Was Colonialism a good thing?

[peonyu]

It doesnt matter if it was good or bad, there was a oppurtunity for Europeans to easily take over other countries for thier benefit and wealth...And they did it. If they didnt do it then others would have IF they had the technology and capability to do it. The closest to a non-European nation taking advantage of other countries being weak at that time is Japan...But they were to little to late, on the scene for colonizing.

As for how it effected the people...It effected them greatly. But it is how it is, if Europe didnt do it then perhaps a hundred years later the Chinese or Japanese would have done it.

Good or bad though ? Good overall. It forced the world into the modern age.

 

[RabidMongoose]

I would say that's the way things were rather than the way they should be...

The reason the British (etc) took over the world is because they could, not because they were any more bloodthirsty than anyone else, or any more immoral. If the japanese (to pick one randomly) or anyone else could have done it they would have. People just didn't think like we do now.

Nobody can tell how the world would have turned out without coloinialism, but right now (partly because of the exploitation of the past) we are in a position to do things a different way.

Somehow I don't think that it would be so easy for other civilizations to ruthlessly murder hundreds of millions of people like the British did. No, I don't think that anyone else would have been as immoral and bloodthirsty as the British - the true Empire of Death.

 

[Zebo]

Somehow I don't think that it would be so easy for other civilizations to ruthlessly murder hundreds of millions of people like the British did. No, I don't think that anyone else would have been as immoral and bloodthirsty as the British - the true Empire of Death.

It's happening very easy to this day and no ones doing anything about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur

Or do you only pay attention when British did it ages ago? And hundreds of million LOL. Get a clue.

Even the Sultans only Killed about 80 million Indians.

 

[Zebo]

It doesnt matter if it was good or bad, there was a oppurtunity for Europeans to easily take over other countries for thier benefit and wealth...And they did it. If they didnt do it then others would have IF they had the technology and capability to do it. The closest to a non-European nation taking advantage of other countries being weak at that time is Japan...But they were to little to late, on the scene for colonizing.

As for how it effected the people...It effected them greatly. But it is how it is, if Europe didnt do it then perhaps a hundred years later the Chinese or Japanese would have done it.

Good or bad though ? Good overall. It forced the world into the modern age.

What do you mean 'if' They did. Mongols still have largest empire record land wise. Arab Conquests are second then British. Japanese are fourth who once ruled all of SE Asia and half china..

 

[Madwand1]

When I was young and growing up in India 60s and 70s I used to hear my Dad berate the rulers of newly independent India and longing for the good old days of British rule. Being fed on a constant diet of post-independence patriotism in school, I used to laugh at him but, over the decades, I am wondering if there was an element of truth to his views on British rule. Most of the newly minted leaders of post-colonial rule were in essence British in their outlook (many, like Gandhi, were in fact a product of the British education system) but when they took over they just couldn't keep a lid on old loyalties based on tribal, feudal, religious, caste and various other relationships. This is the basic reason why countries like Zimbabwe and Yemen have spun out of control and various others like Kenya and Pakistan are on the verge of doing so. As an Indian, I think it's only Gandhi's work in forcing Indians to look at and correct their own shortcomings that has kept such fissiparous tendencies at bay.

How so? British rule was one of the strong over the weak, and of exploiting other groups for the specific benefit of their own, and the primary distinction in this context was that they were able to supply clearly-defined power and stability through that power in contrast to those fighting for power in the resultant power vacuum who are arguably doing nothing more than trying to follow the same principle of unequal rule of force for the benefit of their own group.

Multiple cultures have co-existed in India and elsewhere for centuries, and Indians claim to have given the British and the world a lesson on tolerance and peace, while colonial powers have been known to exploit and hence heighten ethnic divisions for their own benefit and disastrous results upon departure.

The bit about "product of the British education system" is especially bad, because that same British education system was responsible for the continued intellectual stagnation of India as it was meant to produce, as it did, subservient clerks to help manage a vast subservient bureaucracy. To claim that the likes of Ghandhi and Aurobindo, who fought against British rule, were mere "products of the British education system" is to demean them. Aurobindo has written much on the subject, which he knew it by living it, and makes that specific point -- that the remaining points of vitality in India during British rule were the schools which taught in the ancient Indian languages and maintained a connection with that philosophy, and didn't allow themselves to be entirely degraded to the task of producing subservient clerks well-versed in the superiority of mother England.

