Colonialism: ah, ye olde glorie!

[DanteGabriel]

24 minutes ago, Sullen said:

I don't know, I think he was honestly screwed over by history, and the British seriously harmed the progress of Europe when they plotted his downfall.

It's okay, though, since the British crusaded to end slavery a mere two hundred years after spreading it all around their colonies, so net positive.

[Tijgy]

26 minutes ago, Sullen said:

I was being extreme for comic value, but yes, I really do feel that way.

He was a hard-working, progressive man while still steering clear of extremism (which led to the fall of Robespierre, Marat, Danton, and the rest). I honestly believe he was a man of the people, and that his people (which he defined not by ethnicity but rather by the territory they lived on) loved him right back.

As for his aggressiveness, I honestly believe that every single one of his campaigns was defensive, with the exception of his takeover of Spain. Europe under Napoleon would have really been better if you ask me. More inclusive, more open-minded, more fair, and yet would have a great amount of self-determination as was the case with Poland... generally better. I seriously think he was in the right when he said that history was a lie everybody agreed on, and that it would end up fucking him over after his defeat at the hands of Wellington.

I don't know, I think he was honestly screwed over by history, and the British seriously harmed the progress of Europe when they plotted his downfall.

Now we are talking about colonialism. Was Wellington not complicit in "conquering" India? He fought at least there during several years, his brother was the Governor-General of India, ... He was at least during certain years of the 19th century PM of England and one of Queen Victoria's advisors. He was very conservative (however he worked very hard for the Catholic Emancipation in Britain). 

But I do think you can put all the blame on the British. It was also the fault of the Austrians, the Prussians, ... (the British tend to forget the role of the Prussians in Waterloo). 

But I think both of them are interesting and similar men. Both of them were not born in the "mainland" but in places which considered the elite something backward (Ireland and Corsica); both of them were born in the year of 1769; both of them were great warriors and general; both of them were politicians; ... The big difference between them Napoleon did a sprint and Wellington a marathon. 

(I must say I am not a historian. So I probably do not know everything. A very interesting book series was the Revolution Quartet written by Simon Scarrow. It is still fiction but it was very interesting to read about the parallel of the lives of Wellington and Napoleon.)  

[Britannia Pacificatrix]

3 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

I still don't see any actual defense of the British Empire. Still more "Trust me, I have read about this stuff." At least you didn't try and pimp Niall Ferguson again.

You don't get credit for ending slavery earlier than most other countries, especially when the British spread slavery to their colonies. Absolutely the British ended slavery before the Americans did. That's a reason to damn the Americans, not praise the British. Oh, they led the anti-slavery movement to that spread across the world, only a couple of hundred years after spreading slavery to the colonies they conquered and despoiled! What fucking humanitarians! Do you praise a husband for only beating his wife for the first few years of their marriage?

Sorry, you must be mistaking me for an American imperialist. I have lived in the US most of my life, but I was born in a country that was colonized and exploited by two different empires and whose civic culture is still crippled by the colonized mindset. One of the things I hammer on about most in political threads here is that slavery is America's original sin and we're still paying the price for it. That's not entirely accurate though, as the genocide of Native Americans is probably America's original sin, but our colonial forefathers mostly got away with that.

So we're seven posts into your posting career and your highly educated and historically informed of the British Empire's great deeds during the colonial period is "Other people are worse, and everyone else was doing it." Even I, who "focus on the negatives," at least brought up fucking railroads as a beneficial thing the British did (though one must wonder what kind of labor was employed to build such mighty works). You have failed to back up your vainglorious handle and your claims of deep study.

I did in my last post. But let me do it again: the British Empire also brought about the greatest period of enlightenment in human history. It was the British form of governance and the systems Britain left behind that has brought many millions out of poverty (since Britain left in the 50's and 60's... granted that the post-governments left behind didn't wreck their own country). It also invented and discovered literally thousands of things that are still used to this day, that has massively benefited the lives of countless billions (the invention of penicillin, or seed drill or the vaccine for example). But if you want a more concise and far more in-depth account, look at the book I recommended.

False. The peoples Britain conquered practices slavery. The Indians under the Mughals and Marathas enslaved people. The native Americans also practices slavery, as did the Zulus and other African tribes conquered by the British. Sorry to break this to you mate, but every culture, ethnic group, country and "people", has practiced slavery. So your claim that we spread it throughout the world is a fallacy. And I can't help but note you fail to mention that this was far from a British-only problem, and we were far from the worse culprits either... you fail to mention that the Muslim Arab states were the largest slave traders in the world... oh, and Britain not only wasn't the largest slaver-state in the world, but we weren't even the largest slavers in Europe, that titles goes to the Portuguese.

