This, on balance, may have been the direction in which the imperial
state was trying to move, but conditions in India and the logic
of the empire itself – not least, the danger of rebellion, culminating
in the Mutiny of 1857 – constantly reasserted the primacy of the
military state. The evolution of the British Empire would continue
to display these contradictory tendencies, oscillating between
“modernization” and “traditionalization”, as the imperatives of
capitalism were constantly offset by the logic of an imperial military
state, which imposed its own imperatives. 52
But this is not the story Ferguson chooses to tell. Rather, while other
colonies were in decline India “was booming. Immense sums of British
capital were being invested in a range of new industries: cotton and jute
spinning, coal mining and steel production.” 53 This is, at best, only a
partial truth; very few economic historians would agree with this rosy
picture of Indian development. After 1860 British-manufactured textile