“I thought they died out,” a woman remarked flippantly to my friend just the other day. She, like many Indians, has long believed that Anglo-Indians ceased to exist when the British left the subcontinent. But despite a recent Indian government effort to strip us of our legislative protections after a bogus census count, we have endured.

I am Anglo-Indian—AI, as we are commonly known. I am not dead. In fact, there are over 350,000 of us in India today. And our history tells the story of a group of people that straddle two worlds, offering a glimpse into the complexity of colonial and postcolonial life. It is also the story of how a small minority group has nurtured a deep sense of community for hundreds of years in Indian society, which has both embraced us and held us out as vestiges of a foreign occupation.

Yet we have remained invisible in most colonial histories. Article 366(2) of the 1950 India constitution defined an AI as “a person whose father, or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line, is or was of European descent, but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is, or was, born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein, and not established there for temporary purposes only.” My childhood friend Barry O’Brien, in his exhaustive book The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait Of A Community, traces the story of AIs, “one of the oldest and largest communities of mixed descent people in the world,” back to 1498 “when Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, set foot on the shores of Calicut—a whole century before the British arrived in India.”

All my grandparents—Wilfred Mayer, Mary Michael, Benjamin D’Monte, and Vida Chatelier—were born in British-ruled India, as were their parents and most of their grandparents. My parents, George Mayer and Alicia D’Monte, were born before India won independence in 1947.

My family spread out across the subcontinent following the veins of the growing railway network. My grandfather Benjamin D’Monte was an engine driver who succumbed to lung cancer after a brief life spent shoveling coal into the belching boilers of English engines. His daughters, my mother, and her sister, Lourdes, grew up in a railway colony in the southern Indian town of Podanur.

Moira’s parents, Alicia and George Mayer, at their wedding in 1965. Courtesy of author.

Annual Prize Day at Frank Anthony Public School, with leaders of the Anglo-Indian community seated in the front. Courtesy of Karen Mayer.

From left to right: George Mayer, Moira (Mayer) Shourie, Jill (Mayer) Morris, and Alicia Mayer at the All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) Ball in 1995. Courtesy of author.

Anglo-Indian leaders at an All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) in 1980. From left to right: George Mayer, Josep Fusté, Maj. Gen Williams, and Malcolm Booth. Courtesy of author.

Over centuries, Anglo-Indians have formed composite identities in the multiracial population of India. Like our forebearers, AIs are Christian and multilingual: our mother tongue is English, and we often speak Hindi and the languages and dialects of the places we originated from (like Konkani, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu). For generations, we married mostly within our community. We exist outside the Hindu caste system, and have been referred to in derogatory terms like half-caste, kuccha bachha (half-baked child), and no one’s favorite, “bastards of the British.”

We have endured slurs and been alienated by our own people. We have been made the punching bag of every nationalist politician. The Indian stereotypes of Christians in general and AIs in particular are promiscuous, drunk, lazy louches. Hindi movies reinforce this idea by naming cocktail waitresses—symbols of loose morals—Mary. It was particularly harrowing for my parents to raise three daughters in a society that saw girls wearing skirts as fair game for sexual harassment.

This alienation had at least one positive effect: AI women gravitated toward careers that went against the restrictive gender norms of Indian society, working in public-facing jobs as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and flight attendants. As people with professional training and college degrees and a mastery of speaking English, many AI families rose into the middle class within a generation of India’s independence.

Our in-between status also created cohesion. In 1926, Sir Henry Gidney formed the All India Anglo-Indian Association to create a central financial, political, and cultural hub for our community. Among its early leaders was Frank Anthony, a London-educated lawyer, who in 1942 negotiated with Gandhi, Nehru, and leaders of the independence movement to enshrine legally-protected representation for Anglo-Indians in the infant country. Still, at that time, many AIs left India along with the British and emigrated to other Commonwealth countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

But AIs have found ways to keep our subculture alive through music, food, and the annual general meeting. AGMs are usually held during the Dussehra-Diwali holiday season in October and cover a wide range of issues, from education and sports to civic participation. While our parents engaged delegates from all across the country in debates about the future of our community in the great hall of Frank Anthony Public School in Delhi, we kids played childhood games that morphed into teenage dance parties that blossomed into romantic relationships. Every year new couples found love, new romances were celebrated, new babies were christened. Moira Georgina Mayer was one such baby, crowned “Most Beautiful” in 1973, and paraded by Mr. Anthony’s wife, Olive, or “Beaut,” as she was affectionately known. And so we Anglo-Indians ensured our longevity and our sense of identity, even as a mere 0.01% of the Indian population.

