How do you feel about the British Empire?

Empress Of India, what about all the other colonies?

The Empress-ing (actually it may have been 1877) was basically a stunt by Disraeli to provide a big excuse for street parties and parades, to cover up the fact that he didn't have much legislation on the books. This is all from memory, history fans, feel free to correct. It was controversial in places anyway and wd have been more so if he'd tried to chuck Australia, etc. in too.

I don't get it. Does that mean America is Ringo Starr?

I don't approve or disapprove of the Empire: it's just something of our past that doesn't personally fascinate me that much, but I accept it as a fact and as a part of its time. Although Britain has redefined itself much more successfully than many outside it think, I would say that imperial values were influential on the BBC and on certain newspapers for longer than they should have been (and sadness over loss of empire still partially fuels some papers: it'll be interesting what happens at the Daily Mail, say, when a younger man succeeds Paul Dacre).

"WITH YOUR ARMIES".

anybody got any recs for a good history of the British Empire?

i liked piers brendon's <i>decline and fall</i>. mostly 19c tho.

whoops. i've been writing copy all morning for an entity that likes angle brackets.

love these dudes

will check out brendon thx dlh

started Brendon book last night, so far so awesome thx for the rec!

I have not read it yet but have heard good reports about his The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s books as well.

book, I meant to say.

So I've been watching Simon Schama's A History Of Britain. I gather he's not very well liked 'round these parts, but I'd assumed he's at least a reasonable barometer of how mainstream British society views itself.

Last episode was called "Empire Of Good Intentions" and for the first half hour or so, Schama speaks from what I have to assume is the perspective of the Victorians he's analysing, explaining how they viewed Empire as a stepping stone towards giving countries control of themselves after "civilizing" them. Schama does go into the atrocities that followed, but the idea that this whole missionary ideology was basically an add-on for people to feel good about themselves while looting and pillaging half the world only gets mentioned in one sentence, handwaved away with a "maybe", and at the end of it Shama suggests that, despite all their failings, we should still believe in some version of their ideal of harmony between cultures, not just in foreign lands but here in the UK, as we have such a huge immigrant population (to be clear: I don't think he's advocating Victorian-style thinking on this matter, just trying to fit the Victorians into some narrative of racial understanding?)

Anyway, it all felt very strange to me and I'd like to ask some brits: is this close to official opinion on the matter? Is this what you learn in school?

Other than a term covering the East India Company, I don't recall really learning anything about the British Empire at school and I'd be surprised if my experience was particularly atypical. You might get something about what a jolly good job of abolishing slavery the U.K. did. The biggest barrier to having a general public position on imperialism is probably that it isn't really given a great deal of thought.

Most polls seem to suggest that the Victorian fig leaf narrative about civilising the world is still, by far, the most followed - though it would be interesting to see whether that still holds true for under-30s.

schama is great at starting chapters and terrible at ending them IMO: he can find a fabulous, crunchy, often funny in medias res]anecdote that contains all the clashing elements of the story he's telling -- but by the end everything is tidied off into snoozesome platitudes

i think "empire: it had bad stuff but also good stuff"is pretty much the platonic essence of what i mean re the latter (though i have not read this particular book, and don't plan to) (was there a related tv series? i watched some of that, until i realised i was sighing far too heavily)

as for the former: in his book abt "the gothic", ss begins with the tale of hugh walpole, the man who built strawberry hill and spearheaded the gothic revival in the 18th century: walpole and his bf went to visit swizterland, to gaze awestruck at snowy peaks and dark forests and cataracts, the very picture of the sublime. as their carriage arrived at the first very mountainside inn, and their stepped out, their little poodle (named "TORY"!) ran around happily yapping -- until a huge wolf rushed out of the murk and the trees and ate tory whole

^^^this is v good obv, but the book as a whole instead simply dissolves into unmemorable nothings, as does his book on the french revolution. basically he is a FALSE WHIG and i DISCARD him

to listen to him talk i guess my dad was brought up at a time when he was taught and believed the "mission to civilize" bollocks. i don't remember doing much stuff explicitly about the Empire at school. my guess is in terms of the "official position" is that most people don't have one, and those who do will be split between "it was horrible" and "WE ARE ENGLAND WE DO WHAT WE LIKE"

mark otm about Schama, way too limp to be credible. Norman Davies is much better, at least on England's "inner" colonialism, tho not without his own faults.

As empires go we weren't too bad, look at the Spanish/ French/ Belgian etc., seems a pretty ingrained attitude.

Also, despite the Empire being stuffed full of Scotsmen on the make/take it's greeted with deafening silence up there.

Yep. iirc, colonialism, India aside, is taught in the broader context of 'the race for Africa' or whatever rather than specific analysis of British participation - which does tend to lend itself to following the path of 'the British built railways and the Belgians went round chopping people's ears off'.

Looking at some recent spec papers, colonialism doesn't feature at all at GCSE level, so is only covered at optional A-Level.

