Mission: evacuation. Do you think the Israelis in Lebanon will be targeting British citizens there? No, I didn't think you did. From the BBC, with thanks to News4U:
Defence Secretary Des Browne has given orders for HMS Illustrious and HMS Bulwark to "make ready" for operations off Lebanon.The pair will depart as soon as necessary, possibly within 24 hours.
No order for evacuating UK citizens has yet been given, but ministers and defence staff are considering a plan to evacuate those trapped in Lebanon....
The decision whether to proceed with an evacuation plan has not yet been taken and no orders have been given.
The Foreign Office has urged British citizens to keep a low profile and warned against travelling there.
"Mission: evacuation"
Tis a shame the mission isn't deportation/evacuation. Oh well, all in good time.
Tis a shame the mission isn't deportation/evacuation. Oh well, all in good time.
LOL :p
........i expect things to cool down real REAL fast ,............ The Islamic world will wait, with growing patience ,.................. they will wait ,...until the next U.S. presidential election is over -- while they quietly build strength, and work on the BOMB ,....... while at the same time ,.. they will continue to back the liberal / democrats with hidden campaign funding - and the rhetoric of peace ,..... then,... if by chance a democrats DO win ,.....the Muslim fanatics will finally release their full furry on the infidels, Israel and the western world ---------------------------------the 'progressives' and the liberal left, are the 'useful idiots ' the Bolsheviks used to speak of,........... during the Russian revolution
With the memories remaining of the kidnappings of Terry Waite, Jackie Mann, John McCarthy and others it isn't the Israelis who the British subjects are at risk from.
The Arab league man Amr Moussa says the peace process is dead..
When was their a peace process? The Islamic world has been trying to kill all the jews since their prophet mohammed. Today all the Arab and muslim peoples want to "wipe Israel off the map".
Peace has always been an olive brach extended by the Israelis to be answered always by the arabs and muslims by war.
No. There has never been a peace process. Only an imagined one on the part of the west.
HMS Illustrious is an aircraft carrier and HMS Bulwark is an amphibious assault ship (probably with a full complement of Royal Marines). I'm wondering if any Mohammedan political leaders will consider this an act of aggression. Since Mohammedan killers are so fond of taking hostages, any Westerner is at risk in Lebanon.
Pelayo-- very true. It brings to mind the incident when Iraq had just invaded Kuwait and Saddam rounded up a bunch of foreign nationals inside Iraq as "guests" (Saddam-speak for "human shields").
I can see Hezbollah or other nutty elements on the ground in Lebanon doing something similar, even if just on a small scale.
It would be fascinating to have, in some major British paper, an article prompted by this development. But the focus of the article would be the activities of British warships in the e in the period 1946-1948. It was then, as all educated people know, that Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps were prevented by those warships from reaching Mandatory Palestine, sent back to endure life in those DP camps in Germany (and what, said some, was wrong with staying in Germany?). It was then that the British, under such officrs as Sir Evelyn Barker, took back the guns that during the war had been distributed to the Jews of Palestine to help the Allies rebuff any German attack; when the war was over, and the exploits of local Jewish volunteers, in the Western Desert, in Syria, and in Iraq, on the most dangerous of all missions, were carefully made nothing of in Whitehall, and certainly not by the likes of Ernest Bevin, those guns -- the only weapons the Jews had in Mandatory Palestine -- were rounded up. Of course those warships also delivered arms, directly and overland, to the armies of three Arab states -- Jordan (elevated to statehood in 1946), Egypt, and Iraq.
Here's a possible title for anyone inclined to write such a piece:
"Our Honorable Warships?"
Hugh: from the abolition of the slave trade, to Dunkirk, to the Falklands...they ABSOLUTLEY remain our Honorable Warships.
Who will have the stones to carpet bomb Teheran after an American or British helo is downed carrying evacuees by Iranians?
More pandering? More excuses? Does Israel have to carry the entire load?
Iran and Syria are ALREADY responsible for how many American and British deaths in Iraq?
Unanswered deaths.
Which does nothing but encourage insane pissants like Ahmadinejad.
Go Albion.
I don't think you send an aircraft carrier and assault ship and then let Iranians have a field day shooting down your helicopters. Maybe thats why we are sending Harriers out there as well.
As for encouraging the nutter in Iran. Does he need any encouragement?
I advise the western nations to screen the hell out of anyone they evacuate from Lebenon. It might be a stupid plan of Islamist maniacs to highjack a rescue ship and hold it hostage. Stupid because it would only harden western public opinion against them. So often western commentators accede intelligent planning to the likes of the Islamist groups and KJI in Korea where any thinking person would question the wisdom of killing and/or starving your own people. I am praying that more people than us and the CAIR crowd reads these blogs; hopefully the CIA, MI5 and the other protectors of western civilization.
I think its bye-bye Mo.
OT sorry,
Good news from Helmand province as 3 Para give the Taliban a pasting again;
Sky News Correspondent Geoff Meade said some 300 paratroopers seized the Taliban base after being landed by helicopter.
A total of 1,000 troops were involved, with many in supporting roles.
The paras' helicopter came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades and two soldiers are reported to have been slightly injured.
Meade says Sangin has been "a hotbed of Taliban activity" and probably the most violent part of Helmand province.
It's not shaping up to be a week for the Islamists to celebrate is it.
Another reason to have gone into Iraq:
We don't need to send in ships, we're occupying a real big one bordering both Syria and Iran.
Cripes - Hugh has almost managed to make the visiting of this blog an unpatriotic act for a Brit!
Off topic:
New religious police in Afghanistan
Ummah News Links
"Hugh has almost managed to make the visiting of this blog an unpatriotic act for a Brit!"
-- from a posting above
Not at all. I merely wished to urge some English journalist or writer with a sense of history to remind many in England, given the Guardian-BBC venom that, in the BBC, in such newspapers as The Guardian, has been injected into the public's undestanding, or misundrestanding, of what the war against Israel is all about, to look again at how, even two years after the death camps were opened, official English policy was designed not to fulfill the obligations solemnly undertaken by the Mandatory authority, but to prevent them from being fulfilled. It was England's unfinest hour. Why should it be overlooked? And what definition of "patriotism" would require one to overlook, or still worse, defend, that entire episode? It would be as if Americans felt it was unpatriotic to admit that slavery was not exactly admirable. The blockade of ships bringing death camp survivors, so that they could not land in Mandatory Palestine, is impossible to defend, and should not be. The blockade on weapons ofr the Jews, while England -- that had agreed to uphold the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine including "facilitating Jewish immigration" and "close Jewish settlement on the land" when it accepted the Mandate from the League of Nations -- supplied arms steadily to Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, cannot be defended. The discharging of the two best British officials -- Colonel Meinterzhagen and then Captain Orde Wingate -- because of their fury at Arab terrorism and attempts to help the Jews defend thsemelves --and their both being forced to leave Palestine, cannot be defended. The statement of Sir Evelyn Barker, the British military commander in the Eastern District of Mandatory Palestine, included in a letteer to his Arab mistress, the widow of George Antonius, that he, Barker, would wish to take the Arab side and join in "the extermination of the Jews" of Palestine -- a letter that only came to light after the Six-Day War, when an entire cache was found in East Jerusalem, cannot be defended.
It is clear that 30 years of steady venom in the press, radio, and television, false coverage, devoid always of context, using a loaded lexicon (as "occupied Arab lands"), has had an effect even on normally sensible people who have not bothered to study the history of the Arab war on Israel, and many of whom simply know nothing not only of the context, but even have grown up with such notions as "the Palestinian people" and have gotten used to, without ever questioning, such words as "occupied" (as in "occupied Arab land"). Repeated endlessly, these phrases have their effect. Furthermore, most people do not know a thing about the reasons for, or provisions of, the Mandate for Palestine (for that matter, they know almost nothing of the other mandates in the Middle East and elsewhere). they know nothing about the treatment of the Jews (or for that matter about the treatment of Christians) in lands controlled by Arab Muslims, nothing of the demographic history, the land ownership, or much else in those former Ottoman vilayets (and the sanjak of Jerusalem) that became the territory of Mandatory Palestine (or, at least, of Western Palestine, since Eastern Palestine was closed off, contrary to the intent of the Mandates Commission, to the provisions of the Mandate itself).
In order to undo the nonsense and lies of the past decades, still being fed the public by the BBC, by The Guardian, and similar guides to misinformation on these matters, one might begin by pointing out who, in the administration, civilian and military, of the Mandatory authority, and what acts by others, betrayed the commitments originally made.
If any moral debt was incurred by those British officials in Mandatory Palestine or in London who refused to fulfill the terms, and intent, of the Mandate for Palestine, it was not to the Arabs thatthat debt was owed. If any people was wronged by the behavior of British officials in the Middle East in the period of the Mandate and right through to 1948, it was not the Arab people.
http://www.break.com/movies/startswiththekids.html
Pretty disturbing video
It must be time to watch that wonderful American actor and philanthropist, Paul Newman, in one of his great movies - "Exodus"- again!
Reports are that complementing the evacuation of its nationals by various western countries, refugees are fleeing Lebanon into Syria. Good thinking, like when Ted Bundy migrated to Florida because he thought that capital punishment wasn't law there. My guess is those people would be a lot safer in Lebanon if this thing escalates.
Any Westerner, Brit, etc in countries like Lebannon are too stupid to be saved by anyone from the West. as they are more than likely Lebanese with British passports, let them stay in the middle east.
Quote:
Do you think the Israelis in Lebanon will be targeting British citizens there? No, I didn't think you did.
Robert,
That is the first and most stupid statement you have made in my entire time of visiting here.
Thanks alot.
Hugh,
And you also.
Attack your friends and allies the both of you, why dont you...
What the hell are you thinking of?
Hugh,
Regarding the Guardian.
You don't take that bleeding heart islamist apologist bullshit seriously do you?
I am sure you are smarter than that.
"Do you think the Israelis in Lebanon will be targeting British citizens there?"
Of course not! But as Pelayo said above:
"Since Mohammedan killers are so fond of taking hostages, any Westerner is at risk in Lebanon."
Isn't that the whole point of getting the friendlies out of there?
Do you think the Israelis in Lebanon will be targeting British citizens there? No, I didn't think you did.
Sorry, must have come to the wrong site. I thought this was supposed to be about jihad.
From the BBC:
Why the hell do we bother?
Cheers, "friends".
"let us not forget that FDR sent the St. Louis packing as well. Had it tried to dock in Miami, US navy ships would have been there to stop it. Yes, that was 1938, but the pogrom against the Jews was already in full swing."
-- from a posting above
Who's forgetting it? The comment above was merely prompted by the notion that since, in the Western world, there is a general notion afoot --and certainly there is in England, that somehow the English have to endlessly apologize for the British empire, for colonialism, and so on. The good that was done by the British is often minimized or ignored. On the whole the British Empire did more good than bad.
