How do you feel about the British Empire?

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

If drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In recking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word —
Thy Mercy on thy People, Lord!

Nelson Muntz: HA-haa!

Imperialism in the traditional sense of the word is something of a dodo nowadays. Economic imperialism however is very much alive and kicking.

Economic squabbling compared to who and who?

substitute european for pacific/oceanic and we have Oz...

australian insomnaics let us unite, for we are part of the UK....

So maybe I'm not proud that we had an Empire, but that the one we did have was at least run well and with a semblance (and not much more) of a conscience. That said my knowledge of the actual doings and dealings of empire are more than scant so this view will not be easy to justify.

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.

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.)

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

awareness & context seem like the most unambiguously good aims. memorialising atrocities isn't that instructive by itself but instilling a useful understanding of the colonial system (& crucially how much of that still continues decentralised in the private sector) is quite a tall order. looking at how the spoils of empire were shared seems like mb the most illuminating angle. 'empire was in the end A Bad Thing' is v abstract, and morality on that scale seems to me, an amoral creature of my times, kind of absurd and uselessly vague (as suggested by the capitalisation). recognising injustice suggests a need for some sense of responsibility, for someone to own it (self-flagellating or not), and that's in conflict with the general long-term quiet disintegration & transmutation of british identity. the deeper structural legacy [economic/political/religious/moral/racial/social] seems like the most widely useful level to bring attention to

idk how you would create an audience for that though, even though the empire is extremely interesting

I wonder if a "useful understanding of the colonial system" and the "deeper structural legacy" isn't something that comes more easily after a moral societal consensus has been reached on a topic - like it's relatively easy to talk about the structural qualities of the Third Reich and the Soviet Bloc I think in part because there's the moral urgency of "how could this happen?", and that's a really motivating energy for that type of analysis?

"in conflict with the general long-term quiet disintegration & transmutation of british identity" - I don't have the knowledge to disagree with this, but do feel like you could say that about anything in history ever. Mainstream history still works within the frame of nation-states, a collective We that is to blame or to applaud or to be shaped by events is the first premise.

further to what I said in the first para there, I come from a German family (though raised in Portugal) and there's a pretty direct line for me of "this was terrible -> but regular people, like my grandparents, were involved in it -> how could that be? which encourages a search for deeper (and not just moral) answers. Probably wouldn't have been as much of a priority for me if my notion was "oh, some history thing, had some good and some bad stuff, others would've done the bad if we hadn't".

not that I think the Empire should be treated with the same degree of moral horror as the third reich, to be clear

there's this contrary pull between alterity & identity, & it seems to me the twin move of getting people to identify with the empire at the same time as condemning it is probably unrealistic. history can & should work within all sorts of frames besides nation states & any serious national history will obv pick at nationhood.

the british empire is perhaps less of an aberration than the third reich & the soviet bloc, prefiguring the current world system rather than operating outside of it & this makes the sense of moral judgment difficult. if ppl don't feel the need to condemn the foreign depradations of british petroleum & BAE then it seems hard to see how they'll summon a sense of moral outrage about empire. the sense of empire is subtler, and foggier for a lot of british ppl without connections to colonies beyond perhaps grandparents being posted round the world in the war. that might go some way to explaining the lack of motivating energy for imperial history, there's never been the same sense of crisis within the UK

history can & should work within all sorts of frames besides nation states & any serious national history will obv pick at nationhood.

Sure, which is why I qualified with "mainstream"; I don't think non-expert discussion and (crucially) the way history is taught in schools has gone beyond the nation state model...anywhere yet, really, and the possibility of that happening soon is probably as fanciful as anything else being discussed here

I think total defeat - of the kind the Reich and the Soviet Union experienced - certainly helps, as does the fact that they're fresher in mind than the Empire, which spread out over centuries. But in the end the question was about what change would be desirable, not what would be probable

Also perhaps relevant that third reich and soviet bloc can be assessed after they ended. British empire winding down since idk the seventies probably hasn't yet provided the necessary end point

XP

definitely, there's a greater awareness of empire in former colonies where that sort of reckoning has occurred but for (most?) ppl in the uk there's been more continuity than disruption & it's harder to disentangle what is & isn't imperial (another thing that makes a straightforward moralistic approach a tricky proposition)

the way history is taught & understood has changed a lot so there is room for optimism there imo. my little brother is doing a-level history atm & is doing a bit on early colonialism & the church, it seems pretty good!

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/dont-mistake-nostalgia-about-british-empire-scholarship#survey-answer

"On 8 May, The Times will host an event on “the legacy of the British Empire”, at which participants will debate whether Britain’s empire was “a force for good or a force for evil”"

"Reappraising the British Empire in this vein has become a way in which race-thinking, if not outright racism and masculinism (The Times panel, we’re told, will examine the “men and motivations” of empire), if not misogyny, can be rehabilitated in a celebratory story that excuses occasional “excess” by evoking overall “benefit”."

This Empire nostalgia shitfest was brought to you by The Times, surprise surprise.

Good to see it can only be considered as a binary either/or, no room for subtleties in modern Britain. Salute the flag, carry on up the khyber, brexit mean etc etc etc

calling academics who take a nuanced and humanist stance on the excesses of colonialism a "left-wing fifth column" and then moaning about them stifling the debate is rather fucking thick and hypocritical, but I think they know that tbh and are playing to the "anti-pc gallery" - or something like that.

even weirder that the dutch had an empire

well the countries that had a colonial empire are exactly the ones you would expect from their geographical position in europe, i.e. atlantic coastline. even sweden did a bit of colonizing as the dominant scandinavian power. meanwhile, the italians started it all but went the other way, to the black sea.

Only the swiss keps their paws off eh?

they devoted their energies to magnificent clocks, and the world was a better place for it.

when you have such nice mountains, why go anywhere?

don't mention what Swiss did in the mid 20th Century tho!

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/Military_Affairs/13/4/The_Dutch_Invasion_of_England_in_1667*.html

and this Dutch invasion and military defeat of UK forces on UK soil isn't often mentioned.

True but they stayed put

If the Dutch were to attack UK today it would be a toss up

This came up in SNA and I half-wondered if it was one of

promising thread titles that turn out to be on ILM

Like "How do you feel about British Sea Power?"

If the Dutch were to attack UK today it would be a toss up

Tbf our brave women and men for some years now have to practice shooting while voicing the sound of a bullet/shotgun because there's no money for actual bullets. A situation I wholly approve.

Still a toss up though probably.

even sweden did a bit of colonizing as the dominant scandinavian power.

― Roberto Spiralli, 20. april 2018 17:34 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck the world. no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_colonial_empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

Danish vikings trashed the place near where I was born, which granted me the opportunity to run an April fools story in my newspaper about a Danish viking helmet being found in our soil (our soil being polder land, reclaimed long after the vikings actually set sail here). The supposed exhibit of said helmet attracted a big enough crowd for it to be a successful April fools gag, and some people I know here still hold the Danish accountable for whatever insufferable fate seemingly bestowed upon them. It is a lie, and yet it is the truth. I am at peace with both coexisting.

Tom, I don't think Fred is doubting that Scandinavia has colonialist skeletons in its closet so much as taking offense at casting Sweden as its dominant power.

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)..._