The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

Imagine invading a country to essentially control it's natural resources. Thanks goodness we have moved on from that sort of behaviour and now we need some kind of moral reason (e.g war on terror) to do this to other countries (e.g. Iraq).

When things like the bengal famine happen because of just diverting India's supply chain to the WWII how the F* do you put up with something like that. If you haven't seen it already read the wikipedia entry[1] and pause and think for a moment, they denied food shipments for almost 2 full years in a famine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

> If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years

I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by colonizing them.

And because of that, today, India is a major software player for outsourcing, all thanks to the British for colonizing them, and bringing them English.

I sat there thinking to myself, this is unbelievable. I didn't want to talk politics in a business setting, so I ignored it.

The British destroyed a civilization. Enslaved a generation. And enriched themselves in the process. But all that is swept under the rug, because they brought English to their colonies.

"For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2]"

You mean in those parts of recorded history when everyone was dirt-poor, only Bengal had more people? I've read my Maddison, India was no better than anyone else at the time.

Interesting. However, when anything, such as that video, mentions "zionism", that automatically triggers my anti-Semite radar.

The Dutch VOC is right up there.

I'm not sure why you are bringing this point. OP is not saying British are worse than Ottoman or other empires.(Two Wrongs Make A Right Fallacy)

The Mughal's did bad things too, but some of their kings like Akbar at least tried to integrate society and not cause religious strife. The Mughal Empire did a lot of bad things in India, especially nutcases like Aurangzeb, and Indian people recognize those bad things.

The problem, as I understand, is that a lot of British people don't know all the bad things the Empire did, or don't learn about it the way German people learn about the Holocaust and the Nazi's. Same thing might apply to Belgium - I was appalled to visit Brussels and see a park called "Leopold Park" [1] in the center of the city.

Edit: Turns out this park is named after King Leopold I, the first king of Belgium, and before the Congo atrocities. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15314232 for the person who educated me :)

On a more personal level, as an Indian person who grew up in the US, I always thought Churchill was a badass dude and a good wartime leader. It wasn't until Middle School that I learned about the WW2 famines and all the stuff he said about Indian people. He hated Indians and was extremely racist. His decisions directly lead to the death of millions of people in India. He's no better than Hitler or any of those dictators in my view, and it's mind boggling that people idolize him as the Lion.

Tangent aside, a lot of people did bad things (globally), but saying the Ottomans are bad or the Belgians are bad doesn't absolve the British Empire of its crimes. I don't think we need reparations or blame anybody today, since we all understand bad things happened, but more people should be educated about what happened and how to make sure it never happens again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Park

> Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide)

Fewer still know about the "Turkish Genocide" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_genocide) but that's more to do with cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself.

Of course that Wikipedia page redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Ottoman_Muslims which kinda proves the point that for some reason we can't use the term "Turkish Genocide" and must use quotes and softer language like "Persecution".

I think on balance a better response to sordid histories is acknowledgement and solemn remembrance. It is important to recognize, as enlightened folks, just how terrible our ancestors misdeeds often were. That many groups often perpetrated such atrocities ought not be a reason to say "well we were just as bad as everyone else". Each person should draw a line from their own group's history to themselves and feel empathy towards the oppressed and yes, a bit of shame, that such things had been done by their ancestors. I'm not suggesting that means we walk around with our heads hung all the time, but rather that we challenge ourselves: how will we be different than them and what parts of our world are not yet just. Where do we have a part in making them more so?

It’s worth also mentioning the the Armenian genocide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide ) which happened around the same time by the Ottoman Empire, and is just as unknown. That resulted in the death of over 1.5 million people, and tensions between Armenia and Turkey are still rather tense today. Many Western countries still refuse to accept it took place, most likely due to their favourable political position with Turkey.

All the rest of your points have been addressed, but re: the Mughal Empire

It is important to note that while the foundations of the Mughal Empire were forged with plunder and loot, the Empire itself became native to the Indian subcontinent not soon after and also subsequently for a couple of centuries brought about great cultural boom in the general area. The Mughals eventually came to see themselves as "Indians"(sic) and built their homes here.

This is a far cry from an Empire which was founded on loot and extortion & also evolved into siphoning off the wealth (both cultural and scientific) to a motherland completely disinterested in the welfare of its subjects.

2 things -

1. The British Raj is still in living memory. All 3 of my surviving grandparents were born before independence and were adults and married by 1947 (when India gained independence). They remember British rule. Comparing the criticism that an evil empire from living memory receives with empires that came before it is pretty disingenuous.

2. As an Indian, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when tyrants like Winston Churchill are celebrated in modern Britain. His thoughts on the Bengal famine of 1943 and his inaction during that time which caused the death of an estimated 2 million people due to starvation is a matter of public record.

I think a willingness to look critically at your own past is a virtue, and it makes sense that people in a given country would be more concerned about their own misdeeds.

Also, the scale of the British empire was much vaster than the ottomans or the Belgians, and we’re still dealing with the repercussions of it the empire and it’s collapse all over the world.

Uhmmmm, does the Ottoman Empire or Mughal Empire still exist? The British Government is still run in the name for the Monarch who was the monarch of the Britsh empire while it still existed. The government is still run by the descendants of the British political elite (eg. House of lords) who carried out those atrocities. No common people should be blamed for sins of a regime but the elite who perpetuated and benefitted from those atrocities and passed on the benefits to their offsprings are fair game.

Right, but that's happening _now_ so we (well, the people who are doing it) have the power to prevent it.

These are individual people. If the British government was to complain, then that could be considered hypocritical. But an individual person can't be held to account for actions taken, by others and (quite probably) before they were born.

There's a scene in the first episode of Sherlock where it's pointed out that Dr. Watson is a "British doctor injured in the war in Afghanistan" - I laughed. Apparently I was the only one in my circle of friends who got that that was the original character's biography, written in 1887!

Common folk everywhere have more in common with each other than they have with people in power. The problem is that they are constantly fooled into believing otherwise. This is why our grandparents shouldn't be left out of this. All too often children are taught blind devotion to one's country, when in reality this means blind devotion to the leaders.

Things have gotten better though. We have elections and the internet. We can more openly sympathize and empathize and learn and hopefully this will make us all better together.

> IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this.

So you believe in inherited guilt? I reject that idea. None of us is responsible for the actions of our ancestors.

Actually they weren't even demonstrating. It was a gathering of people from inside and outside Amritsar, who came there for a festival. The order against gatherings of more than 4 people weren't distributed well, and so most of those people weren't aware of the order. Dyer then went and ordered the massacre.

Then why do you sound like one.

The Indian subcontinent had already experienced the Mauryan and the Mughal empires (both bringing immense prosperity to the region) before the British showed up and looted the place clean.

> The British East India Company was actually much larger.

Do you have any sources for that? Most things I can find mention the opposite. For example, from Wikipedia[1]:

> Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the British East India Company (EIC), the VOC's nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

I know but one has an ad block banner.

I just wanted to say that your post implies that the East India Company could be thought of as fictional and that shocked me. I mean, I've learned about it in school, so I also had no idea it existed before that (I'm not English), but it's concerning that it isn't taught.

If you hate our culture so much why do you want citizenship?

So basically, you'd like to just destroy any productivity the UK has by flooding it with low skilled ag-workers who would need to live off of government subsidies?