Post by nemolives on Nov 15, 2016 21:52:26 GMT
Actually, that's not really true; we were never a slave owning nation; we were a slave trading nation. We sold the slaves to you, they never really set foot in the United Kingdom itself. And we didn't really conquer countries; we turned up, said "Hey, who here wants to be on our side?!" found some local allies, bribed the hell out of them, gave them a lot of our much better guns, and used them to conquer the country on our behalf... because we never had the money or the troops to hold that huge Empire directly.
Hence the famous Slave Triangle. Local allies in Africa enslaved other people and sold them to us. We sailed them from Africa to America and then sold them to you Americans, who didn't seem to mind owning slaves. We then bought your tobacco and cotton and sailed it to our ports in the UK, and made manufactured goods out of them, whilst pretending it had nothing to do with slaves, because people here did mind that. We sold those manufactured goods to who ever wanted them, and then sent the profits back out to Africa to buy more enslaved people.
At least until 1807 when we banned the Slave Trade; but by then our Industrial Revolution was beginning, you'd gone Independent so we didn't fancy helping a competitor, and we found money was so much more powerful than ships or guns... so much so we banned slavery outright a few decades later, which didn't upset our true rulers all that much because people who think they are free are so much easier to bribe and cajole than people who know they're slaves. See the various Indian and Canadian wars where we got to annoy the US lots and lots without sending tonnes of our own troops, because we had lots of local allies to do it for us now instead.
Bit us in the ass when those far flung locals all went for Independence in the 1900s of course, because by then they'd got their own entrenched local power structures (including some with tragic consequences, like white power in South Africa); but the Victorians got a century or so of "Empire" they couldn't otherwise have held anyway, and did it on the cheap, so I'm sure if they weren't all long dead by then, they'd have thought it was all worth while.
The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”.
You forget about the West Indies sugar trade. And opium in India.
The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed link
And come on, the Brits didn't just "show up" and say, "who is on our side?" They "showed up" to exploit both people and resources to grow an empire. That's what empires do. It just happened to spread to N. America and all these European countries wanted resources. For pete's sake, look at Christopher Columbus - Spain - enslaving the indigenous population and forcing them in sexual acts, gold mining, giving any amount of wealth they had. One of the reasons it failed is that native populations refused to be slaves. But eventually gunfire overcame everything and everyone, to get the goods they were after.
Come on, none of you can dispute this BS.
America is not lily white, it never has been. It's been at the heart of domination, conquests for riches, and trampling over anyone and anything that gets in its way. America has never been a "peaceful country." It's literally been at war since they set foot in N. America - either outright wars or secret wars with the CIA.
That's not left wing or liberal. It's factual history.
Well firstly, "Public" school in England actually means "Private" weirdly, so most of us aren't Public School Educated. That's the OxBridge Toff Set when you refer to Public School Boys here. And this matters because it's the Public Educated that hate our educational system, because the State run system actually goes into great detail about the flaws of the British Empire.
Yes, when we compensated slave owners, we freed 800,000 slaves... which is an abhorrent amount of individuals on it's own. But remember we controlled at our peak a quarter of the entire globe. Set against that, 800,000 is nothing. If you want to talk about hidden history, we had more troops from India alone fighting in the First World War for the Empire than that. More than a million of 'em. You never see them in the pictures, hence the dumb outrage about having Indian faces in Battlefield 1 say because nationalist history likes to pretend they didn't exist, but they were there and fought all the same. The British Empire was acting on the scale of multiple millions.
You're mistaking emotive symbols with actual facts too though. Obviously as a slave trading nation, we must have temporarily owned some slaves as a matter of course. But we simply didn't enslave everywhere we went, we couldn't, there were just too many places we were trying to steal. And if you don't understand how we did it, you won't understand what the actual evil was, and won't have a clue how to fight it again. I say we turned up and asked who wanted to be our allies, because that's what we did to get access to the resources we wanted. And it was also much more efficient for us to do that.
You mention the West Indies Sugar Trade; we know all about that, the boycotting of the Sugar Trade is taught as one of the core moral movements in British Abolitionism. The UK's role in the Slave trade has been compulsory in Secondary Education for nearly 8 years now. Even the state funded BBC has details for children hosted on its webpage (much to the rage of the Tory Right). Our state schools really aren't as shit as Americas. It's considered actually rather British to mock our own arrogant past. We love the underdog, and now we actually are one, it's doubley good!