That said, Aurobindo also states that British rule was an act of Nature caused in part by the stagnation of an aged and stale religiosity in India, and that to be ruled by Britian was far better than for example a rule by Germany or Russia might have been -- cultures which would not have been as concerned about looking good.

But that was then and this is now, and it's all good, and bad, depending on how you look at it.

 

[RabidMongoose]

It's happening very easy to this day and no ones doing anything about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur

Or do you only pay attention when British did it ages ago? And hundreds of million LOL. Get a clue.

Even the Sultans only Killed about 80 million Indians.

I think you're the one who needs to get a clue. The British Empire, aka the British Death Machine, is one of the most genocidal powers in human history.

 

[Zebo]

I think you're the one who needs to get a clue. The British Empire, aka the British Death Machine, is one of the most genocidal powers in human history.

Not even top 10.

 

[RabidMongoose]

You must be joking. Or, as your avatar likely suggests, incredibly biased.

 

[CanOWorms]

I would say that's the way things were rather than the way they should be...

The reason the British (etc) took over the world is because they could, not because they were any more bloodthirsty than anyone else, or any more immoral. If the japanese (to pick one randomly) or anyone else could have done it they would have. People just didn't think like we do now.

Nobody can tell how the world would have turned out without coloinialism, but right now (partly because of the exploitation of the past) we are in a position to do things a different way.

Sorry, but they were more immoral than others. They continued to attempt to retain a ruthless grip on so many colonies well past any era where colonialism and slavery were acceptable. Their WW2 and post-WW2 colonialist history is especially horrible. Luckily they were defeated multiple times, ultimately turning into the pathetic country it is today.

 

[CanOWorms]

It's happening very easy to this day and no ones doing anything about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur

Or do you only pay attention when British did it ages ago? And hundreds of million LOL. Get a clue.

Even the Sultans only Killed about 80 million Indians.

Wow, denying a Holocaust. Good job.

Tallying the number of deaths during the man-made famines induced by the British would alone equal over 100 million. In just their Indian slave colony and only considering the major famines, over 50 million were killed by the British. Tallying up the deaths from all the man-made famines + all the colonies = hundreds of millions or even over a billion lives the British eliminated throughout the world.

 

[txrandom]

Many of my Indian friends are glad the British colonized India. Although it may have temporarily made life bad for their ancestors, the country is better off as a whole than it would have been without western influence. None of them would be in the US studying engineering without British colonialism.

 

[GroundedSailor]

How so? British rule was one of the strong over the weak, and of exploiting other groups for the specific benefit of their own, and the primary distinction in this context was that they were able to supply clearly-defined power and stability through that power in contrast to those fighting for power in the resultant power vacuum who are arguably doing nothing more than trying to follow the same principle of unequal rule of force for the benefit of their own group.

Multiple cultures have co-existed in India and elsewhere for centuries, and Indians claim to have given the British and the world a lesson on tolerance and peace, while colonial powers have been known to exploit and hence heighten ethnic divisions for their own benefit and disastrous results upon departure.

The bit about "product of the British education system" is especially bad, because that same British education system was responsible for the continued intellectual stagnation of India as it was meant to produce, as it did, subservient clerks to help manage a vast subservient bureaucracy. To claim that the likes of Ghandhi and Aurobindo, who fought against British rule, were mere "products of the British education system" is to demean them. Aurobindo has written much on the subject, which he knew it by living it, and makes that specific point -- that the remaining points of vitality in India during British rule were the schools which taught in the ancient Indian languages and maintained a connection with that philosophy, and didn't allow themselves to be entirely degraded to the task of producing subservient clerks well-versed in the superiority of mother England.

That said, Aurobindo also states that British rule was an act of Nature caused in part by the stagnation of an aged and stale religiosity in India, and that to be ruled by Britian was far better than for example a rule by Germany or Russia might have been -- cultures which would not have been as concerned about looking good.

