SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: THE BRITISH, FRENCH AND DUTCH EMPIRES WERE THE WORST!

https://x.com/sov_media/status/2008919566081273946

Sovereign Media

THE BRITISH, FRENCH AND DUTCH EMPIRES WERE THE WORST! In this exchange on Mehdi Hasan's Head to Head with Nigel Biggar, post-colonial sociologist Gurminder K Bhambra dismantles a core myth used to rehabilitate empire: the idea that all empires are essentially the same. Her intervention is historical, precise, and deeply human. Bhambra challenges Nigel Biggar’s claim that empire is a universal and morally neutral feature of human history. She argues that this framing deliberately erases a crucial distinction between empires of incorporation and empires of extraction. The Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires governed through incorporation, integrating populations into administrative, economic, and social systems. European empires, by contrast, were built around extraction; wealth was siphoned out, societies were reorganised for profit, and human life was treated as expendable. She grounds this distinction in one of the most basic measures of governance: food and survival. Famines occurred across history, but their causes matter. Under Mughal rule, Bengal did not experience mass famine deaths over the course of four centuries. Under British control, the East India Company presided over a famine that killed more than 10 million people while continuing to extract taxes. During World War II, under direct British rule, another famine killed an additional 3 million. These were not natural disasters; they were policy outcomes. Bhambra’s point is simple and devastating. Empire is not an abstract idea. It has material consequences. Who eats, who starves, and who profits are political decisions. To flatten all empires into a single category is not scholarly neutrality; it is moral evasion. Her analysis exposes how colonial violence is often rewritten as inevitability, progress, or tragedy without perpetrators. By restoring historical specificity, Bhambra refuses that erasure. This is not about guilt or virtue. It is about truth, accountability, and recognising that millions died not because of scarcity, but because extraction was prioritised over human life.

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2:12 AM · Jan 8, 2026