I know that, i was speaking of peoples general perception of the Empire, and not if their perceptions are any right or not.manythings said:
The imperialism of Britain
- Thread starter Tennou486
- Start date
No genocide was involved, actually.manythings said:
Strictly speaking, genocide is a deliberate attempt to destroy a race of people. While the English certainly had a low opinion of the Irish natives, they certainly didn't try and wipe them out. After all, what would be the point?
I don't know where you got the "800 years" figure from, either. Ireland wasn't fully conquered by England until the 16th and 17th centuries. and it wasn't until the 19th century that Ireland was united with the Kingdom of Great Britain. Ironically enough, the first Anglo-Norman invasion was invited by King Dermot Mac Murrough of Leinster.
You don't get taught it.
In school I did the Normans, romans, the renaissance, World war 1, Nazi germany, Ireland in the 20th century, Fascist Italy and now James I.
In school I did the Normans, romans, the renaissance, World war 1, Nazi germany, Ireland in the 20th century, Fascist Italy and now James I.
Arguments have been made that British policymakers saw the Great Famine as an opportunity to restructure the 'backwards' Irish society and economy by wiping out the cottiers and small tenants, thereby modernising and restructuring land relations. Christian Providentialism among the main Whigs is cited as a major contributing factor as well...and Famine policy was pretty brutal.RyVal said:
However, I personally subscribe to the 'government were morons' argument.
The Great Famine was a result of the Potato Blight, which was an entirely natural phenonemon. Sure, you could criticise the Dublin Government for mismanaging the crisis and failing to adequately react and maintaining food exports, but you can't blame them for the famine itself.Aerowaves said:
Hanlon's razor, basically.Aerowaves said:
SO far (year 10) I've only been taught the slave trade (no colonial stuff), but what the half lesson deviation boiled down to was:
Britain WAS a small, Greedy nation who had obssessions with owning more land to compensate for the small size of our current bits (innuendo!). Unfortunately we were absolute cocks and I am not proud of that part of my country's history. Hopefully A level doesn't have too much on it.
Britain WAS a small, Greedy nation who had obssessions with owning more land to compensate for the small size of our current bits (innuendo!). Unfortunately we were absolute cocks and I am not proud of that part of my country's history. Hopefully A level doesn't have too much on it.
Not the 'famine', but famines itself weren't unusual in Ireland at that time. What made this particular famine a "Great Famine" - resulting in the deaths of over a million people - was bad policy on the part of the Whig government, such as the Gregory Clause (cutting off smallholders from their land), the discontinuation of soup kitchens despite early success, and insistence of upholding the 'free market', enabling prices to skyrocket (compared with the Tory interventionist policy, which held them down as much as possible). To name but a few.RyVal said:
I'm not British, but I just wanted to point out that there's no such thing as 'unbiased' history. History is the perception of the past through the eyes of an individual. Serious historians (which I'm actually studying to be) openly admit that there's always bias in their work, it's impossible to be purely objective. The only time that people thought that history could be objective was during history's emergence as a field in the 19th century, especially in (ironically) the British Empire.
Well for me its one of the A level topics but I think the real question was answered in the first post. We don't sugar coat, we tell it how it is and thats fine by us.
That's hardly "most of Britains inventions being accredited to england in the history books when they were actually invented by Irishmen" is it? That is people who are Scots British being called British and possibly people who are ill educated might assume that they were English. Even the most cursory investigation would reveal the man was Scottish.Maraveno said:
Most people will assume that the Duke of Wellington was English, but that does not equate to the history books saying he was English, he was Irish British and they say so.
Ever heard of Oliver Cromwell? The bit about his past that is obfuscated is that whole "To hell or to Connaught" thing. This involved the killing of MILLIONS of Irish people because of his psychopathic hatred for the Irish and to, a much lesser extent, make way for the plantations. Last time I checked killing thousands of people of a specific group could be classified as genocide. Millions are also more than thousands.RyVal said:
Also that's not Irony, that's politics. He was forced out of Ireland by his rivals and so he jumped into bed with the devil to get back what he wanted.
Another few happy topics to look up with regard to Irish history are; The penal Laws, The famine (and the very deliberate seizure of food by the english military to thin out the native population), The Pale, the 1798 rebellion, the Black and Tans (another shining example of Imperilist benevolence), the whole "Fight the German's and you'll gain freedom" thing that was reneged at the end of WWI after 100,000 Irish men joined the military of a country they hated for a chance to live free, the RUC and how they would pass on the addresses of troublesome paddy's to militant groups to keep things good for protestants.
