Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 150 total)
  • The British Empire
  • theotherjonv
    Full Member

    For a friend’s daughter (12yo) homework; to do a survey on the British Empire. No more than a few sentences – not a diatribe – was it a good or bad thing and why?

    muddydwarf
    Free Member

    Financially Good for the private companies who originally set it in motion, Became a millstone around the neck of the British Govt when they inevitably had to step in to ‘correct’ (i.e. sort out in favour of the British Govt) problems caused by those companies, a threat to other Nations as Britain became richer and more powerful causing turf wars around the globe, bad for the people of the Nations who found themselves under British rule.

    sc-xc
    Full Member

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    meehaja
    Free Member

    Good: Spread western standards and values around the world.
    Bad: Spread western standards and values around the world.

    Caused a lot of wars as well.

    enfht
    Free Member

    It’s certainly fuelled the bed-wetting apologists for the next 1000 years 😆

    Good thing imo, too many reasons to mention. “what did the brits ever do for us” etc

    tinribz
    Free Member

    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csr0dxalpI[/video]

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    it was a way for a few elites to make money.

    it did an awful lot of harm to great many people.

    if anyone tries to tell you that bestowing ‘public goods’ upon the empire was a good thing, ask them to consider the lives of countless african slaves in the plantation colonies of the caribbean and tell them to show a little humility.

    Extracts from the Diary of slave owner Thomas Thistlewood 1756

    Wednesday, 26th May 1756: Caught Derby by Port Royal eating canes. Had
    him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth.

    Sunday, 25th July 1756: Port Royal [a runaway slave] brought back. Gave
    him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth,
    immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full and made him wear it 4
    or 5 hours.

    Friday, 30th July 1756: Punch catched at Salt River and brought home.
    Flogged him and Quacoo well, and then washed and rubbed in salt pickle,
    lime juice and bird pepper; also whipped Hector for losing his hoe, made
    New Negro Joe piss in his eyes mouth &c.

    Sunday, 1st August 1756: Hazat catched again. Put him in the bilboes both
    feet; gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with molasses and
    exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitoes all night,
    without fire.

    Glorious ?

    RustySpanner
    Full Member

    I liked the receptionist who kept the baby in the drawer.

    theotherjonv
    Full Member

    I asked for this to not turn into a diatribe, but there was a heck of a lot more to the British Empire than the slave trade. And Thistlewood was a particularly nasty example of the worst parts of it.

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    there was a heck of a lot more to the British Empire than the slave trade.

    seriously what could have possibly have followed that would in anyway make anyone think that it might have been an overall positive thing ?

    add in

    famine in ireland
    famine in india
    informal empire around the globe based on financial muscle
    genocide in tasmania and north america
    concentration camps in south africa
    drawing of a huge percentage of the worlds current borders as straight lines on a map for imperial convenience.

    so much more that i’m sure everyone knows anyway.

    like i said, show some humility.

    john_drummer
    Free Member

    I liked the receptionist who kept the baby in the drawer.

    😀

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    I asked for this to not turn into a diatribe,

    you also asked for opinions what did you expect ?

    Some folk will tell you it was great some folk will tell you it was a form of state sponsored capitalistic genocide.

    Pick one

    Basically we raped and pillaged the world to make us richer and we did not care who we hurt in the process. we were so arrogant we actually thought we were doing good 😯

    You have to have no moral code and a supreme sense of arrogance to think it was good …plenty will be here to expand on that view no doubt

    El-bent
    Free Member

    It’s certainly fuelled the bed-wetting apologists for the next 1000 years

    Not much point apologizing for the Sins of our forefathers, but:

    Good thing imo, too many reasons to mention. “what did the brits ever do for us” etc

    No point romanticising that it was good either.

    People today like yourself have a certain romanticism about “what the brits did for us”, thinking that this will somehow make up for all the diabolical things we did.

    Like:

    ask them to consider the lives of countless african slaves in the plantation colonies of the caribbean

    Just to name one thing. And to think, the National trust wouldn’t quite have so many stately homes to look after in the interest of preserving our national heritage, if we weren’t such keen slave traders.

    It was good watching the fall of Singapore the other night on TV. “we are superior to those little yellow fellas”. oops.