But recognizing that impulse, I suggest that if there is a need to feel guilty about past behavior, let's make sure that the real sins, and not the false ones, are identified. It has long been a staple of Arab propaganda, repeated by their sympathizers and collaborators, that the British made "promises" to the Arabs. The misreading of Sykes-Picot, and the absurd Arab interpretation of Sir Henry MacMahon's discussions as solemn commitments, even though MacMahon pointed out continually that this was a unilateral (Arab) interpretation, and he, MacMahon, not exactly a friend of the Zionists, nonetheless wrote a letter published in The Times (July 1937 I recall), denouncing the Arabs and setting the record straight -- this is all in Kedourie's diplomatic history of the period --and carefully explaining that the area that became Mandatory Palestine was never meant to be included in any of MacMahon's representations, and furthermore, that MacMahon never was in a osition to bind His Majesty's Government.
But the failure of many of those in Palestine under the Mandate, and the grotesque actions of some, including Bertie Waters-Taylor in Jerusalem (who egged on the Arabs to riot and murder Jews -- which is exactly what Colonel Meinertzhagen, intelligence officer with Allenby, complained about), and the British Political Officer who stood by during the Arab pogrom in Hebron in 1929, and others in the same spirit, right up to that Sir Evelyn Barker -- should not be forgotten. Nor should the British ships that prevented vessels from leaving Rumanian ports (they remained open during the war) when perhaps as many as one million Jews fleeing the Nazis might have entered Palestine, had the British permitted it. And finally, there was that postwar blockade on surviors, and on arms, while arms were supplied to the Arab Legion in Jordan, and to the armies of Egypt and Iraq. Should we simply pretend that none of that ever happened? I think making sure this is known would not only recognize a historical injustice, but in offering up a real one to supplant the false one (that "we owe the Arabs something for the creation of Israel" -- for god's sake, the creation of Israel was exactly what the Mandate for Palestine was intended to create, and rightly (the late Indro Montanelli. most celebrated and cultivated and historically-minded of Italian journalists, once described the founding of the modern state of Israel as the most just political act of the 20th century). You would never know this reading The
Guardian or listening to the BBC. But you should.
Furthermore, it is important for people in Great Britain to cease to believe that they owe the Arabs anything. This belief is based on a false presentation of the history of the MIddle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it should be undone. It would be nice if, as part of undoing it, there were some recognition of real, as oppoosed to false, injustices or unfairnesses committed by some, but by no means all. I would note, and celebrate, those who were on the right side -- Wyndham Deedes, Joshua Wedgewood, Winston Churchill after his stint as Colonial Secretary, Colonel Patterson, Colonel Meinertzhagen, Captain Orde Wingate -- and compare them favorably to Bertie Waters-Taylor, Evelyn Barker, Malcolm Macdonald, and of course Ernest Bevin.
I'll ask here as I've asked at LGF also. Has anyone seen the google/current video of the 2 hezbollah guys who go to the American university of lebanon. They state for fact with no rebuttal the Israel started this war. And had GW Bush's blessings. I sat there in awe.They were telling the youth of America to vote him and his beliefs out.
got a link to the vid?
I'll guess and say its google/current.com it was on at 2:30 est saturday7/15
We're sunk by demography.
Not just in Eruope but in Lebanon and Israel as well. It would appear that Christians constitute about 30-40 percent of the population of Lebanon. Maybe one million out of 4 million. A few years back in 1960, they held 60-70 percent of the population.
What will the country look like at 10 % Christians. Most are well educated and may leave--or are more likely to leave than the Shia majority.
A sad reality is that the demographic decline of the Lebanese Christians mirrors that of all other Christians in the middle east as well as the Jews in Israel. The Muslims outbreed the Jews--not only in Gaza and 'The West Bank' of the Jordan, but within Israel as well.
What will Israel look like in 20-30 years. How large of a minority will the Muslim minority within Israel proper be? Are they immune to the peril of Islam? Stupid question, isn't it.
One can either predict a 'slow burn' of Israel's Jewish majority--ie the Lebanese model, if a single devestating event doesn't hit them first.
Other factors could accelerate these trends. Recall the almost complete demographic vanishing of Christians in the Palestinian areas. The Hamas election has acted as fuel to this decline. Will constant rocket attacks lead to the same for Israel?
Exodus. What will it take for thousands, perhaps millions of Israelis to pack up and move? Such talk will bring joy to Israeli haters and Jihadis, but I see it coming. The same could be even more true for the Lebanese Christians. I read an astounding fact tonight: 150,000 Lebanese Christians died in the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990. The durability of the Lebanese Christians and/or the Israelis could prove me wrong, but it's starting to look like that old Cervantes book: charging at the windmills.
It would be kinda ironic that a tiny nation such as Israel - no bigger than Vancouver Island - would help bring international terrorism to its knees.
I say go for it - Shana Tova Israel!
Demography is not destiny. Infidels should end all Muslim migration. In those countries with large Muslim populations, measures can be taken to make it more rather than less difficult for Muslims to practice Islam with full-throated ease, to prosper enough to support large families, or even to assume that their presence, no matter what they do, will be indefinitely tolerated. If that presence is seen to create a situation of maximum peril for the Infidels among whom they live, attitudes can change.
Consider tolerant, advanced, easygoing Czechoslovakia in 1920, or 1930. Consider Czechoslovakia in 1946, and the Benes Decree.
Demography is not destiny. Infidels should end all Muslim migration. In those countries with large Muslim populations, measures can be taken to make it more rather than less difficult for Muslims to practice Islam with full-throated ease, to prosper enough to support large families, or even to assume that their presence, no matter what they do, will be indefinitely tolerated. If that presence is seen to create a situation of maximum peril for the Infidels among whom they live, attitudes can change.
Consider tolerant, advanced, easygoing Czechoslovakia in 1920, or 1930. Consider Czechoslovakia in 1946, and the Benes Decree.
Hugh, what you say about "England's unfinest hour" is true, and more people should know about it. However, I cannot see what that has to do with perfectly reasonable evacuation measures being taken in this particular case.
Of course British citizens need to be evacuated, not because they will be targeted by Israelis, but because they are in danger of being taken hostage. This is a war zone. Unless I'm missing something here, I would have thought that was obvious.
Similar measures are being planned for evacuation of other foreign nationals, not least the 25,000 US citizens, who, it seems, are to be transported to Cyprus. Are we to see a spiteful post about this, too, together with some irrelevant commentary about the slaughter of native Americans?
"Mission creep" does not even begin to cover it.
From www.jpost.com
Jul. 16, 2006 8:10
Report: Nasrallah wounded; Hizbullah denies report
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah was wounded Sunday morning in an IAF strike on his neighborhood in southern Beirut, SKY News reported.
Lebanese sources affiliated with Hizbullah denied the reports, saying they were Israeli attempts at causing confusion in Lebanon and lowering morale.
There is no spite in this item either, just a story of friendship and other matters which is food for thought.
More food for thought here.
"It would be kinda ironic that a tiny nation such as Israel - no bigger than Vancouver Island - would help bring international terrorism to its knees."
tomax7, its not the size that matters - its the will of the people and its leaders.
India, [my country] with its 75% HINDU population and a total population which is second only to China [ we will outbreed them by 2050 it seems ] - does not have the will to raise a little finger at Islamic expansionism - Indian leaders starting from Gandhi to Manmohan Singh have sided with the Paedophilic Cult.
Israel and its people have woek up and they know that they HAVE to fight to survive, while India is DROWNING and still not attempting to clutch the straws [if any ..]
binge_drinking_pig,
India MUST know what is going on all around them. What exactly is holding back the powers that be from passing laws to limit muslim immigration, limit their breeding like rabbits, closing the madrassas, rounding up the banned SIMI members ?
In other words, do exactly what the muslims have done in their own countries, like banning EVERYTHING that is non muslim.
All infidels should have also learned by now how to effectivly WHINE.
Hugh
Ref Britain and Palestine in the 1940's
The fact that Jewish extremists assassinated Churchill’s envoy and personal friend Lord Moyne in Egypt did not help their cause. You might be interested in Churchill’s memo to his staff about this time, which if I remember it asked,
"Is there any reason for us to stay in this troublesome place? If the Americans are so concerned perhaps they will take it over. Prepare me a report."
By the way the young man who killed Lord Moyne was tried, convicted, executed and buried in Egypt. However when his leader Mr Begin became Israeli PM he had him brought back to Israel and given a state funeral.
Hugh
Ref Britain and Palestine in the 1940's
The fact that Jewish extremists assassinated Churchill’s envoy and personal friend Lord Moyne in Egypt did not help their cause. You might be interested in Churchill’s memo to his staff about this time, which if I remember it asked,
"Is there any reason for us to stay in this troublesome place? If the Americans are so concerned perhaps they will take it over. Prepare me a report."
By the way the young man who killed Lord Moyne was tried, convicted, executed and buried in Egypt. However when his leader Mr Begin became Israeli PM he had him brought back to Israel and given a state funeral.
Hugh
Ref Britain and Palestine in the 1940's
The fact that Jewish extremists assassinated Churchill’s envoy and personal friend Lord Moyne in Egypt did not help their cause. You might be interested in Churchill’s memo to his staff about this time, which if I remember it asked,
"Is there any reason for us to stay in this troublesome place? If the Americans are so concerned perhaps they will take it over. Prepare me a report."
By the way the young man who killed Lord Moyne was tried, convicted, executed and buried in Egypt. However when his leader Mr Begin became Israeli PM he had him brought back to Israel and given a state funeral.
Interested
I don't know what you were reading, but I thought that Robert was making the obvious point that the British government, despite its lack of clarity on the Lesser Jihad, knows that its citizens in Beirut would be threatened by marauding Muslims. This they demonstrated by their act of withdrawing them. I read it as an ironic commentary about actions being louder than words, and in this case, contradicting anti-Israeli statements previously made by British officials, like Livingstone.
Sorry, doesn't wash. As an attempt at irony - if such it was - it is pathetically feeble, and is in any case a mean spirited attack on what is a perfectly reasonable action on the part of our government, which is concerned for the safety of its citizens. One which, I noticed, was not made on France or any of the other countries whose governments have been virulently anti-Israel, and who, moreover, have not supported the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is not the first such mean spirited attack and will not be the last.
For some time now, because of the BNP supporters who post here, I have been reluctant to recommend this site to black and Asian friends and colleagues.
The barrage of Brit-bashing that has gone on in recent weeks means that I will no longer recommend it to anybody. Nor will I be commenting here myself.
Enough is enough.
Hugh,
"The comment above was merely prompted by the notion that since, in the Western world, there is a general notion afoot --and certainly there is in England, that somehow the English have to endlessly apologize for the British empire, for colonialism, and so on. The good that was done by the British is often minimized or ignored. On the whole the British Empire did more good than bad."
Good done by the British Empire? May be you are refering to the millions dead during artificial famines of the 19th century, and one as recent as 1943, or the deadly taxes on the peasantry, or mercantalism, and the systematic de-industrialization of India, or destroying traditional educational system, and imposing a Macaulite education system resulting in widespread illiteracy, or the building of a few railroads, telegraph lines, roads and bridges to facilitate the stranglehold over the country, or maybe for all those places where "Dogs and Indians" weren't allowed.
Countinuous apology? We are waiting for the first one.
I never took you to be an apologist for imperialism. Very disappointed.
As a stupid American, I am unable to see what was so insulting, to Britain and the British, about Robert Spencer's words: "Do you think the Israelis in Lebanon will be targeting British citizens there? No, I didn't think you did."
