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The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

theguardian.com

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Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#61

Post by weerd »

newyankee wrote: post #5

It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries India is important because it was the crown jewel of the British empire and was completely destroyed of its soul by the colonialists with very clever mixture of politics, military and ot…

There's a quote I really enjoy from a German historian that nicely describes this:

"There are un-tragic peoples, whom history pearls off of like water from a well-polished boot." - Rolf Peter Sieferle

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#63

Post by TallGuyShort »

srean wrote: post #41
Balero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are individual people. If the British government was to complain, then that could be considered hypocritical. But an individual person can't be held to account for actions taken, by others and (quite probably) before they were born.

What if they are still benefiting from those historical acts ?

Name a country where you can live without unknowingly benefiting from some atrocity in the past.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#64

Post by DoubleCribble »

chimeracoder wrote: post #33
BlackJack wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mughal's did bad things too, but some of their kings like Akbar at least tried to integrate society and not cause religious strife. The Mughal Empire did a lot of bad things in India, especially nutcases like Aurangzeb, and Indian people recognize those bad things. The problem, as I understand, is that a lot of British people don't know all the bad things the Empire did, or don't learn about it the way German peo…

> Churchill's decisions directly lead to the death of millions of people in India. He's no better than Hitler It gets even more ironic than that. During the 1940s Bengal famine, things were so bad that the Axis powers offered to step in and send humanitarian aid. Churchill not only refused, but he tried to prevent the newspapers from printing news of the offer, so that people wouldn't know how truly unnecessary their…

Being neither British nor Indian, I'd always thought of the British as not horrible colonialists of India, that is until I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. [1]http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/15-the-prime-minister...

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#65

Post by ak39 »

If Indian history is up your alley, I heartily recommend William Dalrymple's set of three impressively researched and written books:

1. The White Mughals

2. The Last Mughal

3. Kohinoor

I began reading The Last Mughal just as I had left Delhi and Agra and I regretted not starting it before my visit.

Dalrymple knows his onions.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#66

Post by pm90 »

nonamechicken wrote: post #29
blackrock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by…

If westerners think that, I can understand. Unfortunately, lot of Indians think the same way, that the British invasion was good for India since they gave us the railways and some other stuff. I don't know much history, but seeing how they destroyed India and killed millions (through famines), I can't wonder how brainwashed these Indians are.

Its not brainwashing as much as lack of a good education or doing some basic individual research. Most of my Indian friends have little interest in history, and accept tidbits like this as fact and don't think much about it.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#67

Post by portpecos »

apsec112 wrote: post #56
fooker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Mughal's did bad things too, but some of their kings like Akbar at least tried to integrate society and not cause religious strife." I wouldn't be so sure of that. A lot of Akbar's praises can be attributed to 'creative' history writing after the 1950s.

Interesting, do you have sources for that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Hindus

Scroll down to Akbar and you'll find some interesting things. Also of interest is Allauddin Khilji.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#68

Post by briane80 »

mlinksva wrote: post #44
CrasVestibulum wrote: post #6

I fondly hope for a reverse wealth drain from UK to India at the same scale or more.

Indeed, or at least the dissolution of imperial legacy culture through domination by the populations and cultures of ex-colonies. Independence was a mistake. It only cemented global apartheid. There is still time to demand democracy instead, starting with imperial states granting the residents of former colonies the full rights of citizens unconditionally.

If you hate our culture so much why do you want citizenship?

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#69

Post by zjaffee »

lucaspiller wrote: post #52
apsec112 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II ( https:/…

It’s worth also mentioning the the Armenian genocide ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide ) which happened around the same time by the Ottoman Empire, and is just as unknown. That resulted in the death of over 1.5 million people, and tensions between Armenia and Turkey are still rather tense today. Many Western countries still refuse to accept it took place, most likely due to their favourable political…

Maybe it's just me, but the Armenian genocide is much more well known than the greek one. There are pulitzer winning authors who discuss the Armenian genocide, and at least for me it was taught on when I learned about world war 1 (abet this isn't as touched on as much as ww2). And in more recent years, you have seen countries of serious prominence such as Germany recognize the arminian genocide as a genocide rather than just a war. I learned about the greek aspect from this post.

I'm curious if this is because the arminian genocide killed 90% of the ethnic groups population, being one of the most horrific and close to complete acts of ethnic cleansing ever to happen.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#70

Post by pkd »

apsec112 wrote: post #15
newyankee wrote: post #5

It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries India is important because it was the crown jewel of the British empire and was completely destroyed of its soul by the colonialists with very clever mixture of politics, military and ot…

AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II ( https:/…

All the rest of your points have been addressed, but re: the Mughal Empire

It is important to note that while the foundations of the Mughal Empire were forged with plunder and loot, the Empire itself became native to the Indian subcontinent not soon after and also subsequently for a couple of centuries brought about great cultural boom in the general area. The Mughals eventually came to see themselves as "Indians"(sic) and built their homes here.

This is a far cry from an Empire which was founded on loot and extortion & also evolved into siphoning off the wealth (both cultural and scientific) to a motherland completely disinterested in the welfare of its subjects.

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