The rest of your post is piffle. 

Try again.

 

 

[James Arryn]

Napoleon's rep as a warmongering despot is a really interesting case of adopted perspective.

It was how the monarchical powers wanted to portray him at the time, of course, when he/France represented an existential threat to their system of government just by being. That we, who would sympathize with the French political scene much more than their antagonists, have chosen to maintain that depiction is very odd. Some of it has to do with political cartooning really exploding at around that time in Britain, some if it is the piggybacking of winner-writes-history-books, but there is enough info out there to defy most of the propaganda w/o much effort. The fact that the warmonger almost never started wars and always followed fought in order to force peace treaties with states that treated France like Arab states treated Israel back in the 60/70's...ie, their existence meant war, period.

 

 

I think it's fair to say he deviated from some of the principles of the Revolution, or perhaps more accurately to say that he sacrificed some in order to preserve others he felt most essential, but without a Napoleon it's hard to imagine revolutionary France of any kind even surviving both external hostility and internal cannibalism much longer, let alone ascend as they did. i am opposed to exporting representative political forms/'freedom' by military means when that's chosen over peace...that's just imperialism in a dress...but when it's your response to invasion, it's pretty understandable. 

 

[The Killer Snark]

The British Empire was mostly a source of good in the world, in terms of cross-cultural relations and mutual economic growth and the development of civilisation in countries which were either more inequitous or less civilised before the limited colonisation of the British: this being  irrespective of the cultural retaivist, historical revisionism perpetrated now via the social agendas of middle class Marxist professors. Some gross colonial inequities, on occasion, which were not sponsored by either liberal or moderate conservative governments, have been systematically represented as representative of the whole, by Marxists who ignore the mostly destructive and genocidal, rape-infused colonialism of Islamists that were originally responsible, in protection of Middle Eastern Christian communities, of The Crusades, which are regularly cited by Cultural Relativists in excuse for centuries of Islamic expansionist and terrorist atrocities. I am not excusing the ravages perpetrated by the Kinghts Templar, who were mainly supported by feudally excused murderers, thieves and rapists in order to bring coin back for their masters, but it's always helpful to have some historical perspective here.

[sologdin]

whatever, late victorian holocausts.

[DanteGabriel]

14 hours ago, Britannia Pacificatrix said:

I did in my last post. But let me do it again: the British Empire also brought about the greatest period of enlightenment in human history. It was the British form of governance and the systems Britain left behind that has brought many millions out of poverty (since Britain left in the 50's and 60's... granted that the post-governments left behind didn't wreck their own country). It also invented and discovered literally thousands of things that are still used to this day, that has massively benefited the lives of countless billions (the invention of penicillin, or seed drill or the vaccine for example). But if you want a more concise and far more in-depth account, look at the book I recommended.

False. The peoples Britain conquered practices slavery. The Indians under the Mughals and Marathas enslaved people. The native Americans also practices slavery, as did the Zulus and other African tribes conquered by the British. Sorry to break this to you mate, but every culture, ethnic group, country and "people", has practiced slavery. So your claim that we spread it throughout the world is a fallacy. And I can't help but note you fail to mention that this was far from a British-only problem, and we were far from the worse culprits either... you fail to mention that the Muslim Arab states were the largest slave traders in the world... oh, and Britain not only wasn't the largest slaver-state in the world, but we weren't even the largest slavers in Europe, that titles goes to the Portuguese.

The rest of your post is piffle. 

Try again.

 

 

You know what's piffle? When someone living in a country that is still coasting off the massive wealth plundered through centuries of slavery and conquest writes smug little encomiums about all the wonderful things the colonizers brought to the countries they conquered and enslaved. Like somehow a 16th century native of foreign shores was fortunate to have the British show up to plant a flag, enslave his sons, rape his daughters, and burn down his village to build a sugar plantation.

Sorry, I am not going to invest my time in a smug colonial apologist like Ferguson, if this is the core of his argument -- even if he manageas the miraculous feat of being both "more concise" and "far more in-depth."

Oh, but we come to the ace in the hole of every slavery apologist -- "The people we conquered and enslaved also practiced slavery!" True. But it also manages to ignore the unprecedented brutality of the sugar plantations that the British set up, bringing their depressingly single-minded efficiency for exploitation to the industry of human misery as well. The brutal efficiency of those plantations, of course, was the foundation of the wealth that endowed universities so that centuries later, smug twits like Ferguson could write about how fortunate the natives were that the British civilized them while conquering and enslaving them.