Personally I would have placed a period after "No", rather than a comma, but that seems rather inconsequential, even for the literary.
As for content, it seems to me that Mr. Spencer was attempting to counteract the suggestions, in various mainstream media, that the crazed bloodthirsty Israelis are trying to kill anyone and everyone, including British citizens. Those sorts of suggestions, while obviously false to most readers of JW/DW, are not obviously false to many people on this planet, such as fans of the so-called "Guardian".
Could one of the offended British commenters please explain why you feel offended about this sentence by Mr. Spencer (slowly and carefully)? Thank you.
The poster above who is disappointed in my contra-corrente defense of the British Empire, which I might not have made when the British were still ruling the roost and that Empire, but that I think in a time when, at least in the country I live in, the United States, praise of any European empire (non-European empires, such as the Empire of Islam, are not recognized) for anything is simply not done. Any element of nuance in one's judgement, any pointing to the effects of the spread of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law and even, the best gift of all, the English language and its attendant literature, appears to suggest a wogs-begin-at-Calais Colonel Blimp, a figure of fun.
But I am not Colonel Blimp. I am one of those wogs who begins at Calais. I have my own grudges and resentments about British rule, or some of those British rulers. But in a time when everyone assumes -- it is a reflex in the newspapers -- that the whole thing was a mess, I feel the urge to declare that it wasn't all a mess.
There have been bad things, and good things. I weighed them up, at a time when few want to recognize the good things. Admittedly, I have been struck by the difference between what the Muslim conquerors did to India, and what the British did. The first brought nothing that I can find of value, but killed tens of millions. The second brought some things of value, and while brutal in places, did not kill tens of millions. And the British, in ending Muslim rule, made possible the rediscovery of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic India.
One questio to ask is: what would have happened if the British had never arrived at a particular land? Would America have been better off as part of the Spanish colonial empire or the French? What about sub-Saharan Africa -- better or worse where the British ruled? What about India -- if the British had not arrived, Muslim rulers would still rule. Were the British an improvement, or just as bad, or worse, than the Muslim rulers?
Surely you agree that there was good and bad. You tote up your scoreboard, and find, I gather, that the bad far outweighed the good. I tote up mine, and find that that the good outweighed ("on the whole") the bad. And I also think that whatever is the prevailing Received Opinion ordinarily deserves to be kicked and kept off balance.
The Received Opinion in the United States, mostly in universities where such things are still studied, and in other parts of the advanced West, are that European empires were unpleasant, unacceptable, terrible. It is as if the Christian missionaries in Mashonaland and Matabeleland were all little Leopolds in the Congo. But they weren't.
So I gave that Received Opinion a little kick, as I was passing by. That's the extent, really, of what you take to be my "disappointing" defense of -- of what? Famines? Misrule? Brutality? Cruelty? What did you think I was defending or saying a good word about?
During the first “Gulf War” in the early ‘90s, a good friend of mine was stationed on the battleship Missouri. He told me of how at one point they heard the alarm for “incoming missile, brace for shock” and all they could do was bend their knees and wait for the inevitable. The inevitable never came however because a British ship shot it out of the air. When you fight side-by-side against a common foe, a lifelong bond is formed.
(Point: To interpret comments made on this site as evidence of some anti-UK slant is pure garbage.)
At first I thought the British ships might be taking up some of the slack for the Patriot-missile’s inability to handle the short-range Katyushas. But there is no missile system able to effectively handle these short-range missiles and artillery projectiles.
That’s when I came across the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL).
http://www.defense-update.com/directory/THEL.htm
It is a shame that this tool is not yet ready for deployment in Israel. Even a barrage of Katyoshas is no match for the lasers of the THEL. I would like to see Israel employ the use of the sound cannons however, if they do indeed have to invade Lebanon.
-XRDC
whiplash - (noun?) the sensation which occasionally comes from reading blog thread comments.
To whit: JW/DW contributors are simultaneously criticized on this thread both for criticizing and defending British actions, even when they weren't actually quite criticizing, nor quite defending, British actions.
This thread on its own, which does contain some opinion of merit, is merely the straw that has broken one camel's back.
I have spent the last 10 days whenever I have visited JW/DW biting my tongue and thinking "least said soonest mended".
If you cannot see why we are offended then that inability is part of the problem.
No offence, but you are beginning to sound like my wife.
I know that there's a lot of background baggage that the Brits here have had to endure, and I do understand and sympathize with why some of you don't like it here. However, while I can see why Hugh's criticism of the Royal Navy turning back Jews during the war would rub you the wrong way, I still fail to see how Robert did, which I think was del's question as well. I've re-read Robert's statement at the top, but try as I might, I just can't see him condemning the British government for evacuating Her Majesty's Subjects to safety. Maybe he is, and has made it clear in a way only Brits can understand.
I know there has been a lot of anti-British sentiment here. What I don't see is that being translated into a desire to see Brits in such dangerous places go down in flames. Since the G-Had thread, I missed all the Brit bashing. But then again, what do I know - I just post here.
Hugh's criticism of events 65 years ago is no worse than what many British people have said, at the time and since. I remember my late parents always felt that it was the wrong thing to do.
I know there has been a lot of anti-British sentiment here
The constant drip, drip, drip, here these last few weeks has had it's effect and I thank you for your understanding expressed above. You also agree that such an evacuation is a wise action. I doubt that it will be confined to UK citizens; I believe that there are plans to accomodate US citizens in Cyprus.
Coming after so much, Robert's remarks, interpreted as meaning that the government (lambasted on previous thread as Arab controlled dhimmis) are only evacuating because they expect the Israelis to target UK citizens (which we know is nonsense, as shown by their warning civilians to leave Hezbollah areas before the strongholds were attacked) caused more distress than they might have done.
Mrs Pride sounds like a fine woman ;-)I send my regards to her.
Hugh,
"Admittedly, I have been struck by the difference between what the Muslim conquerors did to India, and what the British did. The first brought nothing that I can find of value, but killed tens of millions. The second brought some things of value, and while brutal in places, did not kill tens of millions. And the British, in ending Muslim rule, made possible the rediscovery of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic India."
The Marathas, the Sikhs, the Jats, and the Rajputs, had already liberated most of the subcontinent from Muslim rule by the time the British arrived. The Mughals remained in nominal control over small areas of India, and the Mughal emperor was a titualr head; the muslims never regained their dominant position in the subcontinent. The East India Company had to fight for India in the Anglo-Maratha Wars, and Anglo-Sikh Wars, not the Anglo-Muslim wars.
RC Majumdar's The History and Culture of the Indian People - Vol. VIII Maratha Supremacy, describes the end of Muslim rule by Hindu Marathas. Since you have mentioned Sita Ram Goel and K. S. Lal in your earlier articles, here I
quote both of them.
K.S. Lal in The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India,
(1) After Aurangzeb’s death when Muslim power started to disintegrate, the Sufi scholar Shah Waliullah (1703-1763) wrote to the Afghan King Ahmad Shah Abdali, inviting him to invade India to help the Muslims. The letter said: “…In
short the Moslem community is in a pitiable condition. All control of the machinery of the government is in the hands of the
Hindus because they are the only people who are capable and industrious. Wealth and prosperity are concentrated in their hands, while the share of Moslems is nothing but poverty and misery… At this time you are the only king who is powerful, farsighted and capable of defeating the enemy forces. Certainly it is incumbent upon you to march to India, destroy Maratha domination and rescue weak and old Moslems from the clutches of non-Moslems. If, Allah forbid, domination by infidels continues, Moslems will forget Islam and within a short time, become such a nation that there will be nothing left to distinguish them from non-Moslems.”
Sita Ram Goel in The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India,
"Hindus have survived as a majority in their motherland not because Islam spared any effort to conquer and convert them but because Islamic brutality met more than its equal in Hindu tenacity for freedom. Nor is it anywhere near the truth to say that the British empire in India replaced an earlier Muslim empire. The effective
political power in India had already passed into the hands of the Marathas, the Jats, and the Sikhs when the British started playing their imperialist game. The Muslim principalities in Bengal, Avadh, South India, Sindh, and the Punjab were no match for the Hindu might that had resurged. The Mughal emperor at Delhi by that time presented a pitiful picture of utter helplessness. The custodians of Islam in India were repeatedly inviting Ahmad Shah Abdali from across the border to come and rescue Islam from the abyss into which it had fallen."
While it is true that the British did not kill people in the same way as the Muslims, millions of Indians died because of their deliberate policies or criminal misrule, whether it was exporting a large number of grains, even during famines, or using the farm land for cash crops, or ignoring the canal systems. In addition to theinflationary policies to fund adventures outside India (Afghanistan for example), the famines were made worse by the impoverishment of the artisans by high tariffs (70%-80%) on exports, and the flood of cheap imports with lower tarriffs, as well as refusal to lower the amount of revenue during famines. Out of many works that support these arguments, I am quoting a few:
Montgomery Martin, in The Indian Empire (1858), noted that the East India Company "omitted not only to initiate improvements, but even to keep in repair the old works upon which the revenue depended."
Sir William Willcock in his Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems wrote, " Not only was nothing done to utilize and improve the original canal system, but railway embankments
were subsequently thrown up, entirely destroying it. Some areas, cut off from the supply of loam-bearing Ganges water, have gradually become sterile and unproductive, others improperly drained, show an advanced degree of water-logging,
with the inevitable accompaniment of malaria. Nor has any attempt been made to construct proper embankments for the Gauges in its low course, to prevent the enormous erosion by which villages and groves and cultivated fields are swallowed up each year."
In 1901, W. Digby, noted in "Prosperous British India", "stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread." In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31(thirty one) serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17(seventeen) in the 2000 years before British rule."
In The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule (1906, reprint 1990), Romesh Dutt wrote,"India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asian and of Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East Indian Company and the British Parliament ... discourage Indian manufactures in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England ... millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of their wealth"
Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts also notes many facts like "The central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in
Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind).... Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history.An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular durbar. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero."
"The grim doctrines of Thomas Malthus, former Chair of Political Economy at Haileybury, still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in Calcutta, Malthusian
principles, updated by Social Darwinism, were regularly invoked to legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England."
Regardless of whether someone believes that wogs-begin-at-Calais, the scale still shifts towards the bad as far as India was concerned. I expressed my disappointment because you made a generalized statement in defense of the British Empire, rather than a nuanced one.
Hugh,
"Admittedly, I have been struck by the difference between what the Muslim conquerors did to India, and what the British did. The first brought nothing that I can find of value, but killed tens of millions. The second brought some things of value, and while brutal in places, did not kill tens of millions. And the British, in ending Muslim rule, made possible the rediscovery of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic India."
The Marathas, the Sikhs, the Jats, and the Rajputs, had already liberated most of the subcontinent from Muslim rule by the time the British arrived. The Mughals remained in nominal control over small areas of India, and the Mughal emperor was a titualr head; the muslims never regained their dominant position in the subcontinent. The East India Company had to fight for India in the Anglo-Maratha Wars, and Anglo-Sikh Wars, not the Anglo-Muslim wars.
RC Majumdar's The History and Culture of the Indian People - Vol. VIII Maratha Supremacy, describes the end of Muslim rule by Hindu Marathas. Since you have mentioned Sita Ram Goel and K. S. Lal in your earlier articles, here I
quote both of them.