I remember Christmas dances filled with the music of our very own Cliff Richard (born Harry Rodger Webb in Lucknow in 1940) and Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold Dorsey in Madras in 1936). Where ladies copied fashions and hairstyles sported by Hollywood stars like Merle Oberon (born Estelle Thompson in Bombay in 1911). And the menu consisted of dishes like glassy, pepper water, jalfrezi, country captain, and yellow rice with ball curry, a bed of turmeric-tinged coconut rice with a spicy tomato-based meatball curry. After all the uncles and aunties turned in for the night, we teenagers would bring out guitars and makeshift drum sets for spontaneous jam sessions, dancing along to ABBA, Lobo, Boney M., and Shakin’ Stevens. Often, a power outage would send us out to the school’s cricket field, where our neighbors from the surrounding Lajpat Nagar colony would pour out onto their balconies for respite from the oppressive heat and to enjoy the spectacle of Anglo-Indian youngsters partaking in wild revelry. On those nights the unofficial AI anthem was “Roll Out the Barrel,” a song that perfectly captures our lightheartedness, and love for a dance and a stiff drink to wash off the day.

I moved away from India to the U.S. when I was 24. Because I didn’t marry an Anglo-Indian man, my children are not AIs. But I continue to share the rich and hybrid culture we made our own with them. And so, the essence of so much of my community survives. I feel that they sense it in the way I speak, in the AI lingo I use when speaking with my sisters that sends my sons into conniptions (“Come on men Moira-girl, chuck off in the mouth,” which is AI-speak for “have a bite to eat, Moira”). And in the subtlest of my mannerisms. And not least in the food that nourishes us, often drawn from the handwritten cookbook my own mother gave me as a parting gift before I boarded my flight to Boston for graduate school, filled with recipes for Nana’s roast, bloody cutlets, mixed grill, and that signature dish of Anglo-Indians everywhere: yellow rice and ball curry.

The Anglo Indians Favourites Playlist:

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To mention the fledgling enterprise in the presence of a white master was a ticket to torture and likely death by hanging, so everyone took precautions to swear new recruits to secrecy. With a few months, more than 60,000 enslaved people had heard about the effort, through well-wired plantation networks.
 
Then, on the night of December 27, 1831, “the business” opened. The first signal fires were lit in the hills above Montego Bay, and soon plantation houses went up in flames across the richest West Indian colony of the British empire. White Jamaica found itself contending with its biggest insurrection ever. It took five weeks for a British military crackdown to restore quiet.

The rebellion’s end would not be a lasting defeat. Much of the British public was already disgusted by slavery—the price of maintaining it seemed to be endless wars overseas—and after the Jamaica rebellion, political pressure built. Within 18 months of the first fire, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

The rebellion, after failing, had succeeded. And not just at advancing freedom. “The Christmas Uprising” in Jamaica was a groundbreaking action and a model; its enslaved leaders anticipated the methods of later revolutionary movements—from the Irish Republican Army to Gandhi’s struggle against the British, from the French underground fight against the Nazis to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The story of the Jamaican revolution suggests that methods of calculated revolutionary action transcend historical periods.

In other words, the ways of resistance are timeless. 
 
Jamaica’s enslaved population was among the most abused and powerless on the globe in 1831. Most were illiterate. Few had ever seen anything but their owner’s plantation. Their only weapons were machetes and rocks. They constantly lived on the edge of hunger and harsh punishment. Yet even in this isolated atmosphere of extreme deprivation, they developed durable strategies for a politically successful revolution.

One such strategy was nonviolence. The chief conspirator of “the business,” an enslaved Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe, had insisted the protest would be a peaceful sit-down strike. The plan was to simply refuse to work on the second rest day after Christmas unless masters agreed to pay striking workers half the daily wages that a free person would get for chopping sugar cane.

This simple tactic of resistance anticipated the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi by 70 years. What Gandhi would call satyagraha, or “truth power,” forced authorities to confront and defend a central injustice, and perhaps open their own eyes to a moral blind spot. Just as Gandhi knew that British abuses would not last forever under the scrutiny of outside public opinion, Sharpe was also aware of a larger world that might sympathize with his cause.

As a traveling church deacon, he had access to the newspapers brought by cargo ships and had read about the abolitionist sentiment in Britain. His Christian beliefs were of the pacifist kind and he repeatedly told his followers not to harm anyone. Indeed, the extremely low reported death toll among whites in the uprising—just 14, when up to 500 rebels were killed or executed—speaks to the tremendous restraint and forbearance among those who had every reason to want revenge. 
 
