The British Empire: Not all Bad

It gets a bad press nowadays but some good did arise from it in all fairness.

 

Care to expand on this then Dev?

 

They did away with slavery for one thing.

 

Only after using it to their advantage for centuries to help build the empire and more than likely topping the all time tables in terms of number of slaves captured, transported and used.

 

They did ship a bunch of criminals to Australia

 

We also made a fortune from our "friends" by stealing most of their gold, silver, diamonds, plutonium and most of their other natural resources.

 

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Is this what you mean by 'British Empire'?

 

Most of their natural resources? Bit OTT.

 

Lets not forget that in the clamber to express disgust at the piracy off the coast fo Somalia, much of the Empire's wealt and many of the crown jewels were in fact gained from what basically amounted to piracy against Spanish ships in the Carribean

 

a good article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jul/22/comment.mainsection

 

That's what you get for letting Scots colonise

 

Oh dear, those poor Spanish people, it's not as if they murdered thousands of natives in South America and stole their gold, no they wouldn't do a thing like that, only the Brits.

The way I see it is:
Every European nation was after the wealth in America, Africa and Asia, we just happened to be better at taking it.

 

What needs to be said (donning my lets be fair cap) is that France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch were equally as bad, just not on such a large scale

 

**** me. I actually agree with you.

That was a hard thing for me to type.

 

See above



* oh and thats a nice attitude to have isnt it

 

my personal view is that every one who could did it. those who couldnt luck of the draw

every dog has his day in the sun if you like. and i disagree with all the apologies required from queenie etc from centuries ago

at the same time there has to be an acknowledgement of current crisis having a foot in that history, and a solution sought to rectify if possible

 

Nonsense. Have you not seen Pirates of the Caribbean.

 

The problem is that modern attitudes are very different to attitudes hundreds of years ago. What was acceptable then has changed greatly over the centuries.

Why not have a go at the Romans and their empire building or the Mayans and the sacrifice of 80,000 captured slaves?

At the height of the British Empire it truly was 'Great' Britain. We owned from Ireland to Oz. Canada to India. The sun truly never set on the greatest Empire the world has ever seen.

 

What attitude? I just stated a fact.

By the way: you lot were part of the United Kingdom then and complicit in everything we did.

 

I can only think of one example where what you said is correct stopmeandslapme but you would still have to really stretch the definition of being complicit and even then I dont think it still falls into the category.

I dont see the forced relocation and settlement of Irish children into Australia under the guise of criminal justice for things as trivial as swearing and stealing loaves of bread as being complicit. That is the only example I can think of, maybe you know more?