“The natives called the British System ‘Sakar ki Churi,’ the knife of sugar,” the Indian MP Dadabhai Naoroji told his London audience in 1871. “That is to say, there is no oppression, it is all smooth and sweet, but it is the knife, notwithstanding”[1]

            Stressing Indian signs of progress in “humanity” and “civilization” under the Raj, Naoroji contributed to a lasting narrative regarding the British empire’s “credits” while acknowledging its “debits.” But appealing to his British listeners to “do justice” to the Indian plight, Naoroji catered to their British “spirit and genius.”[2]  His assessment of the British empire as a “knife of sugar,” far from resolving the imperial debate, questioned the feasibility of such an outcome: Is it possible to identify objective merits of the British empire when collective perspectives were British as the empire’s legacy? Would Mahatma Gandhi thank the British for their “loans for railways and irrigation” after he denounced capitalism as “enslave[ment] by the temptation of money?”[3] Would the Ottoman ulamā appreciate “western enlightenment” after they exiled a Tanzimatist from Istanbul for comparing prophets to philosophers?[4] Even if Britain had “made the modern world,” was it really “a Good Thing” when the world cannot agree on what is modern or good?[5]

While acknowledging that the merits of imperialism did not cancel out its cruelties, this essay argues that there was something universally good about the British empire, not because imperial rule reinforced particular signs of progress, but because imperial ruin tailored the western idea of progress to suit indigenous interests. Linear progress was born as a European concept: Adam Smith introduced economic progress in his “four-stage theory;” Voltaire, social progress in his Essays on the Manners of Nations; and Immanuel Kant, universal progress in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”[6] History-writing civilizations outside Europe, such as the Islamic and Chinese empires, did not treat their past as a progression from a primitive “state of nature” to modernity, but as eschatological evidence or nostalgic tutelage on restoring the Mandate of Heaven.[7] Despite its singular origin, the objectives of progress are malleable, with thinkers like Karl Marx constantly “criticizing one substantive form of modernity in the name of a different one.”[8] The plural “Western modernities” suggests how the uniform motive to perfect modernity can precipitate variegated efforts by individuals and communities to “rise up to meet [modernity], negotiate it, and appropriate it in their own fashion.”[9] The eager “ris[ing] up” at the prospect of improvement worldwide, I will argue, was a positive, albeit unintentional legacy of the empire. The British threat to self-determination and rhetoric of western superiority compelled peoples outside Europe to change their communities in ways that mimicked but never replicated the European nation-state. In other words, British imperialism became a catalyst for colonial and post-colonial activism that changed the status quo for what the colonized defined as better at the time, even when it contradicted British liberalism today.

When the British empire overthrew traditional society in its new colonies, its new subjects sensed that they must outcompete Britain in British parameters of progress to salvage their property and honour. After the British suppressed the Sepoy Rebellion and terminated Mughal rule in 1857, the Muslim novelist Nazir Ahmed wrote that Indian wealth “rain[ed] down on” the British because they “leap[ed] into the void of God’s creation,” while Indians engaged in “useless disputation;” India must, to quote Sayyid Ahmed Khan, “Educate, Educate, Educate” itself in “the style and art of Englishmen.”[10] The finish line of this progressive race, however, soon changed from what Mahatma Gandhi called “English rule without the Englishman” to include Indian people and philosophy.[11] In 1905, Bengali youths protested Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal by peacefully prostrating before British shops, entreating shoppers not to buy British goods, and preaching swadeshi, self-sufficiency. The subsequent retraction of the Partition persuaded the Indian National Congress to promote satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, and ally themselves with lower-class Indians, who by peace and rioting, won independence in 1947.[12] But to retain their independence, Jawaharlal Nehru knew that progress must continue: “[w]hat Europe did in a hundred…years, we must do in ten,” even when it contradicted Gandhi’s spiritual teachings.[13] In his Second Five Year Plan, Nehru transferred 16% of government subsidies from agriculture to heavy industry, which he once called the “iron bands confining and imprisoning India;” to survive the Cold War, Indira Gandhi abandoned the pacifism of her father’s “saint”-like generation, realpolitiking the Soviets for military aid and Non-Aligned countries for Indian dominance.[14] Albeit articulated by individual politicians, any plan for India was subject to the collective will, which voted out Indira Gandhi when she tried instituting one-party rule, and solutions to collective problems, whether emerging since independence or dating to the Raj.[15] Rallying today around the slogan Udaipur Nav Sankalp, “towards a better tomorrow,” the Indian National Congress has revoked British injustices such as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which banned homosexuality in a civilization historically tolerant of what the Victorians called “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.”[16] Recovering from the British intrusion, Indians have found national pride as “the land of the better story” of tolerance and endurance, despite never surpassing their colonial overlords as “the side with the bigger army.”[17] The urgency for self-betterment, whether to expel the British or save Indian heritage, did not excuse how the British Empire crippled India, but prompted Indians to rebuild India in Indian vision.

