“The blood of India is on England’s hands… the whole system of English rule in India is one of systematic plunder and oppression.”
Ernest Jones
“In the boundless areas of India, Egypt, Persia, over which the gigantic octopus of British imperialism sprawls—in this uncharted human ocean vast internal forces are constantly at work, upheaving huge waves that cause tremors in the City’s stocks and hearts.”—
Leon Trotsky on Britain
We plough and sow, we’re so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, And then we’re thrust away.
Ernest Jones
“They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British imperialism, no matter what the price, and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above.”—
Leon Trotsky’s Writings on Britain
John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried offers a powerful refutation of the widely held belief that British imperialism served as a benevolent, civilising force. Drawing upon the evocative words of Chartist poet Ernest Jones for its title, Newsinger’s work forcefully asserts that violence and coercion were not exceptions but fundamental to the Empire’s foundation and maintenance. The book traces this thread of brutality from the conquest of Ireland through to the Opium Wars in China, the forceful suppression of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the post-war counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Malaya and Kenya.
In doing so, it provides a necessary critique of the resurgence of imperial nostalgia in contemporary discourse. This challenge is particularly pertinent given recent attempts by figures such as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to portray Western colonialism as a positive legacy, thereby highlighting the ongoing political relevance and urgency of Newsinger’s intervention.
Ernest Jones: The Revolutionary Tradition the Pseudo-Left Buries
Ernest Jones (1819–1869) remains one of the most important yet often overlooked figures in British radical history, primarily because his ideas threaten the superficial politics of the pseudo-left. He was the leading revolutionary figure of the later Chartist movement, a close political ally of Marx and Engels in England, and possibly Britain’s first to deliberately combine the fight for democratic rights with a clear socialist agenda rooted in the working class.
Jones had an unlikely background, born in Germany to a British military officer, raised as a gentleman, and trained as a lawyer. However, by the 1840s, he was fully dedicated to the workers’ cause. A gifted speaker and poet, he conveyed genuine class anger in his poetry. His 1852 “Song of the Lower Classes,” penned during two years of hard labour in Tothill Fields prison for his Chartist activism, remains one of the most powerful expressions of working-class consciousness in English. We plough and sow, we’re so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, And then we’re thrust away.
This was not mere sentimental reformism. Jones advocated for expropriating landlords and capitalists, nationalising land and industry, and empowering the working class politically. Unlike many of his Chartist peers, he understood that the six points of the People’s Charter were not the final objective but, as Engels observed, “a mere means to further ends,” specifically, the socialist transformation of society.
Marx and Engels held Jones in high regard. After the 1848 defeats of Chartism, when many leaders shifted toward bourgeois liberalism, Jones remained committed to the revolutionary agenda and maintained close ties with Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International). In a 1858 letter to Engels, Marx emphasised Jones’s significance, describing him as “the only educated Englishman (in the professional sense) among the politicians who is fundamentally on our side.” Jones lectured on political economy, using Marx’s categories, and maintained regular correspondence with Marx. He understood—more than most of his British contemporaries—the international nature of the workers’ struggle.
Importantly, Jones was among the rare figures in 19th-century Britain’s labour movement to adopt a principled anti-colonial position regarding Britain’s empire. During the peak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion—referred to by the British ruling class as the “Indian Mutiny”—as patriotic media demanded retribution, Jones spoke at large gatherings advocating for the Indian people’s right to oppose British authority. He described the rebellion in his publication, People’s Paper: “The blood of India is on England’s hands… the whole system of English rule in India is one of systematic plunder and oppression.”
This was not merely moral indignation. Jones understood the connection between the exploitation of colonised peoples abroad and the exploitation of the working class at home — that the same ruling class that ground down the Lancashire mill workers also bled India dry through the East India Company, that the surplus extracted from colonial peoples helped finance the bribery of the upper layers of the British working class. This is precisely the insight — the connection between imperial exploitation, the labour aristocracy, and the corruption of the working-class movement that Lenin later theorised in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and that Trotsky built upon in his analysis of Britain.
Jones’s legacy offers a clear political lesson. British schools seldom teach about him. When the pseudo-left discusses British radical history, it usually focuses on the “Moral Force” branch of Chartism—represented by William Lovett—emphasising respectability, petitions, and reform, rather than the revolutionary tradition of Jones and the Newport Rising. The true revolutionary aspect of Chartism, advocating for the working class to directly challenge the capitalist state both nationally and internationally, is deliberately downplayed by the pseudo-left.
John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (first published in 2006, updated in 2013) is an accessible, unflinching chronicle of the British Empire’s crimes: the slave trade and its defenders, the conquest of India and the deliberate creation of famines, the brutal suppression of the 1857 Rebellion, the Opium Wars forced upon China, the conquest of Egypt and Sudan, the Boer concentration camps, the suppression of the Irish, the Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the Malayan “Emergency,” and the bloody retreat from empire through the mid-20th century.
Newsinger writes from a socialist perspective and plays a significant role in recovering the voices of those who resisted, including not only the colonised peoples but also the small number of British workers and radicals who refused to reconcile with the Empire. The book serves as a valuable popular history and offers a helpful counterpoint to the imperial nostalgia that periodically emerges in British society. Nonetheless, a Marxist critique of Newsinger’s work must go beyond mere appreciation. Newsinger spent many years as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, the same organisation identified as a key vehicle for pseudo-left politics in Britain. The political limitations inherent in the SWP’s tradition influence even Newsinger’s most notable work.
