Churchill

As Churchill confessed: the ‘loss’ of India was one of “my greatest personal losses” And no doubt his lugubrious whine must be grasped in this context when he saidthat it was not only an irreparable‘loss’ for the British Empire but for humanity as a whole and “ a personal loss that will never cease to gnaw at my soul.”Abstracted from the bogus rhetorical outburst it simply meant that the lush pickings of empire flowed in his blood stream.And as you know he was a subaltern in the Indian imperial army. He was also a major shareholder in British tea plantations in Assam and the the South African gold mines of his friend Cecil Rhodes.



On his father’s side (his Mother was American industrial heiress) his family’s extensive pickings harked back to the East India Company to be vastly compounded in his own lifetime. These investments embraced large land holdings in the Punjab, commodity trading, mines, shipping and insuranceand a wide variety of other assets. Here was the assemblage of the personification of capital wedded to Big Politics. The two moved in easy consonance. Plunder is seldom faceless and in the case of India and the Empire Churchill, like members ofhis social caste, personified the scale of its parasitism.