The Jamaican revolution also employed a simple idealism—its leaders understood that, if oppressed people were going to risk their lives, they must be given a vision of a higher purpose that could be phrased in simple terms. Samuel Sharpe used the New Testament, visiting slave villages to preach verses considered too provocative by white missionaries, in particular those that emphasized freedom in Christ. Along with scripture, Sharpe (one of the few enslaved people on the island who was literate) let his followers in on a secret: The British people across the ocean were agitating to free the enslaved, and the King of England had signed a general “free paper” that was being kept under wraps by the Jamaican sugar barons.

This last part was embroidered. William IV was an ardent defender of slavery. But the enslaved people in Jamaica still revered his name and believed him to be their friend. Sharpe’s pro-liberty message was both simple and electric. Slavery was against God’s law and the King’s will.

This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals touted 40 years later by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who exulted, “In Moscow from a sea of blood and flame the constellation of the revolution will rise, high and beautiful, and will become the guiding star for the good of all liberated mankind.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an admirer of Gandhi, also advanced a message of Christian love and justice that cut across racial lines, was easy to communicate, and proved difficult to refute. 
 

In Jamaica, Sharpe, while insisting on nonviolent methods, also knew he needed a military wing. At planning meetings in fall 1831, several of Sharpe’s lieutenants agitated for a backup plan in case the strike should fail. Two of those present—Thomas Dove and Robert Gardiner—would become the fiercest fighters against the white volunteer militia once the strike had moved into a less peaceful phase. In January, they even built and staffed an impressive hilltop fortress, designed to repel incursions, called Greenwich Hill, and fought several engagements with British troops. In this, they anticipated another commonplace practice of 20th-century resistance movements: to maintain an armed underground sector operating beneath the political wing. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and Ireland’s Sinn Fein are the most well-known examples of this “arrows and olive branch” approach.

Sharpe also cultivated the enslaved “elite.” The Jamaican colonial government was surprised when it learned that the revolt’s leaders were among the most privileged of the island’s enslaved population: head drivers, head boilers, butlers, and traveling deacons like Sharpe. They were those with seemingly the least incentive to rebel because they enjoyed the most perquisites and avoided the whipping customarily dealt out to field hands. Sharpe himself told his interrogators he had always been treated kindly by his master and never beaten.

Yet the “elites” were also best positioned to recruit followers because they were trusted both by laborers on their watch and by white guardians of the sugar estates. The value of elite support is an enduring lesson of revolution. American colonial resistance to British rule was backed by Boston’s richest men. Vladimir Lenin was no peasant; he grew up in a middle-class household in Ulyanovsk, attended Kazan University and surrounded himself with fellow educated radicals.

Sharpe also used operational tactics—including small cells and safe houses—that would become de rigeur. French Resistance operatives in World War II famously kept themselves in small clusters to avoid mass arrest, and recruited only one or two people at a time, using a case officer who did not know the central command. After the war, communist insurgents used a similar strategy. But enslaved people in 1830s Jamaica had already figured it out.

Samuel Sharpe had been permitted to travel between plantations for the ostensible reason of teaching Bible lessons and leading small worship services. This he did, but he also appointed cell leaders who appointed their own small groups. Sharpe created a ritual called “taking the swear” in which new recruits would promise on the Bible to sit down after Christmas and not work. Sharpe did the first secret swearings, but from then on, his own “case officers” did the work of exponential recruitment. In this way, and within one of the most repressive societies on earth, he built a connected network of strangers that stretched 70 miles in all directions.
 
Sharpe’s development of safe houses was also ahead of its time. Every Jamaican plantation had a section the white ruling class called the Negro Village: a “main street” of individual houses occupied by enslaved people. Field hands typically occupied small huts, but those in senior labor roles tended to have frame houses. In these elite houses, Sharpe preached about the “business.” His top-level recruits used these houses for the most sensitive meetings, stockpiled weapons in them, and even created their own military-style uniforms: blue jackets with red sashes.

This was not unlike the system that Nelson Mandela would use in townships all across South Africa in the formative days of the African National Congress. He would appear at certain homes unexpectedly, a step ahead of the state police. “He put a number of questions to us and then gave us a briefing about what he had been doing outside the country and then discussed the tasks that lay ahead,” recalled one man who met Mandela secretly at a house in Durban in 1962. 
 
Finally, the Jamaican rebels were astonishingly good at the secret sharing of intelligence, and they often knew about troop movements, government decrees, and even international news before their white masters heard about it. They used a sophisticated network of deck hands, house servants, traveling Bible teachers, and cargo ship stevedores to pass along messages.

A planter on the north shore once heard a critical piece of news from Kingston before the mail arrived and surmised there must have been “some unknown mode of conveying intelligence.”

