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Typo posted: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. That was important for the Qing Empire, as prices for goods were paid in cash, whereas government duties were paid in silver. It began to affect revenues from the highly lucrative salt market and cause discord in the marketplace, which the Qing court cared about a lot more than addicted peasants. I suppose, as always, neither side in the debate was wholly altruistic. The anti-prohibition faction wanted a return to stable markets and trade, and regarded the reduction of opium smokers that they predicted as a happy coincidence, whereas the prohibitionist faction wanted to stop foreign influence and eliminate what they saw as a disease, even if that meant executing every user and merchant. As it was, the anti-prohibition faction fell on deaf ears and the Xianfeng Emperor pushed for even more draconian measures until he eventually came up against somebody bigger than him (the combined forces of several empires). Those empires themselves were obviously also acting in their own interests alone too, as the conditions weren't limited to the opium trade, but also to exempt them from taxation and duty payments on all goods and expanding their indentured servitude programs, but a lot of unpleasantness could have been avoided if the prohibitionists stepped down. Basically: Fojar38 posted:Also need to remember that Imperial China was crazy arrogant as gently caress
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Aug 17, 2015 22:00
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Typo posted: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. same thing but with ronald reagan
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Aug 17, 2015 22:11
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ronya posted:* but still less than the Mughals. this is the main prickly problem with attacking the legacy of the Raj - the British certainly passed up a lot of investment in India, but they still invested more than the Mughals did
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Aug 17, 2015 23:01
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Baron Corbyn posted: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. You need only look to the history of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution to realize just how wrong that sort of relativism is and what a monster Mao was.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:41
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The Insect Court posted:You need only look to the history of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution to realize just how wrong that sort of relativism is and what a monster Mao was. Cold war era right wing dictatorships will ruthlessly purge political opposition against them and commit atrocities in the process of doing so. But Communists wanted their massive transformation of society on top of political control which meant that even apolitical people get caught up in one social engineering project or another: with consequences ranging from bad to horrific for said people. Typo fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 00:25
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Number of slaves transported by US ships : 300,000 Number of slaves transported to North America: 500,000 Number of slaves transported by British ships: 2.6 million Number of slaves transported to the British West Indies: 2 million Nostalgia for the British Empire is objectively more detached from reality and racist than modern Confederate mythbuilding.
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Aug 18, 2015 00:54
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Number of slaves transported by US ships : 300,000 drat, I only ever knew the overall slave numbers transported between Atlantic, and Indian Ocean Arabic trade, lol the British.
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Aug 18, 2015 00:58
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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 useful like widescale destruction of cultural heritage, ethnic cleansing, massive inequality and catastrophic mega-pollution in addition to the ultranationalism and warmongering? Mans posted:same thing but with ronald reagan i agree, both mao and reagan were bad. left-liberalism ftw icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 01:03
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Nonsense posted:drat, I only ever knew the overall slave numbers transported between Atlantic, and Indian Ocean Arabic trade, lol the British. The overall number for the Atlantic slave trade is I think, somewhere between ten and fifteen million people, not sure of the exact figure because a lot of slaves died in transit.
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Aug 18, 2015 01:13
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Number of slaves transported by US ships : 300,000 The only reason that the British had slaves at all is because the Africans themselves, who had institutionalised slavery long before the first European plantation was laid out, were more than happy to sell them to us - multiple African states like the Oyo thrived on slaving. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 18, 2015 01:21
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kapparomeo posted:The only reason that the British had slaves at all is because the Africans themselves, who had institutionalised slavery long before the first European plantation was laid out, were more than happy to sell them to us - multiple African states like the Oyo thrived on it. Much like the reason that I am sitting on a ten ton pile of cocaine, is because dealers are more than willing to sell me it. I have no agency in this whatsoever.
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Aug 18, 2015 01:27
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kapparomeo posted:The only reason that the British had slaves at all is because the Africans themselves, who had institutionalised slavery long before the first European plantation was laid out, were more than happy to sell them to us - multiple African states like the Oyo thrived on slaving. So if you buy a slave today it's ok because someone was willing to sell him to you? Are you a retard?
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Aug 18, 2015 01:31
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Nostalgia for the British Empire is objectively more detached from reality and racist than modern Confederate mythbuilding. OwlFancier posted:Much like the reason that I am sitting on a ten ton pile of cocaine, is because dealers are more than willing to sell me it. I have no agency in this whatsoever. 
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Aug 18, 2015 01:34
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lmaoboy1998 posted:So if you buy a slave today it's ok because someone was willing to sell him to you? Are you a retard? I'm not defending slavery but I'm not taking the blame for it either. You can't browbeat us that the slave trade is all an exclusively European iniquity imperialistically dominating and oppressing poor helpless blameless innocent Africa, when the Africans themselves were equal and active partners in the enterprise and also enjoyed its profits. African states ought to be suing each other for reparations and apologies as much as us. kapparomeo fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 01:41
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lol get a load of this guy.
