The former BBC presenter, who was born in London and is of Pakistani and Indian descent, went on to say that Britain owed “43 trillion” to India.
Speaking about Tahani, her character in the series The Good Place, Jamil told the Yestergays podcast that Americans were wrong to think British people were “sweet”.
She said: “I had to make Tahani more of a b—-. Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy because British people are truly the most evil people in history.”
She added that Britain was more akin to “Thanos”, the world-destroying and genocidal villain in the Marvel comic book franchise.
“They owe £43tn to India,” she added. “We colonised the world. Rich British people are not likeable to anyone. They are horrible.”
Utsa Patnaik, an Indian Marxist economist, has repeatedly suggested that the British “drained” $45tn (£39tn) from India in contested claims about the amount of wealth extracted from the subcontinent.
Jamil, who is married to James Blake, a British singer, claimed there was a “race war” happening in Britain.
She added: “Britain is f—-ed. It doesn’t feel as though I’m going back to some haven. There’s literally a race war happening now.”
Jamil was a Channel 4 presenter before moving to BBC Radio 1, and found widespread fame when she was cast in the US comedy The Good Place.
Alongside her acting career, Jamil has been outspoken on a number of issues, such as women’s body image and the Black Lives Matter movement.
British actress, former TV presenter and sometime pundit Jameela Jamil has issued a follow-up to the remarkable comments she made a few weeks ago on the Yestergays podcast describing the British as “the most evil people in history”, primarily citing the history of Empire as her reasoning.
Her follow-up is something of a doubling down on her prior sentiments. I’m not really interested in evaluating the means or the method by which Jamil put her point across, or her feelings about the matter – only in taking her points in order and considering whether they’re correct.
So here they are, starting with her primary statement.
1. “The British are the most evil people in history.”
We’ll begin with an inventory of just the ‘moral inventions’ to which the British have claim. It throws up the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the global template for parliament, the invention of humanitarianism, and of course the abolition of the slave trade, paid for in blood and glory by the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy through the 19th Century – perhaps the greatest moral achievement to which any nation can lay reasonable claim.
Then there’s Wollstonecraftian feminism and the codified idea of individual rights against the Crown. The harm principle.
Indeed, the very theory of toleration which Jamil invokes to defame the British originates with the British. She is wielding a standard against the very people who invented it.
This does not seem to me to be the record of an evil people, let alone an especially evil people. We could go on with the list, but there are many other statements to interrogate.
2. “[The Empire is] widely documented as being the largest in history, having taken all land with violence, and having the highest death count of any other empire.”
The largest? Correct and entirely uncontroversial: roughly 35.5 million square kilometres at its 1920 peak.
“Took all land with violence”? Straightforwardly false as a universal. Britain acquired its territories by every imaginable means: cession by treaty, purchase, transfer from other European powers at the conclusion of continental wars, dynastic inheritance (Bombay arrived as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry), protectorate agreements signed by local rulers seeking a counterweight to their rivals, and settlement of sparsely populated territory. Conquest was one mode among several. Merely considering the size of British standing armies, and the geographical span of their deployment during the period of imperial expansion – especially compared to the size of subject populations – makes the idea of the British blazing in to subjugate the world at bayonet point rather ridiculous.
“Highest death count of any empire”? This is not an established finding but an inference drawn from a single contested paper by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel. It also compares unlike quantities, such as famine excess-mortality estimated against a counterfactual baseline, set beside direct killing at sabre-point in the case of the Mongol or Japanese empires.
It must be remembered that, for instance, the East India Company’s expansion in India ran on Indian capital, Indian troops and Indian allies. Plassey was financed in significant part by the Jagat Seth banking house; by the mid-19th Century the Company’s Indian army was several times larger than its British contingent. A conquest narrative of foreign warships arriving to subdue a single unified polity living hitherto in perfect harmony acutely mischaracterises what was actually a collapsing Mughal successor-state system in which the Company was, for decades, one contending power among many – and frequently invited in.
3. “Up to 165 million Indians died during the occupation.”