1169 was the first landing of the Norman Forces in Wexford. I know my own history.
Yes, and while he did commit many atrocities, what he did was pretty much par for the course in the mid-1600s. Do bear in mind that the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland came only half a century before the Great Northern War of 1700-1721, which is infamous for its brutality. War crimes were the rule back then, not the exception.manythings said:
You will also note that Cromwell was fighting for the Republicans in the English Civil War, while it was the Royalists who were allied with the Irish. As such, he doesn't really reflect on the 'English' monarchy, as you suggest.
It's not really obfuscated at all. Everyone remembers Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, to the extent that its the most contentious aspect of the War of the Three Kingdoms. Don't assert white-washing where none exists.manythings said:
Irish casualties in the war amounted to around 20,000 battlefield casualties and 200,000 civilian casualties due to war-related famine or disease, with approximately a further 50,000 made slaves and exported. There certainly weren't millions of casualties, since Ireland only had a population of just under one million people at the turn of the 17th century.manythings said:
Genocide is about intention, not action. Thousands of French people died in the First World War, but that doesn't make it genocide. It is only genocide if the strict intention is to completely eradicate the race or ethnicity. While Cromwell was viciously brutal to the Irish population, it wasn't his intention to wipe them out altogether.manythings said:
At which point the Irish kings accepted Henry's overlordship. It's only the post-medieval era where Anglo-Irish relations started getting nasty.manythings said:
Genuinely worthy of condemnation, but not much different from the feudalism that was being practiced elsewhere in Europe.manythings said:
Which occured as the result of the Potato Blight, which was hardly the fault of the British Government.manythings said:
Exports of food continued to the British mainland, is what you mean. It's not like the military just went around seizing food from the natives for the banter. It's worthy of condemnation, but you are being selective in your interpretation.manythings said:
How is the Pale particularly heinous? It was an English garrison on a minor part of the Irish coast. It certainly isn't something I would mark out in particular as a great English atrocity.manythings said:
Another civil war, with atrocities committed on both sides.manythings said:
Again, worthy of condemnation, but it bears repeating that the Black and Tans was essentially a paramilitary force composed of First World War veterans, rather than an Imperial regiment.manythings said:
This is such a non-truth that I really must question whether your history textbooks have been subject to white-washing. In 1914, the British Parliament had just passed the Government of Ireland Act 1914, which would give Ireland self-governance and autonomy. Unfortunately, the implementing of the act was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War.manythings said:
The Easter uprising in 1916 severely undermined the possibility of Irish home rule, since it saw the end of diplomatic conciliation and the beginning of open unrest which would lead to the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921. Nevertheless, it prompted the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, to push for the immediate establishment of an Irish Government in Dublin, and John Redmond (Nationalist) met with Sir Edward Carson (Unionist) to discuss this. Redmond eventually walked out of the negotiations, partially due to the political intrigue of Walter Long.
After that, David Lloyd George called the Irish Convention in 1917, which finally came to a decision on Irish home rule in 1918. Unfortunately, the events of the war overtook the UK, since the German Spring Offensive resulted in a major manpower shortage which the British Government could only solve through conscription. In the end, US intervention meant that the draft was never introduced for the Irish, but the damage had been done. A new Government of Ireland Act was drawn up, based on the reccomendations of the Long Committee and the Irish Convention, but it was introduced only in Northern Ireland, since the South refused to ratify it.
As such, it is highly dishonest to claim that the British Government made no effort to introduce Irish autonomy or renegued on promises to do so. From 1914 onwards, there were several plans for Irish self-autonomy, but all collapsed due to outside events or political intrigue.
And was there no anti-Protestant violence in Southern Ireland? The whole point of the Anglo-Irish War and the ensuing North-South conflict was that they were civil wars. Everyone committed atrocities in those conflicts - that's what happens when you have a civil war.manythings said:
Yet that's not when Ireland was conquered. And, as shown, the Irish certainly didn't resist the Normans, considering they rather quickly accepted Henry as their overlord.manythings said:
Simply put, we get the following:
Fighting the French & Spanish: Good.
Mistreating Africans and Indians (including the slave trade): Bad.
Mishandling grievances of American colonies, leading to revolution: very daft in retrospect.
