What happened?
They didn’t get very far. They did fight against the British. Many of them were arrested. And after the war, when they were being brought to trial, top Indian politicians, including Nehru, donned their lawyers’ clothes and went in to defend them, saying they were nationalist patriots. We didn’t agree with them, but they did what they did against a country that was occupying them.
Since Japan had Burma, why didn’t they send more troops over to India?
It is another of these mysteries, why they gave up on India, why they didn’t invade the Soviet Union. They just gave up at one point in time, and felt that they had to concentrate everything elsewhere. I think, by that time, they probably felt that their supply lines were a bit overstretched.
Did India have any wealth for Japan?
Well, India had enormous wealth, potential wealth.
Potential, but not at the moment.
Not at the moment. It was wealth which would have to be exploited, but they had a massive labor force.
Yes, but they would’ve had to be fed, and the Japanese did have food problems.
You’ve written that, after the Second World War, essentially the United States struck a deal with Japan to run a form of one-party state, am I correct?
People talk a great deal about General MacArthur writing the Japanese constitution. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, people proposed a “Japanese-style” occupation of Iraq. But the occupation of Japan was by no means progressive. First, why keep the Japanese emperor around? Normally the United States did not have too much time for that, nor did the French because of their republican traditions. Rule through monarchs is more of a British tradition. But in the case of Japan, I think MacArthur and the US government decided that removing the emperor from the throne of Japan and making Japan a republic might unleash social and political forces in the country that they couldn’t control. They always needed people to control these countries on their behalf, and they felt they stood a better chance with the emperor. In fact, the astonishing thing is that the emperor was already preparing the speech he expected to make when he was tried as a war criminal, because he was centrally involved in the war. And when MacArthur went to see him, he thought this was the end. In fact, MacArthur said, hang on, we’re keeping you on, your position is safe.
The other thing to bear in mind is that, after the Second World War, in all three Axis countries, Japan, Germany, Italy, the bulk of the military structure of these countries was kept intact, and the same personnel who had fought against the United States continued to play prominent roles. In Japan, for example, they removed very few people. There was a war crimes tribunal to prosecute Tojo and some others, but by and large they kept the army in force. In Italy, 60 to 65 percent of Mussolini’s structure in the judiciary, in the military, in the police force was kept in place. In Germany, you probably have the biggest purge, but still a lot of former Nazis joined the Christian Democratic Party, and played a part in the police force and the judiciary, because by this time, the enemy was communism. And so anything that could be used against the communists was used.
Was there a moment during the Second World War when the United States became an imperial power of the magnitude to inherit the British mantle?
From the moment it began, really, something had to give. If the First World War was a decisive event for making the United States a world power, bringing it onto the world stage, the Second World War was a decisive event in terms of making the United States an imperial power, which meant it had to fight wars to preserve its dominion. This soon led to the interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, and so on. Of course, the United States had always been an empire in North America, as we know, expanding its territory at the expense of Mexico. Buying Louisiana from the French, kicking the Brits out. Controlling South America indirectly, by and large, even though the marines went in time and time again, as General Smedley Butler reminds us in his wonderful book War Is a Racket. By and large, the way the United States preferred to rule the world was to find local relays who would do their bidding. Where they did intervene directly, the results weren’t always happy, like in the Philippines.
You have pointed out that Britain ruled India with only, I think, thirty thousand soldiers.
That is amazing, yes. At the height of the British rule in India, there were thirty-six thousand white English soldiers. But the Brits, because they decided to stay there, ruled this vast and populous subcontinent by doing deals with wings of its ruling class in different parts, and creating a “new model army,” the British Indian Army, which was staffed with people from the poorest sections of the Indian countryside. They avoided recruiting in the towns, recruiting mainly poor peasants, or mountain people, like the Gurkhas, instead, who were paid and looked after. It was a sort of paternalistic army. They troops weren’t just left to rot, and that was a very successful operation, which no imperial power could ever repeat again.
And they developed a landlord class?
They did indeed. In previous centuries, during the Mughal empire, landlordism hadn’t been encouraged. The state was dominant. The British created a class of landlords by giving larger states to people who were already notables in these regions but who exercised power through collecting taxes, rather than ownership of land, though in many cases they had slowly begun to accumulate landholdings. So the British institutionalized all this by saying to these people, you’re the landlords, you control these areas, you control the tenants under you, and we need your support. A lot of tenants from these estates often went and fought for the British army in China, in Indochina, and elsewhere in the world. Lots of Indian soldiers died in the Second World War in the fields of Europe.
So you’re saying the United States inherited, with certain exceptions, this colonial legacy?
They inherited this colonial legacy from the British, but they didn’t operate the way the British did. When the British occupied Africa, British civil servants were stationed around the country. The queen was the head of the country. I mean, it was a traditional, old-fashioned colonialism. If you were a French colony in Africa, you were part of the French commonwealth. All the deals were essentially done in Paris. The United States didn’t go down that route. One reason they didn’t is because the early ideology of the United States was we are an anticolonial country because we had to get rid of a colonial power, the Brits, ourselves. And this played a very important part in how the United States formulated its thinking about its own empire. They could never admit they were an empire. It is only recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that they’ve begun to do that. And so that played some part in it, and that didn’t encourage them to send Americans around to staff the customs service of country X or country Y. They’ve always been unhappy when they’re forced to do that, as in Iraq today. So it was a different type of an empire. As a matter of fact, the British got more financially out of controlling Argentina indirectly than they got out of occupying Africa. And for the United States, I think it is this financial aspect that is paramount when US interests are concerned—what their corporations can do, what is the best possible atmosphere for them to function. That has dominated US thinking for a long time.