This is attributable to the much-touted claim among enthusiastic critics of Empire that the British schemed to kill off hundreds of millions of Indians through famine during this period. Tirthankar Roy (LSE, an economic historian of colonial India) has published the substantive counter-case, positing that there is no evidence whatsoever that famines in India were less frequent or less deadly in the pre-colonial period – so the comparison lacks a control, and thus any grounds to lay responsibility at the door of the British.
The mortality data by the economist Robert Allen that Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel and others rely on comes largely from the Indo-Gangetic basin, which was not where the great Deccan famines occurred; Martin Ravallion’s 1987 work found that food exports rose with good harvests and fell with bad ones, stabilising rather than draining domestic consumption; and Deccan famines effectively ceased after 1900 while the underlying weather shocks did not – which is difficult to explain on a pure extraction model but easier to explain on a state-capacity model.
Roy’s own explanation is that famine relief improved as British administrative capacity improved, and there is no reason to believe Roy is a motivated Empire apologist.
4. “Oxfam have a 97-page report that claims $64 trillion was drained.”
$64 trillion is more than all the wealth that has ever existed.
The figure was not calculated by Oxfam but by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik (and calculated for the purpose of being pitched at wealth distribution seminars in Davos). The Patnaik method takes India’s export surplus, which was appropriated rather than paid for in the ordinary way, and compounds it forward at a rate of interest over two centuries, resulting in this vast inflation. The underlying nominal drain is orders of magnitude smaller. The number is best read as “what the drain would be worth if invested at 5% since 1765” – a rhetorical construction chosen to arrive at the highest figure possible. It is not a serious number.
And even if it were, it would not be a final number. Presumably, in any settling of accounts of a reparatory nature between Britain and a colonial subject, the champions of restitution would be just as keen to calculate the extent of that nation’s present wealth that may be owed in some way to the institutions, customs, laws, methods and other contributions made by the British during the period of occupation – and duly factor that in?
5. “India had 25% of the world’s wealth before Britain, four per cent after.”
Prior to industrialisation, GDP was purely a factor of population size. More people meant a higher GDP.
Industrialisation changed this dynamic fundamentally. Industrialised nations were able to increase productivity and thus generate more wealth, per person and per unit of time, than non-industrialised nations. As not only Britain but subsequently all of Western Europe, North America and later Japan industrialised, they created wealth at a far greater rate than India. India’s decline in the standings is due to the relative progression of its peers.
China is an excellent added weight in the assessment. It did not experience a colonisation of a similar nature; it also did not industrialise; and its own relative share of the world’s wealth also fell during the same period.
6. “Sure they built roads, but only to loot with more ease.”
Rail and canal networks built purely for extraction do not look like India’s, which by 1947 was the fourth-largest network on Earth at roughly 40,000 route miles – retained and extended wholesale after independence rather than dismantled as a colonial artefact.
The British built the Ganges Canal and the Punjab canal colonies, among the largest irrigation projects in the world, whose function was agricultural output for domestic consumption in regions that had no export value for Britain.
Furthermore, Britain did much more than build the roads. The full inheritance includes codified law, the census, the survey, the university system founded in 1857, an English-language administrative and commercial layer that is now a huge comparative advantage for India in global services, and the professional civil service on the Northcote-Trevelyan model.
The railway guarantee system, however – under which Indian revenues underwrote a guaranteed 5% return to British investors regardless of performance – was a real and well-documented transfer from Indian taxpayers to British capital. There is neither need nor point in denying as much.
7. “It was not just ‘the done thing’. We had time and experience. We knew better.”
If the British are in fact a uniquely evil people, it can hardly be argued that they did in fact ‘know better’.
But in any case, Jamil is right – albeit in a way that weakens her point: the British really did know better. Britain was the first major power to criminalise the slave trade (1807) and then slavery itself (1833), doing so decades ahead of most of its peers, while the moral case against both was largely developed in Britain by Clarkson, Wilberforce, Equiano and the Quaker network. The claim “they knew better” is true precisely because Britain is where a great deal of the knowing was done.
