h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

But to give a slighltly longer answer, yes, the semantic stuff does matter. When you're looking at a question about something as big as how the British Empire changed/went into decline/doesn't look like it used to, it's handy if you know what the terms people are using actually mean.

Internet fora are not the best place for this kind of discussion, for the same reason that peer review of academic journals is not usually conducted via Twitter: Nobody holds the floor long enough to put forward a coherent narrative and cite their evidence without interruption. And since you're dealing with such a wide range of viewpoints who can chirp in whenever they like, it *is* actually useful to use shorthand. We just need to know what the shorthand means.

Hmm. Dunno. A lot of me thinks that the terms don't much matter because no matter how well and how often they're defined, people change the way they use them. It's just how language works.

But the narrative point is good. It's no use picking on isolated words: you have to look at what someone is saying overall. And in *dialogue*...you have to accept imprecision and ambiguity and be willing to participate in clarification. 'When you say colony, do you mean...'

It's late now. I'll have to poke at the notion of whether colonisation improves the lives of the colonised some other time. You see if I don't.

"I disagree. We wouldn't be in the economic position we are in today if it hadn't been for Empire, just as surely as you (and we) wouldn't be where we are if it hadn't been for slavery. They provided the capital necessary for industrialisation." [Edward the Bonobo]

I can only speak to the relative benefits of slavery in the American experience. The states that relied most heavily on slave labor were the southern states. Economically they fared worse than the northern states. Slavery was a lousy idea, as far as I can see -- lousy for slave and master alike. The big plantation owners always seemed on the brink of going broke. The tradesmen who supplied goods to them suffered when the plantation owners couldn't pay their bills.

As for the idea that we wouldn't be in our current economic position, there is no hope of proving the case one way or the other. There's probably a fancy term for this, but I don't know it. Once you choose one path, you lose the ability to know the ocnsequences of choosing the other available paths.

English has become the closest thing to a global language. Had England not become involved with so many lands across the globe, English would not be spoken in so many places now.

I am really enjoying reading this thread, great intellectual discussion on something really challenging. So I'm lurking but not knowing enough to say much.

<<<I'll have to poke at the notion of whether colonisation improves the lives of the colonised some other time.

Do you mean What did the Romans do for us?


There are a few answers to your original question:

a) It could have been possible an improvement:

Napoleón wanted that his brother José ruled Spain, there were even lots of Spaniards, the Afrancesados, who wanted that ruling, which meant the posibility of seeing the Enlightment ideas take roots finally in Spain.

But it couldn´t be. We had instead an Absolutist king who ignored the Constitution ( one of the most liberal of the epoch in Europe) and brought back a period of darkeness to this country.

b) There was clearly an improvement:

7th century, Arabs entered the Iberian Península. They had not problems, only one battle, and advanced easily until Poitiers, France. The reason: Roman-Hispanians were fed up of the Visigoths rulers, who brouht nothing good.

The presence of those Arabs ruling in Spain lasted eight centuries, and the benefits were also for the rest of Europe:

“(…)the translating activity of the School of Translators of Toledo gave the European centres of knowledge the chance to discover the scientific and literary knowledge that had been compiled and developed by the Hebrews and Arabs in their contact with the East and the West.”
http://www.uclm.es/escueladetraductores/english/history/


c) "Lovely aqueduct for coming generations... but my family and my possesions have been wiped out..."

paulh:

>>I can only speak to the relative benefits of slavery in the American experience. The states that relied most heavily on slave labor were the southern states. Economically they fared worse than the northern states.

*However* southern slavery provided the capital for northern industrialisation. Without the money in the bank, Britain and the US would not have been able to undergo their industrial revolutions.



Marx and Lincoln corresponded.

http://www.amazon.com/An-Unfinished-Revolution-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/1844677222

>One party in the transaction got a better deal than the other.<

That is very simplistic

The British surplanted the Mouguls (an equally ruthless foriegn invader) and in more than half of India ruled through local monarchs. In reality life would have changed little for most Indians, in spite of the abolition of slavery most Indians were suppressed by the caste system a wholly Indian institution, while most Brits were crushed by the class system. If anything the lives of most Britons would have got worse as global trade fuelled the Industrial Revolution and cheap imports colapsed the rural economy.

