I remember my friend laughing at protesters in Hong Kong waving the British flag; they had experienced more democracy under Chinese rule than they ever had under the British.
Importantly, that was because of the PRC not because of the Brits. The Brits had long sought to increase democratic freedoms in Hong Kong however the Chinese flatly refused to permit it in anticipation of the handover. This began shortly before the Cultural Revolution, actually, in the 50s.
I'm not saying the sentiment is wrong per se, but Hong Kong is a bad example. [1]
Liao Chengzhi, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, said in 1960 that China "shall not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories liberated" [by the People's Liberation Army] should the status quo (i.e. colonial administration) be changed. The warning killed any democratic development for the next three decades.
>Grantham convinced London to scrap all plans for political reform on the basis that it did not "interest the British electorate". Later, when confronted by the Hong Kong public, he blamed London.
1980s:
>British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe further promised the democratic process would start "in the years immediately ahead", but they stalled due to opposition from Beijing, local business interests as represented by Executive Council, and the British Foreign Office under the pretext that it would bring chaos to Hong Kong.
Not nearly as simple as you are portraying it either..
... in 1992, Chris Patten the new governor of Hong Kong, began moves to unilaterally democratise the territory by allowing for the election of half the Legislative Council by universal suffrage, and in the process incurring the wrath of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Patten had judged that: "People in Hong Kong are perfectly capable of taking a greater share in managing their own affairs in a way that is responsible, mature, restrained, sensible"
[edit] If I had to speculate I'd say the 50s were primarily due to the aftermath of WWII and reconstruction in Europe and that PRC influence was basically all of the subsequent reluctance. After all, the UK was already taking steps to divest itself of the colonies at that point and had little interest in maintaining Hong Kong one way or the other.
Was Hong Kong not to be a halo territory for democracy in the region?
Given the state of freedom in Hong Kong vs the PRC one could take the position that substantially all the 'western' freedoms enjoyed in Hong Kong are in fact enjoyed thanks to the British.
yeah it's complicated, "Britain would have instituted constitutional democracy in HK but China opposed it" is just too reductive. After all there was (and still is) opposition among HKers themselves to the idea, too. And there were British parties resistant as well, ex. Governor MacLehose, it wasn't unanimous by any means
Honestly, how much can Britain love democracy as it remains a constitutional monarchy with a near centurion who has veto rights over everything and all laws are enforced in her name?
Disclaimer: I'm not saying UK is a dictatorship, but if you pay "lip service" in the hundreds of millions to billions of pounds then you really can't claim that the monarch is a mere figurehead.
It's not just in the UK - Canada, Australia and New Zealand to name a few are all constitutional monarchies.
To your point, they're not democracies, they're constitutional monarchies - but functionally that's inconsequential in this day and age. In large part because if the royals ever exercised their veto, the whole system would fall in on itself. It's been over a hundred years since the last veto in any commonwealth realm near as I can figure.
I've nothing against the monarchy because it makes the highest elected office in the land a public servant - as it should be. It's small, but it's meaningful IMO.
To me your question is roughly equivalent to asking "how much can the US care about democracy when it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic? The president has veto power, and look how fancy the White House is!"
Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and many other modern systems are ruled with the consent of the governed, and they pick their functional leaders. The rest is an implementation detail, with various pros and cons.
"It's been over a hundred years since the last veto in any commonwealth realm near as I can figure."
The Queen last exercised her veto in 1999. Nothing fell in on itself and that is by design; the Queen is sovereign and parliament is subordinate to her.
> The Queen last exercised her veto in 1999. Nothing fell in on itself and that is by design; the Queen is sovereign and parliament is subordinate to her.
I may not have been eloquent but I meant in matters outside of the UK. Trust me, if the Queen tried to withhold Royal Ascent in Canada it would trigger a constitutional crisis. I'm sure this is true elsewhere.
When Britain took over Hong Kong, it was a small town with maybe a couple thousand inhabitants. The vast majority of Hong Kong people are immigrants (or their descendants). They knew what they were getting when they voluntarily entered British territory.