K.S. Lal in The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India,
(1) After Aurangzeb’s death when Muslim power started to disintegrate, the Sufi scholar Shah Waliullah (1703-1763) wrote to the Afghan King Ahmad Shah Abdali, inviting him to invade India to help the Muslims. The letter said: “…In short the Moslem community is in a pitiable condition. All control of the machinery of the government is in the hands of the Hindus because they are the only people who are capable and industrious. Wealth and prosperity are concentrated in their hands, while the share of Moslems is nothing but poverty and misery… At this time you are the only king who is powerful, farsighted and capable of defeating the enemy forces. Certainly it is incumbent upon you to march to India, destroy Maratha domination and rescue weak and old Moslems from the clutches of non-Moslems. If, Allah forbid, domination by infidels continues, Moslems will forget Islam and within a short time, become such a nation that there will be nothing left to distinguish them from non-Moslems.”
Sita Ram Goel in The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India,
"Hindus have survived as a majority in their motherland not because Islam spared any effort to conquer and convert them but because Islamic brutality met more than its equal in Hindu tenacity for freedom. Nor is it anywhere near the truth to say that the British empire in India replaced an earlier Muslim empire. The effective
political power in India had already passed into the hands of the Marathas, the Jats, and the Sikhs when the British started playing their imperialist game. The Muslim principalities in Bengal, Avadh, South India, Sindh, and the Punjab were no match for the Hindu might that had resurged. The Mughal emperor at Delhi by that time presented a pitiful picture of utter helplessness. The custodians of Islam in India were repeatedly inviting Ahmad Shah Abdali from across the border to come and rescue Islam from the abyss into which it had fallen."
While it is true that the British did not kill people in the same way as the Muslims, millions of Indians died because of their criminal misrule and deliberate policies, whether it was exporting a large number of grains, even during famines, or using the farm land for cash crops, or ignoring the canal systems. In addition to the inflationary policies to fund adventures outside India (Afghanistan for example), the famines were made worse by the impoverishment of the artisans by high tariffs (70%-80%) on exports, and the flood of cheap imports with lower tarriffs, as well as refusal to lower the amount of revenue during famines. Out of many works that support these arguments, I am quoting a few:
Montgomery Martin, in The Indian Empire (1858), noted that the East India Company "omitted not only to initiate improvements, but even to keep in repair the old works upon which the revenue depended."
Sir William Willcock in his Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems wrote, " Not only was nothing done to utilize and improve the original canal system, but railway embankments were subsequently thrown up, entirely destroying it. Some areas, cut off from the supply of loam-bearing Ganges water, have gradually become sterile and unproductive, others improperly drained, show an advanced degree of water-logging, with the inevitable accompaniment of malaria. Nor has any attempt been made to construct proper embankments for the Gauges in its low course, to prevent the enormous erosion by which villages and groves and cultivated fields are swallowed up each year."
In 1901, W. Digby, noted in "Prosperous British India", "stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread." In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31(thirty one) serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17(seventeen) in the 2000 years before British rule."
In The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule (1906, reprint 1990), Romesh Dutt wrote,"India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asian and of Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East Indian Company and the British Parliament ... discourage Indian manufactures in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England ... millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of their wealth"
Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts also notes many facts like "The central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind).... Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular durbar. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero."
"The grim doctrines of Thomas Malthus, former Chair of Political Economy at Haileybury, still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in Calcutta, Malthusian
principles, updated by Social Darwinism, were regularly invoked to legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England."
Regardless of whether someone believes that wogs-begin-at-Calais, the scale still shifts towards the bad as far as India was concerned. I expressed my disappointment because you made a generalized statement in defense of the British Empire, rather than a nuanced one.
Sorry for the double post
Granny,
Your initial response, "If you cannot see why we are offended then that inability is part of the problem." is itself part of the problem. You are undoubtedly correct about my inability, but have missed a straightforward opportunity to correct the problem by not answering my request. But thank you for your responses, and your following explanation to Infidel Pride above. My interpretation of Mr. Spencer's words (that his criticism was aimed at the BBC media report, rather than at the British gov't) differed from your interpretation. You may well be correct that some of his criticism was aimed at the British gov't action, or its implications.
I haven't been reading every thread, so have apparently missed some apparent Brit-bashing (which bashing I have never engaged in).
Nevertheless, Mr. Spencer criticizes a variety of actions and behaviors of various individuals, groups and governments. At times, he certainly criticizes my (United States) government, as well as the current British government. I really do not see mean-spirited behavior toward the UK, Britain, the British, England, the English, etc., on his part.
As for some commenters: you must know that it is a mistake to generalize sentiments expressed by certain commenters to blog proprietors, whether or not the comments containing such sentiments are deleted by the proprietors.
Brit-bashing (which bashing I have never engaged in).
Indeed, you never have. And thank you for coming back, I appreciate your response.
I would hate to see Interested leave or Granny Weatherwax, you have become like family here at JW. I have to admit I didn't notice the Brit bashing like I noticed the US bashing...I guess that is normal. If I have ever hurt either of your feelings I apologize. I really don't believe RS intended to bash the Brits, as we all have governments that tend to be dhimmi states.
Carolyn, that is very kind - I have never read you say anything that was not constructive and comradely.
You want to debate the British Empire? Then a debate you shall have...
At the beginning of the 20th century, Great Britain was at the pinnacle of its strength, and controlled the greatest empire ever seen. The Empire dominated trade and held control over more than one quarter of the world’s population, yet in modern times it is commonly thought of as a source of shame and dishonour. However, despite the counter-arguments, factors supporting the Empire, and British Imperialism, easily outweigh those that oppose it.
Unlike most empires, the British Empire was one built almost entirely upon commerce, rather than the simple desire to lay claim to land, as some definitions of Imperial, “Arrogant, commanding, obnoxious” may suggest. It is these definitions that are so regularly used by critics, but also under the classification of Imperialism come “Majestic” and “Commanding” – words far more befitting of the British Empire and its beneficial influence across the world. The historian Niall Ferguson supports the view that trade was the chief factor, ‘Though [Britain’s] imperialism was not wholly absent-minded, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface… but real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism’.
The period from 1815 to 1854 is commonly known as Pax Britannica and was free of any major European wars. Although it is argued that this gave Britain a chance to bully unchallenged other “lesser” countries, the period was in fact a time that established present and future stability. Britain gave her colonies and dominions a better future than they could have hoped for – a future with its foundations built upon trade with Britain. Allegiance to the Crown gave countries the protection of the Royal Navy and increased trade with Britain exempt from the trade tariffs imposed upon other countries. The powerful entrepreneurial spirit that was rife in 1800s Britain allowed her to gain the unofficial title of the ‘Workshop of the World’. As the first country to fully industrialise, Britain was the sole exporter of new labour-saving machinery such as the loom and steam engine (importing raw materials in return) – global trade gave exporters the open market, and the protection of the Royal Navy to fall back on, meaning that even the smallest idea could make a man rich.
British ingenuity not only fed the modern world’s desire for new goods; it became a power that was able to eliminate the serious underlying problems of piracy, slavery and smuggling, guaranteeing its position as a moral force for good. Ever-advancing technology gave Britain the upper hand in its fight against outlaws – Britain twice asserted its authority over Chinese pirate junks and rogue, anti-Capitalist governors in two Opium wars (1839-1842 and 1856 to 1860), which ended with the handover of Hong Kong to the British, and the resumption of trade. The reluctance of the Chinese to trade with Britain was unprecedented, and Britain implemented its much practised gunboat-diplomacy policies to knock China back into line with a short, sharp surgical strike.
Suppression of Slavery (the movement started off by William Wilberforce with his Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade) in the 1800s was somewhat harder, due to the resistance shown by campaigns from the American plantations and slave traders. On seeing approaching British men-o’-war, slave ship crews (in both Africa and the Americas) were not infrequently seen hurling slaves overboard into the sea to avoid prosecution. As Britain moved into the later 1800s the trade was almost entirely eradicated, marking the transition into what is commonly known as the liberal age.
British dominance of the seas allowed countries such as Australia to flourish under the tariff-protected system, and the value of this can still be seen today. According to the Australian government, ‘Australia continues to be one of the strongest performing economies in the world’, with trade as strong as many Western European countries. Its GDP ranks well above those of Greece, Norway, Sweden and Portugal, only a few places behind Spain, Italy and France. India’s GDP is now $3,678,000,000,000, far higher than the UK’s $ 1,867,000,000,000, proving that hardships undergone by India in the 1700s were in fact a worthwhile investment for the country’s future – it is now firmly recognised as a world power, with a seat on the UN security council and a powerful nuclear arsenal.
Trade was not the only factor that benefited the people of the colonies; the empire can also be seen as a civilising force. British influence eventually gave African and Asian countries two vital factors that make up a developed country – the alien system of democracy, and a strong economy. In all newly acquired possessions, the British government followed the same pattern of actions in order to win over the new peoples; puppet governments were first set up, then followed by an influx of missionaries and traders. Without the British power overseas, it would have been impossible to so easily replace governments with pre-selected candidates (or simply British governors), and then to have them discreetly watched over by the pro-consul governing the area. Administrators (and therefore costs) were kept to a minimum, meaning that the skeletal administration was efficient (entry tests to the colonial civil services were notoriously difficult, especially those of India) but secure. Steamships and the new telegraph system meant that orders and soldiers could be sent faster than any rebellion could travel, meaning that martial law was always there as a reassuring fall-back. These measures ensured the maintenance of law and order in the area, and with the introduction of new technology and services (piped water, sewers, roads) kept the native populations under control and made tribal warfare a thing of the past. Trading raw materials (sugar, cotton, wool, timber) for cloth, weaponry and machinery brought poorer countries into the world of commerce, and with the money gained from trade, an infrastructure could then be set up, all provided by British entrepreneurs. After the conquest of India, bridges were built, telephone cables laid and railways installed – whilst these measures served the British troops excellently, they also advanced the sub-continent greatly.
In India, higher caste men were encouraged to acquire a university education in Britain, whilst education in general was set up in the majority of peaceful colonies. Ghandi used his education and English to influence the ruling of India, and eventually orchestrated independence from Britain. Even when he began his civil disobedience campaigns (‘100,000 Englishmen cannot control 350 million Indians if these Indians won't cooperate.’), he was arrested and released twice by the British authorities, and later invited to the Round Table conference to discuss properly the matter of India’s independence.
Whilst conditions in modern India may now be the better for British rule, it is clear that the British Empire did not successfully set up many African countries for the future. Modern Zimbabwe was created by Cecil Rhodes in 1888 and governed by the British as a colony until independence in 1965. Throughout the later years of British rule (and then under independent white-majority rule) the country had been stricken with rioting, burning and the attacking of European farms and farmers. Unlike the colonies founded in the early 1800s (India, West Indies), many events and disturbances were covered by the media, allowing people to form their own, stronger opinions from what they saw and read about. News in the new, media- and liberal-obsessed world focused hugely on the wrongs of empire, overlooking the good points and subconsciously stirring up the people of the modern, less established colonies into what eventually became violent revolts. This behaviour from native peoples disrupted trade, taxing and pioneering, meaning that the country could not become richer and benefit from new inventions and techniques, as those in other colonies and dominions had. The popular media prevented countries like Rhodesia from thriving under the British, forcing the rulers to fight harsher and ever harsher campaigns to pacify the violent anti-European protests, trapping the innocent in a vicious circle of poverty.