As Alex Salmond might say, Gove must be beelin'.

i) i only studied history for a single term at school, we went from the twlight of the goths to the start of the tsars, i have no idea why -- i remember ALARIC THE GOTH obv and also there was a king of the franks called PEPIN, we didn't do BritEmp at all
ii) however for o level eng lit the school encouraged top stream to do a paper which involved a close reading of KIPLING, which sounds bad empire-is-bad-wise, but was actually good, as -- beneath the surface of his own conscious ideology -- RK was fascinated by the mid-level nuts and bolts of the thing he so admired, and his determination to get these on the page actually sometimes gets a LOT more on the page, esp.when reading from a present-day perspective

(i've written a little abt his grisliest, i think most shocking story of empire in india here, as a ghost story abt spells and power and who gets to speak -- the mark of the beast -- but of course there's a great deal more you could say abt this story alone)

i) i only studied history for a single term at school, we went from the twlight of the goths to the start of the tsars, i have no idea why -- i remember ALARIC THE GOTH obv and also there was a king of the franks called PEPIN, we didn't do BritEmp at all

I think nakh had a Pepin referencing thread (poll?) on the go at one stage.

nothing wd surprise me less :D

Pippinids vs Arsacids

My dad is Greek but London-born. His opinion, as expressed to me over the years, is "If we hadn't done it first, they would have done it to us", we and us being the British, and they being the colonials. His opinion remarkably changes in regard to British interference in Cyprus, but anyway. I suspect his opinion is widespread, and is certainly what Tory voters/pols tend to believe: history was (and still is) a Darwinian struggle for survival and mastery, and the Brits did the right thing in striving to be the biggest bastards, for that is The Law of History.

I know.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUzzw1IW4AE9hdO.jpg
30 year War era Europe is an absolute fucking clusterfuck. I really admire historians who can talk authoritatively about all the different players on the board. In this pic here is the size of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619 ... absolutely huge!

scottish people still cheap to this day after being burned financially with the hapless darien scheme

We've never been good away from home.

the lads got over there and were out on the beach getting stramashed, turning lobster-pink, and getting heatstroke.

they'd have fallen out of balconies to their deaths if they could only have built some multistory dwellings.

I presume the Rangers fans were all rejoicing + singing a good ol' rendition of No Surrender to the IRA when the darien scheme went tits up!

England has been a cancer on civilization and I'll sleep better when it ceases to exist

Like Nazi Germany but for 300 years and I'm pushed but truth

I typed pished not pushed

It bad.

Doggerland Empire was probably more chill, but other island nation with ropey evil empire past Japan, bad as well.

Powerful island nations vs continental powers late to the colonial game = fuck knows they are all shit, but arguably the UK were shit for much longer.

Soul brothers me and thee

There's always mitigating arguments from colonialist cunts

They're cunts' arguments

of course every human tribe of the past probably had times of raiding and stealing nearby territories for the past 4 millions years

piers brendon's "decline and fall of the British Empire"

this book is great btw

Fast forward to today "decline and fall of the American Empire"

well we only managed 80 years or so, not bad eh chaps cheerio

https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam/catalogue/pim/editions/407/9781846147753/cover.jpg

this sounds interesting, from what I can gather from reviews he eschews much conventional wisdom and hammers the fuck out of Blair and Thatcher.

How British

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton

Dichotomy of literally wouldn't be here without it and disgusting offensively exploitative system.

Probably wouldn't be here either.

Grew up in its wake probably just at a point of transition. With a racist grandfather and then education payed for by the UN.

& now reading Walter Rodney who I should have read much sooner.

Another American pipe dream (mine, from group email yesterday):

Happy 4th, although I've recently become a British loyalist, because for all its sins and shortcomings, the Empire managed to end slavery w/o equiv of US Civil War. If things could have been worked out soon enough, maybe no American Revolutionary War either---and if we were part of the Empire, then the Commonwealth, who knows what other crazy evil shit that the world might have been spared. Of course, with American resources, who knows what else the Empire might have gotten into, for a while. But still, I think history might have turned out for the better, in a very non-utopian way (wild understatement, yes)...

"British loyalist" in alternate universe 18th-20th Century Empire-to-Commonwealth terms only!

Well we all know who was responsible for slavery in the US in the first place. Few things are more revolting than the British patting themselves on the back for "ending slavery".

America has set the bar very low in that respect, and all related.

Being British is like being German if the Third Reich had literally lasted for a thousand years.

I'm anglophone, but I sure ain't no anglophile.

theyre not awful lads individually i blame the schools

Another American pipe dream (mine, from group email yesterday):
_Happy 4th, although I've recently become a British loyalist, because for all its sins and shortcomings, the Empire managed to end slavery w/o equiv of US Civil War. If things could have been worked out soon enough, maybe no American Revolutionary War either---and if we were part of the Empire, then the Commonwealth, who knows what other crazy evil shit that the world might have been spared. Of course, with American resources, who knows what else the Empire might have gotten into, for a while. But still, I think history might have turned out for the better, in a very non-utopian way (wild understatement, yes)..._