In a sense this situation fits the Hobbes narrative perfectly -- British subjects in Hong Kong voluntarily chose to live with the government and accept the social contract in order to escape the harshness of the situation in China, which at many times in the past century was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
And as thus despite the various faults with British rule, in general it did rule with the people's consent as people continued immigrating from mainland China. It doesn't really necessarily speak to good governance on the part of the Brits than the self-selection of pro-British people.
Of course the other reasons in this thread are valid as well. It's a complicated topic.
This is a review of the book “Legacy of Violence” by Caroline Elkins [0], which came out a few days ago in the UK and will be released tomorrow in the US.
> If you work in tech, and live in the UK / USA / Canada / Aus, then you literally owe everything to the Empire.
Um, what? First of all, 1776 was 246 years ago. Saying that we owe it all to them implies that we get zero credit for what we've done since then.
Second, when the US left the British Empire, was the US more democratic, or less? It was more. The US revolted in favor of more democracy (among other things); attributing all the democracy we have to the British Empire is rather a distorted perspective.
Third: Why single out those who work in tech? We didn't derive much of our tech from the British Empire. Sure, they kind of got us started (including in computers). That was decades ago, though (the crossover was probably around the time of Univac I). Not giving any credit to the US invention of the transistor, and the chip, and the CPU chip? Again, that seems like quite a distorted view of history.
Yeah, the continuity of institutions like chattel slavery and the divine right of kings applied to global expansion including but not limited to the brutal subjugation of India for 200 years.
I'm genuinely curious as to how you can come to the conclusion that British expansion promoted democracy. I did a Google search and was able to find reference to a body of literature that seems to suppose that there is correlation between long term survival for post-colonial democracies and the time a colony had spent being rule over by the British. One paper (below) seems to tie democratic elections as being a necessary qualifier for post-colonial independence but that makes sense from a Pinko standpoint-- former colonies which formerly could be dominated through sheer political and military force may be freed from a, "formal" perspective but, "free elections" and the liberalization of the real economy (globalization) creates a new opportunity for global centers of wealth and influence to dominate developing nations without the need to mobilize the political system or military thereby side-stepping the need to garner or manufacturer consent from the public.
Now where exactly do we get a historical pretext for global exceptionality? This is the promotion of, "democracy?" It seems like this is basis of all the nasty things in the world that stifle real self-determination. I now that it's fun to play edge-lord when you feel like no one else has done the reading (believe me I get it) but these simple, "good guy vs bad guy but plot twist the bad guy is actually good" and its reversal amongst people on the left just reeks of a kind of intellectual snobbery which typifies those that are insecure about what they actually know. As an insecure jackass myself I would know. Cheers.
For thousands of years, slavery was ubiquitous. Empire after empire embraced it and used it.
The British Empire, like those before it, profited from slavery.
Then, they virtually extinguished it. Their navy was used to stop the slave trade on the seas. It was outlawed in lands controlled by the Empire. Piratical nations who conducted enslavement raids were supressed.
It took decades and multiple reforms, but the picture of slavery before the British Empire and after are radically different.
Sure the British Navy helped enforce an end to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (slavery, of course, continued for many decades longer on a massive scale in the U.S. and Brazil, among others), but the slave trade is just one of the many crimes against humanity that the British Empire committed. Especially when the result of ending slavery was largely the continued use of colonial subjects as cheap, disposable labor, with poverty, mass famine, and violent repression by British forces continuing.
The British Empire as a project was inherently a massive resource extraction operation. Slavery was just one method to accomplish this goal, and one that they greatly expanded, developed, and promoted before it became economically advantageous for them to phase out. So I don't think they should get any credit for stopping slave traders.
I've always found the lack of context on slavery's history amusing. In our time, it's considered one of the greatest sins. However, if you look just a bit back, it wasn't exclusive to the English-American line, as the twitter take goes, but was was commonplace across human history. Where you found people, you found slavery.
If (and mind you I mean if), the OP here is correct that the British empire had a sizable impact on ending slavery, then they deserve that credit regardless. If they didn't, the that's a far stronger argument to be made.
> In our time, it's considered one of the greatest sins. However, if you look just a bit back, it wasn't exclusive to the English-American line, as the twitter take goes, but was was commonplace across human history. Where you found people, you found slavery.