The popular argument then follows from here that perhaps the British and other Europeans had no right to be in Africa in the first place, and that the Africans were right to be angry. However, whilst this argument may seem morally correct, it is clear from looking at the facts that the British presence in the areas was advantageous. The overwhelming majority of the settlers in Rhodesia since its creation in 1888 settled down to become farmers (since the gold they set out to find had long since been used up), fencing off dry and dead land on which to grow their crops. The land was not in any way utilised by the African population, and they could not – considering their technological limitations – have farmed the land as efficiently as the settlers. After the pacifying of the African rebel groups by Rhodes’ own South Africa Company, British technology was used to irrigate and plant the land, pouring money back into the country and its people, black and white. Many would argue that the money was in fact entirely directed back to the white settlers, the natives trapped in a European-run and dominated market, out of which there was no escape. As in all cases, the entrepreneurs received the lion’s share of the income, but it is ludicrous to claim that the use of previously untouched land to feed the nation independently of Britain did not benefit Rhodesia. The farming provided jobs for Africans that paid considerably better than nomadic cattle farming, the most common source of wealth in early Rhodesia.
However, with independence came stronger African nationalism; over the past decade, Robert Mugabe’s roaming militia have lain waste to European farms, burning, shooting and killing as they went – a stark contrast to the fair and just Mugabe elected by Zimbabwe in 1987 as President. It is regrettable that the British were prevented by public opinion and international (and naturally Rhodesian) pressure from setting up responsible government in the area, which could have prevented the atrocities and poverty still prevalent in Zimbabwe today.
It is likely that it is ongoing and unchallenged events such as these, combined with highly publicised acknowledgement of suppression of indigenous people that are the real sources of shame for the British people. It is now recognised that figures such as Gandhi may have been right when he made statements such as ‘[British Rule] has reduced us to serfdom, [and] it has sapped the foundation of our culture’, or that Chief Dan George of the Salish West Canadian tribe was right when he said ‘Come and integrate you say; but how can I? What is there in my culture you value?’ It has taken over 100 years for the governments of the white settler dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada) to realise, let alone right, the wrongs done to their native people, such as those in Palestine, certain African countries and Kashmir.
The British Empire was an empire like no other. The period from 1700 to the present day encompasses what in my opinion is the era of greatest human advancements in all fields, from weaponry to medicine, trade to cartography. However, there were two fundamental differences between the British and the Greeks, Romans and Ottomans before them; it offered its subjects an unparalleled level of freedom in speech, movement, government and, most importantly, education. Since 1750, the British government and people have set up schools and universities on every continent on Earth, spreading essential civilised and previously only western principles (such as freedom of speech) which make Britain, North American and most European countries the secure, fair, reasonable and responsible nations that they are today. The British Empire spread these ideas of equal treatment (regardless of gender and race) across the world, and it is undeniably why the world is as stable as it is today. Without the Empire, one can be almost certain that the allied nations would have been unable to twice defeat Germany and her allies – it was only due to Britain’s swift intervention that France was not immediately overrun, potentially leaving all her industrial capabilities available to the fascists.
The British Empire was not only good for Britain; it has spread its beneficial values across the world, but the truly remarkable feature of the British Empire can be found in its downfall. Built and maintained by military superiority alone, it is the first empire the world has ever known that has managed to fade away as gracefully and as splendidly as it was formed, leaving behind it a magnificent legacy of benevolence, civilisation and evolution. Whilst the colonies and imperial splendour of the 1800s may be gone, many reminders of Britain’s imperial past remain visible across the world. No empire has ever surpassed Britain’s in any way, and I firmly believe that thanks to the honourable conduct of the British abroad and at home, during and after imperialism, none ever will.
Imperialism: The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations. Britain's imperial drive was fueled by the desire for economic hegemony (not the untenable "civilizing force" argument which itself was based on racism), and the motivation did not originate from the free trade argument but Mercantalism, which was backed by the armed might of the East India Company (with full support of British naval forces and the government). As Adam Smith wrote, "The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the Eas Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries." There were also security interests, like rivalry with the French and the The Great Game, along with the the amibitions of many governor-generals, which led to the conquest of more territories in India
"The period from 1815 to 1854 is commonly known as Pax Britannica and was free of any major European wars. Although it is argued that this gave Britain a chance to bully unchallenged other “lesser” countries, the period was in fact a time that established present and future stability. Britain gave her colonies and dominions a better future than they could have hoped for – a future with its foundations built upon trade with Britain."
There generally is stability when a hegemon rules over a significant amount of territory; after all there was a Pax Romana, and Pax Mongolica once, but that in itself is no excuse for enslaving entire nations. And your argument of Britain giving better future, that is mere speculation of what might have occured. As far as certain developments like roads, and railways are concerned they would have happened anyways, and the assumption that colonialists, whose main allegiance was to Britain, would be best positioned to safeguard the interests of India and its population rather than Indians themselves is absurd.
"Allegiance to the Crown gave countries the protection of the Royal Navy and increased trade with Britain exempt from the trade tariffs imposed upon other countries."
The truth is that high tariffs were placed on exports from India while tarrifs were artificially lowered on British exports to India. Horace Hayman Wilson in The History of British India from 1805 to 1835 said the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms.While there was prosperity for British cotton industry there was ruin for millions of Indian craftsmen and artisans. India's manufacturing towns were blighted e.g. Decca once known as the Manchester of India, and Murshidabad-Bengal's old capital which was once described in 1757 as extensive, populous and rich as London. Millions of spinners, and weavers were forced to seek a precarious living in the countryside, as were many tanners, smelters and
smiths. India's share of the world income as measured by purchasing power parity fell significantly from 1750 to 1947.
"Trade was not the only factor that benefited the people of the colonies; the empire can also be seen as a civilising force. British influence eventually gave African and Asian countries two vital factors that make up a developed country – the alien system of democracy, and a strong economy. "
Oh yes, where would the Asian and African countries be without the white race? That argument in itself fills in "arrogance" in your definition of the imperial.
"India’s GDP is now $3,678,000,000,000, far higher than the UK’s $ 1,867,000,000,000, proving that hardships undergone by India in the 1700s were in fact a worthwhile investment for the country’s future – it is now firmly recognised as a world power, with a seat on the UN security council and a powerful nuclear arsenal."
The the reason for it is not Britain, but hard work and ingenuity of the Indian people. Literacy in British India in 1911 was only 6%, in 1931 it was 8%, and by 1947 it had been 11%. It took India 50 years to raise the literacy rates to the
present level. Contrast that with the period before the imposition of British educational system:
In 1812-13, Thomas Munro reported that for areas of the Madras Presidency "every village had a school". Later as Governor of the Madras Presidency he reviewed reports to estimate that "there is one school for every 1000 of the
population".
William Adam, a former Baptist missionary turned Journalist, in first report in 1835 observed that every village had at least one school; and that there seemed to be about 1,00,000 schools in Bengal and Bihar in the 1830s.
G.L.Prendergast, Bombay Presidency council member stated in 1821 "that in the newly extended Presidency of Bombay "there is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, and in larger villages more."
In his report on indigenous education in the Punjab, Dr. G.W. Leitner, one time Principal of Government College, Lahore, and for some time acting Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab, stated that "there was not a mosque, a temple, a dharmasala that had not a school attached to it." These observations made in 1852 show that the spread of education in the Punjab around 1850 was of a similar extent to that in Bombay.
In the districts of Madras Presidency and two districts of Bihar for which data is available, it was found that children from communities termed 'Sudras' and the castes considered below them predominated in the thousands. In the Tamil-speaking areas of Madras Presidency, 'Sudras' and 'AtiSudras' comprised 70-80 per cent of all school going children. Among the Oriya-speaking areas of the same Presidency, the percentage of children belonging to these two castes was 62 per cent; n Malyalam-speaking areas it was 54 per cent; and in Telugu-speaking areas it was 35-40 per cent. There were 11,575 schools with 1,57,195 children in Madras Presidency and there were 1,094 colleges. Nearly 25 per cent of all children used to go to school and a large percentage of children studied at home. The number of children doing home schooling in Madras district alone was 26,446 while in the city 5,523 children were going to school."
All of the above facts, and more can be found in at book called A Beautiful Tree by Dharampal
Similar situation can be seen with many ecomomic benchmarks like life expectancy (in the 20's during the 1930's), or poverty (annual British Government reports repeatedly published data that showed 70-80% of Indians were living on the margin of subsistence. That two-thirds were undernourished, and in Bengal, nearly four-fifths were undernourished).
So it can be said that the progress India has made is inspite of the colonial legacy not because of it.
"In India, higher caste men were encouraged to acquire a university education in Britain, whilst education in general was set up in the majority of peaceful colonies. Ghandi used his education and English to influence the ruling of India, and
eventually orchestrated independence from Britain. Even when he began his civil disobedience campaigns (‘100,000 Englishmen cannot control 350 million Indians if these Indians won't cooperate.’), he was arrested and released twice by the British authorities, and later invited to the Round Table conference to discuss properly the matter of India’s independence".
Let us see what was the motive for uprooting Indian system of education, and replacing it with the British one. In the words of Thomas Macaulay in 1835, "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions
whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect."
In Macaulay's letter dated 12th Oct., 1836, he wrote to his father:
"Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully; we find it difficult to provide instruction to all. The effect of this education on Hindus is prodigious. No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respected classes 30 years hence. And this will be effected without our efforts to proselytize; I heartily rejoice in the prospect."
Charles E. Trevelyan, brother-in-law of Macaulay, stated, " Familiarly acquainted with us by means of our literature, the Indian youth almost cease to regard us as foreigners. They speak of "great" men with the same enthusiasm as we do. Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindoos, just as the Roman provincial became more Romans than Gauls or Italians.."
Charles Trevelyan in his testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Government of Indian Territories on 23rd June, 1853 made it clear that the education system was part of colonial process when he said "..... the
effect of training in European learning is to give an entirely new turn to the native mind. The young men educated in this way cease to strive after independence according to the original Native model, and aim at, improving the institutions of the country according to the English model, with the ultimate result of establishing constitutional self-government. They cease to regard us as enemies and usurpers, and they look upon us as friends and patrons, and powerful beneficent persons, under whose protection the regeneration of their country will gradually be worked out. ....."
The British educational system was created for the benefit of the empire not ordinary Indians; that many people took advantage of the system is a credit to them, not the British.
Contrary to popular belief, Gandhi wasn't responsible for India's independence. He only got a few political concessions, nothing more, after his quarter century worth of non-violence. It was the circusmstances that conspired to drive British out. The cornerstone of British presence in India were the British Indian Armed Forces, and they no longer supported their British masters after the war.
