Mohandas Gandhi, Who?

This will surely raise the hackles of Indian nationalists. More than Gandhi and the "so-called freedom fighters", American wartime president Franklin D. Roosevelt brought down the British Empire, a new six-part series on Channel 4 suggests. So that Indian independence was guaranteed more by the US Congress than by the Indian National Congress—a suggestion to be taken with a fair dose of the historical salt produced by Gandhi's satyagrahis. One that raises the question also whether this is crazy or merely controversial.

Niall Ferguson, professor at Oxford University who has written and presented the series, Empire, barely acknowledges Gandhi's satyagraha. He says the Empire finally collapsed because the British ran out of money to run it, and the Americans wouldn't buy. It was at the Bank of England after the second World War ended that the British Empire was finally lost, Ferguson argues. "The hour of freedom had struck, but the hour of freedom was chosen by the Americans, not the nationalists," he says. The Empire was "on sale" in 1945, but the Americans were not buying because "for the Americans everyone had to be like them, democratic and independent". And so the Empire "went into liquidation, rather than acquiring a new owner."

Gandhi gets a minute or two in close to six hours of the documentary. The British had plenty of experience in dealing with violence, but Gandhi's satyagraha was new, and something that a few officers failed to read, he acknowledges. Ferguson translates satyagraha as soul force, and says the British made the mistake of fighting soul force with fist force of the kind Dwyer showed at the Jalianwalla massacre. Satyagraha was not Gandhi's success, the response to it was a British mistake. Fundamentally, Ferguson sees the Empire as an enterprise. By the end of the ww-ii, the Empire was bust, a situation where the creditor takes over the assets. The heir to the British Empire was ironically Britain's former colony, America. Britain had "mortgaged the Empire to pay for war" and as a result owed the US $40 billion. "Could the British bring themselves to sell, and the Americans to buy?" he asks.

When crazy thoughts come to an Oxford professor, they can get published and broadcast. And there are many in Britain lapping up this series, the prime show now on Thursday evenings. The triteness of a reply that there was never a "For Sale" sign over India, that America wasn't looking at India as a shopper, should embarrass Ferguson. He ducked a request for an interview, and it's hard to say whether he means all this accurately, or whether it is an argument provocatively overstated. His position also as professor of financial history at New York University could have brought on this American-British fixation. But to be fair to Ferguson, he is not consistently crazy.

There is a little more to this than some old-worldly waving of the Union Jack over India's past and America's present. Ferguson does not believe, as Curzon did, that the British Empire was "the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen". He acknowledges that the British were never so altruistic—they were driven by greed, they kept slaves, they practised intolerable discrimination, they were brutal in putting down the uprising of 1857, they were negligent or even culpable in creating famines, they "subtly denigrated" local cultures through their scholarly interest. But he argues that the Empire was still a Good Thing then, and has left good things behind. It ended when the enterprise became unsustainable.

And it flourished while it did, as enterprise, and not least in India, as a colony. "It was not a conquered country, at least it did not feel like that," Ferguson says. Only the Indian rulers were subjugated, the landowners and merchants carried on their business, and in fact the presence of the British also brought "an opportunity for self-advancement".In effect, he says the Raj was like a rearrangement among rulers when nationalism wasn't what we know it to be today.

Colonisation then could be what the series shows as the face of Japanese imperialism in taking over Nanking in China in 1937—more than 3,00,000 civilians dead, 80,000 women raped, people hung by their tongue from a meat hook. To coopt or to coerce was the great imperial dilemma. The British took the first path, the Japanese the second. The British were "not overthrown as punishment for their wickedness". The Empire justified its existence by coming to the rescue of civilisation in a fight against nastier empires, and it was "killed by the staggering cost of doing the right thing".

Inevitably, Ferguson brings up statistics that never fail to shame Indians. How did a couple of thousand British officers manage to rule a land of 300 million for the better part of two centuries? It was surprising "not that it ended but that it lasted as long as it did; how on earth did the Victorians do it?" Ferguson asks. With economic and naval mastery, with inventions like the telegram, the steam ship, the railway network, and with cartography, because "knowing where things are is the basic power a government requires." Above all, they did it through the "impartial, incorruptible, omniscient" officers of the Indian Civil Service "who did what Victorians did best—they ruled".

They misruled as well. Jalianwalla Bagh was one. In crushing a Caribbean revolt, the British killed 400 and flogged 600. Many British officers came to see themselves as biologically superior, and that led to creeping segregation. But such actions also led to outrage in London because "the liberalism at the centre and the racism of the periphery were bound to collide". The British "failed to live up to our own rhetoric of liberty" and many of the British imperialists were far from being liberal, "but what is very striking about the history of the Empire is that, whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society".

And that gave the British Empire what Ferguson calls a "self-liquidating character" because "once a colonised society had sufficiently adopted the institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to deny them that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves". And this seems Ferguson's final argument against Gandhi: that satyagraha was his style, but the desire for satyagraha was very British.

The British planted more than ideas in what Ferguson calls a process of "Anglobalisation". These made the Empire an agency for "imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively uncorrupt government". No organisation in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he argues. And no one built as the British did. "Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta, no Bombay, no Madras," he says. "Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British." The argument is, in a sense, beyond argument because it can be compared only to what might have been. "But there's reason to doubt the world would've been the same or even similar in the absence of the Empire," Ferguson asserts.

Ferguson's list of legacies include English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited or 'night watchman' state, representative assemblies, the idea of liberty, and the English language, which he calls the single most important cultural export of the last 400 years.

The Empire is gone, but the English speaking empire continues with America, he says. Bill Gates, Hollywood, American evangelism and an integrated world economy under an English-speaking leadership are the new-look empire. The US has taken on a global burden, "but the Empire that rules does not dare speak its name", he says. This is an empire "in denial about its imperial mission."

He takes no account of the fact, however, that the British were invited to India because of the peculiar structure of Indian society then. The British didn't come crashing in, we opened our doors to them. They came as traders, they were invited to stay on as managers. Many among them were idiots or worse, as some managers are. In time they came to believe they own the place, as managers do. But in some ways they did a fair job, picked up an unfair fee and left. Now for us to get it right for ourselves.