Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin

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• 
  caesar963
  August 6th, 2019
  

  

  They were quite proficient at depopulating as well. Who can forget the catastrophic “managed” famines in India, Ireland and Kenya? And the peculiar fact that the British used concentration camps before AND after the Nazis and Russian communists?

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  iraqois
  August 6th, 2019
  

  The famines were not deliberate, they were a result of not understanding economy combined with large population increase and potato blight. One of the famines also happened during WW2 and was the fault of the Japanese. The British probably saved more lives than any other nation in history and comparing the liberal empire to the likes of the Russians or the Nazis is hardly credible.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  caesar963
  August 6th, 2019
  

  A liberal empire which used concentration camps? In Kenya, they were utilised just a few short years after the fall of the Third Reich, with the Holocaust burned into world consciousness. How can one be morally superior to the Nazis when you deploy their most evil weapon? When you actually used camps decades before the National Socialists were a viable political party?

  Even the most brain-damaged imperialist would not tell you that the purpose of the “enterprise” was saving lives! They invaded over 90% of the world’s countries at one time or another. The operative concept being “invasion” rather than “invitation” - colossal loss of life involved, and all that. Through war, famine, disease & pestilence. That’s all four horsemen, if you’re counting.

  Specifically, with regard to famine, the word I used was “managed” - starvation in Ireland was directly & overtly exploited by the British administration & wealthy landlords to clear the land, force emigration & rationalise holdings. The blight also occurred in Britain. In Ireland, there were one and a half million people killed. However, there are no recorded deaths attributable to the blight in Britain, due to effective governmental relief efforts.

  In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death (a region which repeatedly suffered famine under British rule) as Churchill needed the food elsewhere. Exports of food continued, as they did during the Irish Famine, under armed guard, because you just can’t be too careful with these starving blighters.

  ‘If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’ Churchill, apparently to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell. “Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet! He has never answered my telegram about food.”

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  marcodiluce
  August 6th, 2019
  

  Every age in human history has its own preoccupation. Its problems are peculiar to it, not for obvious practical reasons - political or social - but for deeper reasons of human intellect development. It is the mode of handling problems, rather than what they are about, that assigns them to an age. Their subject-matter may be fortuitous, and may depend on conquests, discoveries, plagues, or governments; their treatment derives from a steadier source. Any attempt to judge historical periods from a modern perspective is mere anachronism.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  caesar963
  August 7th, 2019
  

  Indeed, marco, anachronistic judgment is invalid & it’s what I’m specifically attempting to avoid. I’m judging them by the standards of their own time. Within living memory, the British condemned, then emulated, Nazi atrocities. The British civil service bemoaned Churchill’s appalling attitude to Indian suffering.
  During the Great Famine, we have a direct, telling juxtaposition of action & inaction which epitomises the contradictory intent at issue. The British applied the necessary relief efforts to one region (their own) and were guilty of gross, cruel negligence and maladministration in Ireland. Even continuing food exports from the famine-stricken region.

  They were shamed into some paltry, negligible action by the charitable efforts of the Catholic Church and the Quakers. Internationally, the aid offered by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Choctaw nation, in addition to other European & American initiatives rendered the British failure even more stark. Their minimal, belated action - too little, too late. This was the contemporary verdict also.

  However, when we see people trying to assert that the British Empire was this urgent mission to save lives, well that’s where logic goes to die a lonely, agonising death.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  akk92
  August 7th, 2019
  

  Caesar963… You have hit the nail on the proverbial forehead… British empire was one of the most power hungry greedy empires ever… The ‘Raj’ plundered India’s rich culture and treasures… The ‘Kohinoor’ is one such tragedy…

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  skay
  August 10th, 2019
  

  point of fact: concentration camps are not the same as death camps. The latter were designed and intended to kill the captives as efficiently as possible on an industrial scale. Concentration camps frequently result in mass death too, are are sometimes the site of mass killings at gunpoint, but they are not designed and intended for that sole purpose of killing.

  (And yes, I know that not everyone at Nazi death camps were killed, that some were kept alive. But those who lived were allowed to live as long as they did because they performed functions which kept the camps operating efficiently, and/or they were used for other purposes appreciated by the Nazi administrators.)

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  caesar963
  August 10th, 2019
  

  Neither iteration was designed for keeping people alive or heroically “saving lives” - so, when we’re dealing with mass killings it’s really a sinister distinction without a difference. Always condemn all such inhumanity, it doesn’t matter if it’s part of the left or right political pathology.

  To use concentration camps immediately following the notorious Nazi examples, especially when you’ve loudly told yourselves that you were the antidote to such monstrous, inordinate evil, is where we precipitately descend the rabbit hole of madness.

  The parallels are striking - and sickening. Read about how the British treated the Kenyan inmates of concentration camps. The details are too disgusting to recount here. Have no doubt that such camps were consciously designed as evil weapons of war against the civilian population. This was also the case when Britain deployed them in South Africa.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  iraqois
  August 11th, 2019
  

  How was Britain meant to support India during the height of WW2 when Japan controlled the Indian Ocean? I’d really love to know. How was the food meant to be transported across asia, with what logistics and with what trucks, roads and infrastructure? India was a third world country with a huge populace which was unable to feed itself had the British been there or not. if anyone’s to blame for that famine it’s the Japanese with their deliberate starvation and destruction of crops all over SE Asia. The British, other than a slight mishap in Armistar, didn’t go around with the same deliberate attempt to kill or enslave the native popuatlion like the Japanese, Russian or German empires did. In fact, the largest irrigation system in the world was built by the British https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkur_Barrage why would they bother doing that if they were deliberately out to starve and kill people? As for Ireland, there certainly was a famine but the British government did help, when they were under the impression that the famine was getting better the aid stopped but then it got worse. Furthermore, how exactly are the British meant to support a huge population which largely exists on potatos when their food supply suddenly gets destroyed by potato blight, or are the British responsible for that as well? It wasn’t a deliberate act or a deliberate policy. This happened in the 19thC, a time when logistics, economics and health were barely understood. People were still dying of mass epidemics from Cholera and other diseases in London and the Crimean War. Does that mean the evil British were also responsible for killing their own troops in their unsanitary hospitals? Most of their post-colonial bs comes around through an invention to try and make imperialism appear evil, without bothering to take any notice of what things would have been like without the liberal approach of the British. Prior to the British the Indians were still killing their brides in fires, thuggees were torturing people to death, Papua New Guinea were head hunters and Africans were eating each other (having their neighbours round for tea quite literally). Naturally none of this is taught in schools because the liberals would have a meltdown. These countries were given the rule of law and rights at the end of a bayonet because in those days that was the only way to do it. This meant that, for the first time in many of these countries histories, they could trade freely and travel without fear of violence. The world was largely at peace due to Pax Britannia. The modern UN is far more corrupt and useless compared to the British Empire, the Victorians would never have tolerated ISIS for a start.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin
• 
  bookbay009
  February 8th, 2021
  

  

  Link is no longer working. Please fix it. Thanks.

  Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain - John Darwin

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