The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Imperialist Apologia: Salt on Colonial Wounds - https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/imperialist-apologia-salt-on...
The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/commen...
Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists - https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/safe-spaces-for-co...
The case for reparations by Jason Hickel - https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/13/the-case-for-rep...
Is it? The amount of deaths shouldn't be compared to 0, it should be compared to a counterfactual where the indigenous people were in charge. Otherwise you run into the "doctors with most patient deaths" problem. It's possible that the doctor is objectively bad, or that he's receiving the sickest patients. It's plausible for instance, that areas with local rulers who are brutal and despotic are easy to conquer/colonize by an outside empire, because the brutality/despotism means it's easy to assemble a local coalition to depose the current regime.
For example Russian excess deaths all happened over quite a short time span. Does it mean their intensity of badness was higher?
Wikipedia says the Spanish beat the British to it.
>The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.
The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).
I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.
Combating slavery gave the British Empire a comparative advantage, as they could export commodities like Sugar, Cotton, Palm Oil, and Coffee from the British Raj (which in the 19th century included all of South Asia as well as Malaysia) and British Egypt (cotton) without a plantation slavery model, while undermining competitors like the US and Brazil who used that model for commodity exports.
Same reason why the industrial Northeast and small-farmer Midwest was opposed to slavery, as both lobbies were undermined by the economics of slavery.
Britain ended slavery and started colonization. But yeah "they ended slave trade"
No amount of info will convince people that colonization was evil and abhorrent because they were party to it, they benefited from it.
Much of South India and Eastern India was already British ruled by the early 1800s.
> Apartheid didn't end until the 90's
Apartheid was started by the Boers (Dutch South Africans who also fought against the British) once they got autonomy in the 1920s.
Apartheid Era South Africa was also very anti-Anglo as well as anti-Black.
No they were not. They were run by private East India Company. With the revolt of 1857 and quashing of the rebellion, the official Raj by the British Royals began
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
You are still bickering over pedantic stuff. Britain profited from slave trade. They just didn't want to use the term "slave" and used "colony" instead.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire | Caroline Elkins & William Dalrymple - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeZRDIarayk
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
Truly one of the greatest psyops ever.
Eh, the Americas got a lot of great Irish immigrants out of the tragedy. And those immigrants and their descendants have had a better life than if they stayed in dear old Ireland IMHO.
You could say the Great Famine actually started with the introduction of the potato to Eurasia, an Americas/colonialism introduction that at that point had kept hunger from the door of countless Europeans, especially during times of conflict (since you can’t set a torch to something growing in the ground).
Nothing is simple. It’s an ill wind…
>Henry VIII of England was made "King of Ireland" by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The conquest involved assimilating the Gaelic nobility by way of "surrender and regrant"...
a long while before the potato famine.
Empire in Asia, How we came by it : A Book of Confessions by W.M.Torrens - https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahoww00mccuuoft/mode/...
The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).
I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.
Also, staying that the State of Israel learned suppressive tactics from Britain is rather infantilising in the extreme.
Colonialism might just as well exist today like it did in the 1800s. UK amongst others specifically stopped it.
Nearly every successful peaceful revolution had a lurking threat of a less peaceful version nearby. Which isn't a bad thing and it doesn't discredit peaceful change, it just discredits the idea that people acquiesce to peaceful protests (exclusively) out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's nothing like the European version.
There was no way India could have been properly ruled by the English crown. The understanding of monarchy is so different and also explains why so many kings happily agreed to become British vassals.
Benevolent empires don’t let millions of people die because they are too busy extracting resources from their colonies to care about them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Whoopsie daisy. What stage of civilization have we reached?
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
Truly one of the greatest psyops ever.
> A few tens of thousands of British troops
A lot of Indians happily joined British army because of the (relatively) better pay and better treatment.
> slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians
But those were all divided into hundreds of kingdoms. In fact, a lot of Indian kings and princes preferred being a vassal of the English crown because the alternative was much worse (being imprisoned or killed by Indian rivals). Read about almost any major Indian wars/battles in the 18th century involving English and you will find a lot of neutral Indian parties, or the ones actively fighting on England's behalf.
> any half decent uprising would have been successful
Indian subcontinent suffered from a "coordination problem". Gandhi is admired because he played the biggest role in bringing a lot of them together. Of course, he couldn't bring everyone along (eg. Jinnah and Muslims), and there were a lot of other great leaders who also contributed (Patel, Tilak, Bose etc) towards uniting all the Indians, but none could attain Gandhi's stature.