Claimed Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Battle of Plassey

In the 20th century, the term 'banana republic' came about because of the actions and political power of the United Fruit Company in South America, and the British East India Company could be looked on as its spiritual forerunner, with its imposition of high taxes, puppet rulers and rapacious plundering of Indian goods and land. Out of the British government's control, the company competed for territory with the French and Dutch East India Companies, and conquered Bengal in the Battle of Plassey, with the spoils of battle being funnelled into the company's treasuries. Although the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, had the larger army, several members of his court conspired against him - including Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of the Nawab's army, who Clive bribed - and were collaborating with the British East India Company. Clive made Mir Jafar the new Nawab of Bengal. His name has since become synonymous with treachery in India.

In 1857, following the sepoy-led India Rebellion, the Government of India Act was passed, which called for the company to be liquidated and its assets transferred to the British Crown. However, the company was not immediately liquidated; it continued to manage the tea trade with the British government. It was eventually dissolved in 1874. However, British colonialism in India was far from over.

Answer: The torture of Kenyan prisoners suspected of involvement in the Mau Mau Uprising

The Mau Mau Uprising was a revolt against British colonisers in Kenya, led by Kikuyu, Meru and Embu people, though some Kikuyu were on the side of the British and members of the Kenya Regiment. Both the Mau Mau insurgents and the British and their supporters, committed war crimes, the most extreme case on the part of the Mau Mau was the Lari Massacre, where Mau Mau insurgents herded Home Guard members and their families into huts and set them on fire, attacking anyone who escaped with machetes. The British and African soldiers on their side carried out retaliation attacks, killing at least 400 Mau Mau. The British also responded to the uprising by detaining and torturing confirmed and suspected Mau Mau members, including US President Barack Obama's grandfather. Sexual assault and bodily mutilation were used as a form of torture against men and women; many detainees were hanged, choked to death by having mud forced into their mouths, burned alive or beaten to death. Although Griffith-Jones compared the detention camps to Nazi Germany, he still allowed insurgents to be tortured, suggesting they be beaten on the upper part of the body, avoiding damaging the internal organs. See the above quote about 'sinning quietly'.

Former Mau Mau members who had been tortured or castrated later made claims against the British government, and five of them were chosen to prosecute a test case, though one of them, Susan Ciong'ombe Ngondi, died. Of the remaining four, two men had been castrated, one woman was a survivor of the Hola Massacre - in which 11 prisoners in the Hola detention camp were killed, and 77 more injured - and another woman had been tortured and sexually assaulted.

Kenya became independent in 1963, and was declared a republic a year later.

Answer: South Africa

Hitler was allegedly inspired by the British concentration camps used during the second Boer War. Unlike the Nazi concentration camps and death camps, the British concentration camps were not intended for the systematic killing of Boer settlers. Instead, they were a means of keeping them under control and forcing Boer guerrillas to surrender, by capturing and imprisoning their wives and children after ransacking their farms and homes under Lord Kitchener's 'scorched earth' policy. However, the camps were poorly maintained and overcrowded, and both Boer and black African prisoners - who were also imprisoned and forced to work in gold mines - died of starvation, overwork and disease. Rations, which were already meagre, were docked for minor offences. It is estimated that 10% of the Boer population were wiped out within one year. 22,000 of these were children.

A bit of background: 'Boer' is a Dutch word for 'farmer'. They were Dutch settlers who moved out of Cape Colony into South Africa, and established two independent republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. However, in 1875, Lord Carnarvon - who was British Colonial Secretary at the time - proposed a confederation of states, which meant the annexation of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers responded first with passive resistance, then with guerrilla warfare. Afrikaner leaders would later use the atrocities of the camps as a means of promoting Afrikaner nationalism.

Answer: Forced resettlement of Malay peasants

The Briggs Plan was conceived by Sir Harold Briggs, who was appointed as the British Director of Operations during the Malayan Emergency. The Japanese occupation of Malaya had already caused great damage, with rubber plantations - rubber being one of Malaya's main exports - being abandoned and mines closed down as a result of trade limitations, and the population suffered through a famine. The imposition of Japanese currency also resulted in hyperinflation near the end of World War 2. Seeing that the British had failed to address Malaya's problems, Malayan Communists rebelled, organising general strikes, and the British responded by cracking down on protesters. Leftist parties were outlawed in 1948 after three British plantation managers were killed by a group of Chinese men.

