EMPIRE- did you know this history?

[Needacupofteaandcrackers]

Just watched Empire on BBC….. I didn’t realise the timelines of how long it was tolerated. I’ve been to a few trust sites and only now I’m made to connections on wealth. 🥹

I learnt nothing. We did Industrial Revolution, origins of ww1 and Spanish peninsula war.

Some reading needed.

A lot of reading needed.

I have studied the empire extensively, I probably know far more than the average person.

As I have said - many reprehensible things happened during the period of Empire. Thousands of things. But it wasn’t necessarily all bad, and was over a course of centuries - and yes, some countries value their relationship with the UK as a result of empire and felt it brought some positives to their countries.

Your analysis is based on one issue - mine is on the broader history of the empire. There was more to the empire than plantations.

Analysis of history isn’t binary ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Its usually more complex than that.

Respectfully, your take on Ireland seems spectacularly under-informed.

We were discussing Northern Ireland not Ireland, but ok.

Thats the thing about analysing history - it’s subjective, people will have different views.

But what do the others say? The Trust and others barely touch on the horror of working class life and yet fall over themselves to issue trite apologies and trigger warnings about slavery and empire. Why are they apologising? Their job is to educate. There is some really great research about empire and slavery and some sites and exhibitions do it really well, and its important. But its not the only exploitation story in history. Do the other sites apologise about exploitation in mining and industry?

One of the things that is fascinating - possible unique - about the British empire is that for the entirety of its existence British people were actively debating whether it should exist, what purpose it could morally exist for, how to disband it and hand it over to the peoples of each colony etc. Gladstone was very anti-Empire, yet it continued to expand u see his premiership. It had a momentum of its own. Almost like the laws of physics, it had to run its course before it could be disbanded.

Will other empires be covered in this series? Or is it a BBC series?
Of course not!
I'm amazed that adults, with their school years well behind them, blame those schools for their lack of knowledge.
Life is about learning stuff, grow up and accept responsibility for your ignorance.

At every school I've taught in for the last thirty years it's covered in Y9 before options. As for Austen, I don't think we should be judging what were perfectly normal attitudes at the time of writing through a modern lens.

It's funny how many people feel it is just something bad in past, but don't understand the consequences for today.

It made the UK significantly wealthy, and significantly wealthier than other countries (especially those colonised and those not colonising). It is the lead cause of the fact that if you get a minimal wage pay for 1 hour work in the UK and minimal wage pay for 1 hour of work in other countries to the theorerical world market, you will buy there much more there for the british wage.

As the world is slowly evening out (without the forced wealth transfer of The Empire) the UK is losing this advantage, the gap is slowly closing. And it means that the UK's life style inevitably suffers. In the end there is no real reason why a cleaner in UK should be able to buy more (on that virtual world market) than a cleaner in Poland or cleaner in Morocco.

My ancestors were part of the VOC. I studied colonial history for my degree. When the British gave them compensation for their lost ‘chattels’, they endowed x 2 schools and a university as the ones who were left were mega evangelical Christians. No money has made it into the twenty first century thank God. The educational institutions are still going though!
The Dutch behaved appallingly and still do in lots of places, it is wrong to think it was just the British doing the exploiting. If anyone thinks that global trade and slavery are over, they’re wrong. It’s happening right now. Let’s concentrate on that.

I'm not British but from a former colony which sees the British rule as a dark and brutal thing. I don't think anyone from any former empire should be made apologise or feel guilty for the sins of their fathers. I do however feel education is really lacking among British people. Not just history which to be fair is vast, but contemporary knowledge, as in what is or is not part of the commonwealth. What I think people don't get is if you know the horrors your people went through gaining independence and then meet someone who assumes you are still part of Britain it is extremely hurtful and disrespectful. That other person may simply be uneducated but it comes across as they are racist or bigoted and is really damaging to international relationships.

No I didn't. I didn't want to get into a political discussion/argument. I think I know what he meant, as you probably do.

I don't feel angry at current Britons. I am aware other Europeans were colonialists too. And also I know history is very complex. Irish people participated in Empire and have things to be ashamed of there themselves. Also, criticising colonialism doesn't mean ignoring all the other forms of exploitation, many continuing to this day. But if we try to understand colonialism properly, it helps us understand the present. If we don't know why things are the way they are, we can't really fix them. History is the present as well as the past, and that's why it matters that we are honest and objective about it, as best we can be.

I think everyone realises that empire made the UK wealthy. This really isn't news. Your analysis is very simplistic though. The transfer of wealth was not all one way. Power and financial networks were complex and often co-dependant. But the idea tjat some countries, organisations and individuals have more power in the market is not rocket science and isn't just a result of the british empire either.

Poor cow. I wonder if her black counterpart in Africa would have felt the same if she had one white child in her class.

Niall Ferguson once made the point that one of the better things about the British Empire was that it wasn’t the French Empire.

Haiti is such a poor country because they were paying reparations to the French for ending slavery well into the second half of the 20th century, I believe.

It’s difficult to assess tone in a brief post, @OneBookTooMany- I’m not sure of the point you’re making?

We essentially only ever did the world wars. T’was truly dull.

I did my dissertation on Haiti, this was 30 years ago and the books in library hadn’t been touched since the 1970’s. Now everyone is interested and it’s a hot topic. For me one of the stand out parts of the TAST was that the Catholic colonies ‘allowed’ slaves to marry and believe that they would go to heaven, where the Protestants did not and taught them that they were barred from heaven as ‘beasts’. The whole thing is wild and no TV program will ever manage to convey the absolute horror of it all.

Henry VIII, done properly, is Brexit and the dismantling of the welfare state into royal possession.

The Koreans have a 1600 year history of slavery. The Chinese frankly continue theirs today. The Romans were at it, the Middle East, the many African countries…

Humans don’t live harmoniously together, they stick to their tribes and generally enslave or exploit the ‘others’.

Thanks for the recommendation OP. I’ll look it up.

I did history gcse in 1993 and we only did WW1 and WW2 and a bit of Henry VIII. It was still the attitude that history was only the bits where the British were the good guys.

everything I’ve learned since has been my own reading.