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ronya posted:noticed the ninja edit. no, no. even with India the "colonial drain" argument is iffy in the data; conquest was insanely expensive. There's a lot of wealth transfer to officers operating in the colonies, enough to balance the outflow of remittances. Transfer to the occupying force is still transfer out of the native country though. Even if it's being consumed by the occupiers, it's work and labour being done by the natives, which is then appropriated by the occupiers, and spent on, as you say, oppressing them. It may not all be transferred directly back to the UK, but it's still being taken out of the native country, even if it's being held in segregated British society within that country. It's probably more of a general Marxist argument than anything but it does take on nationalist aspects when you have nationally segregated populations within the same landmass. It is value which is being taken out of the nation that created it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 05:01
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My Imaginary GF posted:Well, Gandhi oversaw the commitance of a genocide and was a serial rapist, so, yeah. I'm starting to think that everyone ever was and is an rear end in a top hat.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:03
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Small Frozen Thing posted:More like 1 or 1.1 holocausts, 6 million was the number of Jews, not the total number exterminated Well that's absolutely true of course, and an important point to make in a thread about atrocity narratives and ignoring non-favoured victims. It's weird that people like me automatically slip back to the 6 million figure for the Holocaust, when of course a bunch of other people died. But then those people were Poles and Russians, haha!
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Aug 17, 2015 05:10
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lmaoboy1998 posted:That famine was certainly one of the more complex of the 25 major famines the British managed in India, primarily down to a lazy civil service and basic racist disinterest in the population than greed, if that makes a difference. the earlier famines are trickier because one, the Mughals and Marathas and other non-British states, two, massive British investment in irrigation, and three, famines on the subcontinent being historically primarily driven by the unreliability of the monsoon. The 1944 Bengal famine has special political resonance precisely because of the call to war and the acrimony amongst nationalists in their disparate reactions on how to respond, amplified by introduced levels of self-government that established a political class ready to entrench grievances (speaking of introduced levels of self-government, the non-Marxist explanation that you are discounting is that other Indian states democratically refused to send aid, with New Delhi essentially powerless to coerce them. See, this can be spun any number of ways) as far as 'basic racist disinterest' goes, the usual star example is the uncontested abandonment of British Penang to the Japanese (with the evacuation of Europeans but not Chinese or Indian migrants). It is a narrative 'with everything', right down to the unarmed, unsuspecting, and trusting local population. 1940s Britain: super racist, when push comes to shove! But still less racist than the Muslim League or the conquering Japanese; the ultimate sin of the British being a stunning failure to live up to grandiose Western promises, rather than never attempting to begin with.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:24
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OwlFancier posted:Transfer to the occupying force is still transfer out of the native country though. what, no, that's a basic ethnic-nationalist error of geographic essentialism a ethnically-local elite is no less elite than an ethnically-foreign elite this is putting aside the thorny question of whether the Turkish/Mongolian/Persian Mughals are "native", or even really what constitutes a "native" in the subcontinent, which even before the Mughals was already constituted of wave after wave of conquering migrants
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Aug 17, 2015 05:31
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Fojar38 posted:I'm starting to think that everyone ever was and is an rear end in a top hat. Something like it. The partition of India and Pakistan wasn't pretty, and would have been avoided had Britain remained committed to the Empire. Alas, Ghandi refused to share power outside of hindu nationalists, and thus genocide occured. It's the story of de-colonialism.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:40