Wherever there is slavery, you will also find many people opposed to slavery (e.g. the slaves themselves). The idea of liberating slaves is not new; just look back at Spartacus's revolt, for instance, which was not the only slave revolt in Roman history. People knew it was a brutal institution - they were simply conditioned to believe it was a natural part of life, and the slaveholding classes benefited economically from the practice. Of course slavery is a widespread practice in human history. That makes it more horrific, not less. The fact that the British Empire greatly expanded and commercialized the practice reflects pretty badly on them, IMO.
> If (and mind you I mean if), the OP here is correct that the British empire had a sizable impact on ending slavery, then they deserve that credit regardless.
I think it is debatable that they had a sizable impact on the end of slavery itself. They definitely did have a big impact in the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which, keep in mind, they helped create and massively expand for over a century (at least) prior. Can you really give someone credit for ending a horrific practice they promoted/expanded on such a large, intentional scale? This seems like less than the bare minimum to me.
Slavery continued to thrive for many decades in the U.S. and Brazil, among other places. Britain had no qualms in trading with the Confederacy, for instance, a nation explicitly founded on slavery. Nor did it have problems with the tremendous death rates and horrible working conditions of "freed" blacks in their Caribbean colonies.
As I understand it, they did have a sizeable impact on the end of slavery:
From what I remember:
They banned slavery in the UK, and later on in all colonies and territories, and applied diplomatic pressure on other nations to also do so.
They would inspect the cargoes of other nations for slaves, and this led to several threats of war from the USA and other countries.
Also, they would enter Brazilian and other nations ports and seize/destroy property of slavers, and free slaves, etc etc. It would be like the USA doing it today. People would be pissed, but there's no way they're declaring war on the world superpower.
The wiki article is quite interesting:
The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron purely to end the atlantic slave trade. It consisted of a sixth of the entire RN Fleet at the height of its operation. This whole thing operated for about 50 years.
It was considered the most costly international moral action in modern history.
>I think it is debatable that they had a sizable impact on the end of slavery itself. They definitely did have a big impact in the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which, keep in mind, they helped create and massively expand for over a century (at least) prior. Can you really give someone credit for ending a horrific practice they promoted/expanded on such a large, intentional scale? This seems like less than the bare minimum to me.
I'd say yes, I would give them credit. As slavery was a baseline then, then you'd expect slavery quantity to go up with any expansion. The slavery increase would be incidental to the expansion, not the objective itself. If they did then implement policies that then reduced the proportion of slavery, and I won't repeat /u/Andaith's point that they did, then they deserve credit.
Our history rife with things horrific to our modern sensibilities, but to cast away individual steps along the way for their imperfections feels like revisionism.
> Our history rife with things horrific to our modern sensibilities
I want to note that slavery was also horrific to vast numbers of people's sensibilities historically as well. Opposing slavery is not a "modern sensibility"; I can confidently say near 100% of slaves (especially those sent to work in British colonies in the Caribbean) found it horrific to their sensibilities as well.
Abolitionism has a long history and even people who were not abolitionists were capable of being horrified by the system of slavery, especially if witnessing it up close and first-hand. It is only fairly recently (since the 1800s) that Western government policy and the elite classes have become opposed to chattel slavery, true, but these views do not represent everyone's views.
>I can confidently say near 100% of slaves (especially those sent to work in British colonies in the Caribbean) found it horrific to their sensibilities as well.
Oh, I'd definitely agree. But I'd rather we use the general societal opinion here as a gauge. As an analogy, some meat-eaters might find the current factory farming situation horrifying, even if they're not vegetarians. Despite that, I'd be fairly comfortable to say that the general populace is mostly ok with the process (or fantastically insulated).
Always find it amusing liberals think this is some kinda gotcha. We did the imperialist thing and exploited the fuck out of other countries: that is win one. Then a hundred years later we feel bad about about it in order to feel morally superior and pat ourselves on the back: win two.
In 2022 who are still running this planet? Jamaica? India?
30 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadI'm not saying the sentiment is wrong per se, but Hong Kong is a bad example. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Hong...>Grantham convinced London to scrap all plans for political reform on the basis that it did not "interest the British electorate". Later, when confronted by the Hong Kong public, he blamed London.
