John Ellis
Subject: The British Empire was a Source for Good
Bio: Former Dean of the Graduate School at The University of California at Santa Cruz
Reading: A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is The British Empire was a Source for Good.
Our speaker is John Ellis who is the former Dean of the Graduate School at The University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also the author of a new book entitled A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism. John will explain why this subject is verboten in American university classrooms, graduate work, and history journals. I want to learn how British imperialism made the world a better place.
John can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
John Ellis:
For much of recorded history, neighboring people regarded each other with fear and loathing. Tribal and racial issues were universal. Now, that is different from the orthodoxy of our own time, which all the peoples of the world are one human family.
Today, anyone who speaks disparagingly of another race or country is likely to be called a racist, but he would not have been 500 years ago. Now that means that before this newer attitude arose, a charge of racism would have made no sense.
For example, the 1619 Project authors call Americans of that time racist, that is plain silly. By today's standards, everyone in 1619 was racist. The interesting historical question is how did the world begin to move beyond that universal tribalism? What were the key events and who were the individuals or groups that made it happen?
There is a concerted effort mainly from our universities to persuade us that we should be ashamed of our national past because it is steeped in racism. Present-day America is criticized in much the same way. The ideology of white supremacy is allegedly still everywhere. Other races are still being kept down. Whites’ money and power, they have stolen it from other races. This is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It is even secured a place in the training of many professions.
Critical Race Theory has everything backwards. The race radicals assume that all was sweetness and racial harmony until the racist Europeans turned up. But an accurate history shows the reverse. That all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued the world from tribalism. The Anglosphere principally England and the US are the heroes, not the villains of this story. While the rest, outside the Anglosphere, are not leaders at all.
It is not hard to understand why tribalism and racism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew absolutely nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples, mostly involved warfare, and that made everyone afraid of strangers. In a dangerous world, people clung to their own kind for safety and that was natural.
How did this change? Physical impediments to the world's peoples getting to know and eventually respect each other were largely removed by British and American engineers. They invented the steam engine to develop the first railways and steam ships. They invented airplanes. They were prominent in developing the widespread use of automobiles. And the Anglosphere was involved in the invention of radio, TV, films, newspapers, and the internet. And the result of these actions was that the ignorance of other peoples was turned around.
In the 18th century, the British began to develop our modern outlook on race. Why did this happen in Britain? Because the liberalizing political developments beginning with the Magna Carta and the first representative Parliament encouraged greater liberty for the British subjects. Liberty led to greater prosperity. By 1700 there was widespread literacy that created the first large reading public.
In 18th century Britain, a series of British writers began to expound ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. The widespread literacy allowed a whole culture devoted to social and political ideas to develop. Prominent examples were John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. David Hume, who wrote that all men were nearly equal in their mental powers and faculties cultivated by education.
These social political thinkers were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. That idea gained ground that in Britain and there alone a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose by the end of the 18th century. That campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere. While at the same time, Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.
This idea of a common humanity spread across the globe only as the power and influence of the Anglosphere grew. The new ideology spread throughout the British Empire where different races were learning to live and work together. The Anglosphere cultural influence went worldwide. As Britain's industrial revolution set off a culture of innovation that has resulted in a universal civilization that is modernity, it carried with it that idea of a common humanity.
Left wing scholars look at the British Empire which they know. These scholars did not look at the hundreds of other empires: Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Zulu, the Central American empires, one after another, they rose and fell. They look at the one they know about and the last one that happened, and they pronounce it the origin of all evil. They ignore everything else that went up to there.
The British slowly began to realize that the whole premise of their empire that they controlled other peoples from London, meant that there was a violation of the new ethos that we are all one human family. So, the British ended their empire voluntarily, which no other empire had ever done.
All other empires have fallen apart because they decayed from the inside. The Roman empire is the greatest example of this, but the British Empire did not do that. What it did was it rose to its greatest height and then decided to dissolve itself and create instead a commonwealth of nations, which was remarkable.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to push back on the causality for the end of the British Empire. There is a cost benefit analysis that goes into empire building and maintenance. At the end of the Second World War, it no longer made economic sense to maintain the Empire.
Britain post-war wanted to join Europe as a trading partner. And that meant that its historic trading relationships with the Empire were secondary.
It was costly to protect Singapore, for example, and if it does not make sense, it has got to go.
John Ellis:
There has always been an economic benefit to Empire. You are right, by the end of the British Empire, it was more expensive to keep the empire going than not.
The other aspect of Empire was security. The security that the British enjoyed through their Empire in the early days was to strengthen the country against the Spanish and the French threatening invasion.