Guerrilla warfare was a tactic used by the Malayan Races Liberation Army, so the British response was to cut them off from means of support by forcibly resettling the peasant population, a tactic that had also been used in the second Boer War. This they did by placing them in 'new villages' surrounded by barbed wire fences and floodlights, heavily guarded by police, and cut off from the outside world. The vast majority of these peasants were ethnic Chinese. Outside the new villages, around 500,000 more ethnic Chinese were deported or exiled.

Answer: Amritsar

The Amritsar Massacre, also known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, occurred on Vaisakhi, the Sikh New Year. The Rowlatt Act had been passed three days earlier by the Imperial Legislative Council of New Delhi as a preventative measure against insurgency, meaning that anyone suspected of terrorism could be imprisoned without trial. Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satya Pal, two leaders of the Indian Independence Movement, protested against the act and were subsequently arrested. On the day the act was passed, violence broke out, with soldiers firing on protesters outside the residence of the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, and public buildings being set on fire. On 11th April, Marcella Sherwood, a British missionary, was attacked by a mob; Colonel Reginald Dyer, Amritsar's military commander at the time, responded on the 19th by ordering every Indian man using the street where Sherwood had been assaulted to crawl down the street on his hands and knees, stating that a British woman was as sacred as a Hindu god.

On the 13th, around 5000 Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims (though some reports suggested crows as big as 10,000) gathered in Jallianwala Bagh to protest against the arrests of Kitchlew and Pal. Dyer and his men arrived in the afternoon, and blocked off the exits to the park; Dyer later stated this was to punish the protesters for 'disobedience'. The troops fired on the densest sections of the crowd, killing and injuring several protesters in just 10 minutes. Those who were not killed by gunfire either drowned in a well while trying to escape, or were crushed to death in the ensuing stampede. Many wounded died overnight, as a curfew had been declared and they could not be moved to safety. Although the official death toll given by the British was 379, an independent Indian enquiry believed it to be closer to 1000. Though both Winston Churchill and former Prime Minister H H Asquith condemned the massacre, other British people - including Marcella Sherwood - called Dyer a hero, and 'the man who saved India'.

Answer: Cyprus

EOKA were a conservative Greek Cypriot movement who wanted the British to leave Cyprus, and for unity between Cyprus and Greece. The Cypriot Communist party AKEL opposed them, calling for passive resistance and strikes instead, but EOKA preferred to use guerrilla tactics. EOKA began an insurgency in 1955, a year after the Middle East Commander-in-Chief's offices had been transferred from Suez to Cyprus. Although they mainly targeted British military and police, they also went after civilians. As most Greek Cypriot citizens either supported EOKA or were too afraid of them to pass on information to the authorities, the British had trouble gaining information on them; there were also the problems of the Malayan Emergency and the Suez Crisis to deal with. However, this did not stop them from rounding up and imprisoning around 3,000 Cypriot citizens, a similar tactic used in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising. Many of them were held without trial, and those convicted of EOKA sympathies were relocated to London.

Cyprus became independent in 1960. As with Kenyans who had suffered at the hands of the British Empire during the Mau Mau Uprising, Cypriots who had been detained and tortured as suspected EOKA members filed claims against the British government. They alleged that prisoners as young as 15 had been whipped and had salt rubbed into the wounds, or hot peppers rubbed in their eyes; waterboarding was another form of torture. Prisoners sent to London were found to have lacerations and swellings on their bodies, and broken arms.

Answer: Winston Churchill

The gas in question was mustard gas, also used as a weapon in the First World War. The quote from Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and Air, comes from a War Office meeting in 1919, where he argued that "it is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected." Ultimately, the British used a combination of bombing raids and arson instead.

Iraq had previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire, but was then occupied by the British, who had hoped to create a British Mandate of Mesopotamia, and installed Faisal I as, essentially, a puppet king after he was forced out of Syria by the occupying French. Both Shia and Sunni Iraqis protested against the occupation, former Ottoman soldiers among them. A group of Iraqi delegates made representations to the British officials, but the acting Civil Commissioner, Arnold Wilson, turned them down. Armed revolt broke out in June 1920, to which the British responded with night-time bombing raids and collective punishment. Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Haldane gave the order to destroy the village of any Iraqi found possessing weapons; not only did that happen, but wells were poisoned, crops destroyed and livestock killed as well. This continued throughout the 1920s. Iraqi RAF workers caught stealing from the RAF would be punished by being forced to stand in a boxing ring and used as a human punchbag.