The truth is that in both countries the rich benefitted and the poor suffered.

>We wouldn't be in the economic position we are in today if it hadn't been for Empire, just as surely as you (and we) wouldn't be where we are if it hadn't been for slavery<

Again very simplistic and rather ironic given that all the peoples the British subjegated practiced slavery - how do you think the Taj Mahal was built? - and it was Britain that abolished slavery. It is true that the the rich got richer by exploiting workers but that applies just as much to Welsh miners and Sheffield file-grinders.

I think the legacy of conquest (exploiting pre-existing cultures) as happened in Asia and much of Africa) is very mixed, the worse crimes of Empire were where colonisation took place (annialating pre-existing cultures and replacing them with colonists) as happened throughout the Americas, and in Australia and Southern Africa.

@Maria (and SoRB):

I'm not saying that there wasn't a degree of improvement under colonial rule. *However*:

1) Counterfactual history is a bit of a silly game - but can we say for certain that the colonised countries, given a fair crack of the whip, could not have improved themselves? In the case of already advanced civilisations such as India and China, why would we suppose not?

2)Might some colonies have fared better under more equitable arrangements?

3)Is our view of colonies distorted by the destabilising effect of the British Empire? What would India look like if the East India Company had lost at Plassey? Or China if it hadn't been for British Indian Opium?

I stress that *I really don't know*. Obviously. The world turned out as it did and we have no other world to compare it against. But we should be cautious about saying that colonisation did good. Post hoc non est propter hoc.

Certainly we didn't do good on purpose. We had our own motives and always got the best side of the deal. Arguably there's noting wrong with that as long as, as in the SoRB argument, there's *some* improvement. Except...when those improvements are made with a particular economic purpose in mind (running the Empire) their benefits may well be differential. We can still see legacy of British economic and administrative structures which were not fit for purpose post-colonialism.

However...*I'm really, really not making out that British were unmitigated brutes* nor that they delivered nothing of value. You can't run an Empire on brutality alone. We weren't Japan or Belgium - even if we came close in the last few years in Kenya. (Anal rape? Stuffing the mouths and anuses of prisoners with sand? Crushing women's breasts with pliers? Crushing and removing testicles? What *were* we thinking of?)

What inspired this thread was this conversation in The Grauniad which mentions the Richard Gott and Niall Ferguson views of empire. (Historian Richard Gott discussing with Kwasi Kwateng MP)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/20/rise-failure-british-empire-imperialism

My own opinion is that the popular imagination overplays the benefits and don't even acknowledge let alone underplay the darker side. But I fully acknowledge the complexities.

We observe that the colonised were rather keen to see the back of the British. Were they just stupid? Could they just not recognise a good thing when they saw one?

@tuc:

I don't disagree with you at all. The Richard Gott argument (mentioned in that link - but I'd seen it elsewhere) is that it's always about Class. The British aligned themselves with power.

Meh. I thought people would be bored with the same old Marxist pish.

See also the Marx/Lincoln link.

One thing to maybe consider is the 17th to 20th centuries were the Age Of Western Empires. The socio-economic pressures of the time made expansion both necessary and inevitable. It wasn't entirely about greed so much as a release valve to the pressure building up due to unprecedented population growth.

The early empires - ie the Spanish, were Renaissance empires and it's maybe unsurprising to see the echoes of the classical period in the brutality of the invaders and widespread enslavement of the natives. The early British attempts were primarily about money - tobacco colonies in America, tea in China and the Empire came about almost by accident. I don't think there was really much evidence of Britain sending out conquering armies to invade and colonise. Instead the military developed to protect the civilians and commerce. The latter age of Empires does seem to be rooted more in the Enlightenment and we see more evidence of trying to create a "global society", with schools and improvement programmes for natives. Granted it was a "global society" with white Brits at the top, but the British Empire did at least take a moral stance and try to recognise natives as people with rights - hence actively ending the slave trade and spending a great deal of time and money enforcing it.

It seems to me that, despite the haste of dismantling the British Empire, it wasn't beset with the violence and ongoing hatred we see with the French in Indochina or the Belgians in the Congo for example. Maybe the epitaph of the British Empire is it died the way it wanted to be perceived - in a very civilised manner

Surely the Foreign Office papers released last week give the lie to the civilised end of empire, if we didn't know it already? I don't think we've been quite honest about our history.