The most critical piece of information of the early uprising, however, could not have been more visible: the first signal fire lit at Kensington Estate on the night of December 27, 1831. Whether Samuel Sharpe approved of it or not, the first blaze was followed almost immediately by a chain of fires lit on neighboring plantations that turned the night sky a dazzling orange and told the entire northwestern side of the island that “the business” was coming to pass at last.

The white ruling class could not help but be intimidated to the point of total confusion.

“The whole surrounding country was completely illuminated, and presented a terrible appearance, even at noon-day,” marveled a white militiaman. “When, however, the shades of night descended, and the buildings on the side of those beautiful mountains, which form the splendid panorama around Montego Bay, were burning, the spectacle was awfully grand.”

News that such a conspiracy could have been so widespread landed with explosive force in Britain. The public became convinced that prolonging the institution of slavery would only lead to further revolts and huge transatlantic military expenses. “The slaves must be sooner or later set at freedom,” editorialized the Morning Advertiser in London, “whether it be or whether it be not for their benefit, and the sooner that proper steps are taken for this purpose, so much the better.”

Within 18 months, William IV gave his reluctant royal assent to the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Samuel Sharpe died on the gallows before he saw it come to pass. But the revolutionary methods of “the business” had been victorious against the most powerful government in the world, and more than 800,000 people were set free as a result.

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Answering these questions might begin with the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century—a moment that changed empires forever, because the Spanish empire became global then in a way that was not possible earlier.

Although Alexander the Great constructed a vast Eurasian empire, and the Roman Empire regarded itself as ecumenical, neither of them incorporated the enormous variety of peoples and cultures to be found in Spain’s empire. And that variety was also characteristic of the other overseas European empires—the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British—that would follow it. This presented the rulers of these global empires with novel problems—most pointedly, the problem of managing diversity.

Differences among the subject peoples of these new global empires called for new ways of thinking about empire. Initially, European rulers were very conscious of following in the tradition of previous empires, which are among the most enduring political forms in human history. In particular, the longevity and achievements of the Roman Empire made it an exemplary empire for most of the European empires (including the Ottoman).

The continuities with the past were evident in how the European empires preserved the idea of universality. Though the existence of other empires was usually recognized, all empires tended to think of themselves—like the Roman Empire—as unique and universal, carrying a special truth about the world that they felt entitled and even obliged to carry to the whole of humanity. Usually this sense of special truth took the form of belief in the imperial mission, and it was often expressed in religious terms. Thus, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs saw themselves as the vehicle for Roman Catholicism throughout the world. The Russians justified their empire for its spread of Orthodoxy; the Dutch and British saw themselves as the champions of Protestantism; the Ottomans were the carriers of Islam.

In later years, as secularism became more pronounced in Europe, the imperial mission was conceived in less religious terms—and instead as the “civilizing mission” of the European powers, through which they spread the ideals and practices of Western civilization. Often this was coupled with the idea of imperial citizenship—the incorporation of all the subjects of the empire into a common citizenship, which they shared with the ruling people.

The ideas of universality, the civilizing mission, and common citizenship were all taken from Rome. But the modern European empires, especially the overseas ones, were also conscious that the peoples over whom they ruled possessed very different traditions and cultures from Western ones, as well as from each other. And so, though convinced generally of the superiority of European civilization, they proceeded with caution.

In the interests of order and efficiency, the promotion of the imperial mission was tempered by a recognition of the need to respect the traditions of the subject peoples. Often empires took the lead in preserving and conserving local cultures, studying the local languages, propping up indigenous institutions, and excavating and restoring often lost or decayed historical sites. This work of conservation and recovery was often done in the spirit of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. But it also had a more strategic purpose: managing diversity in far-flung empires where attempts to impose cultural uniformity might create resentment and resistance.

Such considerations also affected how the ruling peoples of empires responded to nationalism, which from the time of the French Revolution onward became a powerful force—first in Europe and then increasingly in the rest of the world (not least through the global reach of the European empires). Nationalism, which demanded that state boundaries coincide with national ones, was a threat to empires, which were almost by definition multinational and multiethnic. What made the threat all the greater was that empires themselves had often been responsible for the spread of nationalism, not only through their cultural policies of conservation, but also via educational systems that had led to the creation of a class of indigenous, westernized intellectuals who demanded a place in imperial rule—if not outright independence for their nations.