It takes a special kind of arrogance to sneer at the postcolonial failures of countries that the British left. "After we spent a couple of centuries exploiting them, extracting their natural wealth, and destroying their will to resist, who could have predicted that the corrupt, kleptocratic governments left behind would just lead to more poverty and misery for these people that we conquered and enslaved? I hope the instability that follows in our wake doesn't interfere with the operations of the companies we left there to continue skimming wealth out of that country." It's amazing you can unironically opine about postcolonial governments "wrecking their own country" when the mess was left behind by the British.

What unbelievable arrogance to not just continue to carry on this "White Man's Burden" approach to history, but to seek it out after one should know better. What smug bullshittery to sit back from your comfortable, overprivileged perch built from the blood and stolen wealth of native peoples and declare, after reading a couple of books from other similarly overprivileged shitheel apologists, that you judge the British conquest and exploitation of half the world to have been a net positive for the peoples that were slaughtered and enslaved. The only thing you've made a case for is that the British were maybe not as vile and despicable colonizing enslavers as other empires could have been. So bully for you. Enjoy a cuppa and the warm rosy glow of a conscience untroubled by inconvenient and easily ignored facts.

[ElizabethB.]

2 hours ago, sologdin said:

whatever, late victorian holocausts.

This is coming from a poster with a symbol of murders, wars and oppression as an avatar. 

 

[Sullen]

18 hours ago, Tijgy said:

Now we are talking about colonialism. Was Wellington not complicit in "conquering" India? He fought at least there during several years, his brother was the Governor-General of India, ... He was at least during certain years of the 19th century PM of England and one of Queen Victoria's advisors. He was very conservative (however he worked very hard for the Catholic Emancipation in Britain). 

I'd say any English subject serving loyally under Victoria would be complicit in British colonialism, her reign was the apogee of the British empire after all. I had not read about his work to emancipate to emancipate the Catholics, but being from Ireland, it doesn't surprise me that he would try to better the condition of the better part of the population of his homeland. Despite being a massive Napoleon fanboy, I do not consider Wellington to be a bad person, as far as I am concerned, he was a pretty stand-up guy... that his contributions in the British war effort led to Napoleon's defeat leaves me pretty damned mad though.

While on the subject of colonialism, I think it's interesting to compare British colonialism with the other major European powers's ways of colonizing. The French, for instance, while absolutely horrible in the Antilles, didn't do that bad in New France, keeping extremely friendly relations with the natives like the Huron and the Algonquins. They entered in conflicts with the Iroquois, but then again, I blame the British for that.

19 hours ago, Tijgy said:

But I do think you can put all the blame on the British. It was also the fault of the Austrians, the Prussians, ... (the British tend to forget the role of the Prussians in Waterloo). 

True, it was not entirely Great Britain's fault, there were many actors responsible for ol'Boney's downfall, Russia being another one of them. I still do believe that the British hold the largest share of the blame/credit.

19 hours ago, Tijgy said:

But I think both of them are interesting and similar men. Both of them were not born in the "mainland" but in places which considered the elite something backward (Ireland and Corsica); both of them were born in the year of 1769; both of them were great warriors and general; both of them were politicians; ... The big difference between them Napoleon did a sprint and Wellington a marathon. 

(I must say I am not a historian. So I probably do not know everything. A very interesting book series was the Revolution Quartet written by Simon Scarrow. It is still fiction but it was very interesting to read about the parallel of the lives of Wellington and Napoleon.)  

I think a Napoleon-Wellington comparison would be interesting, I shall look about the book series you just mentioned. I wouldn't describe what Napoleon did a sprint though, I'd simply say his burden was several times heavier than any one political force could carry. France was still unstable at Napoleon's ascent, and was surrounded by enemies.

16 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Napoleon's rep as a warmongering despot is a really interesting case of adopted perspective.

It was how the monarchical powers wanted to portray him at the time, of course, when he/France represented an existential threat to their system of government just by being. That we, who would sympathize with the French political scene much more than their antagonists, have chosen to maintain that depiction is very odd. Some of it has to do with political cartooning really exploding at around that time in Britain, some if it is the piggybacking of winner-writes-history-books, but there is enough info out there to defy most of the propaganda w/o much effort. The fact that the warmonger almost never started wars and always followed fought in order to force peace treaties with states that treated France like Arab states treated Israel back in the 60/70's...ie, their existence meant war, period.

 

I think it's fair to say he deviated from some of the principles of the Revolution, or perhaps more accurately to say that he sacrificed some in order to preserve others he felt most essential, but without a Napoleon it's hard to imagine revolutionary France of any kind even surviving both external hostility and internal cannibalism much longer, let alone ascend as they did. i am opposed to exporting representative political forms/'freedom' by military means when that's chosen over peace...that's just imperialism in a dress...but when it's your response to invasion, it's pretty understandable. 

