Given it's the empire responsible for the most human deaths in history, it's hard to argue (still have to contend with the Soviets, Mongols, and of course the Romans).
Of course not everything is black and white - so having a short article about one of top two greatest empires of all times, is bound to lack context and breadth.
>Given it's the empire responsible for the most human deaths in history, it's hard to argue
Is it? The amount of deaths shouldn't be compared to 0, it should be compared to a counterfactual where the indigenous people were in charge. Otherwise you run into the "doctors with most patient deaths" problem. It's possible that the doctor is objectively bad, or that he's receiving the sickest patients. It's plausible for instance, that areas with local rulers who are brutal and despotic are easy to conquer/colonize by an outside empire, because the brutality/despotism means it's easy to assemble a local coalition to depose the current regime.
Attributing any mention of possible positive impacts of British colonialism to apologism on the part of the poster is itself a bad look. Let the good and bad be dredged out of the swamp of the past, washed off and compared. Nobody alive has any significant skin in the British Raj at this point.
Save your self-censorship argument for Tibet, Kashmir, Taiwan, Ukraine, Kashmir, etc. Talk about bad looks (and actual personal danger for some).
To clarify, we're talking about the idea that colonial subjugation might not have been any worse than the power structures that were displaced in terms of excess deaths. This is not the same as saying the British built railways, and also demonstrably untrue, both statistically and philosophically. A passing knowledge on the horrors of colonialism would qualify one to identify this idea as colonial apologism.
I guess, as a academic exercise, such comparisons should include population size and time span. Something like imperial death per year per capita. Ideally measuring "excess deaths" in some fashion.
For example Russian excess deaths all happened over quite a short time span. Does it mean their intensity of badness was higher?
Wikipedia says the Spanish beat the British to it.
>The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.
> Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties
The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).
I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.
> Didn't the Empire go through a lot of trouble to end the slave trade
Combating slavery gave the British Empire a comparative advantage, as they could export commodities like Sugar, Cotton, Palm Oil, and Coffee from the British Raj (which in the 19th century included all of South Asia as well as Malaysia) and British Egypt (cotton) without a plantation slavery model, while undermining competitors like the US and Brazil who used that model for commodity exports.
Same reason why the industrial Northeast and small-farmer Midwest was opposed to slavery, as both lobbies were undermined by the economics of slavery.
>Much of South India and Eastern India was already British ruled by the early 1800s.
No they were not. They were run by private East India Company. With the revolt of 1857 and quashing of the rebellion, the official Raj by the British Royals began
You are still bickering over pedantic stuff. Britain profited from slave trade. They just didn't want to use the term "slave" and used "colony" instead.
All the colonial empires wore. The problem was, that they could monopolize trade- and starve out countries. No need for prisons, camps etc. you just cut off trade and let the starvation do the rest of the horror. Bonuspoints if you changed the agricultural sector of a region to produce only one thing like tea or cotton.
Some even managed to starve breadbaskets - like stalin did. It was a monstrous time, and this world of monsters strangling newborn nations, gave rise to the monsters to out-monster the monsters. Stalinism and Facism. Empires are horrific things, with a starved out, vampire sucked dry periphery and a core pretending that everything is normal and civilized. To want to go back to that time, is to abandon all mankind. Nuclear war and a swift end is preferable to this.
Gandhi was controlled opposition IMO. His approach delayed the inevitable by decades.
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
I think British control worked more subtly than you imply. I'm not that up on India but I heard roughly how the takeover worked in Ireland. Pre British control Ireland was controlled by a number of local rulers of a warlord type who were endlessly fighting. The Brits basically contacted them and said ally yourself with the King and we'll protect you and make sure you have a good life, or oppose us and we'll team with your rivals to wipe you out. Thus most of them pledged allegiance to the British king with hardly a shot fired.
Ireland is a terrible example as it was starved to death (like literally), known as the Great Famine. To this day the population of Ireland is still lower than the pre-famine times (1845)
>Henry VIII of England was made "King of Ireland" by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The conquest involved assimilating the Gaelic nobility by way of "surrender and regrant"...
The Brits didn’t introduce the potato blight, they just mismanaged the resulting situation in their 19th Century trademark bumptious, oblivious, supercilious manner. But it is unclear whether home rule at that point would have come up with any better idea than emigration. Without the potato, Ireland couldn’t (and still can’t (?)) sustain its pre-1845 population, and an agronomic solution was a long time coming.
Eh, the Americas got a lot of great Irish immigrants out of the tragedy. And those immigrants and their descendants have had a better life than if they stayed in dear old Ireland IMHO.
You could say the Great Famine actually started with the introduction of the potato to Eurasia, an Americas/colonialism introduction that at that point had kept hunger from the door of countless Europeans, especially during times of conflict (since you can’t set a torch to something growing in the ground).
> Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties
The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).
I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.
Also, staying that the State of Israel learned suppressive tactics from Britain is rather infantilising in the extreme.
These type of articles are really more of an advertisement for how worthless a PhD in the humanities is. The author clearly has no understanding of power politics (Which is going to be kind of jarring for them as we head back into playing that game from the weird 80ish year deviation we've had under American world hegemony). Further, there's no AB testing here. The comparison is some utopia where nobody bothers the natives, no violence happens internally to the colonized area and it's kumbaya's all around. This was not the reality in any place I am aware of. The reality was, if it wasn't the British, it was going to be somebody worse and if it wasn't going to be somebody worse it was because the area was so rife with internal violence or economically worthless that nobody wanted to get involved. This is true with very few exceptions.
This makes me sad because my taxes have been funding the moronification of otherwise intelligent people for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. We don't need more people that set unrealistic and/or incorrect initial constraints on the argument in order for their political view to come out as correct. We need people that can actually solve problems, which requires critical thinking, which is obviously not present here by way of chosen comparison state.
Seems like the first thing one needs to do before criticizing something is to have a solid philosophical basis for doing so. Therefore, we should just open this dusty cupboard labeled “moral ideas philosophers agree about and…” oh my god…
These sort of comments are exactly why books/reviews of books/articles on the evils of the British Empire needs to be more widely disseminated. A condoning of historical atrocities which literally killed billions and impoverished billions more should never be swept under the rug as "if it wasn't the British, it was going to be somebody worse". Colonial apologists always operationalize "whataboutism" to explain away any and every atrocity.
G. K. Chesterton in his Illustrated London News column on September 18, 1909 wrote;
Suppose an Indian said: “I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him.
I had never heard of colonial apologists but you've dressed up the stereotype quite nicely.
If my great grandfather took your great grandfather bicycle I get to tell you that it was because your great grandfather was a poor cyclist. You in turn get to disagree with me. We might debate but it wont change that I have the bicycle now and I'm not giving it back.
And then we can confuse the example for the subject. The point of the exercise was to get along. We are building a model for future application. I'm struggling to resist the urge to provide some modern examples.
What is this making people liable for their own debts you speak of? Surely this only applies to the peasants and even then rarely? Punishments wont convince you you've done something wrong. You have to tell right from wrong all by yourself while others get to set the wrong example.
The British Empire was actually one of the most benevolent ones. There's a reason why Gandhi's violentless approach worked and why China is an independent country.
Colonialism might just as well exist today like it did in the 1800s. UK amongst others specifically stopped it.
There are many reasons Gandhi's approach worked. One of them was the fear of 2 million newly armed and combat-experienced Indian soldiers returning home after WW2.
Nearly every successful peaceful revolution had a lurking threat of a less peaceful version nearby. Which isn't a bad thing and it doesn't discredit peaceful change, it just discredits the idea that people acquiesce to peaceful protests (exclusively) out of the goodness of their hearts.
In AL Basham's, 'the wonder that was India', he identifies several key differences in the idea of what a king is in India.
It's nothing like the European version.
There was no way India could have been properly ruled by the English crown. The understanding of monarchy is so different and also explains why so many kings happily agreed to become British vassals.
Gandhi’s non violent approach did not work. Until external factors like WW2 forced the British Empire to get rid of most of their colonies. The British empire was content with letting Gandhi protest in the streets and regularly throw him in jail as soon as his protests inconvenienced them.
Gandhi was controlled opposition IMO. His approach delayed the inevitable by decades.
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
(as an Indian, who has studied a lot about Indian history)
> A few tens of thousands of British troops
A lot of Indians happily joined British army because of the (relatively) better pay and better treatment.
> slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians
But those were all divided into hundreds of kingdoms. In fact, a lot of Indian kings and princes preferred being a vassal of the English crown because the alternative was much worse (being imprisoned or killed by Indian rivals). Read about almost any major Indian wars/battles in the 18th century involving English and you will find a lot of neutral Indian parties, or the ones actively fighting on England's behalf.
> any half decent uprising would have been successful
Indian subcontinent suffered from a "coordination problem". Gandhi is admired because he played the biggest role in bringing a lot of them together. Of course, he couldn't bring everyone along (eg. Jinnah and Muslims), and there were a lot of other great leaders who also contributed (Patel, Tilak, Bose etc) towards uniting all the Indians, but none could attain Gandhi's stature.
Imperialist Apologia: Salt on Colonial Wounds - https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/imperialist-apologia-salt-on...
The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/commen...
Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists - https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/safe-spaces-for-co...
The case for reparations by Jason Hickel - https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/13/the-case-for-rep...