First, World War II financially weakened Britain, and the demobilization had left it without enough troops to deploy in order to pacify a nation of India's size. Sir Stafford Cripps said:
"...The Indian Army in India is not obeying the British officers. We have recruited our workers for the war; they have been demobilised after the war. They are required to repair the factories damaged by Hitler's bombers. Moreover, they want to join their kith and kin after five and a half years of separation. Their kith and kin also want to join them. In these conditions if we have to rule India for a long time, we have to keep a permanent British army for a long time in a vast country of four hundred millions.We have no such army...."
After six years of war the British populace was in no mood to support anyone who would engage in another conflict (they even threw out Churchill).
Secondly, Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army had compromised the loyalty of the armed forces to Britain.Claude Auchinleck wrote to the Viceroy Wavell,
"I know from my long experience of Indian troops how hard it is even for the best and most sympathetic British officer to gauge the inner feelings of the Indian soldier, and history supports me in this view. I do not think any senior British officer today knows what is the real feeling among the Indian ranks regarding the 'INA'. I myself feel, from my own instinct largely, but also from the information I have had from various sources, that there is a growing feeling of sympathy for the 'INA' and an increasing tendency to disregard the brutalities committed by some of its members as well as the forswearing by all of them of their original allegiance. It is impossible to apply our standards of ethics to this problem or to shape our policy as we would, had the 'I N A' been of our own race."
Thirdly, the British tried to punish Indian National Army veterabs in the INA trials at the Red Fort. Protests in Delhi and Madurai resulted in police firings. Calcutta was shut down for days in November, 1945, and British and American
vehicles were burned. Violence then spread to Patna, Allahbad, Benares and later to Bombay and Karachi. All this violence forced the British to commute the sentences of Sahgal, Dhillon, and Shah Nawaz, the original defendents.
In January 1946, the Airforce personnel went on strike to protest their conditions and support the INA cause. Calcutta was paralysed by a general strike from 11 to 13 February 1946 and Indian police was reluctant to stop the attack on
Europeans. Then came the Naval Mutiny at Bombay on 18th February 1946 and within two days almost the entire Royal Indian Navy was in rebellion. The rebellion had spread to Karachi, Madras, Vizag, Cochin, Chittagong and Andamans. Most of the ships were out of British hands and the mutiny was supported by strikes in Bombay and other places. It was also supported by the Royal Indian Airforce who went on strike in Bombay and Madras. On 27th February Indian soldiers at the Jabalbur cantonment followed. In many cantonements non-commissioned officers started ignoring orders from British. There were army revolts at Bombay and Pune, and talk and rumors of mutiny were spreading in cantonements across the country. The streets of Bombay were a battlezone with workers from docks, textile mills, and other places clashing with the British troops, and white troops had to be brought in to open fire on the workers. The Labour Government saw the writing on the wall. The above evidence should make it clear that the efforts of Indian troops chanting "Jai Hind" and "Azad Hind", and support and sacrifice by the people achieved India's independence.
By the way, your entire argument justifying the British Empire is based on real or alleged material benefits, and ignores the moral principle of freedom of peoples and nations to control their own destiny, and not being subjected to hegemony by a militarily superior power, regardless of its intentions. It is interesting that you overlook the "honourable" conduct that
resulted in the deaths of millions.
Finally, I quote at length from a review of Niall Ferguson's book Colossus (yes the same Niall Ferguson who along with a myopic elite, is so gung-ho about the democracy project in Iraq, that he refuses to recognise the real problem is Islam,
and the fact that America losing its men and materiel in Iraq will not solve the problem of Islam) in Boston Review (February/March 2005) by Vivek Chibber, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, which addresses many points that were raised.
"The actual arguments Ferguson makes to support his case are by no means new; to the contrary, he trots out some of the hoariest myths of the colonial experience. To make matters worse, his own narrative undermines several of his central points, as I shall demonstrate below."
"Ferguson identifies colonial rule with sound governance, and this identification lies behind his fondness for the imperial idea. Sound governance is, he says, the most significant British legacy—valuable as an end in itself, but also because it furthers democracy and economic growth. Ferguson can’t quite maintain that colonialism directly generated democracy, but he suggests that it laid the foundation by tutoring imperial subjects on the finer points of statecraft and by building secure administrative apparatuses. And by its commitment to the rule of law, secure property rights, and “sound” fiscal management, colonialism encouraged entrepreneurial initiative and coaxed an impressive economic performance out of the colonies. This wasn’t true of the whole span of colonial rule. Ferguson doesn’t think that the 18th-century slave trade, for example, catalyzed African democracy. He restricts his claims to the Victorian era, starting after the Indian Sepahi Rebellion, through the Scramble for Africa and the first decades of the 20th century. This was the high-water mark of liberal empire."
"Colossus is a short book that makes many claims. In assessing them, we need to ask two main questions. First, are the claims true? In particular, was British rule basically about sound governance and the building blocks of democracy? And second, if they are true—if colonialism did have the beneficial outcomes Ferguson attributes to it—was colonial rule necessary to producing such outcomes? Was succumbing to external rule the price that colonies had to pay for democracy and modern economic growth?"
"Ferguson bases his defense of colonialism principally on the Indian experience, so I’ll start on the subcontinent. As it happens, the Victorian era provides a strong test of Ferguson’s claims about the quality of British statecraft, since it was marked by a series of severe droughts in areas of colonial rule. Thanks to Amartya Sen, we now know that famines are not naturally occurring phenomena; they can largely be averted, or at least minimized, if authorities intervene swiftly and decisively. If drought does turn into severe famine, it is most likely because of a breakdown in, or an absence of, well-functioning social institutions. On the Indian subcontinent, which relies heavily on the timeliness of the annual monsoons, droughts occurred periodically. Over the centuries, local elites and villagers had built up a rudimentary apparatus—in effect, an insurance system—to blunt the worst effects of the crop failures, and the British inherited this system as they took over. So at the very least, a regime that prided itself on good governance ought to have performed at least as well as its predecessors in minimizing damage from droughts.
In reality, the Victorian era witnessed perhaps the worst famines in Indian history. Their severity, and the role of colonial authorities in this pattern of disaster, has been brought to light by Mike Davis in his stunning book Late Victorian Holocausts. Even before the onset of the Victorian famines, warning signals were in place: C. Walford showed in 1878 that the number of famines in the first century of British rule had already exceeded the total recorded cases in the previous two thousand years. But the grim reality behind claims to “good governance” truly came to light in the very decades that Ferguson trumpets. According to the most reliable estimates, the deaths from the 1876–1878 famine were in the range of six to eight million, and in the double-barreled famine of 1896–1897 and 1899–1900, they probably totaled somewhere in the range of 17 to 20 million. So in the quarter century that marks the pinnacle of colonial good governance, famine deaths average at least a million per year.
Two factors contributed to this outcome. First, the structure of the colonial revenue system—with its high and inflexible tax rates—drastically increased peasant vulnerability to drought. Whereas pre-colonial authorities had tended to modulate revenue demands to the vagaries of the harvest, the British rejected this tradition. Agrarian revenues during the 19th century were critical to the colonial state, and to funding British regional and global military campaigns. So the screws on the peasant were kept tight, regardless of circumstance. This remorseless pressure drove a great number of peasants to the edge of subsistence, making them deeply vulnerable to periodic shocks in the agrarian cycle. Hence it is no surprise that, according to a report of 1881, 80 percent of all the famine fatalities came from the poorest 20 percent of the population—precisely those peasants who lived on the brink of disaster.
The second, more proximate factor was the administrative response to famine, which is neatly summed up in the Report of the Famine Commission of 1878: “The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief . . . would
probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times . . . which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.” So Viceroy Lytton sent a stern warning that administrators should stoutly resist what he called “humanitarian hysterics” and ordered that there be “no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food.” British officials energetically held the line against humanitarianism as grain prices skyrocketed upward. “Sound” public finance—according to Ferguson, one of the great gifts of Victorian
governance—trumped even the most meager efforts at relief the moment they strained at the exchequer. Curzon, who oversaw the decimation wrought by the 1899 famine, warned that “any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.”
To help Indians internalize this Spartan ethic, Lytton, Elgin and Curzon shut down all but the most anemic relief efforts across the country. Grain surpluses in states where rainfall was adequate were not used for famine relief but were shipped instead to England, which apparently could relinquish its own self-reliance in agriculture without descending into moral turpitude. To further help the Indian peasant pursue his virtuous path, all pleas for tax relief were rebuffed, and collection efforts were redoubled: not a rupee of revenue was to be left on the parched plains. And in case peasants didn’t get the point that they were supposed to pay the government and not the other way around, relief camps were closed down in areas where tax collection threatened to fall short of normal receipts.
These taxes, it should be noted, were not covering the administrative costs of good governance, but were paying for British colonial wars—the Afghan wars in Lytton’s time, and the Boer War in Curzon’s reign. So as the British extended their empire across new frontiers, the bodies of the Indian peasants funding the effort were piling up outside the Viceregal verandas. The colonial state consciously forswore any attempt at intervening and averting these catastrophes. In so doing, it reversed centuries long traditions of famine relief, set aside known techniques of reducing mortality, telling the “natives” all the while that it was being done for their own good.
This last point bears emphasis. It isn’t that the British responded to the crisis with insufficient alacrity, or that they showed a want of resolve. The point instead is that they resolutely—indeed, with homicidal intensity—pursued policies that predictably escalated the human disasters. Ferguson notes that the late Victorian famines were indeed a pity but “were far more environmental than political than origin.” But he does not advance a shred of evidence in support of this thesis."
"The sheer scale of human suffering wrought by the colonial state in just these few decades has deep moral significance. Even if Ferguson’s claims about the other positive legacies were true, we could justifiably wonder if they counterbalanced the staggering levels of suffering and death produced by the Victorian famines. But there is no call to concede to Ferguson his other arguments—either that British colonialism fostered economic growth in the colonies or that it encouraged the transfer of democratic institutions.
When it comes to the putative economic benefits of empire, Ferguson is a garden-variety neoliberal. Imperialism was great because it promoted the integration of markets and subordinated indigenous peoples to the stern hand of fiscal and monetary prudence. “[It] seems unequivocal,” he announces, that “Britain’s continued policy of free trade was beneficial to its colonies.” This he contrasts to the maladroit policies pursued by the natives after they acquired independence—which included high tariffs, industrial planning, labor protection, and the like. It is because of these policies that the “experiment with political independence . . . has been a disaster for most poor countries.”
"A venerable literature criticizes the economics of empire—for draining wealth from the colonies, deindustrializing their economies, and discriminating against local industry. But Ferguson will have none of it. To the contrary, he insists, being in the empire brought the benefits that come from joining an exclusive club—colonies had the imprimatur of international, especially British, investors. Financial managers, always nervous about the possibility of default, saw a country’s colonial status as a kind of guarantee against government default on loans, precisely because they trusted the administrative expertise that Britain brought with it. The most notable effect of colonialism, he tells us, was that it provided the colonies access to British financial flows, which entered these regions as vast pools of capital ready to be invested. That, coupled with the sound governance that the masters provided, was the real benefit of the empire, one which would not have otherwise been available.