1980s:
>British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe further promised the democratic process would start "in the years immediately ahead", but they stalled due to opposition from Beijing, local business interests as represented by Executive Council, and the British Foreign Office under the pretext that it would bring chaos to Hong Kong.
Not nearly as simple as you are portraying it either..
Was Hong Kong not to be a halo territory for democracy in the region?
Given the state of freedom in Hong Kong vs the PRC one could take the position that substantially all the 'western' freedoms enjoyed in Hong Kong are in fact enjoyed thanks to the British.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying UK is a dictatorship, but if you pay "lip service" in the hundreds of millions to billions of pounds then you really can't claim that the monarch is a mere figurehead.
To your point, they're not democracies, they're constitutional monarchies - but functionally that's inconsequential in this day and age. In large part because if the royals ever exercised their veto, the whole system would fall in on itself. It's been over a hundred years since the last veto in any commonwealth realm near as I can figure.
I've nothing against the monarchy because it makes the highest elected office in the land a public servant - as it should be. It's small, but it's meaningful IMO.
To me your question is roughly equivalent to asking "how much can the US care about democracy when it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic? The president has veto power, and look how fancy the White House is!"
Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and many other modern systems are ruled with the consent of the governed, and they pick their functional leaders. The rest is an implementation detail, with various pros and cons.
The Queen last exercised her veto in 1999. Nothing fell in on itself and that is by design; the Queen is sovereign and parliament is subordinate to her.
I may not have been eloquent but I meant in matters outside of the UK. Trust me, if the Queen tried to withhold Royal Ascent in Canada it would trigger a constitutional crisis. I'm sure this is true elsewhere.
When Britain took over Hong Kong, it was a small town with maybe a couple thousand inhabitants. The vast majority of Hong Kong people are immigrants (or their descendants). They knew what they were getting when they voluntarily entered British territory.
In a sense this situation fits the Hobbes narrative perfectly -- British subjects in Hong Kong voluntarily chose to live with the government and accept the social contract in order to escape the harshness of the situation in China, which at many times in the past century was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
And as thus despite the various faults with British rule, in general it did rule with the people's consent as people continued immigrating from mainland China. It doesn't really necessarily speak to good governance on the part of the Brits than the self-selection of pro-British people.
Of course the other reasons in this thread are valid as well. It's a complicated topic.
[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/45877/legacy-of-vio...
The ends does not justify the means, ever.
This is true. And the rest of the world can enjoy the consequences of having been raped.
Um, what? First of all, 1776 was 246 years ago. Saying that we owe it all to them implies that we get zero credit for what we've done since then.
Second, when the US left the British Empire, was the US more democratic, or less? It was more. The US revolted in favor of more democracy (among other things); attributing all the democracy we have to the British Empire is rather a distorted perspective.
Third: Why single out those who work in tech? We didn't derive much of our tech from the British Empire. Sure, they kind of got us started (including in computers). That was decades ago, though (the crossover was probably around the time of Univac I). Not giving any credit to the US invention of the transistor, and the chip, and the CPU chip? Again, that seems like quite a distorted view of history.
I'm genuinely curious as to how you can come to the conclusion that British expansion promoted democracy. I did a Google search and was able to find reference to a body of literature that seems to suppose that there is correlation between long term survival for post-colonial democracies and the time a colony had spent being rule over by the British. One paper (below) seems to tie democratic elections as being a necessary qualifier for post-colonial independence but that makes sense from a Pinko standpoint-- former colonies which formerly could be dominated through sheer political and military force may be freed from a, "formal" perspective but, "free elections" and the liberalization of the real economy (globalization) creates a new opportunity for global centers of wealth and influence to dominate developing nations without the need to mobilize the political system or military thereby side-stepping the need to garner or manufacturer consent from the public.
Now where exactly do we get a historical pretext for global exceptionality? This is the promotion of, "democracy?" It seems like this is basis of all the nasty things in the world that stifle real self-determination. I now that it's fun to play edge-lord when you feel like no one else has done the reading (believe me I get it) but these simple, "good guy vs bad guy but plot twist the bad guy is actually good" and its reversal amongst people on the left just reeks of a kind of intellectual snobbery which typifies those that are insecure about what they actually know. As an insecure jackass myself I would know. Cheers.
rochester.edu/college/faculty/alexander_lee/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Lee-and-Paine-Britain-and-democracy.pdf
Enough said …. The truth is out in the open now and for everyone to see in plain sight.