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Aug 18, 2015 01:44
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kapparomeo posted:No, but neither can you browbeat us that the slave trade is all a unique European iniquity imperialistically dominating and oppressing poor helpless blameless innocent Africa, when the Africans themselves were equal and active partners in the enterprise and also enjoyed its profits. African states ought to be suing each other for reparations and apologies as much as us. Possibly however the Africans did not sell themselves into slavery. They sold other Africans into slavery which did involve a lot of dominating and oppressing fairly innocent Africans. Britain is not solely to blame for the millions of people it traded as slaves but it is certainly to blame for it. If you want to make an argument against apologising for it, you can make a much better one on the basis that there isn't anyone left alive who can meaningfully apologise for it, and that any apology issued would be parsimony. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 01:45
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OwlFancier posted:Go to India or Africa and say that and I'm sure you'll have a lovely time. A lot of Sri Lankans would be provisionally supportive. :ceylon: (Not least because they profited from being a major hub of British imperialism / got not one but two major modern* ports out of it / loving Hated the Portuguese, so the British looked real good by comparison.) But then, as they'll be the first to tell you, Sri Lanka is not India.
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Aug 18, 2015 02:36
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GreyjoyBastard posted:A lot of Sri Lankans would be provisionally supportive. :ceylon: Didn't the British import Tamils en masse to Sri Lanka to work their plantations, which plagued the island with ethnic strife to this very day?
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Aug 18, 2015 03:06
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Didn't the British import Tamils en masse to Sri Lanka to work their plantations, which plagued the island with ethnic strife to this very day? Nope, they've been there pre-Portugal.
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Aug 18, 2015 03:10
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Zohar posted:Of course, given its inherently unstable totalitarian nature I'm not sure Nazi Germany could ever have built those kinds of long-lasting structures, but I still think it's an importance point of difference. Nazi Germany wasn't going to build anything of lasting value even if it did survive, because there wouldn't have been anything left when they were done. The British invaded and occupied countries to control and exploit their labor, the Germans were more interested in killing everybody east of the Danube to ensure the "purity" of their empire. Nazi Germany was a sort of reductio ad absurdum of white supremacy, it couldn't even tolerate the mere existence of non-Germanic peoples. Their ideas of creating a tough Aryan warrior peasant race in the newly vacated hinterlands of the Reich were completely unworkable; if they had won (and they could never have won, they would have needed four or five more Germanies worth of people and resources to win) they would have left vast expanses of uninhabited wasteland, and Germany itself would have collapsed into utter ruin because the colonial economic relationships Europe was dependent on was destroyed because traditional colonialism requires you to actually leave the brown people alive to do the work and the Nazis found that unacceptable. The British certainly get off easy in the eyes of mainstream history due to having won all the major world-altering conflicts of the last 200 years or so, but Nazi Germany was entirely different vision of imperialism, one built in cloud cuckoo land. They could never have developed an "colonial culture" or established colonial social institutions, they couldn't really do anything but destroy things, and no matter what happened they would have eventually destroyed Germany itself.
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Aug 18, 2015 03:21
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kapparomeo posted:I'm not defending slavery but I'm not taking the blame for it either. You can't browbeat us that the slave trade is all an exclusively European iniquity imperialistically dominating and oppressing poor helpless blameless innocent Africa, when the Africans themselves were equal and active partners in the enterprise and also enjoyed its profits. African states ought to be suing each other for reparations and apologies as much as us. You are partially right. Slavery has existed long before European powers stuck their hands in it and exists to this day outside of the United Kingdom. Ancient Egypt, the pre-Catholic Roman Empire, Ottoman empire... If you get into today you have suspected slavery issues with ISIS. When you go through watch groups like Walk Free Foundation India, China, Russia among others show it still exists. It is not a uniquely white European crime. Nor are the victims uniquely African or of African decent.
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Aug 18, 2015 03:37
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computer parts posted:Nope, they've been there pre-Portugal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Tamils_of_Sri_Lanka There are two separate Tamil ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, one of which is native and the other was imported by the British to run plantations in the 19th century
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Aug 18, 2015 03:47
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Number of slaves transported by US ships : 300,000 well look how else were the west indies going to get a cricket team? also taking africans to the carribean gave us reggae so, that's a win.