Once again, Ferguson manages to steer clear of the facts. The most striking fact about British capital flows in the Victorian era is how little of it went to the colonies. Ferguson reports that around 40 percent of British investments went to the colonies in these years. But the vast bulk of the money was flowing to the colonies of recent settlement—the self-governing colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Only a small fraction went to the areas that Ferguson pretends to be talking about, namely, the dependent colonies in Asia and Africa, where the “experiment” of independence has failed. More than 70 percent of all the money that went to “the empire” was flowing to the colonies of recent settlement, leaving slightly more than a quarter—some 10 percent of total foreign investment—to be split between Asia and Africa. By comparison, the free countries of South and Central America—who did not have the good fortune of being subjugated by the British—did better than the colonies, as of course did the dominions. These facts, well known since Paish’s report at the turn of the century, have been confirmed by every major study of the past five decades.Financial investors were, then, far more impressed by independent Latin America as an investment outlet than by the tropical colonies in Asia and Africa. Ferguson may be right in saying that England was not a drain on colonial wealth—though scholarly debate on this issue continues. But it is quite clear that the inverse of this argument—that the colonies were a magnet for British wealth—is not true.
In any case, there is no reason to focus so narrowly on numbers. The more important issue is the wider set of policies that characterized British colonialism and their economic effects. Here, Ferguson simply rehearses the standard neoliberal litany: since property rights were respected, fiscal prudence exercised, and open trade practiced, the imperial order was the best that the dependencies could have had it.
But in the Victorian era, high tariffs were strongly associated with high growth rates. Paul Bairoch made this observation years ago, and Kevin O’Rourke has recently confirmed it. It is consistent with the more general fact, well known to historians for generations, that all developed economies relied on subsidies and tariffs for substantial periods during their initial industrialization. So while Fergsuon assumes, without fact or argument, that the enforcement of a free-trade regime was beneficial to the colonies, we would seem on surer ground assuming the opposite, as did the nationalists whom he so consistently disparages.
In countries that developed in the 19th century, the state took an active and strategic role in the local economy—this was not the neoliberal’s night-watchman state. But, then, colonial states weren’t especially good night watchmen. They actively maintained policies to promote colonial and not local needs. So in the case of India, Ferguson’s exemplar, the main goals were threefold: to use India as the lynchpin of imperial defense policy, to keep the country open for British exports, and to siphon off its export receipts to London so England could balance its external account. Fulfilling these goals meant, as a standard history of the colonial economy explains, that “administrative concerns took precedence over development initiatives.” In fact, the main effect of colonial policy was undoubtedly a deflationary one, as a consequence of low tariffs, high exchange rates (to encourage imports) and a massive military budget, most of which was spent abroad. Indeed, the very book that Ferguson relies on to make his case, by Tirthankar Roy, shows that the development expenditures of the colonial state declined over time. We can do no better than to echo Tomlinson’s conclusion, that “the advances that were made in India . . . were largely achieved in spite of the inertia created by an administration that ruled in economic matters by a mixture of benign and malign neglect.”
"With regard to self-determination, Ferguson maintains that the British bequeathed two critical legacies to their colonies: the idea of liberty, and the parliamentary institutions associated with democracy. Here, Ferguson is on firmer historical ground: democratic norms and institutions did migrate from England to its colonies. But as a defense of colonialism, this fact cannot suffice. For that, it needs to be shown that stable democratic institutions would not have emerged without British colonialism. But while the link to England may have been important for the parliamentary form of democracy, there is no reason to fix on one institutional form of democracy. The relevant issue is whether democracy would have emerged, whatever its form, and Ferguson gives us no reason for doubts on this score. There was no British tutelage of, say, Brazil, or Costa Rica, or Chile, all of which moved toward a more executive-centered democracy rapidly in the early 20th century. Of course, these countries had a colonial history, but hardly one that is congenial to Ferguson’s theory—unless he wants to make a case for Spanish and Portuguese colonialism as being liberal in nature. So even without British colonialism, some kind of movement for popular rights would likely have emerged in the developing world through the course of the past century or so. It could have been derailed, to be sure—but this possibility should be weighed against the horrible devastation wrought by colonial “good governance.” Why, then, insist that the minions should be happy to have suffered under colonial rule?"
Ferguson makes it sound as if colonial authorities stuck around basically because they were readying their wards for self-rule. And it is easy to find lengthy disquisitions from Macaulay, Churchill, Smuts, and the like to this effect. Indeed, whenever he feels compelled to present evidence for his view, Ferguson quotes from them, rather than referring to the historical record. We very quickly encounter Churchill enunciating the general principle behind British colonialism: “to reclaim from barbarism fertile regions and large populations . . . to give peace to warring tribes” and so on. Soon thereafter, Macaulay is drafted to the campaign, declaring, “never will I attempt to avert or to retard” Indian self-rule, which, when it comes, “will be the proudest day in Indian history.”
Once demands for self-rule emerged in Asia and Africa, authorities responded with violence. From the early decades of the 20th century, progress toward self-rule proceeded in lockstep with the strength of the movements demanding it. But Ferguson makes no reference at all to either the massive independence movements that finally rid the world of British colonialism, or to the quality of the British response to them. But even the briefest consideration of these phenomena undermines the notion that the colonizers were educating the “natives” in the ways of self-rule.
In omitting this political dynamic, Ferguson’s obscures perhaps the most important aspect of the story behind institutional transfer. British resistance to independence movements was not exclusively military. When confronted with anti-colonial mobilizations, the British would make political concessions on the one hand, while taking steps to divide the opposition on the other. In India, the divide-and-rule strategy exploited existing religious divisions by communalizing the vote."
"For the British, the central dilemma, as Mahmood Mamdani has reminded us, was to figure out how “a tiny and foreign minority [can] rule over an indigenous majority.” The natural strategy was to rely heavily on local elites—tribal chiefs, landlords, and especially the priestly strata—and thereby reinforce the symbolic, cultural, and legal traditions that sanctioned rule by these elites. In India, it meant using local caste and religious divisions and giving them a salience that they had never enjoyed before. In Africa, this entailed a splintering of civil law and political rights on ethnic and tribal criteria, relying ever more strongly on the despotic rule of chiefs and hardening indigenous linguistic and cultural divisions.Consider the process of hardening in the case of equatorial Africa, Ferguson’s preferred target for re-colonization. Chiefs were certainly in place before the British arrival. But in pre-colonial times, chiefly power was circumscribed and balanced by both lateral checks—consisting of kinsmen, administrative functionaries, and clan bodies—and vertical checks, consisting of village councils and public assemblies. These institutions did not by any means democratize pre-colonial polities; but they did impose real social constraints on chiefly rule and thus imbue it with a degree of legitimacy. The chief was the paramount power, but his power was constantly negotiated with peers and subordinates.
Colonial rule either severely weakened or simply dissolved these social constraints. The colonial authorities needed to have clearly identifiable nodes of power through which they could exercise their rule, and these local functionaries could not be accountable to anyone but the colonizer. So the clan bodies, village councils, and public assemblies were either dissolved or made toothless against the chiefs. What remained was a stern, vertical line of authority from the colonial office, though the district administrator, to the chief—all according to London’s desires. Locally, the indigenous state structure was turned into what Mamdani has appropriately called a decentralized despotism, as chiefs were endowed with unprecedented power. Having stripped away the checks to chiefly power, and thus the main sources of its legitimacy, the British were now confronted with the task of finding new means of making it stable. For this, they turned to customary law—with appropriate changes, decided as ever in London. The effect was that colonial rule preserved and hardened traditional structures of authority and group membership. Tribal membership now determined access to land, tax rates, and the entire gamut of rights enjoyed by African peasants. Tribal membership and identity became the primary sources of welfare—and also, by extension, a principal basis of political mobilization. Group membership of this sort in turn became a significant resource for anti-colonial movements, from the Maji Maji, to the Mau Mau, to the end of South African Apartheid. It also, not unsurprisingly, outlasted the colonial era and was the gift that the British left behind for the new governments to handle.
Ferguson seems clueless about this legacy. Colonial authorities of course did not invent caste divisions, tribalism, or religious fundamentalism. But there is little doubt that, prior to colonial rule, these divisions and religious identities were far more fluid. Left alone, they would have evolved in unpredictable ways through local negotiation and contestation over the course of time and through the formation of a central state. But the British enforced them with a vigor that was altogether new to the colonies. Far from revolutionizing local political traditions, imperial authorities rested on them and used them for their own ends. When we add this imposition to the very conscious strategy of divide and rule, it is impossible to avoid implicating colonialism in the hardening of indigenous divisions.If the British gave the colonies parliamentary institutions, then, they also left behind the racialized, communalized, tribalized states within which the former were embedded, and which have consistently undermined the vitality of self-rule.
This double legacy suggests two alternative, though not incompatible, conclusions. The first is that the colonial legacy was a poisoned pill, bequeathing limited organs for self rule and also a host of institutions that subverted self-government. The second—stronger and more disturbing—conclusion is that if, as I have suggested, democracy was on the historical agenda anyway, then the legacy most specifically associated with colonial rule is a tribalized and communalized state, consciously created by colonial rule, and designed for precisely the divisive effects it has generated. In either case, we have compelling reason to reject Ferguson’s claim that the success of democratic institutions in the ex-colonies owes to the colonial legacy. It is far more accurate to say that what success we have seen of democratic self-rule in the ex-colonies has come about, not because of colonialism, but in spite of it."
"The calamitous results of British rule should not surprise us. Colonialism was rule by an alien, despotic power, lacking local legitimacy, and utterly unaccountable to the local population. In such a situation, it was predictable that the rulers would use administrative instruments to weaken potential resistance, rather than to tutor in civic norms, and mask their assertions of power in the guise of “good governance.” Postcolonial pathologies were a natural consequence of normal colonial rule.
Ferguson’s inability to understand this is striking. And it is what lurks behind the remarkable sleight of hand that he performs in his political analysis: colonial rule gets all the credit for the things that went right but none of the blame for the disasters it left behind. Having elevated imperial history to the mythical realm of good governance, Ferguson eliminates the predictable violence of colonialism as well as any structural relation between British rule and the postcolonial order. If there was violence, repression, underdevelopment, tribal and communal statecraft, it was a product of “sins of omission”—as he pleasingly puts it—a result of the British falling short of their own noble ideals."
This blindness to the causal link between colonialism and its pathologies drives Ferguson’s equally facile conclusions about America’s own 200-year imperial history. Ferguson knows that history, and what troubles him most about it is that American imperialists, unlike their British cousins, have never stuck around in the countries they have invaded—at least not long enough to pursue the same noble ideals that drove the British. Indeed, for Ferguson, the largest failing of American empire is a kind of attention-deficit disorder. "
"As his narrative unfolds, it becomes pretty clear that the “older impulses” were not just working alongside the high-minded internationalism but were undermining it at every turn. We are shown that economic and strategic considerations, not high-minded internationalism, dictated imperial policy toward Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Honduras—where by the 1920s, “any pretense of interest in democratic government was abandoned” by the United States, which was more concerned with the well-being of United Fruit. Indeed, we are told that the United States not only intervened to overthrow democratically elected governments when they interfered with imperial interests, but that when “left-wing governments were overthrown with American assistance or approval, they were generally replaced by military dictatorships whose murderous conduct did nothing to endear the United States to Hispanic-Americans.”
These observations completely undercut Ferguson’s central argument: what difference would it have made if the Americans had stayed on as colonizers if their motives were to set up “a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in”? How would “staying the course” have helped to promote democracy or the rule of law?
