Saturday 27 October 2018

Corsica, Ethiopia, Mexico, Uruguay, Sarawak, Katanga and Morocco all asked to be annexed by the British Empire but were refused

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According to Robert Tombs' bestselling and quite wonderful book The English and their History, Corsica, Ethiopia, Mexico, Uruguay, Sarawak, Katanga and Morocco all asked to be annexed by the British Empire but were refused.

Robert Tombs supervised me at the university when the world was young and Mrs. Thatcher had just led her party to a second victory. 

I can't recommend Dr. Tombs' book too highly. He has written a wonderful Tory (i.e. accurate and non political) history, free not of all liberal prejudices but of many, very insightful and full of brilliance. He spent his career as a historian of France not England.

He explains how the Empire came to exist, despite the forebodings of Liberals like Cobden. (Another Liberal, not quoted by Dr Tombs, Hilaire Belloc said the British Empire was an ugly name for an ugly thing.) 


Dr. Tombs:
Occupying new territories usually turned on some combination of strategic
interests, local responses, economic importance, lobbying by interested parties and the wish to keep other European states out.
Indian princely states and many other places were taken over because they were failed states. 

The Empire cost Britain a lot of money and many hoped that it would evolve into an association of independent countries.

The British had no doubt (like George W. Bush invading Iraq) that they had a civilising mission. Unlike Bush the Younger, the British did have. In particular the British genuinely sought to stamp out slavery long before the Americans got in on the act. Castlereagh persuaded the great powers (who were reluctant) to condemn slavery in the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the first time there was a human rights clause in a major treaty.

The British desire to abolish slavery around the world meant patrolling the seas looking for slavers. It was expensive and gruelling for the sailors. The British policy made the British very unpopular with African rulers, who were keen to keep slavery even if they could no longer, thanks to the Royal Navy, sell slaves abroad. Britain annexed Nigeria, for example, because the ruler refused to abolish slavery.

In the end, as a result of the Royal Navy's efforts, ownership of slaves by white men was stamped out, although Arabs, blacks, Chinese and others continued to own slaves. The British sailors, soldiers and statesmen who achieved this are now vilified in some parts of the Academe as dead, white males. 

Innumerable other benefits came from colonialism, the first of them being order. Others included conversion to Christianity, roads and medicines, European literature, cricket, fair trials, French wine and much else. Yet nowadays there is a tendency to think of imperialism as something bad, even another thought crime.

In Romania the idea is universal that the colonial empires were wicked and greedy rackets. Romanians were lucky to have escaped lightly under Ottoman suzerainty compared with their neighbours, but Turkish indirect rule and Hungarian and Austrian direct rule rankle deeply.

2 comments:

  1. The British desire to abolish slavery around the world meant patrolling the seas looking for slavers. It was expensive and gruelling for sailors.”

    It helped ruin the British Carribean colonies as well. Christ-insanity (and Anglo Protestant Christ-insanity in particular) makes men do wacky and destructive things that are of no benefit to their own people. (Or to the people they think they are saving) Christianity is not conservative but universalist, liberal and ideological.

    “In the end, as a result of the Royal Navy's efforts, ownership of slaves by white men was stamped out, although Arabs, blacks, Chinese and others continued to own slaves. The British sailors, soldiers and statesmen who achieved this are now vilified in some parts of the Academe as dead, white males.”

    If you’re white you can’t do right. That’s the way it is. Even if you were acting out of liberal instincts. Just like the naive liberal Australians of the early 20th Century who swallowed Boasian lies about the irrelevance of biology to imagine they could make civilised people out of grub-eating 60 IQ aboriginals by bringing them up in white society. They are today vilified by the media and Jewish academics for “kidnapping” the children rather than rescuing them from rampant sexual abuse and alcoholism.

    https://www.jta.org/2008/02/13/news-opinion/world/jews-key-to-aboriginal-reconciliation

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  2. I don't know what kind of circles you hang out in, but I know Romanian intellectuals (not pseudointellectuals) who can objectively see the positives brought about by English colonialism in the less developed world. In fact, some of its former colonies are among the most developed national today. Perhaps the menome of Soviet colonialism is too fresh in the collective memory in Romania...

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