How do you feel about the British Empire?

Muselmænd is also old Danish version. And Primo Levi and most other books on the camps writes quite a lot about it. The usual point being that the Mussulmen had given up on surviving, and therefore had their heads bowed, like a muslim (it's not a particularly pc term). Agamben found some witness narratives from former Mussulmen, who managed to survive anyway, which is a really interesting read.

i'm trying to read schama's book on the french revolution and i don't agree with his perspective at all but i don't know of any other books on the topic that contain the facts that he does, even if his interpretation is questionable

Empires are really good at sucking wealth out of their subject nations and into themselves. Put more succinctly, empires suck.

love these dudes

― irl lol (darraghmac), Friday, 26 June 2015 22:31 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Schama was considerably more explicitly critical of English role in an gorta mor than I would have thought in advance. From a colonised perspective he's not terrible tbh.

He's suitably scornful of English invasions of Wales, Scotland, Ireland in early episodes of the series.

What I took from his take on the famines is that the English were guilty of negligence but that this came basically from a belief in the sanctity of free trade that is part and parcel of the Victorian missionary mentality; the economic system that united Britain was part of the civilization they wished to confer upon the peoples of the world. As stated above I think that's him talking from their pov, not endorsing it, and I grant that getting too righteously furious about it in the modern era would be a bit futile, but for a very mainstream BBC educational thing it still feels like there's a lack of reflection on it idk.

He's suitably scornful of English invasions of Wales, Scotland, Ireland in early episodes of the series.

What he's expecting, liberal democracy in the 14th century?

Anyway, Scots have got 800 years of patting themselves on the back over the fact they repelled the English invasion of Scotland and Mel Gibson got an Oscar out of it.

it still feels like there's a lack of reflection on it idk.

Thinking about a country that does get this right, I can only come up with Germany. History education there doesn't sweep anything under the rug about the atrocities of WW2. One could say 'how would you even downplay that?' but it's happening most anywhere else.

The Dutch still take pride in their Golden Age, the term having become synonymous to success. I know I was taught how great 'we' were with trade, ruling the waves. Exciting tales of the sea for a kid. No word on slaves and squeezing out indigenous people all around the world. History here has never properly been revised when it comes to this, and when people try to now, the majority shrugs or gets agitated, basically saying gtfo with your 'down with us'-mentality etc etc.

otoh Germany only acknowledged in 2004 the herero genocide, and still won't pay compensation.

Probably the greatest delusion is that Empire, unlike the Nazis, is ancient history - something that happened in the 1800s. I'd be surprised if anything close to a majority of Brits could tell you when the Mau Mau uprising took place.

True, and it's telling that to me stands out as 'well at least they acknowledged it'. The Dutch are still fiddling with words about their crimes in Indonesia. 'Juuuust the right amount of saying sorry, but juuuust not heavy enough to have to pay up.' It's excrutiating. xp

Yeah. But the herero genocide is also such an enormous crime I tell myself it does to some extent stand out. And it's not like it was a secret, Thomas Pynchon chose it to stand in for colonialist crimes in V and Gravity's Rainbow. Which might on the other hand be why I think it stands out.

Haha yeah, Portuguese attitudes towards empire super fucked up too and often line up quite neatly with British defenses, using a sort of similar exceptionalism ("our colonizations were more humane than the other powers", "racism isn't in the Portuguese mentality, see how much we crossbred with natives", etc.)

Suppose I just view the UK - or at least the BBC - as being much more in contact with post-colonial thought, ethnic groups that suffered under it having more of a voice in the media, etc.

there was a short program on r4 recently about a famous Dutch naval and land victory (I think it was the last successful invasion of foreign soldiers in the UK or something) in the first Anglo-Dutch war I think, at least it is famous in Holland where a museum still has the captured mast head of the then pride of the British navy - they don't like to talk about it much here though!

