Empire’s Children: Trace Your Family History Across the World

Spain found herself plagued by English ships in the Pacific, in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, and decided in the end to punish the unruly northerners once and for all. There were other political and religious matters which forced the issue. Elizabeth was a nimble diplomat, managing to string Spain along for years with the possibility of an alliance by marriage, and keeping Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin and Catholic rival, and a Frenchwoman in all but name, alive as long as she could. But the plots against Elizabeth which centred on Mary could not be ignored or foiled for ever, and Elizabeth finally, reluctantly, had her executed in 1587. A strong response from Spain was inevitable, but the ill-advised and unlucky venture of the Grand Armada against England came to grief spectacularly in 1588. It confirmed the superiority of English seamanship, and from 1588 on England began to establish itself as the leading maritime power of the world, a position Britain was to maintain for three centuries.

The Elizabethans sowed the seeds of colonization, and by the 1620s Virginia was beginning to boom on the back of successful tobacco exports, just as, in a more modest way, a colony established in Newfoundland thrived on the cod fishery business. But in 1620 a new kind of settler arrived in what is now Massachusetts.

Puritans, who sought a plainer form of worship than the Church of England, which still maintained many of the trappings of the Catholic faith, began to feel the weight of religious prejudice on account of their nonconformist attitudes. As a result a group of them sought refuge in Holland, where they enjoyed greater freedom, but not the full autonomy they desired. After a decade or so they returned to England and, having obtained a grant of land from the Virginia Company which ran the colony there, set sail for the New World on the tiny Mayflower, along with a number of other immigrants. The Mayflower was blown off course and made landfall far to the north of Virginia, and the Pilgrim Fathers, as they came to be known, founded a colony where they landed. They were the first Europeans to settle on that coast, and had a hard time of it at first, but they stuck it out and eventually prospered, establishing farms and gradually spreading inland. About fifteen years later, Catholic religious exiles would form a colony which they called Maryland, in honour of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria. The English were now firmly established on the east coast of North America.

JUDGED BY EUROPEAN STANDARDS, THE LOCALS WERE ‘BRUTE BEASTS’, AN INCONVENIENT THORN IN THE COLONIZERS’ SIDE.

Contact with the local inhabitants – the Native Americans – was limited and generally unfriendly. The Spanish had managed to destroy huge numbers of the local populations they encountered with guns and – less deliberately but more effectively – with imported European diseases against which the locals had no natural resistance. Judged by European standards, and it would be a long time before anyone took an anthropological interest in the peoples of the colonized countries, the locals were ‘brute beasts’, who needed to be converted to Christianity and/or destroyed as an inconvenient thorn in the colonizers’ side. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest – itself in part a reflection on colonization – shows a sympathetic (for its time) take on the ‘native’. And when emotional and personal contact was made, it was rare enough to enter into modern myth. The Native American princess Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, born about 1595, married an Englishman, John Rolfe, and returned to England with him and their son, Thomas, where she lived in Brentford. She was presented at Court, but later fell ill, and died at the beginning of her return voyage to Virginia in 1617. A few more exotic outsiders arrived here in the course of the century, prompting such literary responses as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Defoe’s Man Friday – who, however, kept his place.

England, still at loggerheads with Spain, had had an eye on the Caribbean islands since John Hawkins first took captured Africans there from Guinea and sold them to the Spanish as slaves to work the land (the native populations having largely been killed off). In 1627, Charles I granted a charter to settle the uninhabited island of Barbados and establish tobacco plantations there. They did not work, but tobacco was replaced with sugar cane and the sugar industry boomed. Then, in 1655, an army sent by Oliver Cromwell took Jamaica from Spain. Ravaged by dysentery and malaria, the first settlers held out on account of the money to be made, and the sugar plantations established there soon demanded an immense workforce, not least because life for the workers was hard and short. Initially, a system of indentured servants was introduced, generally poor people from the homeland who undertook to work for a fixed term – three to five years – on a very modest wage, in return for their passage out and their keep. These people endured extremely harsh conditions and were treated no better than serfs. Some went voluntarily to escape even grimmer or hopeless conditions at home; others were kidnapped – ‘bar-badosed’. Many Irishmen and women suffered this fate after Cromwell’s crushing campaigns in their country, one of England’s first and most abused colonies. Few lived long.

