The more stories like this are told and remove any shadow of a doubt about the foundations that western imperial states are built on the better.
Occasionally British politicians talk about "British Values" or "Making Great Britain Great Again" without any hit of acknowledgement of what 'British values' really entailed in reality.
I also wonder if you misremember. It's plausible that the person you described refused to believe that the abuses were systemic. It is implausible that a "very intelligent professional" would legitimately deny the abuses entirely. They were widely reported and well documented.
Edit: Actually, you could have just been dealing with someone who actively chooses ignore this stuff. That is a sad possibility. It was still widely reported, though.
Anyway, one thing that isn't in doubt is that it was only one data point. It's good to have some balancing opinions!
If anything that's less of a reason to disbelieve that your taxes, and those of your predecessors, are being spent on atrocities.
Unfortunately, the alternatives to empires is isolation and infighting between smaller powers. For an example of this, take a look at the middle east. The middle east is most peaceful when it is part of an empire - be it the Ottoman, the British, Mongol, or Arab empires. Another example, is Europe. Europe was pretty peaceful when it was partitioned between the Soviet empire and the US Empire (also known as NATO).
Also, empires can provide major benefits through economies of scale. Take a look at Europe before and after the fall of the Roman Empire. Looking back historically, the Roman Empire was probably a net positive for human development throughout the Mediterranean World. The various Chinese empires were also probably net positives for their citizens.
Thus, it is not proper to judge the British empire over violence (given that an empire requires violence). The judgement should be over whether the British empire was a net positive or a net negative overall for the people involved.
The example of the middle east is not really the best for supporting your claim, since there are not only small powers, but also the big empires fighting for various reasons.
And I believe that is the case in nearly every mayor conflict I know. The big empires are allways involved. So it is not really an argument pro empire, when the empires are the cause for the conflict in the first place.
That's easy, it was a net negative for the Indians.
What people forget is that the norms of the past are not the same as the norms of today. At one time, slavery was normal across vast swathes of the planet. That it isn't today, is in part due to a moral revolution that took place in Britain and resulted in a policy change by the British empire - despite its own commercial interests - to abolish slavery and the trade in slaves, even while nearly all other countries in the world at the time were totally fine with it.
I think you may not be aware of the graylevels within that statement. It is true that the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished the African slave trade. But you need to know the details to realize why the powers that be allowed that to happen. Also, it is worth mentioning that while the same 1833 act made an explicit exception for territories possessed by the East India company. Further, slavery was replaced by indentured labor. This is why you find large populations of non-African slave descendants in many countries. If you've ever vacationed in Trinidad, you'll notice lots of Asians (Indian, etc) people. They got there because their ancestors were brought as indentured labor to replace African slaves. In many cases, as is still occurring today in places like Qatar/UAE, indentured labor is just a #define for slavery.
"while nearly all other countries in the world at the time were totally fine with it". I guess this depends on how you define "country", but lets take it to mean the majority of a population. I'll give you that countries benefiting from the slave trade were clearly fine with it. I sincerely doubt the populations being enslaved were though. (their opinions count right?)
If you look at the contemporaries of the British Empire they do not stand out as exceptional either good or bad morally. Meanwhile, if you compare the Nazis to their contemporaries they do however stand out (though not nearly as some people might think).
To me it seems rather cruel and unfair to label someone or something as "immoral" if they are acting within the limits of accepted and expected behaviour in their environment.
I find it ethically very dubious. Certainly many people committing atrocities have been "going along with the flow" of their own local environments.
Clearly you feel that anybody of this opinion is in error. Does everyone who posts an article about the nastiness of the (historical) British Empire feel the same way? There are quite a few come up on Hacker News. To me it doesn't seem like England is perceived as lovable at all, in fact I can't imagine where you got the idea.
You mention the Nazis, but I don't think I've ever seen a post about those guys. It's almost as if one needn't hold modern-day Germans accountable for the crimes of their forebears? What a strange idea.
Quite how any of these were able to rationalise such behaviour, and so comparatively recently, whilst claiming to be civilised beats me.
If they had actually known what atrocities had been committed in order to get them that rubber or cotton would they have been so happy about it? I think modern shame is very much the product of modern access to information.
(To counter that point, most people can reasonably be expected to know where their bananas and palm oil came from and they still buy them)
Which is a development I very much welcome.
The later "benevolent empire" phase, broadly around the time of the Opium wars, saw the repression, misrule and attempt to civilise these places. That saw more separation. This was the phase that saw concerted efforts to add infrastructure, schools, hospitals and such.
I'm somehow suspicious of this claim. There's some circumstancial evidence that make me think that Belgium's crimes were more exposed.
For instance, compare the death tolls of the railways in the two Congos.
British did a lot of nasty killings in India as well, for instance the Jalianwala Bagh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhKYg641K3c&feature=youtu.be...
Surreal imagery.
The British put inhumane and genocidal policies in place, starving millions in a land of plenty.
No, you do not lose the excuse of racism - "Race" is a social construct, not a biological one. The Irish were seen as an inferior people at the time (even in the U.S.), so they did suffer racism.
This doesn't seem like an action of a government intent on genocide.
It seems more to me that British policy in Ireland during the famine is marked by an extreme ideological commitment to laissez faire economics (ie, letting land owners export food from Ireland in large quantities to make money, letting ports export food etc) and no little incompetence and prejudice against imagined "workshy" irish layabouts.
But I wouldn't say there was a deliberate policy of genocide as such.