The BBC should definitely do better but i wouldn't underestimate how poisonous the media environment is - both in relation to the legacy of empire itself and towards minority groups seen to be making a fuss about 'old grievances'. The narrative that children are taught to be ashamed of Britain, even with the minimal information they're given, is well established on the right and you can look at the fuss about the removal of the Oxford Cecil Rhodes statue (which still stands after a concerted media campaign, despite students voting to remove it) as a test case for challenging the status quo. The students were absolutely vilified. The BBC isn't at its bravest at the moment.

He, kinda surprised to hear that, Daniel, since I've spoken to a few post-colonialists who said stuff like 'yeah, my country was really bad, but admittedly we weren't Portugal...' I heard a story that in Mozambique, everything that couldn't be brought back to Portugal in 75 was basically destroyed, people even put sugar in the gas tanks of government vehicles. I would have thought Portuguese was more open to talk about it as well, since it was done under Salazar, and as I understood it the wars in the seventies were a contributing factor to the unrest that led to the Carnation revolution. Portuguese also much more open than other countries to discuss this legacy in cinema (which is where I know all I know about it from...) with films like Tabu and of course the cinema of Pedro Costa really delving into it.

I have heard that the British were sorta 'the best', in that the countries they ruled at least tended to get at least some sort of infrastructure left in place, that could be build upon afterwards. But that's not really the point, though. I would suggest by far the worst colonial crime in the 20th century was King Leopold's Congo, and everyone else can sorta say 'we were better than that', but King Leopold only got to do what he did to Congo because every other country thought it better to deliver millions of Africans to the personal rule of a sociopath rather than have their geo-political rival - or, God forbid!, the Africans themself - rule it. The colonialist logic was lethal at best, and genocidal at worst.

whenever i walk around an unfamiliar city in the uk with grand old buildings i wonder how many of them were built on the proceeds of slavery

some of my favourite buildings in glasgow are legacies of empire - the beautiful museum of modern art was built as the home of a tobacco magnate, for example. glassford street is named after another tobacco merchant. the whole of glasgow's merchant city area, really, was funded by shipping slaves and goods to america and the caribbean - i think something like 30 percent of plantation owners in the caribbean were scottish

none of this was taught at school as far as i remember - shamefully, i was in my twenties before i realised that so much of glasgow was built that way, although i guess i must have had some inkling that 18th-century wealth would have been accrued though the most horrific means imaginable

a lot of people display massive denial if you ever suggest to them that at least part of what they've gained or achieved in life is a product of dumb luck, accident of birth etc; part of colonialism denial is a larger version of that impulse I think

If it hadn't been for a wee documentary presented by Brian Cox (the one from Dundee, not the D:Ream guy) and tucked way on BBC4 somewhere, I would never have found how much shipbuilding/shipping in Glasgow profited from building ships to beat trade embargo on the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Getting almost the entire nation of China hooked on opium was another nice bit of business by the British Empire, again Scots were heavily involved in that too.

That was a good doc that was

yeah, that seems otm xxxp

also, i think if you're not particularly curious about the history of the place you live it's unlikely you're just gonna stumble across that information

funnily enough, i was in belfast over the weekend and ended up having a chat with a guy about glasgow and belfast's history of shipbuilding. he was totally shocked when i mentioned that both cities also got rich through the slave trade - it had never even occurred to him

it were a simpler age, if we hadn't done it to them they would've done it to us, no point worrying about it now what's done is done and the past has no bearing on the present

intersecting sets of people who say stuff like that but are proud of their nationality is a headscratcher

As is my wont I'd find myself testing the arguments against modern Brits being confronted with burden of colonial past but a. would weaken my position in UK politics threads next time I wanted to play the ochone and b. NAGL for the winners to get into the post match controversy and c. fuckin history would fuckin sicken u if u looked enough at it

That was xp before NV gave it the basic runthrough

also funnily enough i was reading mark fisher's ghosts of my life over the weekend and a lot of the hauntology stuff seemed to chime with the conversation i'd had about slavery in belfast and glasgow

wrt denial, it's interesting to see how a portion of the debate has shifted over the years from 'the empire was good' to 'the empire might not have been good but we who were not members of the ruling class were equally under the yoke and didn't benefit from its legacy' - which has probably always been present with varying degrees of justification in the rest of the British isles but seems to be gaining more traction in England.