Let us consider the two countries that the United States did occupy as colonies in the 20th century, Haiti and the Philippines. How do these cases figure in Ferguson’s argument? Hardly at all. From reading Colossus, one would not know that the United States occupied Haiti for almost 20 years and the Philippines for close to a half-century. This neglect is unfortunate, because the benefits of good governance and institutional transfer would surely be most evident here, where Americans had the power—and the long-term engagement—they lacked elsewhere. It might have been illuminating to examine how, as a colonial power, the United States was able to achieve substantially better results than it managed with the less committed invasions of Central and South America. Unfortunately, however, Ferguson does not explore the differences between Nicaragua’s Somoza, the misbegotten spawn of a half-hearted imperial effort, and Haiti’s “Papa Doc” Francois Duvalier, the legitimate progeny of a fully committed colonial occupation.Of course, the fact of colonization made no difference to the results, at least not of a kind that would be congenial to Ferguson’s argument. "
"The British empire came to an end because independence movements made its continuation impossible. These movements make no real appearance in Ferguson’s account, and he seems genuinely not to understand their significance.
This is why he so coolly enjoins American elites to embrace the venture, wondering all the while why they don’t. What he fails to confront is that the independence movements are not just of historical significance, but are symptomatic of a deeper phenomenon, which makes any future colonial projects impossible.
This phenomenon, of course, is the emergence of national identities and a deep sense of national rights. Colonial empires might have been possible in the 18th and 19th centuries, prior to the emergence of strong national identities; but they became increasingly untenable as such identities came into being and basic notions of self-determination took root. For countries that had annexed territory in the preceding two centuries, the only real option was to fight for as long as seemed possible and then arrange an orderly retreat. But it made no sense for a country, operating in a world of nationalist movements and convictions, to assume the costs of colonial occupation. Britain operated differently from the United States as a global power not because of a remarkable national capacity for sustained attention but because of the pre-nationalist world in which British colonialism operated. Given the changes in the world, the United States adopted a prudent and effective strategy of ruling through intermediaries, quislings, or friendly autocrats.The proposition that the United States could embark on a colonial enterprise today, with national identities arguably more powerful than ever, is mind-boggling. "
"If arguments like Ferguson’s are now enjoying wide currency today, it is an understandable reflex of a culture and an elite drunk with power: proof of Acton’s dictum about the corruptions produced by absolute power. Visions of Rome, British Viceroys and grand processions, the benevolent babus tutoring their hapless and childlike wards—these are the fantasies of an imperial elite suddenly finding itself without peer. And this explains the popularity of Ferguson’s history. For what he offers is not an analysis of empires past and present, but empire’s self-image—buffed and manicured. Until recently, such fantasies were expressed mainly by the far right, or in the laments of despondent Oxbridge dons. But with the new cabal of neocons in power, and a new imperial project seemingly underway, such fantasies resonate powerfully with elite moods."
The arguments opposing the British Empire do outweigh the justifications.
Your argument, impressive as though it may seem, overlooks the fundemental point i made in my comment. Whilst the colonies obviously didn't benefit from the Empire as much as the British themselves (Using 'Empire' as a term covering all of Britain's colonial achievements), but it is impossible to state as fact that the negatives of that great period of development outweigh the good. I am not privelidged to have as much time on my hands as you, so I shall be quick.
The first and most important example of development made by the British where it never would have been made without them. The most important legacy left behind by the colonisers was the government and legal system, whose benefits can be seen clearly today as India battles China in the economic race of the east - as a democratic country, India will win because it will have the luxury of having it's own people behind every decision taken. China will suffer greatly under the advances in media take place, as the population begins to realise that it's communist system cannot satisfy them. The system left by the British is a tried and tested formula, and although it may seem weak in comparison to the might of China or the crushing power of Nazi Germany, it is stable and very difficult to break. Democracy brought together the warring princely states of India, and created from the dust a nation powerful enough to supercede even its creator.
The second example of good done by the British was the huge technological advances in transport and communication. Clearly India would never have achieved these levels of advancement alone, but with the help of the British, they are now beating the British in every manufacturing market imaginable.
Whilst you may be correct to suggest that the ingenuity of the Indians made improved the nation, you are at fault when you state that it is down to this that they now have a great amount of power in the world. India as it was before the EIC was comparable to Sudan now. There was no centralised government with any control, the population did not have the technology even to work the land to support its own people and wars between factions was common. The only solution to the problem - and the same applies to the crisis in Sudan - is permenant occupation and civilisation. This can only be carried out by a power which has experienced civilisation itself, and the benefits will be there for all to reap, not just rich faction leaders.
Your criticism of the Indian education system is absolutely unfounded - it obviously inproved the subcontinent, because before the Raj there was no education system - there wasn't even a central government to consider such a system. Your example of improving literacy rates is true of everywhere in the world and proves my point exactly - the British occupation of India set it up for the future.
The same can also be said of many African countries, namely South Africa. The work done by British missionaries and the government there achieved much, and helped the continent greatly. (I acknowledge also that the work done by other religions was not beneficial to Africa, the most notable instance being Catholocism and the damage caused through AIDS) The abolition of the slave trade in Africa and America was one of Britain's greatest achievements, and puts to shame your ridiculous comment, 'There generally is stability when a hegemon rules over a significant amount of territory...but that in itself is no excuse for enslaving entire nations'. I challenge you to give a valid example in which the British enslaved a nation.
The achievements in India were only a part of all that was done accross the world, but they act as a superb model of work done on a greater scale.
In reference to the war in the Middle East between Hezbollah and Israel, I do not see any way by which blame can be laid upon the British. Hugh's comments (obviously written in a rage of misinformation) are downright outrageous. The Mandate of Palestine was dealt with in the best way possible by the British, given the difficult circumstances. If any debt is incurred, then it is to the Arabs, for the betrayel of their support in the Great War by the unauthorised use of and permenant resettlement of their land.
Inreference to Kafir Citizen's post, 'Good done by the British Empire? May be you are refering to the millions dead during artificial famines of the 19th century, and one as recent as 1943, or the deadly taxes on the peasantry, or mercantalism, and the systematic de-industrialization of India, or destroying traditional educational system, and imposing a Macaulite education system resulting in widespread illiteracy, or the building of a few railroads, telegraph lines, roads and bridges to facilitate the stranglehold over the country, or maybe for all those places where "Dogs and Indians" weren't allowed.'
There were no 'artificial famines' - all famines in British India were due to Indian farmers' incompetency in farming. The British never destroyed crops or prevented agricultural development and I do not recall any example of Mercantalism either.
There was no 'systematic de-industrialization of India' and there was no educational system in India to destroy in the first place. The 'building of a few railways, telegraph lines, roads and bridges' was primarily for the people and the advancement of India's economy, but it also served as an excellent means to aid the British in Governing the more lawless parts of India. It was things like this which allowed the British to govern India so cheaply and effectivly, meaning that it used a minimal amount of revenue generated by India's economy to keep making improvements to it, making India the economic powerhouse it is today.
The work done by Britain throughout the C19th up until the present is undoubtedly beneficial to the world, and the proof of this lies in the stability accross the majority of regions of the globe today.
"I am not privelidged to have as much time on my hands as you, so I shall be quick."
Are we getting down to personal attacks now?
All your assertions have no basis in fact. I have given factual information with references in my previous posts about how the British misrule resulted in the deaths of millions, and all the other crimes of the empire.
India would have developed just fine without any interference, and at any rate millions of dead and impoverished people is too high a price. Read my posts carefully before assuming that the British were some kind of angels sent for the upliftment of the other races. Whatever image builiding exercise you or Ferguson engage in, it is not going to change our assessment of the British Empire.
My statement noting that I had little time was used not as an insult but to inform you that I would not be backing up my argument with facts and figures due to a lack of time in which to find appropriate ones. Although I have not given solid evidence, my assertions have an absolute basis in fact and I dispute wholeheartedly your proposterous claims that millions died at the ands of the British. Perhaps your claims would have a little more punch behind them if you could unearth some examples of the crimes and slaughters comitted by the empire, but I guarantee you that these instances are few and far between.
On top of this is the fact that the people dead and impoverished (who number by no means more than two million, as you suggest) are balanced with huge excess by those who benefitted from the empire.
The judgements I have made are not built upon assumption, but upon the rock solid evidence given not just by Ferguson but by a great many historians, and the evidence shows that whilst the British were not 'some kind of angels sent for the upliftment (sic) of other races', the uplifting others is exactly what they have done. I hope you are able to see this through the fog of post-colonial bitterness which clearly clouds your judgement.
The British misrule resulted in millions of deaths during famines from 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (more than 3 million victims).
I quote Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at New York University,
"According to the most reliable estimates, the deaths from the 1876–1878 famine were in the range of six to eight million, and in the double-barreled famine of 1896–1897 and 1899–1900, they probably totaled somewhere in the range of 17 to 20 million. So in the quarter century that marks the pinnacle of colonial good governance, famine deaths average at least a million per year."
"Curzon, who oversaw the decimation wrought by the 1899 famine, warned that “any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.”
To help Indians internalize this Spartan ethic, Lytton, Elgin and Curzon shut down all but the most anemic relief efforts across the country. Grain surpluses in states where rainfall was adequate were not used for famine relief but were shipped instead to England, which apparently could relinquish its own self-reliance in agriculture without descending into moral turpitude. To further help the Indian peasant pursue his virtuous path, all pleas for tax relief were rebuffed, and collection efforts were redoubled: not a rupee of revenue was to be left on the parched plains. And in case peasants didn’t get the point that they were supposed to pay the government and not the other way around, relief camps were closed down in areas where tax collection threatened to fall short of normal receipts.
These taxes, it should be noted, were not covering the administrative costs of good governance, but were paying for British colonial wars—the Afghan wars in Lytton’s time, and the Boer War in Curzon’s reign. So as the British extended their empire across new frontiers, the bodies of the Indian peasants funding the effort were piling up outside the Viceregal verandas. The colonial state consciously forswore any attempt at intervening and averting these catastrophes. In so doing, it reversed centuries long traditions of famine relief, set aside known techniques of reducing mortality, telling the “natives” all the while that it was being done for their own good.
This last point bears emphasis. It isn’t that the British responded to the crisis with insufficient alacrity, or that they showed a want of resolve. The point instead is that they resolutely—indeed, with homicidal intensity—pursued policies that predictably escalated the human disasters."
While famines had occurred in the Indian sub-continent before British occupation, in many instances the consequences of monsoonal failure and resultant drought were addressed urgently by the indigenous rulers. Thus irrigation works, public works employment and food purchase and distribution were useful responses to such impending disasters.
The British brought an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda to India. Economic exploitation damaged the indigenous Indian economy and resulted in a decline in the standard of living. The British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigour to food deficits resulted in a succession of about 2 dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. In severe Indian famines in the mid-19th century export of grain was permitted on the grounds of non-intervention in trade.
The parting shot of the British Empire was the 1943 Bengal Famine, where the British administration bought up all the rise from the countryside, and Churchill pursued his policies to starve the Indians.
The British became colonialists to serve their own interests. You need to get over the fantasy of British Empire as some benevolent enterprise.