 

I pretty much agree with everything in your post, I especially like the parallel between Israel and France when it comes to how they are perceived by their neighbours.

Concerning political cartoons becoming the hot new tool of propaganda at the time, I started collecting every caricature of Napoleon I could find while browsing the web, there's an astounding amount of them, and the image they sent of Napoleon is still how he is popularly perceived nowadays: An aggressive, short-tempered, megalomaniac, height-challenged cuckold. The power of propaganda at work.

[sologdin]

1 hour ago, ElizabethB. said:

This is coming from a poster with a symbol of murders, wars and oppression as an avatar. 

 

not a very useful response, the tu quoque fallacy.  revise & resubmit.

[Sullen]

15 minutes ago, sologdin said:

not a very useful response, the tu quoque fallacy.  revise & resubmit.

Not intending to butt in, but that's using argument from fallacy... another fallacy.

I do agree that British colonialism was overall an evil on the world, but it is true that it comes off a bit hypocritical to criticize the British for their atrocities while (apparently) praising another force that was just as bad, if not worse.

[Maltaran]

1 hour ago, Sullen said:

I had not read about his work to emancipate to emancipate the Catholics, but being from Ireland, it doesn't surprise me that he would try to better the condition of the better part of the population of his homeland.

 

He never considered himself Irish though, his quote on the matter was "Being born in a stable does not make one a horse".

[ElizabethB.]

7 hours ago, sologdin said:

not a very useful response, 

Agreed, but only because the monsters your avatar represents, won. 

edited for clarity

[Sullen]

6 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

He never considered himself Irish though, his quote on the matter was "Being born in a stable does not make one a horse".

Interesting, thank you for the correction.

Nonetheless, being born in Ireland would give him some knowledge of the grievances the Irish, and more specifically the Catholic majority, had to endure. Considering his rather close-minded attitude towards outsiders, I would think that this would heighten his sympathy for the Catholic cause.

[The Killer Snark]

Elizabeth B - I actually quite like sologdin, but well said. But I;m staying away from possible argument. You're right, however. The grand total of deaths that resulted from the occasional inequities of British Colonialism are a drop in the ocean compared to the many millions imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered under various Communist and Fascist (Fascism being State-Corporatist, therefore Collectivist) regimes.

If anyone is interested, though other countries in Europe had never practised slavery in the first place, it was first made completely illegal in Britain before anywhere else in the civilised world.

 

[Fat Mac]

Elizabeth B - I actually quite like sologdin, but well said. But I;m staying away from possible argument. You're right, however. The grand total of deaths that resulted from the occasional inequities of British Colonialism are a drop in the ocean compared to the many millions imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered under various Communist and Fascist (Fascism being State-Corporatist, therefore Collectivist) regimes.

If anyone is interested, though other countries in Europe had never practised slavery in the first place, it was first made completely illegal in Britain before anywhere else in the civilised world.

 

I'm not big on saying one civilization is better or worse than another, but 29 million Indians died from famine caused by British policies. Never mind the hundreds of thousands to millions that died violently in rebellions and insurrections. Or the fact that the British got an entire people hooked on proto -heroin so they could force them to be dependent.

It wouldn't call it a drop in the ocean compared to the Communists, especially if you compare just one civilization to several.

[TerraPrime]

"occasional inequities of British Colonialism"

 

Is that anything like "accidental racism of the KKK" or the "incidental anti-semitism of the Neo-Nazis"? Something that perhaps the busy British colonizing forces managed to indulge in once a month on a slow Thursday afternoon between afternoon tea and the dinner party?

[ElizabethB.]

1 hour ago, The Killer Snark said:

Elizabeth B - I actually quite like sologdin, but well said. But I;m staying away from possible argument.

 

As you should, it has nothing to with you, it is between me and his avatar. 

I like S too. 

edited for, Is it with s though? 

You know of course I like S and s both! 

[Britannia Pacificatrix]

6 hours ago, Sullen said:

Not intending to butt in, but that's using argument from fallacy... another fallacy.

I do agree that British colonialism was overall an evil on the world, but it is true that it comes off a bit hypocritical to criticize the British for their atrocities while (apparently) praising another force that was just as bad, if not worse.

Do you also consider the French empire and her colonial possessions an evil on the world?

[Sullen]

30 minutes ago, Britannia Pacificatrix said:

Do you also consider the French empire and her colonial possessions an evil on the world?

Certainly not to the extent that I consider Britain, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands to be evils on the world. I actually find their overly inclusive policy for African Frenchmen quite good in a world where colonialism was mixed with atrocities. I think they did very well as far as morality goes in North America as well.

The Antilles seriously tarnishes their record though.