I used to think similar myself as a bolshy working class boy but then you realise even the work in working class was built on blood and plunder

I remember a phone-in to Radio Merseyside from my childhood in which one of the topics of discussion was a proposal to name a new housing development after members of The Beatles (I guess this was the late '70s, before the FabFourification of everything in the city had really kicked in). One irate caller suggested that "You'd be better off calling it Kunta Kinte Crescent! They built this city!"

irate caller otm

must be nice tho to live in a mental state where you can accept the reality of a spate of recent suicide bombings on uk soil without drawing a clear line back through the country's history of rah-rah adventurism in the middle east

(by the way, I haven't seen the word 'ochone' used in print since the old Angus Og cartoons that used to run in the Sunday Mail.)

It's a mindset yknow

Well, Angus didn't have his troubles to seek, true.

ShariVari, the Shama doc I mention is from 2000. You could easily mount a case that the worsening media climate since then has had an effect, though, as I remember a year or so ago some terrible wanker doing a show on BBC4 straight-up praising Victorian missionaries as the spiritual fathers of Doctor Who and Live Aid (wish I was making this up).

He, kinda surprised to hear that, Daniel, since I've spoken to a few post-colonialists who said stuff like 'yeah, my country was really bad, but admittedly we weren't Portugal...' I heard a story that in Mozambique, everything that couldn't be brought back to Portugal in 75 was basically destroyed, people even put sugar in the gas tanks of government vehicles. I would have thought Portuguese was more open to talk about it as well, since it was done under Salazar, and as I understood it the wars in the seventies were a contributing factor to the unrest that led to the Carnation revolution. Portuguese also much more open than other countries to discuss this legacy in cinema (which is where I know all I know about it from...) with films like Tabu and of course the cinema of Pedro Costa really delving into it.

The colonial war is one of the biggest taboos in Portuguese society, only recently has it started to be discussed more fully, in literature and cinema (and of course ppl like Miguel Gomes and Pedro Costa only speak to a small cinephile elite - hardly representative of the general feeling). A generation of men were forced into service and then came back to conditions that were basically Vietnam vets x100; no treatment for PTSD, a very hostile political climate. A lot of middle class (predominantly white, natch) people fled Angola and Mozambique during this era as well, lotta lives ruined. The fact that the post-revolution Portuguese government didn't manage much in the way of assuring peace comes into this - a lot of Angolans for instance are as angry or angrier about the shoddy decolonisation process as about colonialism in the first place. Angola after Portugal left had decades and decades of CIA and KGB sponsored civil war so a lot of Portuguese people believe, with varying degrees of bigotry, that things would've been "better" if Portugal had stayed.

Add to that the fact that Portugal did historically have a policy of miscegenation (in India especially, but pretty much everywhere) and a racial hierarchy that was somewhat more flexible than most; these factors were cleverly embraced by Salazar when it came to rebrand the Portuguese empire for a post-colonial era. In this he was helped enormously by a sociological theory called luso-tropicalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusotropicalism), which propped up dictatorships both in Portugal and Brazil. Basically the idea is that the Portuguese mixed with natives peoples and exhibited less bigotry, as such couldn't be compared to other Imperial powers. Nonsense of course, but it helped Salazar immensley politically, because he could dismiss attacks in the UN by claiming that Angola, Mozambique, etc. weren't "colonies" but part of Portugal, and their inhabitants citizens. It's true that there was never a rigid system of apartheid installed, and black Africans could rise reasonably high, as long as they basically forsook their culture - converted to catholicism, wore Western-style clothes, didn't associate with anyone who spoke local dialects, etc. So a sidestep from basic racism to a kind of cultural supremacist position.