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ronya posted:the earlier famines are trickier because one, the Mughals and Marathas and other non-British states, two, massive British investment in irrigation, and three, famines on the subcontinent being historically primarily driven by the unreliability of the monsoon. The 1944 Bengal famine has special political resonance precisely because of the call to war and the acrimony amongst nationalists in their disparate reactions on how to respond, amplified by introduced levels of self-government that established a political class ready to entrench grievances Naturally weather conditions played a humungous part in the development of famines in India - there weren't famines in many other more geographically fortuitous British colonies, so no, we didn't magic them out of thin air. However, it is always possible to turn an existing tragedy into a catastrophe, and that's what we, the British, really excelled at. The forced conversion of arable land to trade crops, the refusal to interfere in the incredibly exploitative market relations between userers and the peasantry, the refusal to accept foreign or offer domestic aid to the provinces and the policy of pressing forward with food exports during times of famine exacerbated existing catastrophes to unimaginable extents. Significant blame must be placed at the feet of the Empire for the extent of damage caused by the famines, if not always for their very existence.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:47
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Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, the book Late Victorian Holocausts should be read to understand the interaction between the Empire's bureaucracy and famine. The image of newly built trains transporting grain to ships headed to Britain while starving people looked on is disturbing. British overseers being reprimanded by parliament for allocating supplies to starving people in one famine lead to them not using any resources when a worse famine occurred.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:55
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Naturally weather conditions played a humungous part in the development of famines in India - there weren't famines in many other more geographically fortuitous British colonies, so no, we didn't magic them out of thin air. However, it is always possible to turn an existing tragedy into a catastrophe, and that's what we, the British, really excelled at. we are quite a way from "for-profit famines" as the argument stands, but one should probably also note the Japanese conquest of Burma and the grant of self-government to grain surplus states without some corresponding amendment of the famine codes as the major causative factor. Whether these, too, are the fault of Britain is historically contested (see again: Bose and the extent to which one believes WW2-era Japanese promises regarding inter-Asian solidarity, and likewise alt-hist speculation on alternative paths to Indian independence). on that note - I want to point out that the particular attack you are advancing inherits heavily from criticisms advanced by the British left against British Tories over a Tory-led government's conduct in the era; it more or less ignores extant regional political outlooks, even prioritizing an aracial "usurers"-vs-"peasantry" narrative rather than the rather more salient dichotomy of predominantly Hindu landowners and lenders against majority Muslim Bengals, or conversely by Muslim Bengals against non-Muslim-majority surplus grain states like Punjab (if anything, the British were already too heavily entangled in the interethnic balance, writing a guarantee of interethnic peace that they could not actually underwrite). Or, say, the Indian Bosean nationalist stance of favouring the armed liberation of Bengal (whereupon Burmese rice could likewise be restored to Bengal - that is, if you believed the Japanese). But this is the nature of colonialism - the British opposition exercises an entitlement to the podium of dissent. These are Western party lines on the famine - hence the disproportionate influence of the especially Americanized Sen - rather than any substantive engagement with the situation in Bengal.
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Aug 17, 2015 07:04
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icantfindaname posted:I'm curious, what was the response of the political establishment in Britain/France to the loss of their colonial empires? Did they pretty much just try to forget the whole thing ever happened, like Adenauer era Germany or Japan? http://thisisafrica.me/france-loots-former-colonies/
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Aug 17, 2015 14:05
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I thought only gigantic neocon retard Niall Ferguson actually saw British Imperialism as good but it might be because I wasn't that exposed to American and British historiography on the matter. Like it's astounding one can defend a state that waged war against China for the right to sell them Opium and monopolize their exports.
