Though empires are out of fashion , British colonies universally benefited from the British empire. The ones who are thriving today owe a huge debt of gratitude, and the languishing ones are that way because they decided not to continue the British tradition.
The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.
I remember asking this question to a work colleague from India almost 30 years ago. I asked something like if he hated the Brits for invading his land. He said on the contrary. They advanced their people so rapidly and efficiently through education and technical advances that would have taken hundreds of years by themselves. He said this allowed them to kick the British out once they had outlived their usefulness. Or something like that. It's been along time since I thought about it.
Like anything, it depends on your point of view and time.
My grandparents and their generation were all born in Ireland, and had a very different outlook than the people who remained and folks you talk to today there. People just want to live their lives.
It depends on which Indian state you were from. South Indian states like Travancore were allied with the British Empire and signed a treaty that brought it under British influence. Travancore was facing extinction from Islamic conquerors - Tippu Sultan.
Travancore and British forces defeated Tippu Sultan which resulted in the Treaty of Seringapatam (1792).
Travancore was extremely prosperous under the Britsh Empire and was given special status. The same could not be said of the Northern Indian states which faced heavy subjugation and exploitation by the East India Company.
Th vast majority suffered under various Indian empires too. The lower castes suffered millennia of oppression (and still do) - imagine millennia of Jim Crow or apartheid. Some of them benefited hugely from British rule as a result, probably including my mother's ancestors.
The caste system itself is wildly considered to be exacerbated and promoted by British colonial rule in post colonial studies, not unlike the US empire promoting sectarianism in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
The caste divisions did exist before British rule but it wasn't as systematic and unified across India as after.
Boy how do we even talk about neocolonialism today if there are still people with full on colonialist sympathies holy shit
> People having different opinions isn’t a bad thing.
No I think that is a bad thing and a failure of our society if there are still people around repeating talking points from 1850s British colonial rule for christ sake!
Its like saying the Roman empire was great because it brought Aqueducts to the savages or something, like that is just education/knowledge of history + basic moral principles. The genocidal barbarism of colonialism should be something we left behind collectively. Or do you think whether or not the holocaust was good or bad is a matter of opinion too?
Wasn't the Roman empire better than most contemporary polities? Like it created a long era of peace in a significant area and successfully integrated various population, culminating in the 3rd century where all free men were made roman citizens. If you'd ask under which ancient polity I would prefer to live, chance are I'll choose the Roman empire.
If aliens invaded earth and after decades of subjugation they successfully "integrated" us savages, they would view it the same way. The forceful destruction of all our culture, languages, religions, history, sovereignty, it would all be justified in the end because their alien technology and culture is "superior". I don't believe it's justified no matter how relatively primitive we are, and if aliens did it that alone would demonstrate their own primitive culture quite clearly no matter how much they whitewash themselves in the intergalactic history books.
I didn't said empires were good, just that in the rhetoric 'empires are bad', the Roman empire isn't the best example, especially since the roman usually didn't engage in forceful cultural destruction.
They were highly systematic and oppressive. Castes have been separated for long enough and strongly enough for there to be detectable genetic differences.
Caste is far older than western colonialism. The genetic evidence shows that castes oppression has been enough to suppress intermarriage for millennia:
But then again, without the British, there wouldn't have been a unified India but a multitude of states, sort of resembling the EU (in the best case). Worst case scenario, mini Africa.
Having a common hated enemy did have its benefits.
The brits took India from a variety of different rulers, but principally the Mughals. The Mughals werent any one thing, but they were despised in a lot of places.
The brits also largely permitted the caste system to proceed. my experience is that upper caste indians preferred the brits, where the lower caste ones dont really discern the difference.
> British colonies universally benefited from the British empire
I can’t tell whether this is a joke or a sincere opinion, but HN readers might be misled if it’s allowed to stand. Briefly, this is an absurd claim.
I can speak confidently about India, and I am pretty sure the story is similar for other unfortunate colonies. Instead of arguing here, let me provide an accessible starting point to learning about it:
The podcast “Empire,” by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. The first series looks at the British in India, covering The East India Company, the Raj, Gandhi, Independence and Partition.
if you're reading a story and there's a harmless & innocent victim and an evil , brutal and insensitive oppressor then your script was written by communists.