Ultimately, what brought down the empires was not nationalism. Their fall was mostly the result of two World Wars, which were fought mainly among the empires. Indeed, empires could use nationalism for their own purposes; some were particularly adept at exploiting the divisions and conflicts between the many nations that composed the empire. The Habsburg Empire, for example—from 1867 the “Austro-Hungarian” Empire—contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians who often saw each other as threats, and looked to the Habsburgs to preserve the peace and provide orderly administration. Muslims and Hindus in India long looked to the British Empire as a protective agency, inhibiting communal rivalries.

While managing the nationalism of the subject peoples was one thing, imperial rulers also had to be equally alert to the nationalism of the ruling peoples themselves, and to rein that in where necessary. Allowing the nationalism of the ruling people to express itself too strongly would have been a profound irritant to the other peoples in the empire, and a dangerous provocation. The ruling people—English, French, Austrians, Russians—got their sense of themselves through their imperial, not their national, identities.

One effect of empire, therefore, was a critical suppression of the national identity of the ruling peoples—a diminishment of a sense of themselves as a distinct nation. So long as the empires survived, this was not a problem for the ruling peoples, engaged as they were in the enterprise of imperial rule, and content with the identity and the spoils that this gave them (despite the high costs of empire). Once the empires had gone, though, imperial peoples were faced with a profound question of who they were, of how to find the national identity that they had previously ignored or suppressed.

Empires now seem to have gone, at least in a formal sense, and no one claims to be re-establishing an empire. Empire itself has become a dirty word; and if anyone practices it—Americans or Russians, as many have suggested—they call it something else.

But the nation-state, empire’s successor, has proved to be an awkward and in many ways unsuccessful form for dealing with the problems thrown up by multiculturalism and globalization. Its principle of “one people, one state” has turned out not to be (as 19th-century theorists hoped) a recipe for peaceful coexistence in a world of equal nations; but as a prescription for an unending cycle of violence, bred by the existence of national minorities in most states.

In such a condition—which we find ourselves in today—empires may have much to teach us about the management of difference and diversity, and of the recognition of principles that go beyond the limited vision of nationalism and the nation-state. Yes, it’s true that empires have had their day. But when they were the norm they covered the earth and they lasted for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. At the very least their study is likely to prove highly instructive.

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“So, let’s cook him,” the men declared.

Tall Boy, who worked as a cook out in the mining camps, persuaded the rum shop owner to let him use the kitchen in back. He softened onions in coconut oil while he slit the belly of the iguana, cleaned out its guts, and chopped up the carcass. After sprinkling a generous helping of curry powder over the onions, he threw the meat in the pot followed by a glug of cane spirit to counter its musty odor. He set a pot of rice to cook while the curry was simmering and the men drank yet more rum. When the food was ready, they eagerly wolfed it down and then sauntered off to doze away the afternoon.

The story of how a group of Afro-Guyanese diamond miners came to be making a bush-meat version of an Indian curry begins in 1627, when a band of 50 British men founded the colony of Barbados, on the uninhabited island.

These colonists experimented with growing tobacco, cotton, ginger, and indigo as they sought to make their fortunes. But it was not until James Drax returned from a visit to Portuguese Brazil with sugar cane in 1640 that the settlers found the cash crop of their dreams. An acre of land planted with cane earned Drax four times more than an acre planted with tobacco. Within a decade, every scrap of land on the 169-square-mile island was planted with sugarcane, and Barbados became the wealthiest colony in the British Empire.

Imperial Federation map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886. Image courtesy of Boston Public LIbrary/Flickr.

The planters initially employed white indentured laborers and convicts to do the back-breaking and dangerous work of cultivating and processing the sugar cane. In Britain under Oliver Cromwell, to be “Barbadosed” was to be transported into servitude on the West Indian plantations. But white men were gradually replaced by West African slaves, as English ships tapped into the trans-Atlantic slave trade already established by the Portuguese to supply workers for their South American sugar plantations.

At the end of the 18th century, on a tour of the West Indies, which included Barbados, ship’s purser Aaron Thomas was so shocked by the conditions in which the slaves lived and worked that he wrote in his sea diary, “I never more will drink Sugar in my Tea, for it is nothing but Negroe’s blood.”

The British dissolved most of the sugar they consumed in tea. Over the 100 years after Drax sent home his first consignment, sugar poured into Britain in unprecedented quantities and its consumption rose in tandem with that of tea. The price of both commodities fell until even the poorest could afford them. A late 18th-century survey found that rural laborers spent as much as 10 percent of their annual income on tea and sugar; while Friedrich Engels noticed that tea was “quite indispensable” to the inhabitants of Manchester’s slums.