By the time you get to the Great World Wars, the security benefit of the Empire was enormous. Britain would have gone under without the Empire. The extent of the help provided by the Indian Army was just much greater than people understand. If you ask the average Brit, what happened in the Second World War, they talk about the English Army and the Americans versus the Germans. What no one seems to remember is that there was a gigantic number of Indians fighting on the British side. You have a tradeoff of economics versus security. The interaction of those two things was still regarded by most Brits as a plus.
It was the issue of we are all one family, all of us in principle equal, which had been stoked by the British. That pressure was what led to the end of the Empire, not the economic issue and certainly not the security issue.
Larry Bernstein:
The British Empire in the modern period was a currency union to use the pound. It is a security arrangement to protect each other. It was a free trade zone. It was a banking community, but it was also a cultural and legal arrangement to use English common law and have contracts that would be enforced across the colonies.
John Ellis:
Education too, religious, sports, the ties between England and India were tremendous.
Larry Bernstein:
The economic and defense arrangements were going to change. When England decides that it is going to have a closer economic relationship with Europe than the Dominions that was surprising. When England says, I cannot defend you, and there is an immediate reaching out to the United States, NATO or ANZUS for New Zealand and Australia, there was a recognition that England no longer had global capabilities.
John Ellis:
No doubt by the end of the Second World War, England, while the winner had been weakened so much economically that it was in bad shape. The postwar Labor government nationalization of industries crippled the English economy. You are right that England was weak. I do not think that was conscious decision to jettison the defense of the Commonwealth. It was just that England was in no shape to do it.
Larry Bernstein:
The most controversial aspect of your book is that the British Empire was a source for good, that looking at it as oppressor vs. oppressed framework is inappropriate. Why was the British Empire a source for good for the world?
John Ellis:
Why isn't this positive contribution that British Empire recognized? America and the British Empire are examples of the wonderful things that happen with a free market system. And the left hates them because of it. And that is why the British Empire is held up as an example of all the evils of the world instead of what it should be a breeding ground for modern attitudes to race.
Larry Bernstein:
An important part of the history of imperialism was a missionary movement, that they thought that savages needed to become a part of Christian culture.
John Ellis:
There is no question that the development of Western civilization to world dominance is an achievement of the Christian Church. You do not have to be a Christian to believe that. The teachings of Christianity are conducive towards people being able to live together in peace. And the notion that if someone hits you turn the other cheek, that is a useful idea.
Larry Bernstein:
There was a certain element of Christianity that was oppositional towards slavery, and they helped end it first locally and then universally. In the United States, religious preachers in the Northeast encouraged the anti-slavery movement. We started talking about the oppressor vs. oppressed framework for analyzing it. Why can't we look at the British Empire as ending an oppressive situation?
John Ellis:
Slavery is an age-old worldwide phenomenon. The history of slavery, what happened in America was unique was ending it. The existence of slavery that had been going for thousands of years, but there was one place where the decisive battle to end it worldwide happened, that was in America.
As far as the British were concerned, the Christian Church in the High Middle Ages around 1200 started to ban slavery. Slavery was thriving in Africa, Asia, and North America. Those initial movements against slavery from the Christian Church were the first of a worldwide movement to ban it.
Larry Bernstein:
The British arrive, they take over the police and have an anti-bribery ethos. There is a court system with the judge that will follow the law that will not be capricious but will be rules and evidence based.
People die all the time because the water is bad. And the English are concerned about public health and believed that they needed to have running clean water. They also believed in public education. If there is a genius that genius should go to Oxford. Tell us about what it means to join an empire with the upside of running water, a justice system, common law, an education system, and public health that allows for growth and success.
John Ellis:
They live much longer healthier lives. The legal situation that you described where people go to courts and there is an adjudication, and people must accept the results. The alternative to the British colonization was tribal war and a lot of people die. There are so many ways that you described in which colonization brings huge benefits to local people.
There were parts of the world that had been colonized and lived under different competing colonial powers, and there is no question which one they preferred. And that meant that in certain circumstances, the local people were incredibly supportive of the British precisely because they feared the alternative.
Larry Bernstein:
I did a book club with Alfred Crosby on his book The Colombian Exchange. The essence of it was that the Americas had been separated from the Europeans and Asians for thousands of years, and ultimately these two societies would interact. And when they did, there would be an exchange of ideas, technology, disease, animals, and plants. And if one society had not been exposed to smallpox, it was going to be a huge problem.
When the horse shows up in the Americas, it would revolutionize agriculture. And when the potato entered Europe, it would change their diet. How should we think about the Colombian exchange as being outside of the oppressor vs. oppressed framework, and that this is the nature of separating two peoples.
John Ellis:
In the book, I distinguish between what I call the known world and the unknown world. The known world is the contiguous countries like France and Germany; they all know about each other. And innovations go across the chain. If one country develops something like gunpowder with China, sooner or later, it goes throughout the chain of the known cultures.