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Aug 18, 2015 04:10
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Didn't the British import Tamils en masse to Sri Lanka to work their plantations, which plagued the island with ethnic strife to this very day? Technically yes, but I'm not convinced the Sinhalese-Tamil divide wouldn't have been a problem with original demographics - the real Sinhalese grouchiness (which in the postcolonial era, coming from an overwhelming majority, is Bad) was about the Tamil upper and upper-middle class getting preferential positions in education, business, and administration, and in general transitioning into a sort of bizarro-affirmative-action program that wasn't really directed at upjumping the Tamil peasantry so much as ensuring the continued effectiveness of the Tamil educated classes in the face of a potential (and, uh, eventually actual) Sinhalese nationalist shitfit. Essentially, while the Tamil peasantry were ABSOLUTELY a huge part of the support base of the Tamil secessionist* rebellion, the seeds were sown by the indigenous Tamils being disproportionately represented in the semi-moneyed classes. ...Which was also the fault of the British, to a large degree, mind you. But I have a hard time being firmly against the postcolonial Tamil quotas meant to ensure they weren't 100% hosed by Sinhalese nationalist populism. Even the traditional British strategy of putting minorities in charge was pretty mild, as far as the real power centers go. (So essentially I guess I'm arguing that the British were Less Bad in SL than usual, and funneled relatively larger fuckloads of cash into the island as a result of it being a convenient place to stand while dominating the Indian Ocean basin.) Edit: yeah, icantfindaname touched on something I forgot to mention. The imported Tamil dirt farmers are VERY DISTINCT from the indigenous Tamils, right down to language (kinda) and religion (lots). And, of course, being ridiculously poor compared to most other non-aborigines on the island, even before the civil war catastrofuck. Double edit: Here's the thing about the Sri Lankan presence of the British Empire. In terms of local perception and history, you can't disconnect it from the comparison to the Portuguese colonial era. Under Portugal, it was a preposterously unpleasant extractive colonial regime; under Britain, it was a moderately unpleasant extractive colonial regime, with ethnic policies that would eventually be problematic, and significant investment in education and infrastructure so that the island could be a major hub of grinding the rest of the Indian Ocean basin under the British boot. That investment and (self-)interest on the part of the British really can't be discounted, unless you're a filthy mainlander who considers the Ceylonese as a whole to be sellouts and collaborators. Which, I suppose, is entirely reasonable. Triple edit: except the historical Kingdom of Kandy, which still has amusingly grumpy historical notes about how the British finally crushed them because the Portuguese and Dutch couldn't / didn't bother. Also, a significant chunk of their semirecent history is "and then we abandoned another chunk of the foothills to the white devils and their local patsies, because we were completely economically outmatched". Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 05:12
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kapparomeo posted:I'm not defending slavery but I'm not taking the blame for it either. You can't browbeat us that the slave trade is all an exclusively European iniquity imperialistically dominating and oppressing poor helpless blameless innocent Africa, when the Africans themselves were equal and active partners in the enterprise and also enjoyed its profits. African states ought to be suing each other for reparations and apologies as much as us. I would be against people rewriting the Oyo as a grand worldwide civilizing force as well, but I don't think anyone is really doing this. Also saying "they sold" is a little disingenuous when we delivered them weaponry that allowed them to capture orders more slaves than they already were. If it makes you feel any better, most African nationalists 'browbeat' (read: mourn) the Arabic slave trade as well. Whitey isn't depicted as the sole-perpetrator by anyone serious - just the main one, which is fair as the 15-20 million slaves transported across the Atlantic dwarfs the internal-African and Arabian channels. When the question is "Was the British empire barabric?" Saying "We behaved the same way as these textbook barbarians!" is not a great defence. lmaoboy1998 fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 09:14
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fda
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Aug 18, 2015 09:21
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OwlFancier posted:The overall number for the Atlantic slave trade is I think, somewhere between ten and fifteen million people, not sure of the exact figure because a lot of slaves died in transit. Don't forget the trade to South America, especially Brazil. If I recall that involved more people (and for longer) than to the US and Caribbean.
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Aug 18, 2015 10:26
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feedmegin posted:Don't forget the trade to South America, especially Brazil. If I recall that involved more people (and for longer) than to the US and Caribbean.
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Aug 18, 2015 10:40
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lmaoboy1998 posted:Number of slaves transported by US ships : 300,000 Given that the US was only part of the slave trade for around twenty-odd years, on account of not existing during the rest of it, that seems kind of intellectually dishonest. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen it as straight up neoconfederate apologia.