Plutonis fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 14:23
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Well that's absolutely true of course, and an important point to make in a thread about atrocity narratives and ignoring non-favoured victims. It's weird that people like me automatically slip back to the 6 million figure for the Holocaust, when of course a bunch of other people died. But then those people were Poles and Russians, haha! Even worse, Roma and homosexuals. Some of which were still imprisoned after the war.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:50
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The British violated the golden rule, and it made them likely the only language that will survive outside of earth once Earth Exodus begins.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:57
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Learning about the British empire from within the UK is really hard. We learnt literally nothing about it in my education, which focussed on the World Wars and a bunch of Monarch as far as History goes. I recently tried to find a couple good books to read about it and I'd say a good 95% of the books paint it in a good light with titles like "GREAT Britain made the modern world!". Whats especially amusing is that all these books on their blurbs say that they are a radical new way of looking at the Empire while all the other books would tell you its bad. Doubly amusing is that the POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE to the British Empire also holds exactly the same views. I ended up reading a book or two by Indian writers about the Indian occupation which is about as much as I could find in terms of "might not have been such a good idea" viewpoints. What I found quite eye opening about them was that once it was clearly pointed out the whole Empire was based on White Supremacism and by Churchill's point the rhetoric had been a kind of post-darwin racial heirarchy where the Anglo-saxon white race was genetically destined to rule, of which ol' Winston was a fervent, old-fashioned fan. Once I'd noticed that it becomes impossible not to notice in basically anything you read about the British Empire anywhere by anyone, a huge part of it was categorising all these races into a global heirarchy that served the white man because he was inherently suited for rule. We also partook in all the same heinious poo poo as any empire has done except on a larger stage but our major innovation was perfecting the art of drawing up ethnic heirarchies and exploiting them in the area. This allowed us to keep white, british hands relatively clean (in comparison to the Nazis) not to suggest that we didn't engage in massacres of our own, we just mainly got other people to do it for us. Whats cool is if you look at some of the wikileaked stuff about US counter-terrorism strategies they frankly analyse those used by the British Empire; its a grimly refreshing read. e1 TheLovablePlutonis posted:I thought only gigantic neocon retard Niall Ferguson actually saw British Imperialism as good but it might be because I wasn't that exposed to American and British historiography on the matter. Like it's astounding one can defend a state that waged war against China for the right to sell them Opium and monopolize their exports. He seems to be the gold-standard as far as current books on the topic go. Looks like things have been quietly swinging back to "it was good". e2 also fun to see MIGF is still going with his Violently Wrong About Everything shtick. Don't know why he keeps finding the need to go prove how wrong he is about new things he knows nothing about though. Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 16:15
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Like it's astounding one can defend a state that waged war against China for the right to sell them Opium and monopolize their exports. It wasn't just Britain that decided that this was poor form, the US, Japan, Russia, and many other nations joined forces against the decision, and while their opportunism and the unequal treaties that followed were bad, the biggest shame is that the take home message was "our century of humiliation" and not "shoot all prohies on sight".
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Aug 17, 2015 16:31
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ronya posted:what, no, that's a basic ethnic-nationalist error of geographic essentialism Entirely true, but in this case the elite doing the crime for a long time were British imperial elite. Like, that's almost the entire critique of capitalism, that concentrating wealth in the hands of the elite takes it from the people, the people who make up the country. It is still bad when people with a more local ethnic background do it, but the point was that for a long time, we were the ones doing it. It doesn't really excuse it I think, to say "oh well they'd only have done it if we hadn't" because that doesn't exonerate the Empire's actions. Essentially, it's class struggle, but for a long time, class correlated strongly with ethnicity and imperialist tendencies, because Britain was pretty white supremacist.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:31
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Also China has almost always warranted outside intervention. The time when the world decided to ignore China, Mao came to power.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:35
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Guavanaut posted:That's one of the few cases where the British Empire wasn't in the wrong in terms of casus belli, even if they were in terms of the unequal treaties that followed. Many of the portmasters and sub-directors of Qing China were against opium prohibition, and favored alternative measures such as taxation and regulation or the creation of domestic poppy plantations to undercut the British. Xu Naiji drafted a proposal that opium should be taxed as a medicine and that it should only be exchanged for merchandise and not silver at the clearing house so to prevent trade deficits or currency imbalances, and that the end users should be left alone unless they were in positions of public responsibility or authority. The Qing Emperor, being a huge prohibitionist manchild, decided nope, full prohibition, burn literal tons of other people's stuff without paying for it, barricade a dozen or so traders in their warehouses without trial, also execute all users. Huh, didn't knew about that. Still it was pretty hosed that most of India's subsistence crops were changed to more profitable cotton and poppy fields, which not only contributed to the Opium epidemic on China but also to the massive famines in India itself.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:39
