New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

122 The New Imperialists
exports picked up sharply. Nearly one-third of demand for cloth in
Bengal and Bihar was met by British imports. 54 The era of free trade was
one in which Britain’s powerful export economy dominated not only the
world economy but those of its colonies as well:
Between 1885 and 1913 India took two-fifths of Britain’s total
exports of cotton goods, based on low customs duties which
worked to Britain’s advantage. India’s share of Britain’s imports fell
to about 10 percent by 1900 and its share of India’s total exports
fell from one-third in 1890 to one-quarter twenty years later, less
than either Europe or Asia. 55
As Davis summarizes: “The looms of India and China were defeated not
so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war,
invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs . . .
the use of force to configure a ‘liberal’ world economy is what Pax
Britannica was really about.” 56
Famine and Free Trade
But it was not for lack of ideological commitment that India failed to
overcome its essentially pre-capitalist dynamic in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Colonial officials both at home and in the colonies
saw their “civilizing mission” as imparting the benefits of economic
“improvement” and Christian piety. The “gentlemanly capitalism” 57 that
dominated in the colonial administration sought to link the socialproperty
relations which lay at the heart of England’s seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century agrarian capitalist revolution with the newer forms
of financial and service capital that came to prominence in the later
nineteenth century. These officials had read their Locke on property,
enclosure, and “improvement.” They were also avid proponents of the
latest principles of political economy espoused by Malthus, Bentham,
and Mill. It was the liberal empire – so vaunted by Ferguson – which
encouraged not just chronic economic underdevelopment, but which
bears responsibility for the deaths of millions due to starvation during
the two great waves of famine which swept India in 1876–79 and
1896–1900.
Between 5.5 and 12 million died in the famine of 1876–79 and
mortality rates were highest in areas best served by railways. As Mike