But that was then and this is now, and it's all good, and bad, depending on how you look at it.

Well said. The younger generation seems to have forgotten why the British went to India in the first place and what they did during their rule. One just has to look at the education system and bureaucracy in India to see the legacy of the brits.

Unfortunately even today the attitudes of many Indians are stuck in the time warp of British rule. Gandhi was one who opposed British on equal terms. His was not the attitude of a slave rebelling against his master, rather of an independent person seeking to stop humiliation against himself and his countrymen.

 

[peonyu]

What do you mean 'if' They did. Mongols still have largest empire record land wise. Arab Conquests are second then British. Japanese are fourth who once ruled all of SE Asia and half china..

Those were different than what the British did. The british ruled with thier white power racist fists - oppressing non-white minorities. While the Arabs only sought to spread Islam, the Mongols to spread buddhism and the Japanese to force racism out of Asia [the british].

 

[Obsoleet]

Guess you'd like it or not depending if you're brown or if you're white.

 

[OutHouse]

OP would your country be better off if the british were still a presence or not?

thanks for starting a interesting thread,

 

[Zebo]

Those were different than what the British did. The british ruled with thier white power racist fists - oppressing non-white minorities. While the Arabs only sought to spread Islam, the Mongols to spread buddhism and the Japanese to force racism out of Asia [the british].

So let me get this straight when British did it it's about white power but others do it it has no racial element? Please it's all about exploitation and conquest. What's race got to do with it exactly, explain? Brits committed genocide against white Boers in South Africa and White Irish in Ireland. They didnt care it's about power and wealth it brings.

You really need to read about mongols- They wiped out whole nations leaving nothing but bones. Baghdad probably the science and art capital at the time was totally eradicated in the 14 century.

Arabs forced other nations to take their names and language and killed by the millions. Just Wiki berbers or Muslim conquest of India where some historians put number of hindus killed at 80 million.

There is a reason lots of people like the British because they were humane relatively to their own rulers, read the article.

 

[Whitecloak]

on the whole, the brits were good for india.

 

[Craig234]

on the whole, the brits were good for india.

Must be why Inida would have agreed to it if they were asked.

Nothing like rationalizing away selfish exploitation with mass murder, if it has bennies.

Maybe Chinas should take over the US at gunpoint, and instill some 'efficiency' and 'order' the way a totalitarian government can, chop our deficit, kill a few million then say 'they're better off that we did'.

 

[Zebo]

Wow, denying a Holocaust. Good job.

Tallying the number of deaths during the man-made famines induced by the British would alone equal over 100 million. In just their Indian slave colony and only considering the major famines, over 50 million were killed by the British. Tallying up the deaths from all the man-made famines + all the colonies = hundreds of millions or even over a billion lives the British eliminated throughout the world.

Scholarly Documentation please. I Googled Indian genocide and genocide in India and all I get is Initial Muslim genocide when conquering ~80M, the genocide by Pakistani army in 1971 ~3M, gender genocide~10M, and about 3.5 million starved by British. Hardly hundreds of millions let alone billions.

 

[Zebo]

You must be joking. Or, as your avatar likely suggests, incredibly biased.

I have no love for Brits buy Lawrence was a man for all peoples like we all should be. Are you Indian?

I think I found where bias lies and desire to blame all things on Brits -

Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called negationism. The really daring negationists don't just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is routinely alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality, Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule, but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.

I guess it's a good idea when you nukes pointing at each other over there though.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/irin/genocide.html

 

[CanOWorms]

Scholarly Documentation please. I Googled Indian genocide and genocide in India and all I get is Initial Muslim genocide when conquering ~80M, the genocide by Pakistani army in 1971 ~3M, gender genocide~10M, and about 3.5 million starved by British. Hardly hundreds of millions let alone billions.

I suggest you read Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts and also the research of Amartya Sen. Sen won a Nobel Prize in Economics in part due to his research on famines. He was a survivor of the 1943 Bengal famine.

