Ghosts of empire book a great read about evils of colonialism

 

Ramon Ramos


"Ghosts of Empire" is basically a book that writer Kwasi Kwarteng writes and examines British empire and how it manipulated certain leaders and ruined the land and its peoples. The writer divides this book in several sections looking at Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and the Sudan. How the English favored some groups over others was a strategy used in Nigeria to divide people and carve up one nation that should be three. Hong Kong was a successful entrepreneurship that England had for a century and helped influence China to make the transition to a modern crony capitalist country. Burma has always been a mess thanks to imperial rule and just ended forty years of brutal dictatorship and is a nation dived by many ethnic groups again the British played against each other to their maximum benefit and control. Sudan is still a mess and basically this is the point of the book is that colonialism's effects still are felt to this day. The chapter on Burma was particularly interesting as not much is written or known about this dynamic land that has a different name now.The main motivation of these colonial British royals for going to these native lands was to be bigshots in another land as this was nothing they could acquire in their native England. Indirect rule through native Chiefs and Indian princes was good method of establishing an elite class that would e loyal to international trade and the early formations of globalization that an establish empire such as France and England would thus more easily enjoy the fruits of hard labor the native rulers would dish out from orders in London.