A Hanging

The British Empire began in the late 16th and early 17th centuries as Britain started to establish overseas trading posts. From the 19th century to the early 20th century, it was the foremost power in the world and held control over almost one quarter of the world’s population (412 million people). The subjugation and enslavement of colonized peoples during this period was justified through theories of racial hierarchy based on pseudoscientific arguments. The theories of Charles Darwin, particularly the concept of natural selection described in On the Origin of Species (1859), were misapplied to human societies. Social Darwinists argued that certain races were more “fit” or “evolved” than others, and they used this idea to justify their false claims of racial superiority and the exploitation of so-called “inferior” races. By twisting Darwinist principles, the colonial powers suggested that colonized peoples were more “primitive,” or less evolved, than their colonizers and were unfit to survive in the modern world without the paternalistic control of a “superior” Western power.

Burma (now Myanmar) was under British rule from 1824 to 1948. At the time when George Orwell was writing, it was a province of British India, and ethnic Indians played a key role in the government and the economy, as is evident in the predominantly Indian character list of Orwell’s narrative. Another community that grew particularly powerful (although remaining inferior in status to the British) was the Eurasian population, born of intermarriage between European and Burmese people. The encouragement of mass migration from one colonial territory to another and the tendency to favor one ethnic community over another are examples of the British policy referred to as “divide and rule”—the strategy of exploiting ethnic tensions in order to avoid unified resistance and maximize control.

Resistance to colonial rule had been building since the beginning of the 20th century and had gained momentum during the First World War and with the rise of Mahatma Gandhi in India. Anti-imperialist feeling in Britain began to grow at the very end of the 19th century as a result of disapproval of Britain’s conduct in the Boer War in South Africa. Among the intellectual left in Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism often went hand in hand.

The death penalty became a formal part of the Indian Penal Code in 1860, resulting in a significant increase in the number and frequency of executions. It is significant that the Indian Penal Code made no attempt to absorb or incorporate India’s pre-existing legal systems or practices. It simply superimposed English law on the colonized state. Executions were particularly frequent among individuals of lower social class and caste. The death penalty can be seen as the ultimate assertion of imperial sovereignty—controlling the life and death of colonial subjects.

Orwell’s own family owed their livelihood to the British Empire. His grandfather was the absentee owner of two Jamaican plantations with 359 enslaved people and was richly compensated in the 1837 Slave Compensation Act following the 1833 abolition of slavery. His father was employed as a sub-deputy opium agent in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. His maternal grandfather was a businessman in Burma, and his mother grew up there. Orwell himself was born in India and still had family in Burma when he moved there to join the Imperial Police. In “A Hanging,” “Burmese Days,” and “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell is clearly anti-imperialist in his sentiment. However, his rather caricatured treatment of colonial subjects and their speech shows that he was not altogether free of the imperialist assumptions of racial and cultural superiority with which he was raised.