The Legacy of British Colonialism*

Rudyard Kipling’s semi-autobiographical novel Kim starts with the eponymous hero sitting “astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.” The cannon Zam-Zammah is a symbol of military might, or more broadly, of imperial power, as Kipling immediately goes on to state: whoever “[holds] Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ [holds] the Punjab.” Across from this formidable weapon stands “the Wonder House”, the museum wherein is housed “the conqueror’s loot.” 1 In one paragraph, Kipling has synthesized various important aspects of British colonialism. The Lahore Museum testifies to Britain’s cultural domination, a fact evident in many museums in the empire set up by British curators who wove British narratives around colonial artifacts. Britain’s military and political authority over its colonies, as embodied in the cannon,2 enabled both cultural exchange and imperial plunder, its fruits ranging from the slave trade to the trade of foodstuffs and commodities. This has left a complex legacy to the Empire’s former subjects, with the British themselves being culturally richer for the experience but impoverished by a legacy of human rights abuses and racial injustice.

This essay will examine the legacy of British imperialism3 through three particular aspects of material culture— foodstuffs, diamonds, and museum artifacts — to show how, like Kipling’s “Wonder House”, they have increased knowledge and appreciation of diverse cultures while also enforcing notions of colonial prejudice and hierarchy. This is done in a variety of complex ways, some overt, some ambiguous, and some dichotomous. As will be seen, they have enriched the British people in terms of their cultural life, but they are enmeshed in narratives of the civilized and uncivilized, the developed and the undeveloped.

The building of the empire relied, in large part, on Britain’s rise as the major naval power in Europe, which rid the seas of pirates and established safe trade routes and ports. Central to this trade was the import of goods from the colonies. By the early eighteenth century, products such as tea and tobacco flowed into the British market in growing numbers, making significant changes to the British diet as well as British culture. Tea became the beverage of choice for polite society in 1720, and in a couple of decades was nothing short of a national phenomenon, being consumed by all levels of society and across all age groups. The consumption of tea as a social activity also generated special codes of behavior, which dictated manners and habits of dress and required participants to use various tea-drinking utensils correctly and with ease. Elaborate tea-drinking rituals became symbols of Britishness, and tea-drinking paraphernalia an indispensable part of the British household. 4

Tobacco was another major import from the colonies, specifically North America. Quality tobacco was usually associated with the colony of Virginia, with merchants frequently labeling their tobacco as “Virginia’s Best”.5 Such labels were often found on trade cards—the eighteenth-century equivalent of the business card, but larger, more elaborate, and often illustrated—which shops and small businesses would distribute to customers, sometimes as package labeling. Many were printed with illustrations that associated tobacco cultivation with plantations and slavery. They depict naked black people harvesting or loading tobacco onto ships while white, elegantly dressed colonists lounged nearby.6 This imagery is overt in its display of British imperial power over the seas and the superiority of a ‘civilized’ race in stark contrast with an ‘uncivilized’ one.

This idea of ‘civilization’ was one of the justifications for British imperialism, which naturally made its way into a number of different narratives across cultural media. Works of literature, such as Robinson Crusoe, provided obvious and overt depictions of a white British colonizer ‘civilizing’ a native,7 but these narratives were also transferred to and became ingrained in the discussion and presentation of material objects, whose cultural significance made them suitable symbols for imperial power. Nothing summarizes this situation today more than the Koh-i-Noor, a diamond that was given to Queen Victoria and now rests as one of the prizes of the British crown jewels. The Koh-i-Noor arrived in Britain from the Sikh Empire, whose young Maharajah Duleep Singh was deposed after the annexation of the Punjab.8 Amongst the Maharajah’s other treasures in Lahore, the Koh-i-Noor was chosen as a gift for the Queen not because it was the best jewel available, but because, as Lord Dalhousie put it, it was “a historical memorial of conquest”, seized by one king after another before it found “a final and fitting resting-place in the crown of Britain”.9 In Duleep Singh’s offer of the jewel and Victoria’s gracious acceptance, British officials saw the diamond as a symbol of Indian submission and British domination.10

This narrative of conquest and submission was why the Koh-i-Noor was chosen as a centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851. But despite the narrative’s grandness, many spectators were disappointed by the material reality of the diamond. They expected to see a true “Mountain of Light” (the English translation of the Koh-i-Noor) but were greeted by a “Mountain of Darkness” since the Koh-i-Noor reflected light poorly and had an inconsistent coloring.11 Its reception probably contributed to Prince Albert’s desire to recut the stone. The idea was that the cutting of regular facets into the Koh-i-Noor would increase reflectivity and hence value. Yet this too was framed in imperialist narratives: like Britannia’s attempt to ‘civilize’ her colonies, the recut was an attempt to ‘civilize’ the Koh-i-Noor by imposing Western diamond aesthetics (symmetry, regularity, reflectivity) on this Eastern jewel of irregular shape and little brilliancy.12 Though the diamond that emerged from the cutting machine was perfectly regular and symmetrical—and hence ‘civilized’, it had lost approximately eighty carats in the process, leaving the object, in practical terms, reduced and devalued.13 Today, the Koh-i-Noor sits in the Tower of London as a museum piece enriching the thousands who go to visit, its complex legacy still radiates imperial ties to racism and discrimination.