The whole Ireland thing: quite horrible, but much more complicated than either side would like to believe.
I'm not an apologist for the British Empire, but in the same way that the Romans or the Normans changed us for the better, I genuinely believe that it's a mixed bag and just condemning it out of hand is ignorant and over-simplifying the matter enormously.
For instance, the slave trade. Yes, we bought and in some cases kidnapped slaves from West Africa and took them to plantations in the New World. However, this was not a British invention and although the excuse that "everyone else was doing it" is a shit one, it happens to be true. Also, Britain banned the slave trade before most other countries did and the enforcement by the Royal Navy did a lot to damage the trade. It should be pointed out that the enforcement was largely a question of self-interest to stop economic competition, but that's the empire all over.
The main difference between the British empire and most of its European contemporaries (the Dutch were similar in some regards) is that largely speaking it was more concerned with turning a profit than lording it over people. Napoleon sneered at us as a "nation of shopkeepers" but that's what we are. We are traders. We don't want to burn people at the stake or rape the shit out of them because we think some white blood in their family tree would do it good. (the Spanish empire ran on these practices for a while) We respected warrior cultures, even when we were fighting them (Zulus for instance inspired Baden Powell to found the scout movement, Sikhs were sought out as soldiers in India, whilst Gurkhas still fight as part of the British Army to this day)
Whilst Spain, Portugal and France were busily erasing the cultures of their colonies, converting people to Catholicism on pain of death, banning native scripts and seeking to further the glory of their kings, the British largely didn't care what languages you spoke in addition to English, what religion you practised or how you lived your life providing the trade routes worked.
The whole colonisation of India was provoked by the French in Pondicherry trying to stop the East India Company from conducting business. Ditto the Opium Wars, pretty much- colonisation for our economic benefit.
Not to say that that excuses the actions taken there, but it means that the inhabitants of the former British Empire did a bit better than the colonies of their competitors upon independence, because the structures we put in place benefited the populace when we left.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, Belize, Bermuda, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong... All these countries have benefited from having been run by the British Empire at some stage, even if only by gaining a common trade language and some infrastructure.
Right. You may now begin flaming.
Fighting the French & Spanish: Good.
Mistreating Africans and Indians (including the slave trade): Bad.
Mishandling grievances of American colonies, leading to revolution: very daft in retrospect.
The whole Ireland thing: quite horrible, but much more complicated than either side would like to believe.
I'm not an apologist for the British Empire, but in the same way that the Romans or the Normans changed us for the better, I genuinely believe that it's a mixed bag and just condemning it out of hand is ignorant and over-simplifying the matter enormously.
For instance, the slave trade. Yes, we bought and in some cases kidnapped slaves from West Africa and took them to plantations in the New World. However, this was not a British invention and although the excuse that "everyone else was doing it" is a shit one, it happens to be true. Also, Britain banned the slave trade before most other countries did and the enforcement by the Royal Navy did a lot to damage the trade. It should be pointed out that the enforcement was largely a question of self-interest to stop economic competition, but that's the empire all over.
The main difference between the British empire and most of its European contemporaries (the Dutch were similar in some regards) is that largely speaking it was more concerned with turning a profit than lording it over people. Napoleon sneered at us as a "nation of shopkeepers" but that's what we are. We are traders. We don't want to burn people at the stake or rape the shit out of them because we think some white blood in their family tree would do it good. (the Spanish empire ran on these practices for a while) We respected warrior cultures, even when we were fighting them (Zulus for instance inspired Baden Powell to found the scout movement, Sikhs were sought out as soldiers in India, whilst Gurkhas still fight as part of the British Army to this day)
Whilst Spain, Portugal and France were busily erasing the cultures of their colonies, converting people to Catholicism on pain of death, banning native scripts and seeking to further the glory of their kings, the British largely didn't care what languages you spoke in addition to English, what religion you practised or how you lived your life providing the trade routes worked.
The whole colonisation of India was provoked by the French in Pondicherry trying to stop the East India Company from conducting business. Ditto the Opium Wars, pretty much- colonisation for our economic benefit.
Not to say that that excuses the actions taken there, but it means that the inhabitants of the former British Empire did a bit better than the colonies of their competitors upon independence, because the structures we put in place benefited the populace when we left.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, Belize, Bermuda, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong... All these countries have benefited from having been run by the British Empire at some stage, even if only by gaining a common trade language and some infrastructure.
Right. You may now begin flaming.