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    i love the new discourse that for some reason currently has some credibility. based largely on the work of niall ferguson and resting on the so called ‘public goods’ that the empire bestowed upon the world.

    this idiot is an oxbridge and harvard professor and actually thinks that the empire was a positive sum game because it gave the world :

    ‘the english language
    english forms of land tenure
    scottish and english banking
    the common law
    protestantism
    team sports
    free trade’

    What would the world have done without those ?

    wrecker
    Free Member

    Not much point apologizing for the Sins of our forefathers, but:

    Absolutely correct. I don’t feel a warm glow at the thought of the empire nor do I feel remotely responsible for it.

    theotherjonv
    Full Member

    So overall, because on one end of the seesaw we have the slave trade, famines in Ireland etc., ……which I don’t need any convincing were a very bad thing….. nothing on the plus end of the seesaw can be considered to be of value because it can’t counter balance the bad?

    I think actually this is the point of her homework assignment. To show that the empire on balance was (significantly) more bad than good but you can’t measure it in binary terms.

    Could equally have asked – A lot of the techniques in heart surgery / transplantation were initially pioneered by Nazi doctors in concentration camp experiments. Are they of no value because of the way they were developed?

    loum
    Free Member

    The BBC programme “Empire” was great, and had a bit of balance to it but without being too gruesome for a 12y old.
    Maybe order her the free OU poster from it, if its still available.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00p138b
    http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-empire

    TuckerUK
    Free Member

    One must also remember not to take any actions out of context. The slave trade for one, their own countrymen were enslaving them long before we got involved. Slavery has existed probably as long as mankind has.

    In tens/hundreds/thousand of years we’ll all look back at the barbaric practice of mutilated any childs’ genitals, of course now some get away with saying it’s acceptable.

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    as has prostitution/sex trafficking. If I sex traffic some prostitutes my conscience will be clean and I have done nothing wrong then?

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    We’re onto nazi surgery and circumcision and we haven’t even hit page 2 😐

    Tbh, I can’t see beyond the famine. I read all of tm’s excellent post above but it all comes back to the potato famine for me. Never forgive. Never forget.

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Jaysus, JY’s brought whoring into it now. Classic driftage. 😀

    muddydwarf
    Free Member

    The Empire was – unlike the other European Empires – an accident of trade. England and later Britain never really set out to obtain and run an empire, it was a byproduct of private trading monopolies granted to trading Companies that often had influential people on the board.
    The Honourable East India Company was one such, it grew to be so powerful and had so much money invested in it by Govt Ministers (privately) and by the Govt itself (i.e. public money) that it inevitably became an arm of Govt itself. The conquest of India was never projected policy by the British Govt, rather that British Army troops had to help John Company protect its substantial interests in the three main trading ‘cantons’ on the Indian coasts. The thing is, the threats to these trading centres were being directed by French and other European powers, so it was basically a war-by-proxy fought a long way from Europe. It is interesting to note that the lessons learnt on the Indian Peninsula enabled Sir Arthur Wellesely to defeat France in Europe.
    The Zulu Wars came about because the local African representatives of the Govt defied Govt instructions and caused the war in order to steal Zulu land and the vast cattle herds.
    The 2nd Afghan War was similar, local Govt representatives went against direct instructions and caused a war, of course in both cases the British Govt had to step in and finish the job because Britain could not afford to be seen as weak.
    By the time of the Zulu and Afghan Wars, Britain (just as Rome discovered) had realised that the Empire was costing far, far more to administer than it was earning for the exchequer – the last thing they needed was for blithering Imperial pillocks to be trying to add to it!

    Remember, overall the Empire was administered by the feckless, useless and often directionless 2nd and 3rd sons of the Gentry and Aristocracy – all the bright chaps were in Britain sat in the House of Commons and Lords, leaving the thickos to wander off to the fare flung reaches of Empire to try to find a way to make a name for themselves.

    How typically British, we blunder into owning the largest Empire the world has ever seen then staff it with blithering nincompoops who’s only qualification for the job was an inbred sense of superiority and self-entitlement.