You mention Opium in India. But we didn't have Slavery in India. In fact, British rule in India begins with building a factory, and then setting up a trading company. Yes, they then hired mercenaries to fight for them; but note this paragraph;
The proliferation of the Company's power chiefly took two forms. The first of these was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions, which collectively came to comprise British India. The annexed regions included the North-Western Provinces (comprising Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur, and the Doab) (1801), Delhi (1803), Assam (Ahom Kingdom 1828), and Sindh (1843). Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir, were annexed after the Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1849–56 (Period of tenure of Marquess of Dalhousie Governor General); however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of Amritsar (1850) to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu, and thereby became a princely state. In 1854 Berar was annexed, and the state of Oudh two years later.[8]
The second form of asserting power involved treaties in which Indian rulers acknowledged the Company's hegemony in return for limited internal autonomy. Since the Company operated under financial constraints, it had to set up political underpinnings for its rule.[9] The most important such support came from the subsidiary alliances with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule.[9] In the early 19th century, the territories of these princes accounted for two-thirds of India.[9] When an Indian ruler, who was able to secure his territory, wanted to enter such an alliance, the Company welcomed it as an economical method of indirect rule, which did not involve the economic costs of direct administration or the political costs of gaining the support of alien subjects.[10]
The second form of asserting power involved treaties in which Indian rulers acknowledged the Company's hegemony in return for limited internal autonomy. Since the Company operated under financial constraints, it had to set up political underpinnings for its rule.[9] The most important such support came from the subsidiary alliances with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule.[9] In the early 19th century, the territories of these princes accounted for two-thirds of India.[9] When an Indian ruler, who was able to secure his territory, wanted to enter such an alliance, the Company welcomed it as an economical method of indirect rule, which did not involve the economic costs of direct administration or the political costs of gaining the support of alien subjects.[10]
Private company militias. Bribed local powers. Our superior forces turning up when those two weren't enough to keep control, slapping around the resistance and then quickly moving on to the next hotspot. That's how we did it. We didn't have anywhere near the troops required to control even the territory right next door in Ireland, let alone India, Africa, Canada, the United States...
And that's why we didn't bring Slaves to the United Kingdom or, for that matter, sell opium to the market in India; we were selling it to the Chinese, and using Indian markets to get around their local laws. Slaves in Britain or opium for Indians would make us unpopular locally, and we needed people to be just quiet enough not to require the British Army itself to turn up. However in China, a single ship can flatten their entire fleet (hence "Gunboat diplomacy"), and they can't stop their own troops
making themselves incompetent through drug usage, so it was an ideal market. And notice that, after we win both Opium Wars, we don't enslave China or even hold anything but treaty ports on the coast. As long as you let us make obscene, immoral profits, British war aims have been won. We wanted the money.
It's not about Britain being whiter than white. But we genuinely weren't that interested in Slavery, because unlike the United States until it learned the same lesson, Slavery is not just immoral, it's also just not as efficient as an Industrial Revolution. People strung out on caffeinated tea, and thinking they are free even as they're basically cogs in the industrial machine, make so much more profit than unwilling slaves. I don't think the Empire's argument was moral; but it did make us so much more powerful and that's why the UK embraced it. The British Empire wouldn't even exist without that mercantile attitude; when Napoleon dismissed us as "a nation of shopkeepers", he thought it was an insult... to the Empire, it was not just a source of pride, but the source of our power. And the power of our local allies if we let them get a cut of these obscene profits too.
Honestly, this is something you really should know based purely on facts during the US Civil War; The South assumed that we were so in love with "King Cotton" and as filthy Empire builders to be so pre-disposed to Slavery, they believed Britain and France would fight with them in the war they chose to start. Instead, the British public hated slavery so much that even the during the Lancashire Cotton Famine, the laid off mill workers starving due to lack of Southern Cotton still wrote to Lincoln supporting him... and the British establishment were only interested in siding with the eventual winner so as to make lots more money off them. We did build lots of blockade runners and warships for everyone in the short term though, gotta grab all the money, ever! Still, the South got us wrong then, and it seems you're still getting us wrong today.