Also...If Empire was regarded as a programme of improvement then this as a rationalisation. The improvements that were made were those necessary to hold the place together.

I'm not saying that there was anything *wrong* with that. Shit happens. I guess I'm just being a Historical Materialist as ever. People don't go empire building because of an empire building, morally improving spirit. It's an economic matter and this determines culture and attitudes. Horse. Cart.

But I would say that, wouldn't I.

Also...didn't we lay the groundwork for ongoing interfactional messes in Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India/Pakistan (a big one that!)...to name a few?

I'm not saying everything since then has been all our fault. But surely we were at least as negligent as France or Belgium?

I don't want to start a fight, but I need to point out that Britain started the slave trade in the first place, and then abolished slavery only when they no longer had a use for it.

As a colonial, a Canuck, I live here amidst what is quintessentially
a New Whirled Scottish Mafia Type State. And I've been waiting to see
what this thread might say about North America in general and the
Loyalty of Canadians in particular.

Apparently you Brits are following the legendary example of Lord
Nelson and holding your scope to your blind eye.

>> I don't think there was really much evidence of Britain sending
out conquering armies to invade and colonise. <<

Evidence...hmmm.
Nelson's buddy Hardy was married here in Halifax.
About the same era (late 18th century) that Edward Duke of Kent
spent 25 years here building fortifications. Round forts, round churches,
round bandstands and gazebos. He freed the Maroons.
Then there was Prince Arthur who came and did upgrades and renos
a few decades later.
Yes, even the current Crown Prince came here last year to learn
how to land a Sea King on a backwater pond.
Yes, you people did get a round.


As a descendant of early Canadians from both the refugee and
military hero categories I must now learn to cope with our
newfound invisibility.

~jwf~

Not to burst Mr X's bubble (he hates that) but a little
research will show that slavery has been an economic staple
for centuries if not thousands of years before the British
were caught in their own legal trap.

The at the centre of the Empire's web had passed a
law that required any goods or commodities from any colonial
country going to another colonial country to be 'conveyed' via
the Mother Country, if not always physically by profiteering
middle-men with shipping magnets, the at least through a broker
who would collect all the fees and taxes that would have been
otherwise owing. "No taxation without representation!"

Once America was no longer a colonial country there was no longer
any tax or tarrif profit to be made from shipping human beings to
be sold into the US and every reason to sabotage the basis of
American agriculture's success, its cheap labour. Where-as there
were free enterprise opportunities for both Britain and Germany
to do business with the growing industrial sectors.

Reality bites,

~jwf~

Swl, your post 91 is sooo tender, so naïve…

but I , descendant of those wild Spaniards*, am evil, and feel like pricking your sweet bubble:
“The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities


* Actually, I don´t identify with them, I leave that for my nationalist conservative country fellows, inmune to a healthy criticism and always eager to falsify history.

"I need to point out that Britain started the slave trade in the first place"

Hmm.

I need to point out that Britain also invented the wheel, built the pyramids, the Parthenon and the Colosseum.

Or, just possibly, trading in slaves is something that happened long before Britain even existed as a single governed territory and continues to this day, and suggestions otherwise are the usual self-loathing apologetic bullst that pretends everything bad that's ever happened in the world is the fault of white people who speak English.

~*~Not to burst Mr X's bubble (he hates that) but a little
research will show that slavery has been an economic staple
for centuries if not thousands of years before the British
were caught in their own legal trap.~*~



I know that. But after the Roman Empire collapsed it was largely superseded in Europe by the feudal system. The first colonizers to America got their cheap labor from indentured servants who, often, died before the contract holder had to pay their side. When medical technology and living conditions improved more of the indentured servants lived until the end of their contracts and the system became unprofitable. At which point Britain revived the slave trade after centuries of disuse. (In Europe.) THAT'S what I was referring to.

Incidentally, that revival was, to my knowledge, the first time that racist overtones were ever applied to slavery. Before then it was an equal opportunity business.


To paraphrase Hook: "Don't mess with me man! I'm a Historian!"

Aside//
There are still slaves nowadays. Those people who work for foreign companies that have "delocalized" their business and moved to where workers can be exploited.