The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Spanish also did horrible things during their colonial periods. Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought. So they choose to not teach it. This leads British institutions today to have a serious colonial hangover whether they know it or not. The operating paradigm is still an outdated one in many cases.
They teach students what they think made Britain great -- the Romans, the Norman invasion, the World Wars, Churchill etc. -- while actually glossing over what made them great: Empire. It really brings to mind a line from the Thor: Ragnarok movie - "Proud to have it; ashamed of how they got it". The British people today might not have an idea of their Empire but the effects still linger on in their former colonies.
I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Two world wars, and slavery is pretty much all we were taught, unless you specialised.
"modern" immigration was/is much more driven by our former membership of the EU than empire.
Empire is why our friends had Caribbean grandparents. WWII for polish grandparents, and Idi Amin why they also might have had indian parents born in Uganda.
But they were all pretty British to us. They sounded like us, dressed the same.
"modern" immigration when I was growing up was mostly Portuguese and Polish, later more baltics when that opened up to schengen.
But those later countries were also a product of another empire: USSR.
Millenial here from the US. I was taught about the British Empire, extensively, in both high school and college. My high school teacher played "Rule, Britannia" (lyrics include "rule the waves") for us to hammer home the point.
Maybe you meant no millennial in Britain?
Additionally my history classes all ended around the 60s-70s - roughly when the teachers were kids. Seemingly from their perspective "history" didn't include anything they experienced.
The rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the English language, ending Sati etc.
The empire wasn't all good, but was more benevolent than a lot of colonial empires. See the work of Nigel Biggar for reference.
Neither. While colonialism didn't _create_ generational poverty, the systemic genocides of the British were new. Colonial policy of prioritizing exports directly led to the deaths of millions. That's a fact.
A similar comparison would be between Roman slavery and the chattel slavery of the Americas. They are both abhorrent practices (just like the genocides caused by Indian rulers in the pre-British period), but it pales in comparison to the scale and horror of antebellum slavery.
I think that is a tacit assumption that a lot of British people make.
It's just going to be the default view if one does not have further information.
(the Scots diaspora as a result of Land clearances, and the Irish independence struggle and its links (and opposition) to Scots Protestantism and Irish migration to the mainland might have driven this. We have both Irish independence fights at football matches and orange order parades)
American person on social media (and, yes, I would claim HN is social media) claims "They never taught us this in school!!!" with many agreeing emphatically.
... and 90+% of the time I remember specifically being taught it. Most people don't remember much of their educations.
But yes, most people have a really bad memory of what's taught in school (and that probably isn't entirely their fault, the system clearly doesn't lead to sticky knowledge).
This actually isn't true in general. Baltimore (poor city) city schools, eg, spend twice as much as Carmel Indiana (wealthy city) does per pupil.
The link between education outcomes and spend is extremely weak.
They didn't teach this in high school!!!
Also, time changes things. I did school during a period where school history was in ferment and the teacher said at some points we were learning a new curriculum which rejected "great men of history" theory and focussed on mass movements. I suspect after Thatcher this was revised, it was almost overtly marxist. The textbooks on post colonialism were pretty clear.
I hasten to add I had no problem with this, and I read "the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte" as revision for the history exam in the library, with much pleasure. This was because we'd done a lot on the revolutions across Europe in 1848. Strangely we did very little on Chartism. When I went to uni I found out this was a really active field of study, especially in the midlands because so many Chartist pamphlets are held by places like Leeds university, the working class towns. Maybe thats why Scots History ignored it: it was a south of the border story! If they'd done the emergence of the British Labour party I bet we'd have had a lot given the origins of Labour in Scotland, and the Red Clyde story. That was probably done in year 12 and I left school early to go work in a Marine Biology lab.
I probably remember this because I enjoyed it. A lot of history doesn't excite everyone, perhaps I was lucky. I am buggered if I can remember the Maths, which isn't very helpful given I work in CS. Like Arnold Rimmer in "Red Dwarf" I am acceptably meh at colouring in the crinkly bits in Geography but not much else.
Looking back, it's also kind of amazing to think that the Northern Ireland Conflict was largely glossed over in English schools while it was going on, but the news coverage was pretty one-sided also.