While the Koh-i-Noor, whose provenance, despite superimposed imperialist narratives, may also be understood as innocuous ‘gift-giving’, no ambiguity surrounds the provenance of objects such as the Benin Bronzes. They were acquired in an indisputably imperialist setting that would nowadays be seen as a violation of human rights. Created in the historic Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria) during the middle ages, these ‘bronzes’ were statues and plaques made from metal, bronze, or ivory, used to honor ancestors, validate kingship, and record historical events.14

The scene for the eventual looting of the Benin Bronzes was set in January 1897, when British Consul James Robert Phillips informed the King of Benin, traditionally known as the Oba, that he would like to send a delegation to the royal city. The Oba objected, as the people of Benin were hosting a religious festival during which no foreigner was allowed to enter. Despite this, Phillips proceeded with his delegation, which was ambushed and killed. This allegedly triggered the punitive expedition against Benin in February 1897, though it has been suggested that war was already contemplated before Philips went to Benin City and that the killing of the British delegation functioned as pretext.15

After the city fell to British rule, the Benin Bronzes became war booty. Shipped to Europe, they were exhibited in Berlin, Vienna, and London and sold to museums and collectors to cover the costs of the expedition.16 This callous treatment of the objects reflects the lack of appreciation for West African art on the part of the exhibitors, and some Europeans went further by initially refusing to believe that art, a product of civilization, could be created by ‘uncivilized’ Africans. Instead, they attributed the bronzes to white sailors who once passed through the area.17 The provenance and display of the bronzes testify to the imperialist efforts of British colonizers in Africa, and their rejection as being ‘African’ reinforces the narrative of white cultural superiority and racist stereotypes. Like the Koh-i-Noor, these bronzes today are housed in British institutions, notably the British Museum, where they provide a major source of insight into early West African art and culture. Inside the Africa Galleries, they are accessible to the British public as well as millions of people from around the world. Outside the museum, they have become an invaluable part of the intellectual and educative life in Britain. Even the current King of Benin, Oba Ewuare II, acknowledged that being on display in the British Museum gave the bronzes an international outreach that turned them into “cultural ambassadors” for traditional Benin culture.18 This display has not, however, used its influence and outreach to address the problematic history of the bronzes, which remained largely unengaged with until recently, when calls for their return to Nigeria have highlighted their dichotomous identity as enrichers of British or even international culture but physical reminders of the disenfranchisement of Nigeria through imperialist actions and ideologies.

These material objects all reflect the multifaceted legacy of the British Empire and the complexity of understanding their contributions to modern-day Britain. One sees this complexity across all ‘artifacts’ of the Empire, be they physical like the Koh-i-Noor or intellectual like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Despite his status as a British author, Kipling produced a body of work that was essentially Indian, replete with Indian settings, traditions, characters, and vocabulary. But though his literary legacy is distinctly South Asian, his legacy to the British Empire is harder to analyze. Interpretations of both his fictional and nonfictional work have alternatively characterized him as a staunch imperialist and racist, or as a friend of ‘natives’, a man critical of imperial rule.19 Kipling’s corpus, still read by many today, is a prominent example of the circumstances surrounding British imperial legacy: a rich fusion of traditions and ideas muddied by prejudice, a dichotomy manifest across colonial legacies ranging from the tea one drinks in the morning to the objects one admires in a museum.

I have explored this complexity by looking at a variety of different material objects which, on their own, are simply daily products and exotic curiosities, but when examined, reveal intimate ties to imperialism. Such ties can be overt like tobacco trade cards with their illustrations of white colonists overseeing laboring slaves, or they may point to the dichotomy of cultural enrichment and imperial injustice evident in the provenance of the Benin Bronzes and their current status as British possessions. But the legacies of many objects from around the world remain within ambivalent contexts; the Koh-i-Noor, presented simultaneously as a friendly gift, a memorial of conquest, or the representative of an ‘inferior’ culture in need of civilization, is only one example. Artifacts such as the Elgin Marbles, which are also surrounded by ambiguities of provenance and cultural heritage, must be understood through the same lens. Had British colonialism never been, its imperial narratives, whether overt, ambiguous, or dichotomous, would perhaps not exist, but nor would these ‘artifacts’ in their current forms. Although the British would have been richer without the burden of a legacy of human rights abuses, they would have been left culturally more impoverished without the interactions that the empire produced.

*from 2023 JLI History #1: How much richer or poorer are the British today than they would have been without the effects of British colonialism?