The fundamental theoretical problem is this: The Blood Never Dried tends to present the crimes of the British Empire primarily as a moral and political outrage, which of course they are, without fully grounding them in the structural logic of capitalism itself. The Empire was not an aberration from British history that can be condemned and then set aside while preserving the existing social order. It was the product of British capitalism at its most expansive, driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation, the search for markets, raw materials, and fields of investment. As Marx wrote in Capital, capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The enclosures that dispossessed the English peasantry, the slave trade that financed the industrial revolution, and the colonial famines that generated surplus value for British capital were not separate phenomena; they were facets of a single system.
This issue is extremely significant for contemporary politics. If the British Empire’s wrongdoings are viewed simply as a historical moral scandal — terrible acts committed in the past by bad actors under a now-defunct empire — then the natural political response tends toward “decolonisation” rhetoric, reparations, and cultural politics within the current capitalist system. This pattern is evident in the SWP environment, which has shifted from a nominally anti-imperialist stance to becoming entangled in identity politics and “decolonise the curriculum” campaigns that fail to challenge capitalism and instead tend to divide the working class along racial lines.
The British Pseudo-Left’s Approach to Empire: Moral Outrage Without Class Politics
This underscores the main problem with how the British pseudo-left, including groups like the SWP, Counterfire, and various Corbynite factions, approaches the history and legacy of Empire today. Their stance is characterized by three interconnected shortcomings. Firstly, they see imperialism mainly as a moral concern rather than a structural one. While they rightly condemn particular atrocities, they neglect to connect them to the underlying logic of capitalist accumulation. This view enables them to cling to the false hope that a reformed Labour government or a different foreign policy could make British imperialism “ethical.” For instance, the Stop the War Coalition’s proposal for Britain to pursue an “independent foreign policy” modeled after France and Germany reflects this belief: that imperialism can be made more humane from within, without challenging the capitalist class that sustains it.
Secondly, there is a shift from traditional class politics towards identity politics and the discourse of “decolonisation.” The SWP’s support for racial and gender issues, its endorsement of “intersectionality” as compatible with Marxism, and its focus on the professional-managerial classes in universities all tend to reduce the class debate to a cultural concern. While the atrocities of Empire are real and must be addressed, genuine confrontation occurs only when they are linked to the capitalist system that causes and sustains them. In contrast, identity politics promotes the absurd idea of a “diverse” British military—including women, people of color, and LGBT soldiers—participating in actions like bombing Afghanistan or supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Representation within the imperial state is not a form of anti-imperialism; it is merely its latest cultural facade.
Most importantly, the pseudo-left fails to develop a vital political tool: an independent revolutionary party that genuinely represents the working class, the only force capable of ending imperialism. Ernest Jones understood that the working class needs its own party, program, and leadership that are fundamentally opposed to the bourgeoisie. In contrast, the SWP mainly revolves around the Labour Party, pressures the trade union bureaucracy, and confines anti-imperialist ideas within controlled bourgeois channels.
Alongside pseudo-left critiques of the British Empire, a new wave of right-wing and racist historiography has emerged, led by figures like Kehinde Andrews. Andrews’ *The New Age of Empire* warrants serious critical analysis from a Marxist perspective because, although it rightly condemns imperialism and capitalism’s crimes, it is fundamentally rooted in postcolonial theory and racial idealism. This framework, despite its radical rhetoric, ultimately offers a political dead end for the working class.
Andrews rightly sees that colonialism is an ongoing issue, not just a closed chapter in history. The exploitation of the Global South—through wealth extraction via unequal trade, debt dependence on international financial institutions, and the persistence of neocolonial regimes—remains a continuous aspect of capitalism. His critique of Western liberal hypocrisy is also valid. However, recognising these symptoms alone does not provide a full diagnosis, and this is where the book’s framework falls short.
Andrews focuses on race rather than class as his central analytical category. He views racism—defined as a system of white supremacy rooted in colonialism and still ongoing—as the main organising principle of the modern world. This perspective resembles postcolonial theory presented as radicalism, yet it has historically favoured the interests of the upper-middle class and the national bourgeoisie in former colonial countries, rather than the working class.
His framework lacks an explanation for this history because it doesn’t clearly see it. When race is the primary lens instead of class, it’s difficult to understand why formally “decolonised” nations led by Black and brown bourgeoisie remain trapped in poverty and dependence. The Marxist perspective is explicit: capitalism and imperialism are primarily class projects, and they employ race merely as a division tool.
“The Blood Never Dried” serves as a stark reminder that the crimes of the British Empire are ongoing. British imperialism has sent Challenger tanks to Ukraine and provided arms to Israel for the Gaza genocide. They detained Julian Assange and used the entire colonial state apparatus against its own working class through austerity and wage suppression. The blood continues to flow because the system responsible for shedding it remains unoverthrown. While “The Blood Never Dried” is valuable for exposing imperial crimes, workers seeking to understand the reasons for imperialism, how to oppose it, and what political strategies are needed should study Lenin’s “Imperialism,” Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution,” and the daily analysis on the World Socialist Web Site. Ultimately, the history of empire is the history of capitalism; only when the international working class overthrows capitalism will it end.
A Trumpet of Sedition 