The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.
My grandparents and their generation were all born in Ireland, and had a very different outlook than the people who remained and folks you talk to today there. People just want to live their lives.
Travancore and British forces defeated Tippu Sultan which resulted in the Treaty of Seringapatam (1792).
Travancore was extremely prosperous under the Britsh Empire and was given special status. The same could not be said of the Northern Indian states which faced heavy subjugation and exploitation by the East India Company.
The caste divisions did exist before British rule but it wasn't as systematic and unified across India as after.
Boy how do we even talk about neocolonialism today if there are still people with full on colonialist sympathies holy shit
Also I think you likely meant widely, not wildly.
No I think that is a bad thing and a failure of our society if there are still people around repeating talking points from 1850s British colonial rule for christ sake!
Its like saying the Roman empire was great because it brought Aqueducts to the savages or something, like that is just education/knowledge of history + basic moral principles. The genocidal barbarism of colonialism should be something we left behind collectively. Or do you think whether or not the holocaust was good or bad is a matter of opinion too?
Caste is far older than western colonialism. The genetic evidence shows that castes oppression has been enough to suppress intermarriage for millennia:
https://www.livescience.com/38751-genetic-study-reveals-cast...
> Boy how do we even talk about neocolonialism today if there are still people with full on colonialist sympathies holy shit
How do we talk to people who are in denial bout historic oppression?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India#During_B...
But then again, without the British, there wouldn't have been a unified India but a multitude of states, sort of resembling the EU (in the best case). Worst case scenario, mini Africa.
Having a common hated enemy did have its benefits.
The brits also largely permitted the caste system to proceed. my experience is that upper caste indians preferred the brits, where the lower caste ones dont really discern the difference.
I can’t tell whether this is a joke or a sincere opinion, but HN readers might be misled if it’s allowed to stand. Briefly, this is an absurd claim.
I can speak confidently about India, and I am pretty sure the story is similar for other unfortunate colonies. Instead of arguing here, let me provide an accessible starting point to learning about it:
The podcast “Empire,” by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. The first series looks at the British in India, covering The East India Company, the Raj, Gandhi, Independence and Partition.
So of course I'm inferring the writers values here.
That's not at all true. There are many examples, but no need to look farther afield than Ireland, which has not yet recovered from the deliberate genocide of the Irish famine.
The island of Ireland had not yet reached the population it held pre-famine, and if Ireland had grown at the rate of its neighbours, it would now being closing in on 25 million+ instead of the ~7 million across the island.
> The ones who are thriving today owe a huge debt of gratitude, and the languishing ones are that way because they decided not to continue the British tradition.
Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.
> The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.
In a comment brimming with ignorance, this becomes absurd. The dissolution of the British empire is the great victory of the 20th century. A victory of human rights, decency, and even off the British population, who are disposable to the empire as foreign "subjects" were.
Unbelievable eh? Maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome.
On the other hand it could have been worse. We should remember that for almost every colonized people, the alternative to British Jurisdiction was not unmolested progress towards modernity but conquest by someone else, the French, the Germans,the Turks, the Russians,the Japanese and worst of all, the Belgians.
There's pretty clearly a distinction between different individual colonies on this one. Something like the Falkland Islands which had no indigenous population is very very different from Jamaica which was a plantation colony full of slaves, which is yet again very different something like Aden (now part of Yemen) which had about 600 people living there at the time it was annexed and which has had a very very difficult post-independence story.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand did alright, though.
United States too in a way (i.e. I doubt it would be what it is now if the same territory was colonized by the Spanish or even the French. Of course unless you were Native American…).
Yeah, the 100-200 million Indians who were killed by the East India Company through famines after being forced to raise opium instead of grain to help EIC to sell opium to kill 10-20 million Chinese every year would definitely agree...
Every great regime will experience crisis. But you have to ask yourself -- where would I have been otherwise?
Indians are still clamoring to get into this supposedly genocidal regime.
Ireland and Wales are no where near where they would be without being colonised. Let alone states further from the core of the empire.
>The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures
Greatest successes. Honestly it could only be better if the britons pushed the angles and saxons back into the ocean.
It's not like Ireland and Wales are doing much to preserve their legacies regardless. So it's hard, as an outsider, to intuit how much they actually care.
Bear in mind that a lot of the bad policies only started to be repealed in like the 60s. And that among other things, both suffered through a lot of the forced cultural assimilation the british empire was peddling.
I wonder what the aggregate sentiment of colonialism is in former British colonies.