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I don't disagree with that, Imperial agricultural policy was generally complete poo poo wherever it went, from "let the free market deal with it" in Ireland to "replace traditional rotations with cash crop monocultures" in Africa and "let's transport millions of human beings as livestock to farm sugar and tobacco" in the Americas and the Caribbean. Even enclosure within Britain itself was awful and used to force desperate people to the factories for starvation wages. The problem there wasn't the plants but the naked rent seeking and the methods employed.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:48
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Nonsense posted:Also China has almost always warranted outside intervention. The time when the world decided to ignore China, Mao came to power. The alternative was a Pinochet of sorts.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:54
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I thought only gigantic neocon retard Niall Ferguson actually saw British Imperialism as good but it might be because I wasn't that exposed to American and British historiography on the matter. Like it's astounding one can defend a state that waged war against China for the right to sell them Opium and monopolize their exports. Pretty much. And I think we've actually said sorry to everyone by this point? OP might be one of those people who thinks everyone in the UK should give like £10,000 in reparations ignoring the fact that while we are one of the biggest economies in the world we are also really poo poo and inequality means most of the population has no savings at all. Have fun getting reparations out of people barley able to keep a roof over their heads.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:22
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Zohar posted:Funnily enough I was randomly browsing through open survey questions on YouGov yesterday and came across this corker:  computer parts posted:The alternative was a Pinochet of sorts. You only need to look at the history of Taiwan to see that Chiang Kai-Shek was just as awful as Mao, only with a smaller country to gently caress up.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:31
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Nonsense posted:Also China has almost always warranted outside intervention. The time when the world decided to ignore China, Mao came to power. Actually China practiced isolationism for massive periods of its history and was for the best part of that an economically and culturally successful state. Mao was a communist who took control of a ruined post-war country so famine and idiotic policies were reasonably inevitable and hardly a racial phenomenon.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:31
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Regarde Aduck posted:Pretty much. And I think we've actually said sorry to everyone by this point? OP might be one of those people who thinks everyone in the UK should give like £10,000 in reparations ignoring the fact that while we are one of the biggest economies in the world we are also really poo poo and inequality means most of the population has no savings at all. Have fun getting reparations out of people barley able to keep a roof over their heads. I don't think that a program of reparations is implementable at this stage, no. As for we, who's 'we'? Leaving those polls and the weird alt-history industry other posters have mentioned aside, even the British government has swayed forward and backward on this one, see the Gordon Brown comments.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:45
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Actually China practiced isolationism for massive periods of its history and was for the best part of that an economically and culturally successful state. Mao was a communist who took control of a ruined post-war country so famine and idiotic policies were reasonably inevitable and hardly a racial phenomenon. An 'economically and culturally successful state' which engaged in aggressive foreign policy; which repressed minority populations; that followed autocratic rule without institutions to empower stakeholders; that laid siege to the legation and massacred christians by the millions. The Empire liberated China from itself and forced it into the modern world.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:48
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Fojar38 posted:The pillaging of works of art is a good thing, particularly in cases like China where the pillaging is the only reason they're still around. This is actually correct.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:00
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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My Imaginary GF posted:massacred christians by the millions. My man I'm gonna need citations to that because unless you count the Taiping as Christians (and even then they did their own massacring) this is incorrect.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:33
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people are wiling to overlook a whole lot if you give them cool sports to play.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:38