Wikipedia does a decent job on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Famines.2C_epidemics.2C_and_public_health

An easy read is Johann Hari's article which caused pro-imperialism historians to go into a rage. He cites 29 millions deaths just from famines in the late 19th century alone:

The truth? Our empire killed millions
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...-truth-our-empire-killed-millions-404631.html

We are still a nation locked in denial. If you point out basic facts about the British Empire - that the British deliberately adopted policies that caused as many as 29 million Indians to starve to death in the late 19th century, say - you smack into a wall of incomprehension and rage.

He slammed into reverse, and began to conduct experiments to see how little food Indians could survive on, noting coldly in his book when "strapping fine fellows" were reduced to "little more than animated skeletons ... utterly unfit for any work". In the average British labour camp that Temple was ordered to set up, inmates were given fewer daily calories than if they had ended up in Buchenwald 80 years later. This new Temple was praised by his imperial masters as a fine example. If you study the records, you can see this pattern practised as deliberate policy all over India.

If you think about it, the horrifying tools most discussed which were used by the Nazis, Japanese, and USSR were utilized by the British yet people seem to ignore it. The British popularized concentration camps in Africa. They utilized famines just like the USSR in the Holodomor. And they experimented on people like the Japanese.

All of those empires are popularly viewed as evil and most people don't seem to deny those atrocities. Yet it's common place when it comes to the British Empire.

 

[Zebo]

I suggest you read Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts and also the research of Amartya Sen. Sen won a Nobel Prize in Economics in part due to his research on famines. He was a survivor of the 1943 Bengal famine.

Wikipedia does a decent job on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Famines.2C_epidemics.2C_and_public_health

An easy read is Johann Hari's article which caused pro-imperialism historians to go into a rage. He cites 29 millions deaths just from famines in the late 19th century alone:

The truth? Our empire killed millions
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...-truth-our-empire-killed-millions-404631.html

If you think about it, the horrifying tools most discussed which were used by the Nazis, Japanese, and USSR were utilized by the British yet people seem to ignore it. The British popularized concentration camps in Africa. They utilized famines just like the USSR in the Holodomor. And they experimented on people like the Japanese.

All of those empires are popularly viewed as evil and most people don't seem to deny those atrocities. Yet it's common place when it comes to the British Empire.

So in other words you found a journalist and a language professor and dismiss peer reviewed historians as 'pro-imperialism'. That makes no sense unless your only goal is to demonize the British. Which seems entirely probable since you also ignore other great empires, their conquests, and destruction and solely focus on Brits. Also you Ignore modern genocides we should be drawing attention to which can actually be stopped. Not just here either almost every post. So what's the deal?

 

[DesiPower]

For India "Colonialism" was a very good thing. I have 3 reasons for that:
(All considering Britishers never ruled India)

1.The modern Infrastructure of Rails and Roads would have very likely not been there in 1947.

2. "India" would have been much smaller geographically. No one united India like the Britishers, Southern and Eastern India would have been separate countries.

3. India (north central which would have been a separate country) would have become a "Muslim nation".

 

[BladeVenom]

For what it's worth,

The “annual death rate” in India declined from a genocidal 3.5% in 1947 under the racist British to about 0.9% now (still twice what it should be). The death rate up to about 1920 was an appalling 4.8 %. The avoidable mortality in India under the British was about 0.6 billion (1747-1831), 0.5 billion (under Queen Victoria, 1837-1901) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947). Things dramatically improved after Independence with India’s population soaring from about 0.35 billion (1947) to over 1.0 billion (2006). Nevertheless, the “Indian élite” learned well from the genocidal “British Establishment”, and while the catastrophic famines of British India ceased after Independence, the Indian Establishment was much less successful at dealing with endemic poverty than the Chinese. Thus the post-1950 avoidable mortality has totalled 352 million for India (present population 1097 million) as compared to 156 million for China (present population 1322 million) – these figures reflecting the realities of poor, “greatest democracy”, emergent India and rich, burgeoning, “great power” China.

-- http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5668/26/

I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but the part about famines is true.

 

[feralkid]

Colonialism is good as long as it is Christ based.

Tap...tap...tap.

Nope, can't get a clear reading.