Social commentators condemned the poor for wasting their money on these “luxuries.” But tea-drinking was a symptom not of extravagance but of workers’ impoverishment. Rising food and fuel prices meant that they could barely afford to cook a warm meal let alone simmer the wort to brew their own beer. As a consequence, they turned for sustenance to shop-bought bread washed down with tea sweet enough to provide them with energy as well as the illusion that they were eating a warm meal. One family of ironworkers dissolved four pounds of sugar—enough to fill 10 teacups—in their weekly half-pound of tea. Britain’s Industrial Revolution was fueled by tea and sugar.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803−15), Britain acquired two new sugar-producing colonies: French Mauritius and British Guiana. But when slavery was abolished in 1838, more than half the West African slaves turned their backs on the sugar plantations, resulting in a drastic fall in production.

The planters searched for a replacement workforce and found it in India, where a growing number of impoverished laborers were seeking work. Britain’s Industrial Revolution had sent India’s economy into turmoil. In the 1820s the British imposed protective tariffs closing the British market to Indian textiles; instead, cheap, machine-made Manchester cottons flooded into India. Millions of Indian artisans went out of business and joined the growing number of landless laborers pushed off the land by debt.

And so the resources of the British Empire, which had been channeled into the slave trade, were redirected into moving hundreds of thousands of Indians to work on plantations around the globe. Between 1838 and 1916, about 240,000 Indians were taken to British Guiana.

This was how curry came to the northern coast of South America and the country now called Guyana.

Indian indentured laborers were given rations of rice, lentils, coconut oil, sugar, salt, and curry powder, all of which allowed them to make a semblance of Indian meals. The one ingredient that they would not have used in India was curry powder. This was a British invention. The Victorians usually would mix cayenne pepper, cumin, coriander, lots of turmeric (Indians tended to be more sparing in their use of this spice), and fenugreek, which was a commonly used spice around Madras, where the first curry powder factories were set up.

When the British had first settled in India as merchants and traders they had loved Indian food, and brought cooks and recipes back to Britain with them when they retired. The first cookbook to include a recipe for “how to make a curry the India way” was Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy published in 1747. In Indian kitchens the spices were freshly roasted and ground each morning before they were added to the dishes at different stages in the cooking process. Glasse’s recipe attempted to replicate Indian practice by instructing the cook to first roast the spices on a shovel over the fire before beating them to a powder.

However, as the British grew accustomed to making Indian food, they took shortcuts, and over time Victorian cooks transformed curries into spicy casseroles. An essential element in this transformation was the use of standardized, pre-mixed curry powders that became commercially available in the 1780s. The Victorians would use a spoonful of curry powder to curry anything from periwinkles to sheep’s trotters. British curries became unrecognizable to Indian visitors who were dismayed when they were confronted with these hashes “flavoured with turmeric and cayenne.”

Even though it was Indian indentured laborers who first taught the Africans in Guyana how to cook curry, Indian food there was diminished by the forces of Empire. Limited rations meant that the indentured laborers struggled to replicate Indian home cooking. There were only two types of pea available to make dhal and everything had to be cooked in coconut oil. The biggest handicap was that, instead of the plethora of different spices and herbs available to an Indian cook, the laborers were only given a pre-mixed curry powder. This meant that, in Guyana, the panoply of different styles and types of dish were replaced by one simplified version of a curry. Although there are distinctively Guyanese combinations, such as shrimp and pumpkin, Indo-Guyanese dishes are all variations on one theme.

The meal of iguana curry eaten by a group of Afro-Guyanese diamond miners on a Sunday morning in 1993 carries within it the story of how Africans and Indians were brought to the Americas by the British craving for sweetness.

These two groups of arrivals and their progeny developed different relationships with their new homeland. The Indo-Guyanese tended to stay close to the coast within the orbit of the plantation world. Once freed from slavery, the Afro-Guyanese had made their way into the interior to tap rubber, and prospect for gold and diamonds. Here they interacted with the Amerindians who taught them how to hunt and cook the forest animals. And so the Africans applied the currying technique they had learned from their Indian neighbors to bush meat.

The British Empire was a powerful force for spreading new foods and new ways of eating throughout the globe. And yet it was also a powerful force for homogenization. Through the collisions of history, middle-class British housewives and South American descendants of African slaves both ended up eating a similar version of Indian food: a curry of peculiar meats, made with curry powder.

The post What the Path of Curry Tells Us About Globalization appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Curiously, the nation’s decision to admit asylum-seekers was not a direct consequence of our Revolutionary idealism. Instead, the extension of political asylum owes much to a naval uprising—on a British ship—in 1797.