Answer: The Irish Potato Famine

Some historians argue that the Irish Potato Famine was effectively a genocide due to the inaction of the British, and the belief of people like Trevelyan that the Irish deserved it, and that it was a punishment inflicted on them by God. Although the potato fungus spread across Europe in the 1840s, Ireland was particularly badly afflicted due to the potato being a staple crop there, the heavy reliance on peasant labour, and a lack of genetic variation among potato plants grown in Ireland. Prime Minister Robert Peel had maize and cornmeal shipped to Ireland, but mills in Ireland had to be adapted for milling maize, a lengthy process, and the cornmeal needed to be cooked thoroughly before it could be eaten. Peel was replaced by the Whig Prime Minister Lord John Russell in 1846, and instituted a relief programme that involved digging roads, in the hope that peasants would no longer rely on subsistence farming. However, these roads were largely pointless and merely a form of work for work's sake.

Trevelyan was a strong believer in laissez-faire policies and did not want to interfere with market forces; because of this, the price of grain skyrocketed, and was far too expensive for most Irish labourers to afford. Trevelyan did not want to lower the prices, believing high prices would encourage foreign imports, with the result of many people starving to death or emigrating. He also believed that the famine was a form of divine judgement. Anti-Irish propaganda in England also resulted in Irish emigrants looking for work being turned away and openly mocked in the streets.

Answer: Partition

The Partition of India came about after growing demands for independence, both from Muslim leaders who wished for a Muslim state, and the Indian National Congress, of which Mohandas Gandhi was a member. Congress had opposed Britain taking India into the Second World War. The war had cost Britain greatly, and maintaining overseas empires was proving to be costly, so in 1946, Clement Attlee's government decided that British rule in India should end and India should become independent by 1948. Lord Mountbatten was appointed as Viceroy to oversee the transfer of power, and brought the deadline forward to August 1947, leaving little preparation time.

The creation of a new state led to the displacement of 30 million people, with Muslims who found themselves in India trying to escape to Pakistan, and Hindus finding themselves in the new state trying to escape to India. The situation was particularly problematic for the Punjab, where the violence was at its most extreme, and Bengal, the east of which later became Bangladesh. Both states had the Radcliffe Line - the demarcation line between Pakistani and Indian territory - running through them. Clashes broke out when the two factions collided. Pregnant women were disembowelled, babies slaughtered, and villages burned down. Muslim gangs held up trains and killed any non-Muslims on board, forcing men to drop their trousers to prove their religious beliefs (as Muslims practice male circumcision). Hindu gangs responded in kind. Disease was also a major killer for people in refugee camps.

Answer: Chad

The percentage of African territory under European control rocketed from around 10% in 1870 to over 90% in 1914. Almost 30% of Africa's population were under British control between 1885 and 1914. The nascent anti-slavery movement in Europe was used as a justification for colonisation; in Madagascar, for instance, over 500,000 slaves were freed after the French abolished slavery there in 1896. Other countries were targeted for their natural resources, such as metals, coffee, rubber and cocoa, as there was a growing demand in Europe. Some indigenous people of the various colonies were exhibited in 'human zoos' in Europe; one particularly famous example was Sara Bartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa whose large buttocks attracted attention. She was put on display in places such as London and Paris, with people paying extra money to touch her. She died in 1815, but it was not until 2002 that her remains were returned to her homeland.

The Bechuanaland Protectorate is the former name for the country we now know as Botswana. Both the German and British Empires expressed interest in the territory, but the British annexed it as a means of securing the Road to the North. It became independent in 1966.

Southern Rhodesia was named for the mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes, owner of the British South Africa Company, who targeted Zimbabwe because of its potential for mining precious metals. Rhodes also wished to create a railway that ran from the Cape Colony to Cairo, as a means of connecting British colonies, and Zimbabwe was one of the countries on the proposed route. It officially became the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1980.

Basutoland became a British colony after its king, Moshoeshoe I, contacted Queen Victoria to ask for protection from the Orange Free State, a Boer colony in what is now South Africa (Bloemfontein, one of South Africa's free capitals, is in this area, now the Free State province). Basutoland gained independence in 1966, and changed its name to the Kingdom of Lesotho.

Chad was a French colony, and part of Equatorial French Africa. It became independent in 1960.