Luso-tropicalism itself is pretty obscure now, we don't get it taught in school or anything, but talk to the average Portuguese person and very often their opinion will come directly from that ideology, though they almost certainly don't know it.

"Lost Empire" though, is something that we are very happy to discuss, as it feeds into a narrative of decadence that has been going on at least since the 19th century, sort of an indulgent self-pity that we'll never be as great as our seafaring ancestors. It's such a cliché in Portuguese society that people rarely notice the racist premises behind it.

Ah yes. And 'Fifth Empire' and Dom Sebastiao and stuff like that, right? That's an Oliveira-film :) I should really read more about that, it's really fascinating.

Yeah, all of that stuff looms large, first as a typical fascist Return To Glory narrative, and then more as a justification for decay - there's a very strong feeling in Portugal that things are bad <i>because</i> it's Portugal, that we're hopeless and there's no turning back. I think a lot of latin cultures have that to some extent, <i>Il Gattopardo</i> has that scene of the main character explaining to a reformer that modernity is all well and good for the rest of the world but Sicily just won't be able to take it.

Yeah, all of that stuff looms large, first as a typical fascist Return To Glory narrative (Pessoa ties into this somewhat - like a lot of modernists he had quite fashy impulses), and then more as a justification for decay - there's a very strong feeling in Portugal that things are bad because it's Portugal, that we're hopeless and there's no turning back. I think a lot of latin cultures have that to some extent, Il Gattopardo has that scene of the main character explaining to a reformer that modernity is all well and good for the rest of the world but Sicily just won't be able to take it.

Speaking of Oliveira, one of his best is No, Or The Vain Glory Of Command, featuring a group of colonial war soldiers discussing Portugal's past, and it's kind of a critique of Portuguese imperialism, though even there Oliveira throws in a scene from the Lusíadas, an epic poem praising Portugal for discovering the naval route to India, as a kind of alternative - as if it wasn't instrinsically connected to empire building.

de Oliveira is complicated, isn't he? A Talking Picture could be easily read as a paean to European values under assault - from Islam, it seems... I really should watch a lot more of him, have never seen No either.

Oh, sorry for the derail, everyone. Back to Britain :)

Before remounting the British imperial rail, can you Daniel recommend some non fiction in English on this aspect of Portuguese history/identity?

Not really :( I've picked this stuff up here and there, from a TV documentary series on the colonial war, novels, liner notes, one history of Angola...

On a tangent, the only person who would get documentaries about history made on Portuguese TV regularly was a) a minister under Salazar's regime, b) boring as fuck and c) often just made shit up, and has been dead for years now. Which might partly account for why I'm fonder of Shama than many here on ILX.

Good taste in intros tho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPulIGBgMw

Someone has pointed out on Twitter that of the 139 speakers at the UK's largest history festival, there is one member of a minority group (talking about the Koh-i-oor) and three members of the Wehrmacht.

https://programme.cvhf.org.uk/festival-programme/speakers/

quite a line-up. i forget in my ivory tower that this is what history is to a lot of the GBP/suburban home-owners

I don't really know what if anything I would want the british public to feel about the british empire in general. the sentiments itt largely a kickback against the chauvinist nationalist narratives (& studious silences), but beyond the remedial waryness I'm tempted to say a lack of sentiment is probably a good thing

An awareness of the atrocities commited and how they enriched the nation? A general consensus that empire was in the end A Bad Thing no matter how you slice it? I don't think all that needs to descend into performative self-flagellation or anything of the sort.

an appropriate corrective to unreflective nationalism, a better-informed sense of "our" place in the world that might influence people's views on what our nation-state ought to think about in terms of its obligations to non-nationals and nationals from immigrant backgrounds

if we're fantasizing wildly