The abolition came at great cost and was enforced across decades. The 1833 compensation settlement, about £20 million, ran to roughly 40% of annual government expenditure and was financed by a loan not discharged until 2015. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron patrolled for around 60 years, directly freed around 150,000 people, and lost roughly 1,600 sailors in the process. Rationally self-interested extraction does not look like this, has never looked like this, and will never look like this. Interestingly, the Royal Navy’s efforts were directly responsible for things like the break-up of the African Kingdom of Dahomey, in modern-day Benin, whose economy was so completely reliant on the trafficking of other Africans for slavery that it could not survive once the trade had been stamped out.
And colonisation by real invasion and bloody, ruthless conquest was the ‘done thing’ at the time, as in every prior era; to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. The Mughal state was itself the product of foreign invasion – still a bone of enormous, live, modern contention for many Indians – Aurangzeb’s Deccan wars had exhausted it, Maratha raiding into Bengal in the 1740s killed people in the hundreds of thousands by contemporary estimate, and Nader Shah’s sack of Delhi in 1739 removed both the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor a generation before Plassey.
The moral standard Jamil applies to Britain is one no 18th-Century state anywhere met. The party that came closest to meeting it was… the British.
8. “The Empire is not in our school curriculum, so many Brits don’t know much about it”
People never stopped going on about the Empire when I was at school – though happily it was taught in a less moralising way than I imagine it is now. It is taught at Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-Level. This claim is nonsense.
9. “Look at Germany and how accountable they have been.”
We will presume Jamil is talking about German apologies for Nazism here. Germany reckoned rightly with a 12-year national-socialist regime – with living perpetrators, following total military defeat, foreign occupation and an externally imposed denazification programme – centred on an unambiguous and systematic programme of racial extermination. It has nothing in common with the Empire.
Germany is actually nowhere near so exemplary in grappling with its own much shorter imperial history. The Herero and Nama genocide was only formally recognised by Germany in 2021, more than a century after the fact; the accompanying €1.1 billion reparations package was structured as development aid over 30 years, was negotiated with the Namibian state rather than with the affected communities, and has been rejected by many Herero and Nama representatives.
And, at any rate, Britain has in fact both apologised and paid. The 2013 Mau Mau settlement was £19.9 million to 5,228 claimants with a statement of regret from the Foreign Secretary; Cameron called Amritsar “deeply shameful” at Jallianwala Bagh in 2013; Blair issued statements on the Irish famine in 1997 and on slavery in 2006.
10. “Where has the money been? Ten per cent hold over 50% of the wealth.”
This is the ‘Empire made us rich’ chestnut. In fact, British per-capita income growth accelerated faster after decolonisation vs during the imperial peak. The richest countries in Europe today include several that had no empire at all, and Portugal, which held its colonies longest, is among the poorest in Western Europe.
11. “[Commonwealth migrants] came here because this is where their money had been relocated to.”
No, they came because of the 1948 British Nationality Act conferring the right of entry, acute post-war labour shortages, and active recruitment campaigns by the NHS and London Transport.
The revealed-preference test disproves this. If the destination of migration tracked the path of extracted capital, Indian emigration would concentrate overwhelmingly in Britain – and it does not. The Gulf states host several times more Indian migrants than Britain does, and the Gulf extracted nothing from India (though some states in the Gulf are certainly extracting an awful lot, of an egregious and shameful nature, from Indians – including their passports).
…
There are many empires in the history of our world that make for rich comparatives in this argument. For pure violence meted out, for the intensity of that violence, and for the efficiency with which it erased the cultures of the subjugated, the British Empire comes nowhere near the top of the league table.
For the richness of the inheritance it left to its formerly subjugated territories – which include a great number of the world’s richest, safest, freest and most prosperous nations – it stands proudly, and perhaps alone, among those at the very top.
And safety, freedom and prosperity have never struck me as ‘evil’.
Jamil’s sentiments are unfortunate, especially for someone who has grown up on these islands alongside the rest of us – and all the more so given that such views are merely the product of being misinformed.
We can all sincerely hope she turns to history shortly, at which point she can quite deservedly let go of the intense anger she needlessly feels towards the country in which she was born.
This piece was first published on X. Maxi Gorynski runs Progress For Britain, a think tank, and has a Substack – Heir to the Thought – that you can subscribe to here.
(UKR)