It was not a system that worked well, and it became harder and harder to fill places left vacant by the high mortality rate. Increasingly, Spanish and English planters in the Caribbean looked for a new source of labour, and in that search a new international trade was truly born.

The slave trade was so successful that it lasted from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, formed the basis for the prosperity of such towns as Liverpool and Bristol, and made the fortunes of large numbers of individuals. Slavers were proud of their trade, saw nothing wrong in it, and one even had the figure of a slave incorporated in his coat of arms.

It was so profitable because the ships which plied it were never out of use. A ship would leave England for the coast of West Africa loaded with finished goods such as firearms, stoves, pans, kettles and nails, along with iron bars and brass ingots. These would be traded for slaves rounded up in the interior by local, often Arab, traders, but also provided by local chiefs from the prisoners taken in local wars. The slaves were densely packed into the holds of the ships in dismal conditions, but enough of them survived the crossing to make a profit for the traders, who, having sold their cargoes in such places as Barbados and Jamaica, but also trading with the Spanish since political enmity and religious difference have never cut much ice with profit, then loaded their ships with refined sugar or tobacco to take back home. This was known as the triangular trade, and may be responsible for the fact that the British sailor employed to sail the ship had an even greater likelihood of death en route (usually from yellow fever, malaria or scurvy) than the slave. By 1700, it was estimated to be worth £2 million in contemporary terms – perhaps a hundred times that or more in modern money. Because the death rate was high, and because even when slaves bred the rate of infant mortality was high, demand for replacements was inexhaustible. Eric Williams, a former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and a historian of the Caribbean, gives an example from Barbados which is worth quoting: ‘In 1764 there were 70,706 slaves in the island. Importations to 1783, with no figures available for the years 1779 and 1780, totalled 41,840. The total population, allowing for neither deaths nor births, should, therefore, have been 112,546 in 1783. Actually it was 62,258.’ The slave population therefore was smaller by 8,448 people than it had been nineteen years earlier.

Chillingly, the slaves were referred to as ‘product’, in rather the same way as the Nazis later referred to the Jews. Rebellious slaves (and there were several rebellions) suffered vicious punishments, and those who stole sugar cane to eat themselves could, if caught, look forward to being flogged, to having their teeth pulled out, and to other cruel humiliations, as one Jamaican estate owner noted in his diary in May 1756, having caught two slaves ‘eating canes’: ‘Had [one] well flogged and pickled, then made [the other] shit in his mouth.’ Slaves who escaped headed for the hills where they formed their own communities, governed by a system of laws developed by themselves. The British, borrowing a word from the Spanish cimarrones (peak-dwellers), called them ‘Maroons’. So successful and independent did these communities become that the British, despairing of destroying them, eventually concluded treaties with them, and, ironically, engaged them to hunt down other escaped slaves.

THE SLAVE TRADE CONSTITUTED ONE OF THE GREATEST MIGRATIONS IN RECORDED HISTORY.

In the course of the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, more than 1,650,000 people were uprooted, shipped and sold. The slave trade constituted one of the greatest migrations in recorded history. In England itself, and especially in London, there was a sizeable black population – Simon Schama tells us that there were between 5,000 and 7,000 in mid-eighteenth-century London alone. All of them were technically free, while resident in Britain, under the law, but many, despite the intervention of early activists such as Granville Sharp on their behalf, were cruelly abused by their employers. Some, like Dr Johnson’s servant, Francis Barber, enjoyed the benefits of education and became minor celebrities. Others, especially young men and boys, were often employed in aristocratic houses as pages – the modern equivalent of fashion accessories, dressed in exotic costumes believed suitable to their backgrounds. Yet others eked out a precarious living as musicians or waiters. There were a few soldiers and sailors. For women, the choice was stark: most only had recourse to either begging or prostitution.

ABUSE OF COLONIZED PEOPLES AND OF FORMER SLAVES CONTINUED EVEN LONGER. IN SOME PLACES, IT CONTINUES TODAY.