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Aug 18, 2015 12:40
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The Larch posted:Given that the US was only part of the slave trade for around twenty-odd years, on account of not existing during the rest of it, that seems kind of intellectually dishonest. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen it as straight up neoconfederate apologia. Not really as I've provided the statistics for North American trade as a whole, including the pre-U.S. slave arrivals (you can decide whether you count those arrivals as a proto-American or British phenomenon.) It's a fact that the slave trade in South America and the Carribean was much larger, pointing this out clearly doesn't justify the American slave trade in aany way, shape or form. However, failing to point it out perpetuates the myth that the Confederate states were a unique evil and marginalises the victims of Brazilian and Carribean slavery. lmaoboy1998 fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 13:08
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lmaoboy1998 posted:The British empire's for-profit famines and slave massacres killed more people than either the Holocaust or Japan's civilian massacres in the Asia-Pacific. While this was often down to greed rather than genocidal intent, and while these crimes happened over a larger slice of history, the results are the same. People do not really give a poo poo whether they're massacred by racists in 1944 or starved to death for profit in 1760 (or indeed in 1944, when the last major British famine took place). I agree with all of this.
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Aug 18, 2015 13:16
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their crimes will only be answered when their wretched isle slips below the waves at last
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Aug 18, 2015 13:41
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feedmegin posted:Don't forget the trade to South America, especially Brazil. If I recall that involved more people (and for longer) than to the US and Caribbean. I think that is included in the atlantic numbers but it may not be.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:55
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Britain has been on the winning side of every big war since forever, their crimes were directed against people that nobody in power gave a poo poo about, they didn't represent an ideology that was intrinsically dangerous to the people in power and their early industrial progress let them leverage their industrial power into an unassailable economic advantage that persisted for a long-rear end time. As a result Britain has been remarkably successful in pretending that none of the horrific brutalities that the Empire was responsible for never happened. This is how you get away with, say, ruthless aggression towards defensleless states or starving millions to death every ten to twenty years for over a century in one colony alone.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:25
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It's also interesting to consider the reason that opium was being pushed onto China in the 1800s by the British was becasue the people of Britain were so addicted to tea from China that British silver stocks were reaching dangerously low levels.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:41
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British imperial revisionism is a lot like pardoning a serial rapist because he was nice enough to wear a condom. There seems to be (among the British nationalists I've had the immense displeasure of talking to) a subset of apologists that still rationalise it with some twist on the old White Man's Burden argument. Britain built roads or railroads or whatever, Britain saved Greece's relics from being plundered by the Turks, etc. The other school of thought among such morons is that everyone else was just as ruthless and nobody's hands were clean, which I guess is a fair point, you know, unless you're actually saying our empire was still something to be proud of -- as these people invariably are. It's the same kind of mindset that comes into play whenever you bring up abolishing the monarchy. They make a big deal about continuity and tradition and even such trivial hurdles as changing the name from "United Kingdom" to "United Republic" or whatever, all while missing the point that we should be breaking with the past and going forward, instead of clinging to regressive, archaic nonsense that shackles us to our inglorious history as the world's abuser-in-chief. Such people's worldview and sense of identity must be so empty that robbing them of their pride in empire and monarchy leaves them with nothing.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:12
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On the subject of building railroads and poo poo, I've been told in layman discussions that the infrastructure built in the colonies was primarily built either for military purposes or to move goods to the coast, and thus pretty unhelpful for the actual inhabitants of the various colonies. Is this broadly true?
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Aug 18, 2015 22:46
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vintagepurple posted:On the subject of building railroads and poo poo, I've been told in layman discussions that the infrastructure built in the colonies was primarily built either for military purposes or to move goods to the coast, and thus pretty unhelpful for the actual inhabitants of the various colonies. Is this broadly true? Military infrastructure is often fairly useful for civilian purposes as well, as generally the military want to move between important places, which tend to also be important for the civilian population. Similarly the foundations of a large export infrastructure would be useful to any industrialising nation. Though of course it is obviously going to be less useful than infrastructure developed specifically for civilian purposes.
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Aug 18, 2015 23:16
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I think the reason British revisionism is more acceptable is because of how it was romanticised in fiction, not just in contemporary classics like King Solomon's Mines and the Jungle Book but also movies like Zulu and Indiana Jones. It meant the British Empire was - and still is - seen as a place where pretty much anyone could just step off into the unknown and have an adventure. That kind of narrative appeals to a lot of people.
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Aug 18, 2015 23:50
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vintagepurple posted:On the subject of building railroads and poo poo, I've been told in layman discussions that the infrastructure built in the colonies was primarily built either for military purposes or to move goods to the coast, and thus pretty unhelpful for the actual inhabitants of the various colonies. Is this broadly true? The extractive part is definitely broadly true and somewhat inconvenient, especially in Africa. Most of the purely-military infrastructure (coaling stations, forts, etc) wasn't really all that big an investment in the first place. But who doesn't want a sweet starfort in case of pirates?
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Aug 19, 2015 00:07
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