On the night of September 22, the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy erupted aboard the frigate HMS Hermione off the western coast of Puerto Rico. Stabbed repeatedly with cutlasses and bayonets, ten officers, including the ship’s sadistic captain, Hugh Pigot, were thrown overboard.

The mutiny thrust upon the administration of President John Adams a set of incendiary issues involving natural rights, American citizenship, and political asylum—a consequence of the purported presence of impressed (i.e. conscripted) American sailors aboard the Hermione and, in turn, the prospect of their extradition to Great Britain after seeking refuge in the United States.

The decade of the 1790s wasn’t necessarily friendly to asylum seekers. Although President George Washington favored a liberal immigration policy, limited to be sure to “white Europeans,” the French Revolution coupled with unrest in Ireland against British occupation contributed to a lapping tide of xenophobia in the early Republic, especially among leading members of the Federalist Party, who viewed England as a lone bastion of civil order in Europe.

Nativist fears crested with congressional passage in 1798 of the Alien Acts, which granted President Adams, as Washington’s successor, the power to deport émigrés without due process of law. Another Alien Act, in a thinly veiled attempt to deter immigration, extended the minimum period of residence from five to 14 years for prospective citizens. A Federalist representative from Massachusetts railed that he did “not wish to invite hoards [sic] of wild Irishmen.”

The mutiny challenged Federalist xenophobia.

In the summer of 1799, Adams ignited a political firestorm by authorizing a federal court in Charleston, South Carolina, to surrender to the British a seaman named Jonathan Robbins—a native son, he claimed, of Danbury, Connecticut, who had been impressed by the Royal Navy. The outrage was fanned in subsequent weeks by news from Jamaica of the sailor’s hanging, not as Jonathan Robbins, a United States citizen, but, the British claimed, as the reputed Irish ringleader Thomas Nash.

Although his true identity remained hotly contested, that did not put an end to the martyrdom of Jonathan Robbins. Mourned by Jeffersonian Republicans as a freedom fighter against British tyranny, the incident proved pivotal to Adams’s bitter loss to Jefferson in the monumental presidential election of 1800. The Robbins crisis also contributed to a dramatic shift in United States immigration policy.

In his first address to Congress, on December 8, 1801, President Jefferson pointedly invoked America’s messianic pledge to afford a haven for persecuted refugees. In stark contrast to the nativism of the Adams years, he demanded, “Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”

For 43 years after the extradition of Robbins, not one person, citizen or alien, would be surrendered by the federal government to another country, including other mutineers from the Hermione. And when the United States finally signed an extradition agreement with Great Britain in 1842 as part of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, “political offenses,” including mutiny, desertion, and treason were exempted from a list of extraditable crimes in order to avoid reviving the “popular clamour” of the Robbins controversy.

In subsequent treaties, political offenses would also remain exempt from extradition, as they would in Congress’ first extradition law (1848). That was the point at which political asylum became the express policy of the United States, a major legislative achievement in helping to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution. And in agreeing to extradition agreements with additional nations, the United States significantly promoted the doctrine of political asylum not only at home but also abroad.

The U.S. has not always lived up to these ideals, or these laws. Too often in recent decades, foreign policy priorities have influenced asylum decisions, with preference openly extended to a handful of nationalities (such as Cubans fleeing the Castro regime). Like other federal tribunals, immigration courts should function as part of the judiciary—not as an extension of the executive. After all, it was Adams’ 1799 authorization that a federal judge extradite Jonathan Robbins that touched off the fierce backlash against his presidency.

This political crisis led to a tradition of political asylum that predates the Statue of Liberty’s famous affirmation that foreign nations send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would take the martyred Jonathan Robbins, and another 50 years, but political asylum’s establishment in 1848 effectively enshrined Tom Paine’s promise in 1776 that America would be a beacon of liberty for victims of oppression and violence.

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This is true even in the capital of the old empire. When I visited London last week, the newspapers were full of stories about the United Kingdom pulling the plug on its global ambitions and voting to leave the European Union in a June referendum. But what caught my eye as I walked and took public transportation around London were the garrisons of the Golden State.

“London Has Fallen,” a dumb new Hollywood thriller, might as well have been the city’s new slogan, given the ubiquity of its advertising. Within blocks of where I was staying, I encountered two different Hollywood production studios and testing space for films and TV that would play overseas. And on the telly, our TV shows—“The Muppets,” “Last Man on Earth,” “American Horror Story”—were everywhere. Adrian Woolridge, an editor at The Economist who used to live in California, lamented at a Zócalo event that it’s no longer true that the British are funnier and make better TV than we do. “All the best television—you know, Breaking Bad—it all comes from the United States,” he said.