By the end of the eighteenth century, an abolition movement gathered momentum in Britain. A medallion was struck by the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood in the 1790s showing a kneeling, chained slave, and bearing the legend ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, which did much to popularize the cause; and its supporters succeeded in bringing about an end to the slave trade and then slavery itself by Acts of Parliament passed in 1807 and 1833. The institution itself did not die out instantly. It lingered long in India, and in the former British colonies in America it would survive for another thirty years at least. And abuse of colonized peoples and of former slaves continued even longer. In some places, it continues today. The descendants of slaves, of course, form the majority of the populations of the Caribbean states today.

England was not only expanding in the western hemisphere. Coffee – its name derives from the Arabic qahwah – spread to Europe from the Muslim world (its origins in antiquity are in Ethiopia), and towards the end of the seventeenth century it became an immensely chic, and expensive, drink in London, where coffee houses blossomed almost as fast as chains like Starbucks do today. Tea – even pricier – followed, imported from China. Chocolate, much drunk in the eighteenth century, quickly followed. These new and popular tastes for the exotic suggested new markets. The Dutch had established trading links with the Spice Islands of south-west Asia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and colonized them under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company. Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to the Royal East India Company in 1600, according it the usual high-handed carte blanche, irrespective of any other nation. Rivalry between the Dutch and the English concerns simmered throughout the 1600s, leading to a string of Anglo-Dutch wars towards the end of the century, but resolved by the accession of William of Orange to the British throne in 1689. The French East India Company established a base at Pondicherry (now Puducherry) in 1673, creating further rivalry as the trading possibilities opened up in India began to promise rich rewards.

The English established trading stations in Surat, in what was to become Madras (now Chennai) and in what was to become Calcutta. In 1661 Charles II of England received Bombay (now Mumbai) as part of the dowry due on his marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza. The Portuguese had colonized the Goan coastal strip over one hundred years earlier. ‘Bombay’ derives from the Portuguese bom baia – ‘good bay’. Much of the rest of India at the time was under the control of the fading Mughal empire (one of the last great emperors, Shah Jahan, created the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife in the middle of the seventeenth century), but the subcontinent was also divided into petty kingdoms whose warlike rivalries worked to the advantage of the European interlopers.

Trade dominated here initially, not colonization, and far from encountering unsophisticated tribes who could easily be dominated, the local peoples here were organized and powerful. Initially, the Europeans stuck to their coastal trading stations and bickered among themselves. The sea voyage east had to be made via the Cape of Good Hope (where Britain also established coastal bases) and was considerably longer (six months) than that to the Americas (about eight weeks), so East India Company officials enjoyed a great degree of latitude and independence, often making private fortunes on their own account.

The process by which India gradually fell under exclusively British control is long and complex, but, briefly, the Dutch were outmanoeuvred because they had a less versatile range of goods to trade with. The French, whose main centre was at Pondicherry, just south of Madras, ultimately foundered when the ambitious governor of the Compagnie des Indes, the Marquis Dupleix, fell foul of one of the first great heroes of the British Empire, Robert Clive. Clive, a severely flawed and pugnacious character who was to commit suicide (succeeding at the third attempt) at the age of forty-nine in 1774, was nevertheless a brilliant soldier and an able and astute administrator and negotiator. When the equally truculent Dupleix, with the aid of Indian allies, took Madras (then called Fort St George) in 1746, Clive recaptured it, and went on to take Pondicherry from the French, effectively neutralizing their influence. Not long after this campaign (1751–3), Clive, after a brief interval in England, returned to India to crush another enemy.

In 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah, became disaffected with the East India Company’s interference in the internal affairs of his country, and sensed (correctly) a threat to his independence. In June 1756, he ordered an immediate stop to improvements in the fortifications of Fort William in Calcutta. The Company ignored him. Thereupon the Nawab laid siege to the fort and took it after a bloody battle. His troops imprisoned about 120 British and Indian survivors – men, women and children – in a barrack which measured only about 4.5 by 5.5 metres, and left them there without food or water overnight. The air to breathe was limited among such a large number, the heat was atrocious, and when the prisoners were released the next morning it was found that only twenty-three were still alive. This was the famous Black Hole of Calcutta.

