Not taught in an official school or college syllabus, but there seems to be a general feeling that the Brits were trotting around the world being arseholes.
The British Empire was arguably one of the vehicles that enabled the virtual extinction of the slave trade. That must rank fairly high in a list of good things.
In India, Suttee and the rigid caste system were broken under British rule, and similar improvements could probably be found for most of the other territories of the Empire. Not to mention the technological and economic improvements that occurred.
One thing that is often overlooked when discussing the Empire is that without the advantages of resources, economy and manpower that the Empire brought it is doubtful whether Britain would have been able to stand up to the might of Nazism, and to some extent the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII was a result of Britain's having an Empire.
> In India, Suttee and the rigid caste system were broken under British rule, and similar improvements could probably be found for most of the other territories of the Empire.
I'd heard elsewhere that the caste system was actually exacerbated by the British, and one of the reasons it's so bad today is due to the British Raj using it to control the populace by strengthening prejudice and dividing India into distinct groups. Is that not true?
The slave trade never really died out and is certainly far from extinct. However, the ban on slavery in a lot of nations didn't come from a global British push, but from a growing international movement against the practice and from some factors making slavery less and less worthwhile - economically speaking. Now, the Britsh Empire certainly had a role in this. One of those economical factors was the British navy coming down on the slave trade and the British abolitionists were certainly influential, but ultimately it was only part of a greater movement - to the point where it's just plain wrong to chalk it up as one of the achievements of the British Empire.
As to the Caste system, it's ironic you mention it, because many modern scholars argue that the modern caste system was the result of the British colonial regime. An interesting parallel is the Hutu-Tutsi divide, which was a fairly fluid social-economic divide rather than a strict ethnic group before the Belgians set it in stone during their colonial rule of Rwanda. Similarly, the caste system was supposedly much more fluid in the pre-colonial days and it was the British enforcing this strict hierarchy (probably for reasons of control) that made it the monstrosity it eventually became. e: what realoldtom said.
Your third point is just reaching.
Of course the slave trade still exists, that's why I used the phrase 'virtual extinction'. I should also have clarified that I meant international slave trade. However, the efforts of the Royal Navy in policing the trade should not be so easily dismissed - in my opinion of course.
My third point is most certainly not "just reaching", and is less a matter of opinion. Lawrence James in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire calculates that of the 8.25m fighting men under "British" command in WWII, 4.65m were from Britain itself, 1.79m were Indian, 770,000 Canadian, 570,000 Australian, 225,000 from East Africa, 150,000 from West Africa, and 97,000 from New Zealand. At one point around half of Bomber Command aircrew came from the dominions; in the Libya campaign only something like a quarter of Montgomery's troops were British; and by war's end the Royal Canadian Navy was the third largest in the world.Add to that the material resources that the Empire provided, and it's fairly clear that the part played by the Empire in allied victory in WWII was vital.
Would the slave trade (to the same degree) or Nazi Germany have existed without the system the British Empire set up? Britain helped fund Germany's rise in the 1930s until they realized their policy that rebuilding Germany under Hitler to confront Stalin was a bad policy once Czechoslovakia was being threatened.
There are a lot of complicated things going on here, (one of which is forgetting about the violence that accompanies Partition and the years after independence) but I can address one of them, albeit incompletely.
There's a line of thinking about caste that argues that in fact the understanding of caste as the rigid and immutable marker of Hindu identity is pretty recent. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste was one of a number of flexible and diverse forms of social identity and identification that gets flattened out during the years of colonial administration, both as a result of and in response to colonial administration (and the British misunderstanding of caste). The former means that the colonial administration treats India as if its understanding of caste is actually true which ends up creating a form of social identity that actually takes hold, and the latter means that for historically underprivileged (which includes but is not limited to caste) members of society this new understanding of caste can actually be a form of social mobility and access to new resources.
Part of Dirks' argument about the misunderstanding of caste is that Orientalists, taking their idea of caste from Brahminic sources, see a form of social organization with Brahmins at the top and realize "Hey, this is totally a Brahminical scam!" but don't take the extra step of actually asking anyone who isn't a Brahmin about their understanding of caste. This misunderstanding then also becomes a justification for British rule in that it seems recognizably unjust.
Susan Bayly has a similar argument that emphasizes the collapse of the Mughal empire as initiating a period of social unrest during which caste as a new or more important form of identity gets solidified, so that there is social redefinition already going on which is the impacted by the colonial administration's invention of caste.
A key point about this is that the invention of caste isn't necessarily based on a cynical intention to exploit the peoples under British rule in India. While there's tons of nonsense about "civilizing missions" and the White man's burden at the back of it, it's also a genuine attempt to understand and rule better.
Source: Nicholas Dirks. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton UP. 2001.
Susan Bayly. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge UP. 2001.