    And all the while, as all the money from Empire disappeared into the pockets of the select few the people of Britain starved, suffered in the new factories and were denied representation…

    kimbers
    Full Member

    how about drawing up the map of the middle east

    iraq, iran, palestine, israel,saudi arabia, egypt all those lovely stable, peaceful,democratic places we can be proud to have had a hand in creating

    can you argue colonialism is anything other than exploitaion?

    br
    Free Member

    What it certainly didn’t do was teach the ‘natives’ efficiency…, as anyone who’s spent time in India will attest to 🙂

    molgrips
    Free Member

    The slave trade wasn’t specifically due to the empire as we would now think of it, it started before we had much of what we ended up with in the heyday 19th century.

    It was a mixed bag, I reckon. Remember a lot of places were pretty desperate under their own rule before the Brits waded in. It spread certain positive modern values around the world a bit, but also brutally repressed the natives at times. A bit like the Romans really.

    I suspect the trade brought a lot of money for (some of) the locals, of course it wasn’t very fairly distributed but wealth never was in those days.

    I worked for a while with a bloke from a rural part of Sudan, who lived in Manchester. He said that when he went back the old folk would ask him hopefully if the British were coming back.

    iraq, iran, palestine, israel,saudi arabia, egypt all those lovely stable, peaceful,democratic places we can be proud to have had a hand in creating

    What was it like before? And what would it have been like if we hadn’t been involved?

    muddydwarf
    Free Member

    General Gordon was wondering the same thing til he finally got the point…

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    of course it wasn’t very fairly distributed but wealth never was in those days.

    Are you suggesting it is now? 😕

    molgrips
    Free Member

    JY – it is a lot more fairly distributed overall, I think.

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    A lot ?

    Nah we have abolished slavery and the peasant class but the very wealthy elite is as far away and as rich as always especially if you think globally.

    If fairness is rated 1 – 100 and the empire is 6 we are 8 -10 now

    rogerthecat
    Free Member

    deadlydarcy – Member
    Never forgive. Never forget.

    That’s certainly not a route towards world peace! Never forget is absolutely right, without lessons from history we are likely to repeat the same mistakes. But, as younger generations understand, their peers in Germany and Japan are not responsible for the actions of the fathers and grandfathers.

    The Empire was a product of its time. It has to be understood within the context of how it came to be. Muddydwarf has, IMO, summed a very complex piece of history really well in a few paragraphs- I’d copy it quick and say nowt!! 😀

    If that period of history interests her and she wants to understand the international pressures and competition for overseas trade there is a very readable book called The Great Game

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Never.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Nah we have abolished slavery and the peasant class

    You talk about those things as if they are not important! In Europe in the 19th century most people had bugger all. Now we have widescreen TV and foreign holidays etc.

    wrecker
    Free Member

    Never forgive. Never forget.

    Apart from living amongst, working for and drinking with the British obviously.
    I do see what you mean though, I’ll never forgive the southern Irish for bombing our cities. Never.

    TuckerUK
    Free Member

    Nah we have abolished slavery…

    Really? Tell that to those poor buggers on the ‘travellers’ sites!

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    Yes clearly I think the abolition of slavery and the peasant class is trivial, thankfully you nailed the important issues of big tvs and package holidays.

    the richest 2% own half the world wealth, 10 % 85 % bottom 50% 1 % of the wealth

    this is not what i term a “lot more fiarly” though you are free to do so if you wish

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Doesn’t take much these days does it. 😀

    TuckerUK
    Free Member

    I’ll never forgive the southern Irish for bombing our cities. Never.

    Or the Americans who funded them or their government who allowed the fundraising…’War on Terror’ my arse.

    wrecker
    Free Member

    Or Brian o **** Driscoll for running British backs ragged.

    TuckerUK
    Free Member

    as has prostitution/sex trafficking. If I sex traffic some prostitutes my conscience will be clean and I have done nothing wrong then?

    I didn’t say it wasn’t wrong. But it is ignoring fact to paint the British as being responsible for a trade that was very well established even amongst the slaves own peoples. Don’t see many of them apologising for their forefathers wrongs either.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    thankfully you nailed the important issues of big tvs and package holidays

    Access to leisure time and pursuits are extremely important, yes.

    the richest 2% own half the world wealth, 10 % 85 % bottom 50% 1 % of the wealth

    How does that compare with 100 years ago? I didn’t say it was FAIR, I said it was MORE fair. Two things can be bad but one can still be better than the other.

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