Apart from the need to nip this rebellion in the bud, for the British were indeed planning to use Bengal as a base for greater expansion in India, the affront demanded vengeance. Clive acted swiftly, moving north from Madras, and took Calcutta with relative ease on 2 January 1757. Siraj continued his fight, but the British forces had superior discipline and weaponry, and he was defeated finally at the Battle of Plassey towards the end of June. Titular control of Bengal passed to Siraj’s former commander-in-chief, who was already in Clive’s pocket. The hegemony of the East India Company was assured, and, incidentally, once Bengal was surely in its grasp, the Company took over the lucrative opium trade, formerly the preserve of the Dutch, and exported the drug to China.

APART FROM THE NEED TO NIP THIS REBELLION IN THE BUD, THE AFFRONT OF THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA DEMANDED VENGEANCE.

Siraj was not the only Indian ruler to try to assert his independence against the British. Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore (1750–99), was the eldest son of Haider Ali. He succeeded his father as ruler of Mysore in 1782. Tipu was a cultivated man, a poet and a linguist, as well as an able soldier. He is one of the heroes of Indian independence. An early opponent of the British, and quick to see the danger of giving them too much rope, he fought alongside his father, then an ally of the French, and defeated the British in the Mysore War of 1780–4. He continued to resist the British for the rest of his reign, and died bravely, defending his capital, Seringapatam, when Mysore’s resistance came to an end.

The most famous relic of his reign is his Tiger-Organ, a life-sized model of a Bengal tiger mauling a prostrate British redcoat. The organ is fitted with a number of pipes, and when operated, the tiger roared and growled and the soldier cried and groaned. After Tipu’s fall, it was seized and sent for display to the East India Company Museum in London, where it created a great stir. Keats even alluded to it (rather foolishly) in his ‘Cap and Bells’. It can now be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, but it is no longer played.

During its ascendancy, from the time of Clive’s victories in the mid-eighteenth century to its demise in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British East India Company, or ‘John Company’ as it was nicknamed, through a policy of shrewd trade-offs with local rulers, and of playing them off against each other; through the placement of British ‘advisers’ in the various courts of the rajahs and maharajahs, and the development of a highly efficient private army, ran the subcontinent for the British with a minimum of fuss and a great deal of profit.

Another aspect is of interest. It was not until the nineteenth century that fraternizing with the local people began to be discouraged as a general rule. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, miscegenation was actively encouraged, and many a prominent ‘British’ officer was born as a result. James Skinner (1778–1841), the founder of ‘Skinner’s Horse’ cavalry regiment, had an English father, but a Rajput mother.

Such events, tragic as they are, and whatever the truth behind them, are the very last twitchings of a dead age. More serious are the possible repercussions. There has been talk in Kenya of following Zimbabwe’s lead in forcible repossession of farms owned by whites. Over all this falls the shadow of Empire.

In Britain, and much more positively, belonging as it were to a different age, perhaps the greatest recent flowering of ‘immigrant’ talent has been in the arts. Not only does Britain have established sculptors and painters of the calibre of Anish Kapoor (born in Bombay in 1954 but now living in England) and Chris Ofili (born in Manchester in 1968) as well as rising stars such as Raqib Shaw (born in 1974 in Calcutta, now living and working in London), but in the last decade or two she has been privileged to see a great wave of new novelists from the non-white ethnic minority community. Apart from established, eminent, even venerable writers such as R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie and the Nobel prizewinners Sir V. S. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka, recent years have seen a flood of novels from the pens of such (predominantly female) writers as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Andrea Levi, Zadie Smith and Arundhati Roy. Not all of these, of course, live in Britain, but their work has exercised profound influence here and enriched her cultural heritage immeasurably, as well as having been influenced to a greater or lesser degree but always irresistibly by the old Empire. And so the complicated, colourful story continues. But to understand the true roots of the Children of Empire, we must first look at the origins of that Empire itself, at the men and women who shaped it, and how it, in the course of three centuries, shaped them.