The unknown world knows nothing about this huge contiguous culture of the known world. They are separated. The known world keeps learning. One culture learns from another about social organization, political ideas, agriculture, building, everything. And as you point out diseases too, and they spread all over. So, the known world becomes a whole pool of immunities from various diseases.
The cultures that are unknown, that are separate from not just the known world, but from each other too, they do not have access to all the modern innovations. The known world goes from bronze swords to steel swords, for example. The unknown world is still in the age of stone tools. Some cultures of the unknown world develop agriculture but not many. As European ships get more advanced and can go longer distances, these unknown cultures are going to become part of the known world, and then they will be catching up. And they will catch all the diseases.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go back into the oppressor/oppressed framework for analyzing Native Americans as the example of indigenous people. Europeans show up in 1492.
John Ellis:
They become part of the known world with all of its advantages, all of its accumulated years of innovations. Suddenly the Northern American Indians are brought into that. So, they are not oppressed. Sure, you can point to the forced migration of certain tribes, but you must remember that while there was a big advance in social political thinking in 18th century Anglophone society, it was still by no means what it is today.
The net result for Indians they benefited hugely in terms of their medical care. Life expectancy of North American Indians before the Columbian voyage was probably 30. When the Native Americans met with the European world that doubled their life expectancy, much healthier, better fed and much better opportunities that cannot be viewed as oppression.
Larry Bernstein:
There was excitement about what would happen after the British left their Empire. There was a hope that once the oppressors were gone that the locals, once the shackles were relieved, would enjoy greater freedom, economic growth, and be much better off. What did we see? Let's start with the former British colonies in Africa.
John Ellis:
The situation got worse. To take the example of Zimbabwe, which originally was Rhodesia, the Marxist government took over. It was obsessed with getting ownership of farms into the hands of native peoples, which one can understand the motive, but the result was that those farms suddenly became unproductive. The Brits were preparing their colonized peoples for self-government but not quickly enough. Africa was very damaged by its premature application of self-government.
Larry Bernstein:
If you were 30 years old and you published this book as your dissertation, would a history department accept it?
John Ellis:
No.
Larry Bernstein:
Would you be able to find work at a major university in the West?
John Ellis:
No.
Larry Bernstein:
Would you be able to publish your articles on these topics in a major history journal?
John Ellis:
Nope.
Larry Bernstein:
What is it about what you are saying that is so unattractive that no university journal would accept this work as worthy or factual or novel that is so upsetting that cannot be said?
John Ellis:
Universities in the West have long since been taken over by a fringe group of the left. It is not accurate to call the scholars left of center. The prevailing opinion in Western universities is imperialism is wrong, and the British are the most extreme example of imperialism. If you say anything good about the British Empire, you should be run out of town. Bruce Gilley who published an article saying there were benefits to colonialism got canceled immediately.
The orthodoxy that we live with now, that we are all of one family. The notion that the British produced this orthodoxy that the left now lives by is anathema to the left. They will not accept it. On the contrary, those Brits are the racists, and my book is written to show that the people who originated and promoted and finally persuaded the world of this consensus now that we are all one human family, that origination of the idea being British, that strikes at the heart of everything the university left believes. So white supremacy is the villain. White political and social thought cannot possibly be the basis of what the left now believes.
Larry Bernstein:
If you went to visit a history department at a major university and you went individually and spoke to the members of this department, does everyone say your ideas are beyond the pale?
John Ellis:
What I can tell you is that the remaining right-of-center voices in our universities are being harassed into early retirement. John Eastman is a well-known case. John Eastman was chairman of the law school the most distinguished legal scholar, was harassed so much by his colleagues that he finally said to hell with you I am retiring early. This is a mad house. It's happening all over the country.
Larry Bernstein:
You will not be able to teach in the University of California system, but you could teach at a University in Texas or at the University of Florida.
John Ellis:
You have the University of Austin which is a new institution founded by serious scholars. That is very promising. You will have institutions in Florida that are being cleaned up by the governor. I would say we have gone from two or three campuses that I could recommend 10 years ago to perhaps a dozen universities.
Larry Bernstein:
I end on a note of optimism.
John Ellis:
Everything depends on the public attitude. If the public decides this nonsense cannot continue, then change will be forced on the universities.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to John for joining us.
If you missed our 2 previous podcasts the topic was The LA Fires. Our speakers included Ed Glaeser who is a Professor of Economics at Harvard and the author of book Triumph of the City. Ed discussed the key issues for rebuilding the Pacific Palisades. Ed expects big problems with permitting and zoning.
We also heard from Vicky Collison who gave us a firsthand account of what it was like to fight the fires in the Palisades.
Our final speaker was Gerald Posner who will talk about the public policy failures for fire mitigation in LA. I would like to make a plug for our next podcast with Nicholas Eberstadt who will discuss the collapse in the birthrate across the world and what the implications are for business, housing, and warfare.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Fanning the LA Flames, here.
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