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Guavanaut posted:That's one of the few cases where the British Empire wasn't in the wrong in terms of casus belli, even if they were in terms of the unequal treaties that followed. Many of the portmasters and sub-directors of Qing China were against opium prohibition, and favored alternative measures such as taxation and regulation or the creation of domestic poppy plantations to undercut the British. Xu Naiji drafted a proposal that opium should be taxed as a medicine and that it should only be exchanged for merchandise and not silver at the clearing house so to prevent trade deficits or currency imbalances, and that the end users should be left alone unless they were in positions of public responsibility or authority. The Qing Emperor, being a huge prohibitionist manchild, decided nope, full prohibition, burn literal tons of other people's stuff without paying for it, barricade a dozen or so traders in their warehouses without trial, also execute all users. Except this wasn't the 21st century where drug addiction can be treated by rehab and education, opium addiction had become a serious problem in mid 19th century China and there wasn't much the state could do about it except cutting supply. This seems to be reading backwards into history in the context of the modern war on drugs and deciding prohibition is bad. And domestic opium production undercutting British imports was precisely what ended up happening anyways, especially because it was much harder to crack down on opium growing in some backward village in the middle of nowhere in Sichuan than opium coming in through major ports.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:32
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My Imaginary GF posted:An 'economically and culturally successful state' which engaged in aggressive foreign policy; which repressed minority populations; that followed autocratic rule without institutions to empower stakeholders; that laid siege to the legation and massacred christians by the millions. The Qing ironically wasn't very oppressive towards minority population, it was quite the opposite if anything where minorities such as the manchus and mongols gave themselves a leg up over the majority ethnic Han population. quote:; that followed autocratic rule without institutions to empower stakeholders
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Aug 17, 2015 19:34
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Nonsense posted:Also China has almost always warranted outside intervention. The time when the world decided to ignore China, Mao came to power. Except the nationalists failed despite massive american aid
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Aug 17, 2015 19:35
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Nonsense posted:Also China has almost always warranted outside intervention. The time when the world decided to ignore China, Mao came to power. and then life exectancy went from 40 to almost 75 what a monster amirite
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Aug 17, 2015 19:50
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Typo posted:The Qing ironically wasn't very oppressive towards minority population, it was quite the opposite if anything where minorities such as the manchus and mongols gave themselves a leg up over the majority ethnic Han population. Yeah if anything it's similar to how in Latin America the majority Mestizos were ruled over by the minority European/White descendants (Except replace with Han and Manchu, respectively).
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Aug 17, 2015 19:53
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Mans posted:and then life exectancy went from 40 to almost 75 They must renounce communism and embrace liberal democracy.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:56
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Nonsense posted:They must renounce communism and embrace liberal democracy. they took all the useful parts of liberal democracy and discarded the obsolete parts, if anything we should embrace their values
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Aug 17, 2015 19:59
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Mans posted:they took all the useful parts of liberal democracy and discarded the obsolete parts, if anything we should embrace their values I fear that since people don't really seem to worry too much about climate change that China's/Singapores Authoritarian model is the future of all human governance?
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Aug 17, 2015 20:00
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Mans posted:and then life exectancy went from 40 to almost 75 Mao was a terrible governor and the big improvements were made despite him because there were some genuinely competent people in the Communist party who got to run things once in a while (before they got purged during the cultural revolution anyway). Deng was pretty much the only one of those people to hold a top level position in the 50s-early 60s and politically relevant by 1976. Mao himself was a great military leader and politician though Typo fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 20:11
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Nonsense posted:I fear that since people don't really seem to worry too much about climate change that China's/Singapores Authoritarian model is the future of all human governance? That's because China's authoritarian model can collapse tomorrow and nobody would really be surprised and Singapore is a city state.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:16
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computer parts posted:Yeah if anything it's similar to how in Latin America the majority Mestizos were ruled over by the minority European/White descendants (Except replace with Han and Manchu, respectively). It effectively an apartheid system for a while before the Taiping rebellion shook things up so much that the Manchus had no choice but to give more and more power to Han Chinese, and we all know how that ended up
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Aug 17, 2015 20:18
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Also need to remember that Imperial China was crazy arrogant as gently caress and a clash at some point was probably inevitable simply due to that fact.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:00
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