Ive here. Let us not forget that, independent of the British school imperialist efforts, this empire had many outstanding boosters. I have to admit, I read Neil Ferguson before he was completely out of the abyss of Empire fanaticism. Ferguson’s book 2001 The Cash Nexus, published before he became famous, does an excellent job of documenting how the UK’s tax collection system (government employees rather than the often corrupt tax farmers like France’s) kept the UK in the spotlight in the financial markets for its time. Reliably fund their spending. This allows them to exceed their GDP weights in terms of borrowing power and thus spend as much or more on the military than France. But even so, Ferguson is threatening the United States to have a proper empire, but lacks the courage to do so. As I wrote in a review of Ferguson’s later book in 2003:

The current administration is courageous enough, but…its narrow conception of how to advance American interests is unlikely to serve America or the world in the long run.

This is a verbose statement that an open democracy is right to focus on the importance of taxation, especially the importance of colonies.

By Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex and President of the British Sociological Association.Originally Posted in open democracy

Various UK government ministers have emerged in recent weeks – fromOliver Dowden arrive Kemi Badnoch Recently, the Minister of Education Nadeem Zahavi — both glorifying the benefits of the British Empire and urging their imparting.This is the government’s response to the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Differences, which raises the need for New History Demonstration Course This will provide advice on how schools can best teach these issues.It’s all part of the government Inclusive UK The strategy requires us to acknowledge the rich and complex history of ‘Global Britain’.

In the spirit of this appeal, I offer a complex, tangled history of colonial taxation and state welfare that continues to shape modern Britain. Few people know that colonial subjects in the Indian subcontinent paid taxes, including income tax, to the British government in Westminster. Or rather, at a time when Britain’s working and middle classes were exempt from paying income tax, the tax was used to ease the condition of Britain’s poorer people.

Taxes – and the way they are returned to citizens through benefits – are “Imagined Community” Birth of a nation. That is, the relationship between taxes and benefits is part of the institution-building process and the idea of ??a nation. If we admit that this “imagined community” was established not only by state taxes, but by colonial taxes, how would that change our understanding of British people today?

My grandfather Mohan Singh was born in 1913 in a small village in Punjab, then British India. He was 4 when his father Goodit Singh died and 17 when his uncle Hanan Singh, who had always supported him, also died. My grandfather had planned to attend the Government Academy in Lahore, but – to support his mother and sister – he spent six months training in boiler making. He then married Pritam Kaur and went to Calcutta to work in various factories, engineering and rolling mills.

In 1942, he traveled to the British colony of Kenya – later with his family – and worked for the East African Railway and Port Company for 18 years. He spent the last two decades of his life in the UK as a sheet metal worker at Chalvey Engineering in Slough before retiring at Southall, west London, at the age of 65.

Mohan Singh traversed three continents during his lifetime, but never left the jurisdiction of the British Empire. After the British Nationality Act 1948, he wrote in his application for registration as a British and colonial citizen: “I was born in British India.” He further noted that he lived and worked in India and Kenya, two British colonies. It was these connections that confirmed his citizenship and gave him the right to travel and live in the UK. He duly exercised these rights, but upon arrival he asked local residents to question them, who were either unaware or indifferent.

Right-wing opponents have been calling for “go home” since at least the 1970s, and as part of the British government, it’s also plastered on the side of vans. ‘harsh environment’policy in recent years. They are also implicit in an influential scholarly work oriented on issues of belonging and entitlement, advocating a preference for “white working classes” in public policy. This is based on the fact that they are “insiders” who, through taxes, contribute to wealth paid for through benefits.

Former colonial subjects like my grandfather were considered immigration outsiders even when they came to the metropolis with a British citizenship passport. They are believed to have not contributed to Britain’s wealth by paying taxes, and they are believed to have received an unfair access to the nation’s heritage.as Jeff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young“As newcomers, their families can’t possibly invest much in the system, so they shouldn’t expect so much,” wrote New East End.