From Mahatma to Indira Gandhi, the kaleidoscopic blueprints for India showed that although the colonies initially desired progress when confronting apparent British superiority, their pursuits were not always progressive by British definition. China, Britain’s “Informal Empire,” once believed itself to “[possess] all things in prolific abundance and [lack] no product within its own borders,” but the Opium War and the burning of the Summer Palace led the Chinese to ask: “why are others stronger than we are, and why are we weaker?”[18] The answer, wrote Yan Fu, was because “the nature of social evolution [was] progressive,” and China had fallen behind the west.[19] Returning from his study at Royal Naval College, Greenwich, to find that his two friends committed suicide in the lost War of Jiawu, Yan translated Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinist rhetoric: “creatures compete[d] for Heaven’s selection,” and China should fit in, or tihe, with its superior surroundings because only “the fittest survive[d].”[20] Among Yan’s readers were Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yat-sen, who felt an existential crisis for their culture. “Reform and be strengthened,” Kang wrote as he called for a constitutional monarchy, “Guard the old and die.”[21] After Sun’s Republic of China descended into warlordism, their interpretation of tihe changed from copying western institutions to reconciling them with Chinese identity. When he experienced racial segregation in the United States, Liang questioned whether Anglo-Saxon democracy, which allowed the majority to commit “cruel and inhuman acts” against the minority “in broad daylight,” would best suit multiethnic China, instead proposing a “benign autocracy” that imposed equality upon every class and race.[22] Implementing Liang’s vision against Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, which argued that the proletariat alone could overthrow the bourgeois, Mao Zedong promised equal education and leadership opportunities to peasants and minorities like the Hui Muslims, who soon preferred the Red Army to the elitist, Han-nationalist Kuomintang.[23] After Mao liberated his people from “feudalism, imperialism, and bureaucratic capitalism” in 1949, China tried to tihe with the next Marxist stage of social evolution, communism, with People’s communes evenly dividing crop yields among commune members who contributed uneven labour.[24] His fellow communists, however, realized that Mao’s imposition of equality only disincentivized his people, and his China no longer tihe-ed with the post-war world economy. After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping shifted the party’s objective for progress from “class struggle” to “economic construction,” while retaining a single-party system in what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics;” Deng’s reforms abolished the People’s communes, built a “socialist market economy,” and raised China’s share of world GDP from 2.4% in 1978 to 14.8% in 2018.[25] Through its economic prowess and tolerance for capitalism in the “One-Country-Two-Systems” policy, Deng’s regime persuaded London to return Hong Kong, ceded to the British in what Chinese nationalists called the first “unequal [T]reaty” of Nanjing.[26] Imported from Victorian London and accepted only in Chinese defeat, the notion of tihe never relieved the Summer Palace of its destruction or Yan of his trauma, but in the long run, it guided the Chinese to redeem British wrongs and Chinese mistakes until they exceed their predecessors in the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”[27] While the return from democracy to authoritarianism would be regressive in Britain or India, it represented progress toward sovereignty, strength, and self-determination to the Chinese authority.

Although European progressivism also motivated colonial and post-colonial activism in other 19th-century empires, the British were the most eager to celebrate their imparting modernity to their subjects by their “stimulating example” in democracy, or “imposing” modernity on their domains by colonial governance.[28] While British colonies were indeed more likely to become democratic upon independence than other empires, the impart-by-example narrative was still problematic because the empire exemplified only British democracy, not Indian socialist democracy, Chinese People’s Democracy, or Nigerian republican democracy.[29] The “Sisyphean” history of democracy or modernity as a whole was of colonized intellectuals choosing, changing, and resisting aspects of British civilization until they became “whole new way[s] of life” rather than pirated copies of Britain.[30] It was the colonized who conceived modernity for themselves, not the empire.

It was also the colonized who implemented modernity. The impose-by-governance narrative was more problematic because it contradicted the imperial reluctance to cultivate “self-governing institutions” in the colonies as Winston Churchill claimed.[31] Individual Britons sometimes heartily endorsed nationalists with whom they shared democratic ideals, like Dr. James Cantlie, who rescued Sun from the Qing secret service when he was kidnapped in London.[32] However, imperial civil servants typically shied away from nationalism, like Secretary of State for India, John Morley, who declared that if his reforms “would directly up to the establishment of a Parliamentary system in India, I, for one would have nothing at all to do with it.”[33] The Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909 permitted Indian councils, selected by the British, to report public concerns, but retained legislative veto to the viceroy and disappointed the Indian National Congress, who demanded Indian suffrage as “the freedom which is their right.”[34] Morley, a Liberal Party member and an admirer of William Gladstone, could have empathized with their rhetoric without the obligation to preserve the Raj or the imperialist psychology that saw Indians as “helpless subjects” and never “citizens.”[35] Because the empire discouraged rather than eased British support for nationalist movements, it is historically inaccurate to confound the imperial institution with individual goodwill and credit the empire with political justice that colonial subjects “had to seize” and “snatch” from the British.[36] Neither teaching nor helping its subjects to govern themselves, the empire had a positive impact only because the colonized converted its disparagement and destruction into self-improvement when wresting sovereignty from the British.

