The 7 June 2020 tearing down of the Bristol statue of slave trader Edward Colston sent local authorities into panic across Britain. Joining Tory government condemnation, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer attacked as ‘completely wrong’ the idea that anti-racists should take matters into their own hands. Keen to placate Black Lives Matter protesters and diffuse any fight against state racism, reviews were announced across Britain of statues linked to slavery. Soon after, Manchester Labour councillors attacked the ‘mindless graffiti’ of those painting ‘racist’ and ‘BLM’ on a statue of Oliver Cromwell. Despite being lionised as a revolutionary, Cromwell’s connections to colonisation and slavery run deep. He remains a favourite of an imperialist bourgeoisie fighting tooth and nail to defend its ruling ideology.
Revolution in England and the re-colonisation of Ireland
The English revolution of 1640 and civil war of 1641-49 were born out of the resentment of the bourgeoisie to the new, absolutist monarchy under Charles I. The royalist regime had intended to reinstall the king’s independence from the English Parliament, attempting to win over a section of the Catholic Irish landlords to fight on his side. War ensued in Ireland and England, with anti-Papist sentiment coming to the fore among Charles’ opponents, who viewed his reign as pro-Vatican. Religion was seen by the ruling class as a function of the state and English authority, with the Church part of the state apparatus, a unit of local government and a large stakeholder in landed property. It was also, in the words of TA Jackson, a tool of ‘moral police,’ to discipline peasants into accepting ruling ideology. This was as true under Cromwell.
English soldiers mutinied and Charles eventually lost control of parliament. There was a material basis to England’s instability, with a great depression affecting small landlords acutely – Cromwell came from this section of the landed gentry and recruited the puritanical New Model Army (NMA) from petty-bourgeois small traders, artisans and yeoman farmers. The Irish were effectively caught between two armies, attacked by both royalist and parliamentary forces, and their Catholic Confederation split, at odds over whether to accept reforms and remain under the crown.
Cromwell landed in Dublin in August 1649, leading a battle-tested army. The English Republic had by this point held an insecure power since May; Charles had been executed by the NMA, sending a message to its European enemies. However, the revolution did not have the backing of the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie and those in the NMA’s ranks pushed for economic and political ‘levelling’, to crush the opposition of the squire class; Cromwell led the defeat of the Levellers, but not until after they had supported his fight against the ‘new nobility’. Cromwell’s intention now was to smash completely the Irish armies, particularly as European powers saw an opening to confront the republic.
Ordering ‘no quarter’, Drogheda and Wexford were put down ferociously by the NMA, with civilians massacred along with the fighters – around 7,000 killed, proving the republican bourgeoisie as bloody as the Elizabethan conquerors had been a century before. Clonmel, Waterford, Limerick and a few other towns put up fierce resistance, but the final defeat was crushing. In 11 years of war Ireland had suffered bloodshed, plague, famine and the widespread devastation of economic and social life; a quarter of the population perished. The Cromwellian regime, which saw Ireland as a possession, as part of England’s Commonwealth, hanged those accused of rising in 1641 and forced a ‘debt’ onto Irish landlords and farmers. With the restoration of the monarchy in England, the landlords would regain their previous positions as subservient agents of the crown.
The Caribbean: Cromwell’s colonialist design
In the period between the defeat of the Irish and the restoration in 1660, Cromwell launched his so-called Western Design, a colonialist venture into the Caribbean, insisting the plan was God’s will and that it would bring wealth and glory to England. The Empire would challenge the interests of Spain, which had captured the entire region, driving the slave trade since the late 1400s. A turning point in Britain’s imperial relationship to the Americas and an unprecedented use of global force, Cromwell’s mission added vast sugar plantations and slavery to Britain’s global ‘possessions’.
Repulsed by the Spanish and their slave armies at Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic and Haiti), the British turned to Jamaica. After waging a five-year war against guerrilla Spanish forces and the runaway slave communities known as Maroons, Cromwell’s government sent servants and prisoners (many of them Irish) to the island to swell the labouring population. Jamaica was a centrepiece in Britain’s new Caribbean empire and would eventually provide privileged livelihoods to bourgeois parasites back home. Slaves came to form a large majority of the Jamaican population, under a merciless regime of forced labour and martial punishment. Under Spanish, then British rule, around 600,000 slaves were brought to Jamaica from West Africa between 1533 and 1807.
On the islands of Barbados and Monserrat, both already under British control, African slaves would form the backbone of lucrative tobacco and sugar plantations, with around 387,000 brought to Barbados alone. Cromwell ordered Irish prisoners, including those who had rebelled against British rule, to be sent to the islands. He wrote, in the aftermath of the Drogheda massacre of September 1649:
‘When they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes . . . I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’
There were occasional uprisings in Jamaica, including the 1655 killing of plantation-owners as runaway African and Irish slaves attacked the British militia forces.
Ultimately, the Cromwellian regime marked a new chapter in British colonialism, establishing for the first time an empire of plantations based on the direct and brutal enslavement of Africans. With parliament insurgent against the unchecked rule of the monarch and landed aristocracy, the British bourgeoisie would be the main beneficiaries of slavery for the next two centuries.
Cromwell statues and decolonisation
As Marx famously noted, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’, with the bourgeoisie dominating intellectual and political life under capitalism. Statues and monuments are above all a celebration of ruling class ideology. Any council or government-led ‘review’ will be limited by this reality. Cromwell remains the darling of a section of the British ruling class – and of Labour politicians in particular. It was reported that Tony Blair (another who believed God wanted him to wage war for British imperial interests) upset then Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern by refusing to take down a portrait of Cromwell at Westminster. Cromwell’s statue remains outside the Houses of Parliament and in Manchester’s Wythenshawe Park.
Like Trump’s embrace of open racists of US history, the Tory regime is opposed to any meaningful change. On 12 June Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote:
‘We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.’
A serial liar and committed imperialist, Johnson claims that Britain’s ‘faults’ (which he doesn’t identify) are in the past. But far from being the legacy of a bygone era, British imperialism is a thing of the present, as a centre of parasitic finance capital, extracting super profits and resources from oppressed nations, waging war and propping up ruthless regimes like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Today, Jamaica faces economic ruin under imperialist IMF loans; the north of Ireland remains under British occupation. In Britain, the state racism at the heart of stop-and-search policing, the disproportionate state killings of young black people and the detention and deportation of tens of thousands of migrants reflect Britain’s place in the world. Racism is national oppression in the belly of the imperialist beast.
The Topple the Racists campaign has focused on the statues of those with obvious links to slavery including, in Manchester, Robert Peel, the son of a slaver and two-time prime minister credited with the birth of modern policing. When a statue of slave trader Robert Milligan was removed by council cranes from London’s West India Quay, Guardian writer and Labour member Owen Jones announced that this was ‘how most people would like to see statues removed.’ Like the Democrat-supporters in the US, British opportunists want to suck the anger out of any street movement and divert it into respectable liberal politics.
The battle to ‘decolonise’ Britain has to be about more than statues and symbolism. Targeting the symbols of colonialist racism is a start, but it can’t end with the demands of Topple the Racists, who only see imperialism in the past tense. The alternative is shown by the energy and rage of the protests which ripped down Colston and Columbus. The next step is an anti-imperialist movement that gives the ruling class nowhere to hide and fights to destroy the system itself. That fight means socialism.
Louis Brehony