Must be said the knowledge/interest of historical knowledge among my fellow Dutchies isn`t all that great.
https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/slavernij-en-kolonialism...
> figures from article above: percentages of total history subject matter: colonialism 9% Slavery 4 % Holocaust 2 %
We have the same expression in Russian.
Russia learned a lot from Dutch during Peter the Great's time, but I can't make a connection to literature from that.
Perhaps, just similar national characters?
I asked the toasters, they said this about it:
Yes, Russian literature tends to translate well into Dutch, and there are a few reasons for that:
1. Linguistic Similarities in Syntax and Tone – While Dutch and Russian are from different language families, both can handle long, complex sentences without losing clarity. Dutch, like Russian, allows for a mix of formal and informal tones within a single text, which helps maintain the nuance of Russian literature.
2. Cultural Compatibility – Dutch readers appreciate introspective, philosophical, and existential themes, which are common in Russian literature. Authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov resonate well with Dutch audiences because of their deep psychological exploration and social critique.
3. Strong Translation Tradition – The Netherlands has a long history of translating world literature with high quality. Dutch translators often work directly from Russian rather than relying on intermediary languages like English or French, preserving the original style and meaning.
4. Directness and Emotional Depth – Russian literature is known for its raw emotional depth and directness, qualities that align well with Dutch communication norms. This makes Russian novels feel more natural in Dutch than in some other languages that might soften or rephrase certain expressions.
Many Dutch readers have a strong appreciation for Russian classics, and some Dutch authors have even been influenced by them.
Arnon Grunberg comes to mind as a more contemporary writer, but couldn`t find a Russian translation.
There are Russian translations of some books by Arnon Grunberg[2][3], namely De heilige Antonio, Fantoompijn, Tirza, De geschiedenis van mijn kaalheid and a few very short stories. Which one of these would you recommend?
[0] https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Герард+Реве
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Реве,_Герард#Избранная_библиог...
[2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грюнберг,_Арнон#Публикации_на_...
I did not hear about in school.
It was made very clear that millions of civilians died (even when not counting the concentration camps) due to the war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg)
In the 80s, the Wehrmacht was still presented as a morally decent army. That changed in the 90s, partly due to the Wehrmacht exhibition.
And in New Zealand they also didn't teach us about the way our ancestors holocausted the Māori.
Holocausts happen with alarming regularly in history, and the side doing one usually ends up winning, except, you know, that one time. I wish I understood what factors make people so unable to reason about them or even acknowledge them. Business as usual bias? Ego defense? I think the German teaching that there was only one and there will never be another falls under denial.
The way you can't talk about Palestine in Germany feels like the way you can't talk about Hacker News moderation on Hacker News, except, you know, the life and death of about 6 million Muslims are at stake.
That Quentin Question video made me cringe from the beginning to the eventual end when I closed it for being insufferable.
Patronizing kids does not hold sway in the long term. They don't stay young. I think it's better to treat them more mature than they are, to speak to the people they become.
But there is never a critic of it, it's mentioned as matter of fact for the first, and only in positive for the second.
I had to grow old to realize "wait, napoleon was basically our hitler...".
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!
Given that those deaths were basically because of his lust for territorial extension and disregard for human life, I would say we are in a similar ballpark as Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
Of course, our history books are quick to state he made reforms, particularly legal and administrative ones, that benefitted our country a lot and still echo benefits today.
But again, I think if you a responsible for millions of deaths because of your desire for conquest, any arguments you can make in the other way are instantly moot.
You may, however, made the argument that it would have been better to be a French citizen at the time than somewhere else, depending on where and how you were born. But it's a different point.
When I was a kid in the 80s colonization was very lightly mentioned, mostly in the vontext of punitive comonies quch as Guyana.
Otherwise these territories were shown to children in mainland France as normal departments.
Today it is different. Colonies are part of the cirriculum but teachers have more leeway in appproching the topic. One of my children had the "we are genocide makers" version, when the other one was "colonization was a blessing for them" (I am overdrawing the picture)
When I went to secondary school from about 1997-2001 Indonesia in particular was covered fairly extensively. From what I recall it wasn't white-washed either: I remember one chapter describing how a young Indonesian woman was punished with hot chilli pasta (sambal) on her vagina. Pretty graphic stuff to teach a 14-year old.