As far as I know, the potato blight was not started by British settlers gifting infected towels to the natives.
Small catch: bumper harvests of oats, wheat and meats were being exported, protected by bayonet. The citizens were living off of kitchen gardens, which is why potatoes were a staple to begin with -- the lord wouldn't give peasant rabble access to enough land to grow corn or wheat for private consumption.
After the second potato crop failure in 1846: > Trevelyan's free market relief plan depended on private merchants supplying food to peasants who were earning wages through public works employment financed mainly by the Irish themselves through local taxes. But the problems with this plan were numerous. Tax revues were insufficient. Wages had been set too low. Paydays were irregular and those who did get work could not afford to both pay their rent and buy food. Ireland also lacked adequate transportation for efficient food distribution. There were only 70 miles of railroad track in the whole country and no usable commercial shipping docks in the western districts.
> By September, starvation struck in the west and southwest where the people had been entirely dependent on the potato. British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, upon encountering starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his efforts, Dombrain was publicly A starving boy and girl in Cork hoping to find a potato. rebuked by Trevelyan. The proper procedure, he was informed, would have been to encourage the Irish to form a local relief committee so that Irish funds could have been raised to provide the food.
You can claim that denying a man dying of thirst a glass of water isn't harming him. But when you do that systematically, don't pretend that it's any different than killing him some other way.
One might think though if the famine happened to Britain and not to the "inferior" Irish "race" [see other comments], wether the government would be "letting land owners export food from [Britain] in large quantities to make money".
If a genocide occurs as a result of a commitment to a political or economic ideology, does intention really matter?
I understand what she did was very hard work. But what's the point? People who raise these issues now probably and unintentionally end up generating hatred amongst individuals who might otherwise be perfectly fine with each other. Then there are people who get emotionally touched, take an absolute stand and create an uprising. The people (experts) who raised the issue first get sidelined. The govt tries to control the situation and gets labelled as oppressive. Politicians and media take control now. It goes on and then starts a racial and a religious divide and all the wars in the world. The true purpose is lost and what exists past those wars is just pieces of hazy truth mixed with spiced up vigilantism.
The British did very bad and evil things in the past. But why not talk about evil things performed now by another powerful and smart country that uses methods incomprehendible to most people.
- I can't speak for Caroline Elkins, but I think that many historians, including myself, believe that every human life that was ever lived has some value and deserves to be remembered, as far as that's possible. As living human being we naturally have a tendency to privilege our present moment and the lives of the humans who happen to be alive alongside us, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's humbling to realize that there are tens of billions of lives that have faded from memory, but which were every bit as vivid and profound to the people who experienced them as your own life is to you. So I think one core benefit of history is simply in preserving the memories and the experiences of all sentient beings. (This is going to get very interesting in the decades to come when we get better at digitally preserving people's personalities and memories, but that's for another discussion).
- There are a surprising number of people in the mainstream of political and cultural discussion who truly seem to believe that the British Empire should be uncritically celebrated. Niall Ferguson being probably the most famous example. This kind of work forces us to confront the fact that the good intentions of some British imperialists were counterbalanced by atrocities and acts of unthinking violence. Caroline Elkins' work is important in the same way that George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" is - it documents cruelties, not to settle scores, but to help us avoid repeating them.
- Arguably, more violence and hatred could be incited by failing to remember horrible past events. In other words, if a people have a sense that they've been wronged within living memory, and that as those memories fade, the injustice done to them will be forgotten, this could generate even more distrust and hatred then an acknowledgement and apology. This is a debatable point, but one that makes sense to me from the standpoint of my own life - we tend to get angriest at unacknowledged wrongs.
I agree with that, but the difference is that we have the ability to improve present and future lives, something we cannot do for those of the past. Thus if bringing dignity to the past injures the present and the future, we would not do so.
Pretending history never happened is not only disingenuous, it actively hurts attempts to heal and move forward. There can be no forgiveness if one side tries to pretend something bad never happened. The example everyone cites is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process, in which the horrors of apartheid were laid bare. Everyone acknowledged what happened, and it laid the basis for moving forward.
Facts are facts. If the ugly history of imperialism offends you, look away. It will be there regardless.
Ancestors?!! 50 years ago is in living memory - as the article stated, some the victims of the Mau Mau repression are still walking the earth, why should they 'bury the past'?
Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it, we shouldn't bury it, but study and analyze it and make changes to lower the chances of it happening again - Nuremberg was a good thing for humanity, we need more of that.
For events only 50 years ago, it's more likely that the hatred is already there and the effect of it on families gets ignored because "the past is past".
"Creating an uprising" only happens when there's already tension and unhappiness floating around and people don't feel like they have any other way for their problems to be heard.
I encourage everyone to look into the Truth & Reconciliation movement in Canada. It's truly inspiring to see how important Truth is, and how important reconciliation is, only because of truth.
Really, the question can be of one's own guilt and blissful ignorance when we're reminded how clueless we really are of the plight of others. Looking in the mirror in that simple way isn't always easy.
In education, there are few things more important than teaching the truth about the horrors of the past, and the human capacity for violence, racism, and bureaucratic indifference, in the hope of creating empathy and stopping future genocide.
Also, understanding the actions of the past helps us understand the actions of the present. Without historical context, it's nearly impossible to have perspective on why an individual or group of people hold certain beliefs or act in a way we may not at first understand.
I think that's a flawed way to think. Your logic would imply that we shouldn't make anymore movies about the Holocaust because it might cause Jews to hate Germans.