The British established direct rule over India following the suppression of the 1857 Indian mutiny (also known as the First War of Independence). In 1860, it implemented income tax To colonial subjects, in part to cover the costs associated with these uprisings. Initially, the tax rate was 2% for those earning between Rs 200 and Rs 500 per annum and 4% for those earning more than Rs 500 per annum.

When my grandfather started working in the 1930s, the average salary of a skilled worker in British India was about 40 rupees a month. However, he is unlikely to pay income tax as his income is not enough to meet the annual threshold of Rs 2,000. Of the amount collected, about three-quarters went to the treasury, and only one percent of rupees was used for local purposes. Local purposes include building canals and roads, but not poverty alleviation, even in times of catastrophic famine.

The arrival of the British in India – first through the British East India Company and then through direct rule – brought endemic famine across the subcontinent. The 50 years after the introduction of the income tax was one of the worst periods of such famine, with more than 14 million people estimated to have died of starvation. This was against a backdrop of grain exports by rail from famine areas (including Britain), and colonial taxes continued to be levied even in the most affected areas.

In all cases, the need for “sound finance” trumps the need for public health, and the first thing to avoid is any idea that India’s poor should be sustained by public spending.Ensuring adequate funding for subsequent military operations in Afghanistan – from taxes paid by colonial subjects Local Purpose – more important than using these taxes to alleviate severe hunger and avert millions of deaths.

Here we see very clearly that the concept of an “imagined community” created through taxation and its redistribution does not include colonial subjects. The taxes Indians pay to the treasury and local provinces do not give them any right to redistribute their income. To make matters worse, any relief provided during a famine often relies on hard labor in camps far from where claimants are located.

In the most extreme case, rations offered in exchange for heavy labor were barely above the level required for basic subsistence. “Temple Wages” – named after Lieutenant Governor Richard Temple who brought it – had deadly results, and, Mike Davis Notes from “Late Victorian Holocaust” turned work camps into extermination camps.

The death and destruction that empires brought were well known at the time. In 1925, Harry Polit, the leader of the Union of British Boilermakers said the British Empire was soaked in blood. This was in the context of debates at the Scarborough Union Congress, which culminated in a resolution – by 3 million votes to 79,000 – opposing imperialism and supporting the colonized people’s right to self-determination.

This sentiment, however, contradicts a more stubborn understanding of the utility of the Empire to the Britons.as a laborer Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan Announced in Parliament in 1946, “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, because I know that if the British Empire were to fall… it would mean a substantial reduction in the standard of living of our constituents.”

Here, Bevin concedes that the lives of all in Britain have improved due to the influence of the Empire. However, the Empire was an overwhelming disaster for most of those affected by it. Due to colonialism and the famines it produced, their standard of living plummeted, and in many cases, they lost their lives.

One way to survive is to move. That’s why my grandfather moved from a village in Punjab to Lahore to train in boiler making and then worked in Calcutta, Nairobi and London.This is probably why his previous grandfather from famine orissa To Rajasthan to Punjab. These movements are often not seen as part of British history, global or otherwise, or have had any bearing on understanding Britain or Britishness today.

The forgetting of empire also includes the forgetting of the political community—colonial and postcolonial—constructed through taxation. Few people in Britain today understand the extent to which state programs – from social welfare to cultural institutions such as country houses, museums and galleries – are made possible through taxes paid by former colonial subjects. We urgently need to recognize and explain our shared history.

One aspect of the “culture war” is the call for taxpayer input to be considered in discussions “Controversial History”. For example, Samir Shah, chairman of the London Family Museum, believes that since heritage institutions are funded with taxpayer money, the views of taxpayers – which he believes are the silent majority – should be given more attention. clear consideration. Given that colonial subjects and their descendants all paid taxes to the government of Westminster, then they/we also had a legitimate interest in how, in the government’s own words, our shared history manifested itself. The teachings of the British Empire are good, but the reality is different from what these ministers thought.