Just a few days ago I remember reading some apologist for British imperialism blaming the sectarian violence of partition (which almost precluded my very existence, my mother having been born and raised as a Bengali Hindu in Calcutta and only managed to escape with her life on one occasion due to the quick thinking of my Dadu [grandfather]) on the irrationality and political incompetence of the Indians. It immediately brought to mind how many apologists for American imperialism--I'm looking at you Senator Clinton--are blaming the sectarian violence in Iraq on the irrationality and political incompetence of the Iraqis.

In 1750, India's share of the world's GDP was 25 percent. In 1900, it had fallen to 1.7 percent.

Of all 20 c leaders, no one enjoys the greatest gap between public perception and reality than Churchill.

Winston the saint, the hero did a few good things (like resisting Hitler). But the weird thing is that, fundamentally, he was Hitler's cousin.
Churchill was as close to a psychopath as any leader of a democracy has ever been.

By the way, my comment is not a gratuitous jab at a right-wing hero. There are facts behind that statement.

They didn't think much of the Irish, either.

Throughout the [Irish] Potato Famine, from 1845 to 1847, more than one million people died of starvation or emigrated. Additionally, over 50,000 people died of diseases: typhus, scurvy, dysentery. Despite the famine conditions, taxes, rents, and food exports were collected in excess of £6 million and sent to British landlords.

In the 1840s, laissez-faire philosophy dominated the British economic policy. The government officials supported a policy of non-intervention, which maintained the belief that it was counterproductive to interfere in economics.
http://www.american.edu/ted/potato.htm

Who in Jesus Christ's name does the Archbishop think created the ridiculously mapped country of Iraq in the first place, round about World War One? (Hint: It wasn't the United States.) Let's not even mention their adventures in Afghanistan and Palestine/Israel. Jesus H. Cristo.

Like the blabbering jackasses, sorry, talking heads on cable news, the AB o' C is a "liberal" insofar as one can be when surrounded by conservatives and are steeped in their peculiar world-view whilst they actively work to create a hyper-real bubble for one to live in.

And this morning, the front page of the online NYT has a picture of the factory in India where our manhole covers are being made. We're so glad the British 'normalized' India for us.

Bernard:

It's not simple as that. India's GDP was that high because of another kind of Imperialism. One that was ironically, better for its subjects.

The Mogul Dynasty that the British inherited the rule of India (along with their worst methods of punishment and torture) from weren't exactly Saints either. But they were Old-Style Imperialists in the Roman vein, and disagree as you might with that they did to get their Empire(as we all do) they chose to invest and make places smarter and increase their "return on investment" in the territories they governed to reap from them rather than strip, impoverish and flood with goods from the metropole the way that modern Western Imperialists do.

So it boils down to one kind of Imperialist vs another. I am not exonerating either, for bloodlust and empire are never separable, but I want to say that not all Empires are equal.

I dunno if anyone has heard of a writer called Catherine Austin Fitts, who was Secretary of Housing under the first President Bush, and even she says that the current Empire of the US resembles a tapeworm more than the classic Imperial model. Read this, we have to realize it is not the Imperial model that is necessarily hurting the world as much as the TAPEWORM model.

http://vtcommons.org/node/548

What the fuck? En Ming, the Mughals did not "invest and make places smarter". They were imperialists in a very classical sense - they imposed taxes and fought wars of conquest. And that's pretty much all they did. For a great deal of their rule, their influence was combined to a small area, and constantly disputed by individual kings. The way they differed from the Brits was (1) they lived in the place, and so couldn't abscond with the wealth, and (2) they didn't actively foment strife within the society as effectively as the British (by, e.g., shutting down indigenous industries wholesale). But Mughal rule was not a "better" kind of imperialism than the British kind.

For all the work the British did in India in terms of infrastructure, they were mostly just putting in a wealth extraction machine. That's what we're likely to do in Iraq. Remember: we took out the former Iranian prime minister in the 1950s when he thought about nationalizing the country's oil industry. That would have disrupted US and UK designs on the role the Middle East would play in terms of providing cheap energy versus meet their people's own needs.

(posted at skewz.com)

A personal comment: The racist remarks that follow are the views of other people, ok? I personally believe in treating persons of all races, colors, creeds, national origins, genders and lifestyle preferences as if they were equal.

About the Indians: Churchill might have mentioned that their food smells funny, and since they eat the food, they smell funny too.

About the Irish: This morning I was reading about Charles Kingsley, 19th century British author and clergyperson. He was one of the first to praise Charles Darwin's Origin of Species when it first came out.

Darwin added an edited version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws'."

This makes more remarkable what Kingsley wrote the next year in a letter to his wife describing a visit to Ireland.

But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.

--quoted in many places, including Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization.

cliche' tyme: (YOU ALWAYS hurt the one YOU love)--(rape the earth and exploite the worker) and my favorite (business as usual, AGAIN)

Good post. I had the same reaction (though shorter) over at a comment section at Huffington Post, I think. Depressing too--it's bad enough that we have conservatives getting all weepy over the glorious successes of imperialism in the past, without having liberals doing it too. Not that this is new.

Though I just checked to find my reaction and it never went up.

Saurabh,

Regardless, Indians still lived better under the Mughals. That was not to be denied.

Well, anyone remember the scene from "Life of Brian" where they go round suggesting "What the Romans have ever done for us?", that is what I mean by making places "smarter". Some kinds of Imperialists can forcibly bring in the aqueducts and the hospitals and the fountains and the schools, others just strip and impoverish. Being a believer in self-determination and free will and all does not stop me from exonerating either, but it does not stop me from differentiating either as well.

Any Empire is between the two extremes. Compare Belgium in Congo with the Spanish in South America, France in Algeria and British in India. The varying degrees of "success" (or more appropriately, relative non-damage) are visible in the aftermath.

Here's Winston Churchill, in a letter during the 1940s: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

Is that why they used them by tens of thousands to fight Germans and Japanese, because they are beasts and beasts are known to fight mindlessly? Bastards. Their arrogance, and incredible shortsightedness, led them to become a third rate nation, small and irrelevant, and they deserve every bit of it

Aris, the UK is now a second rate nation, just like the US. The third rate thing ended in the 60s.

Anyway, there are no first rate nations any more. Gotta have those tax cuts, that military spending and that outsourcing.

Never mind, by the current program one day we'll all be third rate, and so will India and China. Equality!

What's remarkable is that we are so generous to the beastly people we rule. It is almost as if it is their very beastliness that allows us such boundless generosity.