When I wanted a bite, I stopped at Tortilla, which served me “real California burritos” as I scrolled through my iPhone. And for most of one day, I wandered around Tech City, a cluster of technology companies in Central and East London, which also is touted as “Silicon Roundabout” in a nod to Silicon Valley.

British Airways had blanketed Underground stations with ads for its new direct flights to San Jose. I talked with people at six different technology firms; all seemed focused not on building a transformational company but on selling their start-ups to some tech giant back in California. (And in those conversations about high-tech mercantilism, I realized that Silicon Valley jargon is the exception to the rule that everything sounds better when spoken with an English accent.)

Then an old friend took me around the perimeter of the property near King’s Cross where Google has planned to build its giant new U.K. headquarters. He also filled me in on the drama involving proud British architects prostrating themselves before the men from Mountain View to earn this commission.

The building of such a bold public monument to United Googledom would be a reminder that the California Empire is something different than the timid American Empire, which the British historian Niall Ferguson described in his book Empire as “an empire in denial” because it “lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security.”

The California Empire is thus more like the British one, unapologetic in its conviction that it represents a better way of thinking. And the cult of California technical “disruption” bespeaks a confidence that we can do whatever your work is better than you, no matter how long or expertly you might have been doing it.

Hollywood has prospered by making big, nasty pictures designed to obliterate the senses of people around the world. California companies and people are busy colonizing the world with inventions and reinventions in social media, food, bioscience, and energy. While the American government is withdrawing from space travel, Hawthorne-based Space X is leading a renewed global push for cheaper space exploration.

One could argue that California-based tech executives have assumed some of the “leader of the free world” space once occupied in Washington. While the lame-duck Illinois president leads from behind, Golden State CEOs—most notably Apple’s Tim Cook—practice foreign diplomacy and wage cyber-war against everyone from American intelligence agencies to European regulators to censors and hackers in the employ of the Peoples Liberation Army. Heck, Steve Jobs, even from the grave, has more juice than any American elected official, and just last year got the worshipful if weird biopic genuflection from a group of British film worthies that included Kate Winslet, Michael Fassbender, and Danny Boyle.

Just as 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli launched imperialist expansion to seize new markets and grab raw materials, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page set up shop around the world to command tech markets in every country possible, and to harvest today’s essential materials: the brains of the young and educated.

This is not the empire of governance that the U.K. maintained; California will never amass all the colonies and protectorates and mandates and territories that the British military and civil servants once made their own. But the reach of the Californians is far greater. At its height, the British Empire held sway over only one-fifth of the world’s people, while California firms have convinced the world to carry phones that allows us to track the movements, choices, and behaviors of more than one-half of the planet’s population. California’s virtual empire controls the hearts and minds of more people than any previous empire in history.

California is a worthy successor to imperial Britain in other ways. California’s empire, like the British one, builds on previous empires (ours the American one, while the Brits followed Portugal and Spain of the 15th and 16th centuries). The British ruled by the seas; we rule through underwater cables. Britain’s rise was accelerated by the industrial revolution; California’s empire is fueled by digital revolution. As the British before them, our imperialists say they are making not merely profits but making the world a better and more peaceful place. Call it the Pax California.

Both empires have been delivered big blows by Washington. In the British case, it was George Washington, and the revolution he led, that robbed Britain of a crucial piece of the empire. In California, it is Washington, D.C.—and its gridlock on energy and immigration policies, not to mention the intrusive hacking of its intelligence agencies—that have slowed the state’s progress and threaten the credibility of Silicon Valley around the world. European continentals whose ancestors once slowed the British via warfare now fight the California empire with European courts and commissions and anti-trust regulations.

The California empire, like when Elizabeth I authorized British raids against Spanish ports and shipping, is not above hacking and piracy in the service of power and economic growth. And the California empire is finding it difficult to relate to the former jewel of the older empire: India. Recently, the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, angry at a decision by India’s telecommunications regulatory board that went against Facebook, started a firestorm by tweeting that India was better off as a colony. (To his credit, he apologized more quickly than the British did.)

Just as their British forebears did, California’s imperial set, for all their hard work and passion, make a great show of their commitment to their hobbies (George Orwell wrote that his was a nation of flower-lovers, stamp-collectors, amateur carpenters, and many other things). Zuckerberg has made an annual tradition of taking on new outside projects, such as learning Mandarin, as successful would-be colonizers do.

There are many books offering many reasons why the British lost their empire: arrogance, overreach, too many wars, financial mismanagement, and doubts back home in the U.K. about the wisdom and justice of possessing colonies. It remains to be seen if California’s empire can learn from those mistakes, or whether its days too are numbered, on account of its hubris.

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