CHRIS BISSON TRINIDAD

Chris Bisson is a familiar face on British television. He is probably best known for playing shopkeeper Vikram Desai for three years, when Coronation Street introduced its first South Asian family. He has also starred as Saleem Khan, the son of a Pakistani fish-and-chip shop owner in the 1999 film East is East, and as Kash, owner of the local mini-mart in the Channel 4 hit series Shameless.

Despite playing so many Asian roles, a lot of them as a shopkeeper or shopkeeper’s son, Chris doesn’t see himself as Asian. His paternal family’s roots are in India but over the last century the family’s history has been so changed by the British Empire that they have lost all connection with the subcontinent. Chris’s grandfather and father were born in Trinidad and he has grown up feeling British West Indian, not Indian. It’s a family history that made him question what it really means to be British in the twenty-first century.

Chris was born in Manchester in 1975. His mother, Sheila, who is white, grew up in a small family in Wythenshawe, a suburb of Manchester. Her relationship with Chris’s father, Mickey, was the first she had had with someone who was not white. Mickey’s lively household, with his nine brothers and sisters in Moss Side, was a culture shock. Sheila’s parents found their daughter’s relationship difficult initially but things changed when their grandson, Christopher, was born.

Chris wanted to find out how the British Empire has shaped his family’s history. His father, Mickey, arrived in Britain in 1965. Chris went to talk to his father about his memories of that time. Mickey recalls how cold it felt in Britain in August. He also remembers the affluent lifestyle that the family left behind and showed Chris photographs of the large house they had owned in Trinidad. Mickey wondered why his father left that life and the successful businesses he had built up. It was clear that Chris needed to go to Trinidad to find out more. He had never been to the island before.

Although Chris’s father was born in Trinidad he is ethnically Indian, like 40 per cent of the island’s population. Chris knew that the key to unlocking the family story was his great-grandfather, whom he knew simply as ‘Bap’. No one in the family had any idea of Bap’s full name and no pictures existed of him. All they knew was that he came to Trinidad from India. When Chris arrived in Trinidad, his first stop was to visit his second cousin, Rajiv, whom he had never met before. Bap was Rajiv’s grandfather so he is a generation closer than Chris. Rajiv was able to provide Chris with two vital pieces of information. The first was that Bap’s full name was Bishnia Singh and the second was that he came from Jaipur in Rajasthan. This was unusual for a labourer – firstly to come from Jaipur and secondly because he was a warrior cast.

IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 2.5 MILLION INDIAN PEASANTS LEFT THEIR VILLAGES AND WERE SHIPPED AROUND THE EMPIRE TO WORK AS CHEAP LABOUR.

Chris suspected that, like most of Trinidad’s original Indian population, Bishnia came to the island as an indentured labourer. In the early nineteenth century Trinidad’s economy thrived on its sugar, cotton and cocoa plantations, which were worked by African slaves. When slavery was abolished in the 1830s the British, who had ruled the island since 1797, needed a new source of cheap, plentiful labour. They began importing Indian peasants under the indentured labour scheme to replace the freed slaves, but refused people of a higher cast, which is why Bishnia’s situation is unusual.

In order to confirm his suspicion, Chris enlisted the help of Shamshu Deen, an historian and genealogist. To his astonishment, Shamshu traced Bishnia to a book in the Trinidadian National Archives containing a register of Indian immigrants to Trinidad between 1901 and 1906. Among the 10,000 names in the book, Shamshu found Bishnia’s. Bishnia’s ‘number’ was recorded as 121,347, revealing that he was among the last of the indentured labourers to come to the island. In total, 147,592 labourers made the journey between the start of the scheme in Trinidad in 1845 and its abolition in 1917. But Shamshu had uncovered even more information for Chris. Each immigrant was issued with an Emigration Pass, signed by the ‘Protector of Emigrants’ in India. Bishnia’s pass recorded that he was 5’ 4”, had a ‘scar on left shin’ and was only seventeen years old when he emigrated. He arrived in Trinidad in January 1905, after a three-month voyage with 620 others, on a purpose-built ship called the Rhine. Chris was amazed by the level of detail contained in the document, which included the village (Kownarwas) that Bishnia came from. The pass held another surprise and showed just how much his great-grandfather gave up when he went to Trinidad: it records the name of Bishnia’s wife, whom he left behind in India.