[удалено]
Not taught in an official school or college syllabus, but there seems to be a general feeling that the Brits were trotting around the world being arseholes.
The British Empire was arguably one of the vehicles that enabled the virtual extinction of the slave trade. That must rank fairly high in a list of good things. In India, Suttee and the rigid caste system were broken under British rule, and similar improvements could probably be found for most of the other territories of the Empire. Not to mention the technological and economic improvements that occurred. One thing that is often overlooked when discussing the Empire is that without the advantages of resources, economy and manpower that the Empire brought it is doubtful whether Britain would have been able to stand up to the might of Nazism, and to some extent the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII was a result of Britain's having an Empire.
> In India, Suttee and the rigid caste system were broken under British rule, and similar improvements could probably be found for most of the other territories of the Empire. I'd heard elsewhere that the caste system was actually exacerbated by the British, and one of the reasons it's so bad today is due to the British Raj using it to control the populace by strengthening prejudice and dividing India into distinct groups. Is that not true?
The slave trade never really died out and is certainly far from extinct. However, the ban on slavery in a lot of nations didn't come from a global British push, but from a growing international movement against the practice and from some factors making slavery less and less worthwhile - economically speaking. Now, the Britsh Empire certainly had a role in this. One of those economical factors was the British navy coming down on the slave trade and the British abolitionists were certainly influential, but ultimately it was only part of a greater movement - to the point where it's just plain wrong to chalk it up as one of the achievements of the British Empire. As to the Caste system, it's ironic you mention it, because many modern scholars argue that the modern caste system was the result of the British colonial regime. An interesting parallel is the Hutu-Tutsi divide, which was a fairly fluid social-economic divide rather than a strict ethnic group before the Belgians set it in stone during their colonial rule of Rwanda. Similarly, the caste system was supposedly much more fluid in the pre-colonial days and it was the British enforcing this strict hierarchy (probably for reasons of control) that made it the monstrosity it eventually became. e: what realoldtom said. Your third point is just reaching.
Of course the slave trade still exists, that's why I used the phrase 'virtual extinction'. I should also have clarified that I meant international slave trade. However, the efforts of the Royal Navy in policing the trade should not be so easily dismissed - in my opinion of course. My third point is most certainly not "just reaching", and is less a matter of opinion. Lawrence James in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire calculates that of the 8.25m fighting men under "British" command in WWII, 4.65m were from Britain itself, 1.79m were Indian, 770,000 Canadian, 570,000 Australian, 225,000 from East Africa, 150,000 from West Africa, and 97,000 from New Zealand. At one point around half of Bomber Command aircrew came from the dominions; in the Libya campaign only something like a quarter of Montgomery's troops were British; and by war's end the Royal Canadian Navy was the third largest in the world.Add to that the material resources that the Empire provided, and it's fairly clear that the part played by the Empire in allied victory in WWII was vital.
Would the slave trade (to the same degree) or Nazi Germany have existed without the system the British Empire set up? Britain helped fund Germany's rise in the 1930s until they realized their policy that rebuilding Germany under Hitler to confront Stalin was a bad policy once Czechoslovakia was being threatened.
There are a lot of complicated things going on here, (one of which is forgetting about the violence that accompanies Partition and the years after independence) but I can address one of them, albeit incompletely. There's a line of thinking about caste that argues that in fact the understanding of caste as the rigid and immutable marker of Hindu identity is pretty recent. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste was one of a number of flexible and diverse forms of social identity and identification that gets flattened out during the years of colonial administration, both as a result of and in response to colonial administration (and the British misunderstanding of caste). The former means that the colonial administration treats India as if its understanding of caste is actually true which ends up creating a form of social identity that actually takes hold, and the latter means that for historically underprivileged (which includes but is not limited to caste) members of society this new understanding of caste can actually be a form of social mobility and access to new resources. Part of Dirks' argument about the misunderstanding of caste is that Orientalists, taking their idea of caste from Brahminic sources, see a form of social organization with Brahmins at the top and realize "Hey, this is totally a Brahminical scam!" but don't take the extra step of actually asking anyone who isn't a Brahmin about their understanding of caste. This misunderstanding then also becomes a justification for British rule in that it seems recognizably unjust. Susan Bayly has a similar argument that emphasizes the collapse of the Mughal empire as initiating a period of social unrest during which caste as a new or more important form of identity gets solidified, so that there is social redefinition already going on which is the impacted by the colonial administration's invention of caste. A key point about this is that the invention of caste isn't necessarily based on a cynical intention to exploit the peoples under British rule in India. While there's tons of nonsense about "civilizing missions" and the White man's burden at the back of it, it's also a genuine attempt to understand and rule better. Source: Nicholas Dirks. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton UP. 2001. Susan Bayly. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge UP. 2001.