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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

#71

Post by smhg »

BlackJack wrote: post #54
jvanloov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The park was called after Leopold I, the first king of Belgium, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Belgium. This was in 1877, a decade before the Congo atrocities. (Source: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldpark_(Brussel) in Dutch)

Thanks for educating me. I updated my post.

But I think your remark was valid though. Leopold II's atrocities get very little attention in Belgium compared to Nazism.

There are still quiet a lot of statues of him. Which indeed sounds weird in relation to Hitler statues. It might be an idea to give them the same treatment as the Nazi party grounds in Nuremberg. Proper context next to them.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#72

Post by sol_remmy »

horsecaptin wrote: post #55
sol_remmy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misdeeds of the British aristocracy . Leave my grandparents out of this. IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this.

Common folk everywhere have more in common with each other than they have with people in power. The problem is that they are constantly fooled into believing otherwise. This is why our grandparents shouldn't be left out of this. All too often children are taught blind devotion to one's country, when in reality this means blind devotion to the leaders. Things have gotten better though. We have elections and the intern…

Huh so my great-grandparents that were farming in the middle of the country side are to blame for this? They didn't even receive newspapers.

The only way they could have protested the government back then was refusing to pay taxes. And that would have gotten them killed.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#73

Post by gertef »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 offers an alternative view.

"Offering aid to your enemy, to highlight their weakness" is a standard propaganda technique, not to be taken at face value.

> hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death

no disagreement here.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#74

Post by pmyteh »

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…

It's covered in school history classes, sufficiently anti-colonially for a certain slice of conservative talking heads to decry Britain 'talking down its glorious past'.

My class covered the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in some depth at age 15; a lovely example of late Empire brutality where one of our army officers ordered machine guns turned on a non-violent crowd who were demonstrating in breach of government order.

So it's not covered in any depth, but the empire certainly isn't celebrated uncritically in school or in other official contexts.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#75

Post by gertef »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #63
srean wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the point. Whoever you are, if you have ill-gotten gains (more than average at least), even as a gift, you have a moral obligation to use them to counter the ill.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#76

Post by gertef »

sol_remmy wrote: post #72
horsecaptin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common folk everywhere have more in common with each other than they have with people in power. The problem is that they are constantly fooled into believing otherwise. This is why our grandparents shouldn't be left out of this. All too often children are taught blind devotion to one's country, when in reality this means blind devotion to the leaders. Things have gotten better though. We have elections and the intern…

Huh so my great-grandparents that were farming in the middle of the country side are to blame for this? They didn't even receive newspapers. The only way they could have protested the government back then was refusing to pay taxes. And that would have gotten them killed.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528...

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#77

Post by gertef »

adamnemecek wrote: post #7

Even though they mention it, I came across this chart a while back that shows just by how much bigger it was than the recent largest corporation https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/4a/6c/144a6c7feb3823f5fd4baa562... It seems to have originally come from here https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/4a/6c/144a6c7feb3823f5fd4baa562...

Your second link is a copy of the first.

What are the units on that graph?

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#78

Post by gertef »

briane80 wrote: post #62

British Empire best empire. On balance probably a greater force for good despite it's misdeeds. The Guardian would love it if we all self flagellated for historical events and ignore any of the good we did it's part of their left wing doctrine.

I trust that you'll have similar gratitude for any doctor who kills you on their way to surgery, or any web developer who does the same on their way to build a revolutionary new Uber for Widgets

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#79

Post by newen »

pmyteh wrote: post #74
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…

It's covered in school history classes, sufficiently anti-colonially for a certain slice of conservative talking heads to decry Britain 'talking down its glorious past'. My class covered the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in some depth at age 15; a lovely example of late Empire brutality where one of our army officers ordered machine guns turned on a non-violent crowd who were demonstrating in breach of government order.…

Actually they weren't even demonstrating. It was a gathering of people from inside and outside Amritsar, who came there for a festival. The order against gatherings of more than 4 people weren't distributed well, and so most of those people weren't aware of the order. Dyer then went and ordered the massacre.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#80

Post by chimeracoder »

pm90 wrote: post #66
nonamechicken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most of my Indian friends have little interest in history, and accept tidbits like this as fact and don't think much about it.

The attitude is empirically far less prevalent in India than it is in modern-day England, so it's not as simple as a matter of education.

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