Atrocities of the British Empire

Queen Elizabeth and her predecessors presided over much of the most deadly imperialism in history (see editorial about her much-delayed death, page 2). At its peak, England seized nearly one quarter of the Earth’s landmass and oppressed nearly 20 percent of the world’s population. Here are some lowlights of the British rulers’ 400 years of racist, blood-soaked colonial expansion:

• Between 1641 and 1808, Britain kidnapped and forcibly moved more than 3 million workers from Africa to the Americas. About 15 percent died en route; the rest were sold into lifetimes of horror.
• During the 1848-1849 Potato Famine in Ireland, a direct result of British economic policies, one million workers in Ireland were killed; another one million were forced to flee.  
• In 1903, to prevent a feared Russian occupation of Tibet, Britain used the British Indian Army to invade the country and massacre more than 700 protesting workers. A British officer told his men to “bag as many as possible.”
• In 1909, Britain’s Parliament passed what became South Africa’s first constitution. With the British working hand-in-hand with the racist Boers, new laws stripped Black workers of all political rights and their land, and paved the way for the legalized segregation and vicious exploitation of apartheid.
• In 1943, more than 3 million workers in India died of starvation after Winston Churchill forced the colony to export all of its wheat to feed British troops during World War II. Four years later, the British Raj partitioned India and Pakistan, an arbitrary division that uprooted 10 million workers and killed over a million more in unnecessary religious conflicts.
• In 1950, a British general conceived of the Briggs Plan to combat communist organizing in Malaysia. British troops forcibly relocated 10 percent of the country’s population to concentration camps.
• In the 1950s, as Queen Elizabeth toured the globe for photo opportunities, Britain fought off an uprising by the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement by imprisoning more than a million workers in barbed-wire concentration camps. Many, including women and children, faced “systematized violence and brutality and torture” with “forced labor and starvation policies” (Vox News, 9/13).