Naoroji ended his assessment of British rule with a culinary analogy; I will end mine with a horticultural one. If 19th-century Asia and Africa were a garden that blossomed into modernity, the colonial experience did not sow the seeds with Liang and Gandhi, or tend to the seedlings with Nehru and Deng; rather, it served its use as a lump of manure, rich in nutrients – the impetus for improvement – but unpleasant to live in. The plants themselves converted these nutrients into proteins, while the manure lay stagnant, stiff, and suppressing the seedlings until they sprouted through the soil. By the 21st century, the imperial fertilizer has expired, but some bits still cling onto the flower beds, most obnoxiously the careless paternalism that led London to wreck the Zimbabwean economy with punitive sanctions for “repress[ing] civil society,” Niall Ferguson to cheer on America the imperial “heir” in Afghanistan, and Jamie Oliver to put chilli jam into his “healthy” remake of egg fried rice.[37] In knowing the empire inside out, perhaps the west will help its former subjects clear up its feces.

[1] Dadabhai Naoroji, Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings, (On Indian Politics,) of the Hon’ble Dadabhai Naoroji, (With Life and Portrait) (Bombay: Caxton Printing Works, 1887), 135.
[2] Naoroji, 131-135.
[3] Naoroji, 131; Mohandas Gandhi, Indian Home Rule (Madras: Ganesh, 1922), 28.
[4] Naoroji, 131; Elie Kedourie, “Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last modified March 5, 2022, accessed June 26, 2022, britannica.com/biography/Jamal-al-Din-al-Afghani.
[5] Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004), xxi.
[6] Matthew Lauzon, “Modernity,” 12, from The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), edited by Jerry H. Bentley; Luigi Cajani, “Periodization,” 11 from The Oxford Handbook of World History; Margaret Lange, “Progress”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), accessed June 26, plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/progress/.
[7] Cajani, “Periodization,” 8 from The Oxford Handbook of World History; Zhitian Luo, “China: History Writing: Linking the Past and the Future,” from Histories of Nations: How Their Identities Were Forged (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), edited by Peter Furtado, 47-49.
[8] Lauzon, “Modernity,” 12, from The Oxford Handbook of World History.
[9] Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999), 17.
[10] Nazir Ahmed from Hidden in the Lute: An Anthology of Two Centuries of Urdu Literature (Delhi: Carcanet Press, 1995), translated and edited by Ralph Russell, 185-186; Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 1988), 23.
[11] Gandhi, 18.
[12] Shashi Tharoor, The Inglorious Empire: What Britain Did to India (London: Scribe Publications, 2016), “Democracy, the Press, the Parliamentary System and the Rule of Law.”
[13] Jawaharlal Nehru, quoted in Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (New York: Picador Books, 2012), 303.
[14] Shravan Bhat, “Economic Milestone: Second Five Year Plan (1956),” Forbes India, last modified August 8, 2014, accessed June 26, 2022, forbesindia.com/article/independence-day-special/economic-milestone-second-five-year-plan-(1956)/38393/1; Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 277; Indira Gandhi, quoted in Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), “The Cold War and India.”  
[15] Westad, The Cold War: A World History, “The Cold War and India.”
[16] “Udaipur Nav Sankalp -Towards a Better Tomorrow,” Indian National Congress, last modified May 19, 2022, accessed June 26, 2022, inc.in/in-focus/udaipur-nav-sankalp-towards-a-better-tomorrow; The Indian Penal Code, quoted in Shashi Tharoor, “Democracy, the Press, the Parliamentary System and the Rule of Law.”
[17] Shashi Tharoor, “Why nations should pursue ‘soft’ power,” TED India, December 2, 2009, accessed June 30, 2022, youtube.com/watch?v=EiTrl0W1QrM; Westad, “The Cold War and India.”
[18] Andrew Porter, “Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” from The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), edited by Andrew Porter, 31; Qian Long, “Letter to King George III,” Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University, edited by Paul Halsall, accessed June 30, 2022, sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp; Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 297.
[19] Yan Fu, quoted in Xiaoxing Jin, “Translation and transmutation: the Origin of Species in China,” The British Journal for the History of Science 52, no. 1 (2019), 125.
[20] The War of Jiawu is also known as the First Sino-Japanese War, not to be confused with the Second Sino-Japanese War in the Pacific front of World War II; “Creatures compete for Heaven’s selection, the fittest survives” is translated from 物競天擇 適者生存, a Chinese saying introduced by Liang Qichao in his 1902 Xinzhongguo Weilaiji 新中国未来记 (The Future Story of New China) as a catchphrase for reform that has remained a popular idiom interpretation of evolution in China; Jin translates tihe 體合 into “adjusting the body to meet environmental needs,” see Jin, 124.