I remember the protagonists were multicultural utopian communists whose every venture and campaign was perfectly noble. And the antagonists were evil power hungry or corrupt races.
So of course I'm inferring the writers values here.
I was listening to Dominic Sandbrook the other day (from "The Rest is History" podcast). His point was that if you had to pick any empire through history to live in (without knowing your place in it - a sort of Rawlsian Veil), you would probably pick the British Empire. It wasn't perfect, but more benevolent than a lot of other empires.
I like to read HN because the conversation here is higher quality than elsewhere, when the subject is tech. But when the conversation deviate to politic, I'm reminded that outside their limited expertise, people here are no better than elsewhere as I read the same ignorant drivel I can find everywhere.
> Though empires are out of fashion , British colonies universally benefited from the British empire.
That's not at all true. There are many examples, but no need to look farther afield than Ireland, which has not yet recovered from the deliberate genocide of the Irish famine.
The island of Ireland had not yet reached the population it held pre-famine, and if Ireland had grown at the rate of its neighbours, it would now being closing in on 25 million+ instead of the ~7 million across the island.
> The ones who are thriving today owe a huge debt of gratitude, and the languishing ones are that way because they decided not to continue the British tradition.
Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.
> The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.
In a comment brimming with ignorance, this becomes absurd. The dissolution of the British empire is the great victory of the 20th century. A victory of human rights, decency, and even off the British population, who are disposable to the empire as foreign "subjects" were.
Rather surprising then that we have the Commonwealth of 56 member states, most of which were former territories of the British Empire from which the Commonwealth developed. They are connected through their use of the English language and cultural and historical ties. Doubtless these countries have appalling memories of the evils perpetrated by the Brits. And yet they even accept Charles III as the head of the Commonwealth. Also amazing that in most colonies independence was achieved without a shot being fired.
Unbelievable eh? Maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome.
On the other hand it could have been worse. We should remember that for almost every colonized people, the alternative to British Jurisdiction was not unmolested progress towards modernity but conquest by someone else, the French, the Germans,the Turks, the Russians,the Japanese and worst of all, the Belgians.
> Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.
There's pretty clearly a distinction between different individual colonies on this one. Something like the Falkland Islands which had no indigenous population is very very different from Jamaica which was a plantation colony full of slaves, which is yet again very different something like Aden (now part of Yemen) which had about 600 people living there at the time it was annexed and which has had a very very difficult post-independence story.
> The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand did alright, though.
United States too in a way (i.e. I doubt it would be what it is now if the same territory was colonized by the Spanish or even the French. Of course unless you were Native American…).
> British colonies universally benefited from the British empire
Yeah, the 100-200 million Indians who were killed by the East India Company through famines after being forced to raise opium instead of grain to help EIC to sell opium to kill 10-20 million Chinese every year would definitely agree...
common law, sanitation, industrialization, administration, diplomacy, record keeping, archeology , business culture, tea culture, etiquette, economics, trade & maritime science -- I could name 50 more.
Yeah. I'm from Malaysia, and while we definitely benefited in many ways, to state that we do not still have massive and pervasive social issues as a result of colonization is insane. I'm glad you posted the link above and spoke up. I didn't even know where to start, but was worried someone might take the original comment seriously.
This viewpoint is still way too popular and was also used to genocide millions of indigenous people, we definitely need to keep speaking up against that.
it's a fair argument, and tips the scales a bit, but the balance is still overwhelmingly in favor
It's not like Ireland and Wales are doing much to preserve their legacies regardless. So it's hard, as an outsider, to intuit how much they actually care.
The correct labels werent yet applied it doesnt count!
Bear in mind that a lot of the bad policies only started to be repealed in like the 60s. And that among other things, both suffered through a lot of the forced cultural assimilation the british empire was peddling.
Well yes, because medieval England or England in the 1500s was in many ways a fundamentally different state than the United Kingdom was in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.