Part One “Indiscriminate Loot and Plunder”: Orwell’s Family and the British Empire There can be no doubt that Orwells family history mirrors the sanguinary history of the British Empire. One forbearer was a large landowner, profiting from slavery in the West Indies . Orwells father was a revenue official for the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service and his mother came from a family of profiteers, those traders so intimately connected with the Empire. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was born in Motihari, Bengal Presidency , in the first decade of the twentieth century, and was soon shipped back ‘home’ to be socialized in the class-conscious society of Edwardian England. [An opium factory in British India, part of the deindustrialisation of South Asia/ (2)] Let us begin at the beginning, more or less; we travel to the sugar plantation monocultures of Jamaica, the source of wealth for Orwell’s great-great grandfather, Charles Blair. Jamaica had been captured from Imperial Spain during Cromwell’s wars of mercantilist hegemonic consolidation during the mid seventeenth century , part of a tradition of European powers fighting amongst themselves to profit from the misery of the non-European world. The plantations of the West Indies exported huge quantities of sugar to Europe, and required a suitably subjugated workforce to cultivate and process the cane. Spanish germs and overt genocide had already destroyed the native tribal population, so the British turned instead to Africa in order to fill their human capital requirements. These slaves were purchased in West Africa with textiles from South Asia. In fact, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, two-thirds of textiles exported from the subcontinent were used to purchase African slaves. An unquenchable cupidity, and the organic development of the capitalist productive forces, facilitated the dominance of this tiny island kingdom. theparallelpost/narratives/featured-articles/650-an-evil-state-of-affairs%E2%80%9D-george-orwell-and-the-british-empire.html
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 16:22:40 +0000