[21] Levenson, 30.
[22] Liang Qichao, “The Power and Threat of America,” from Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America in the Mid-nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), edited by R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, 91; Mishra,176.
[23] Mao Zedong, “Zhongguo Shehui Gejiejide Fenxi 中国社会各阶级的分析 (An Analysis of Each Social Stratum in China)” from Maozedong Zuzuo Xuanbian 毛泽东著作选编 (Selected Works of Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Central Party School Press, 2002), 4-5; Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Groove Press, 1968), 312-316.
[24] Mao, “Zhongguoren Congci Zhanqilaile 中国人从此站起来了 (The Chinese People Have Stood Up),” from Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 382.
[25] Deng Xiaoping, “Jianchi Anlaofenpei Yuanze 坚持按劳分配原则 (Uphold the Principle of Distributing Income According to Labour),” from Deng Xiaoping Wenxuan 邓小平文选 (Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping), vol.2 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1994), 102; “class struggle” and “economic construction” are translated from 阶级斗争 and 经济建设in “Zongguogongchandang Dishiyijie Zhongyangweiyuanhui Disanci Quanti Huiyi Gongbao 中国共产党第十一届中央委员会第三次全体会议公报 (Public Report of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee),” December 22, 1978, accessed June 28th, 2022, gov.cn/test/2009-10/13/content_1437683.htm; “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is translated from 有中国特色的社会主义 in “Zhongguogongchandang Dishierci Quanguo Daibiao Dahui Kaimuci 中国共产党第十二次全国代表大会开幕词 (Opening Words for the of the Chinese Communist Party), from Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (Bejing: People’s Publishing House, 1995), 5;  “socialist market economy” is translated from社会主义市场经济 in “Zonggongzhongyang Guanyu Jianli Shehuizhuyishichangjingjitizhi Ruogan Wenti De Jueding中共中央关于建立社会主义市场经济体制若干问题的决定 (The CPC Central Committee’s Decisions on Problems Regarding the Establishment of a Socialist Market Economy System),” People’s Daily, November 14, 1993, accessed June 30, 2022, people.com.cn/item/20years/newfiles/b1080.html; Xianghui Cao, et al., “Forty years of reform and opening up: China’s progress toward a sustainable path,” Science Advances 5, no. 8 (2019), accessed June 30, 2022, science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aau9413.
[26] “One-Country-Two-Systems” is translated from 一个国家，两种制度in Deng Xiaoping, “Yige Guojia Liangzhong Zhidu一个国家，两种制度 (One Country, Two Systems),” from Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol.2, 58; Dong Wang, China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 1-2.
[27] Xi Jinping, “Achieving Rejuvenation Is The Dream of the Chinese People,” from The Governance of China, vol. 3, (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2018), 37.
[28] John Stuart Mill, quoted in Ferguson, 139; Ferguson, xxi.
[29] Alexander Lee and Jack Paine, “British colonialism and democracy: Divergent inheritances and diminishing legacies,” Journal of Comparative Economics 47, no.3 (2019), 5.
[30] Mishra, 300, 301.
[31]374 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th ser.) (1941) col. 69, accessed June 30, 2022 api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1941/sep/09/war-situation#column_68.
[32] Maria-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 63-64.
[33] John Morley, “The Reform Proposal,” Speeches On Indian Affairs (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co.,1920), 159.
[34] Shashi Tharoor, “Democracy, the Press, the Parliamentary System and the Rule of Law;” Jabez T. Sunderland, “The New Nationalist Movement in India,” The Atlantic, October 1908, accessed June 28, 2022, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1908/10/the-new-nationalist-movement-in-india/304893/.
[35] “John Morley,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last modified June 12, 2022, accessed June 30, 2022, britannica.com/biography/John-Morley-Viscount-Morley;  Jabez T. Sunderland, “The New Nationalist Movement in India.”
[36] Shashi Tharoor, “Dr Shashi Tharoor MP – Britain Does Owe Reparations,” OxfordUnion, July 15, 2015, accessed June 28, 2022, youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4.
[37] “Financial sanctions, Zimbabwe,” GOV. UK., last modified March 18, 2022, accessed June 30, 2021, gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctions-zimbabwe; Ferguson, 381; “Jamie’s Quick & Easy Egg Fried Rice | Jamie Oliver,” performed by Jamie Oliver, (February 23, 2020), YouTube video, accessed June 30, 2022  m.youtube.com/watch?v=dZJD2j1Rc-U.

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