Experiences seem to differ though, because I've heard other people describe that it's barely covered and/or white-washed. Maybe it depends on the school? I don't know. Also the schooling system completely changed since then.
US and Eurocolonial treatment of the Native Americans was covered extensively in regular courses though, often alongside and explicitly compared to the Holocaust which is also covered extensively.
There's just so much history to cover, and to be charitable to those who exclude events deemed important it can be that other events are deemed more important (especially by the local population) and there's only so much class time.
History instruction seems to be of two minds, either grand narratives (great men in the past, metrics-driven narratives like agricultural productivity now), or the case study approach where you sample some episodes from a variety of times and places and study each in depth. In both cases the approach must involve leaving some stories on the editing floor.
I don't think we were really taught at all about European/Asian history or the Soviet Union. I think I could have taken some classes related to those in highschool (secondary school), but for anyone working towards a non-history bachelor's degree those courses were generally not something that you could fit in your timetable.
I believe there was also one in Africa committed by Belgium in the Congo? I remember seeing some photos of something cruel from there to this effect.
Most of them didn't get those farms back after the war either.
I had to check the veracity of this, and it seems to be true. By 1945, Japanese American farms were responsible for 30%+ of the agricultural output of California.
There is a very good documentary about Italian war crimes which include the Ethiopian campaign, as well as the treatment of the Balkans by the Italian troops.
There's a _lot_ of British history, and world history. There are several (5?) competing exam boards offering GCSEs and A Level's in history, and generally schools are free to choose between exam boards on a subject-by-subject basis. Each of these will offer an absolute multitude of historic periods, crises, etc, that again schools are free to choose from; history exam papers will offer students choices of questions depending on what they actually studied.
What you get taught in your history class at school in the UK is down to your school's Head of History, rather than a complex government-led conspiracy. If your school's Head of History wants to teach "Empire is Bad", they will have no trouble finding approved materials to do so!
I read a ton of Usborne and Dorling Kindersley books and these were exactly the sorts or subjects they fixated on. I suppose it's probably part of some long-established national curriculum.
Where I live, people often (conspiratorially) complain that more serious subjects were not covered in school, but the only things I can't ever really remember covering involved South-and-4th-of-July-American history. We didn't really cover Africa outside of the 20th century, either.
To be honest I think American schools are the only ones who really give colonial history the attention it deserves because it's the basis of their entire country and then goes on to fill out the comparatively boring eighty or so years between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II. I find most people I talk to from the UK who are aware of some aspect of colonial history are either apologists for the British Empire or have this imported view common in North American (and especially Canadian) universities that the British were this uniquely nefarious force of evil. I suppose the historically curious ones just spend their time studying the Norman conquests.
Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.
> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.
I've never seen any convincing evidence that it was one of the richest countries in the world. What are you basing that off of?
> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.
In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.
You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.
I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?
The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.
Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:
* https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1083320
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.300.5617.227a
are links to a paper (2003) and commentary that goes down that path looking at genetics.
The more troubling to some is recent history during which attitudes towards using body parts have changed, even in Europe.
Many accept evidence of cannibalism 1,000 years past in the Americas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691637396/pr...
Some are uncomfortable about contempory reports of human flesh used in Asian medicines: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-made-infant-flesh-caps...
People can be forgiving of survival cannabilism in European famines (even in the 1930s) and among castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Europe
A number are just unaware that human bones were used to make beet sugar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/skeletons-from-battle-of...
> You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
You're excused.
The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?
> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.
I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.
There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.
I never claimed that it did.
I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.
There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".
> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.
Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.
On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.
How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?
All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.
I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".
I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.
Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.
Dyer gave explicit orders to fire into the crowd.
Germany's role in colonialism was always limited compared to the other European powers. We were late to the game and lost them after WW1, so it was more of a footnote. It did mention our colonies in East Africa and South East Asia but only mentioned the genocide against the Herero without a mention of details. The Atlantic Slave and trade was covered in great detail both in history and English lessons. Same for the Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of South and Middle America.