But also now the tables have turned.
The British Empire, like those before it, profited from slavery.
Then, they virtually extinguished it. Their navy was used to stop the slave trade on the seas. It was outlawed in lands controlled by the Empire. Piratical nations who conducted enslavement raids were supressed.
It took decades and multiple reforms, but the picture of slavery before the British Empire and after are radically different.
The British Empire as a project was inherently a massive resource extraction operation. Slavery was just one method to accomplish this goal, and one that they greatly expanded, developed, and promoted before it became economically advantageous for them to phase out. So I don't think they should get any credit for stopping slave traders.
If (and mind you I mean if), the OP here is correct that the British empire had a sizable impact on ending slavery, then they deserve that credit regardless. If they didn't, the that's a far stronger argument to be made.
Wherever there is slavery, you will also find many people opposed to slavery (e.g. the slaves themselves). The idea of liberating slaves is not new; just look back at Spartacus's revolt, for instance, which was not the only slave revolt in Roman history. People knew it was a brutal institution - they were simply conditioned to believe it was a natural part of life, and the slaveholding classes benefited economically from the practice. Of course slavery is a widespread practice in human history. That makes it more horrific, not less. The fact that the British Empire greatly expanded and commercialized the practice reflects pretty badly on them, IMO.
> If (and mind you I mean if), the OP here is correct that the British empire had a sizable impact on ending slavery, then they deserve that credit regardless.
I think it is debatable that they had a sizable impact on the end of slavery itself. They definitely did have a big impact in the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which, keep in mind, they helped create and massively expand for over a century (at least) prior. Can you really give someone credit for ending a horrific practice they promoted/expanded on such a large, intentional scale? This seems like less than the bare minimum to me.
Slavery continued to thrive for many decades in the U.S. and Brazil, among other places. Britain had no qualms in trading with the Confederacy, for instance, a nation explicitly founded on slavery. Nor did it have problems with the tremendous death rates and horrible working conditions of "freed" blacks in their Caribbean colonies.
From what I remember: They banned slavery in the UK, and later on in all colonies and territories, and applied diplomatic pressure on other nations to also do so. They would inspect the cargoes of other nations for slaves, and this led to several threats of war from the USA and other countries. Also, they would enter Brazilian and other nations ports and seize/destroy property of slavers, and free slaves, etc etc. It would be like the USA doing it today. People would be pissed, but there's no way they're declaring war on the world superpower.
The wiki article is quite interesting: The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron purely to end the atlantic slave trade. It consisted of a sixth of the entire RN Fleet at the height of its operation. This whole thing operated for about 50 years.
It was considered the most costly international moral action in modern history.
I'd say yes, I would give them credit. As slavery was a baseline then, then you'd expect slavery quantity to go up with any expansion. The slavery increase would be incidental to the expansion, not the objective itself. If they did then implement policies that then reduced the proportion of slavery, and I won't repeat /u/Andaith's point that they did, then they deserve credit.
Our history rife with things horrific to our modern sensibilities, but to cast away individual steps along the way for their imperfections feels like revisionism.
I want to note that slavery was also horrific to vast numbers of people's sensibilities historically as well. Opposing slavery is not a "modern sensibility"; I can confidently say near 100% of slaves (especially those sent to work in British colonies in the Caribbean) found it horrific to their sensibilities as well.
Abolitionism has a long history and even people who were not abolitionists were capable of being horrified by the system of slavery, especially if witnessing it up close and first-hand. It is only fairly recently (since the 1800s) that Western government policy and the elite classes have become opposed to chattel slavery, true, but these views do not represent everyone's views.
Oh, I'd definitely agree. But I'd rather we use the general societal opinion here as a gauge. As an analogy, some meat-eaters might find the current factory farming situation horrifying, even if they're not vegetarians. Despite that, I'd be fairly comfortable to say that the general populace is mostly ok with the process (or fantastically insulated).
In 2022 who are still running this planet? Jamaica? India?
Perfidious Albion doesn't begin to describe it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidious_Albion