How do you feel about the British Empire?

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.

And then you pissed it all away in these silly world wars and allowed America to take its rightful place for centuries to come! *dies*

Well, it's a relief that Brishes history education is as woeful as ours.

kipling tl;dr is p much more: lucky world that the brits became the biggest bastards bcz as bastards go they were less big than everyone else threatening the same viz the fkn germans

plus pirates hurrah! and of course always already multi-cultural which is good not bad

(the last is always a bit of a startling element of course, and totally out of step with the modern tories who try to deploy him for their own ends: kipling's favoured outland minority were muslims, who he called mussulmens)

er mussulmans, or mussulmen

the German version of mussulmen was also a slang word used by SS personnel in camps for inmates nearly dead from starvation.

feel like that gets mentioned in 2666 or somewhere like that?

in one of his prefaces to Decline and Fall Gibbon points out that Muslim is the correct version of the then popular Mussulman but acknowledges that people are swine and sometimes you have to use the most recognised vernacular

I first remember reading that in Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL book, but it probably was in that last chapter of 2666 as well.

Mussulman is the Persian \ Turkic and Muslim is the Arabic iirc. I wonder whether the decline of the Ottoman Empire led to one being used over the other.

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.)