A private corporation committing atrocities is still the country or empire that sets the rules. It's still British people carrying out / orchestrating the violence.
I'm not excusing Britain in any way for allowing the East India Company to behave as it did. I believe many of the British ruling class were shareholders and benefitted directly from its depredations.
British equally carried out similar atrocities there is so much evidence of this. But none of it is taught in British or Australian schools, I also was brought up with the myth of "British weren't as bad as so and so"
Here is the map of British massacres in Australia that have written evidence (so you can double, triple the actual number). They have this right across their empire.
If detail accounts I recommend reading "Conspiracy of Silence" a detailed account of massacres throughout colonial Queensland in Australia, the accounts and actions and just as horrifying.
I totally agree - and just wanted to point it out as people always reach for the what about those other people when discussing these topics.
I had my awakening on this subject in my 30s, I started to read academic writing on colonialism. Having grown up in Australia and knowing colonial history having been learnt from the British perspective I was just shocked at my ignorance on British Empire and it's colonies was.
You are forgetting enslavement and genocide of indigenous populations they encountered, the Atlantic slave trade, mass land theft all in the pursuit of profit.
No indigenous population was left better off - as much wealth and resources as possible were looted.
To say that it was anything but utterly disgusting is an understatement.
What makes a distinction between “land theft” and just conquest?
I mean, if I think about North America, when one native tribe attacked and defeated another tribe and took their land, was that land theft? When the British, French or Spanish did the same, was that “land theft”?
The concept of conquest is clear to me. One country/civilization/tribe occupying land previously owned by another through violent means.
The concept of conquest does not imply "crime" as it occurs at the intersection of two societies with different laws, and in most cases neither would consider a conquest benefiting them to be a criminal/negative activity.
I have never read a definition of "land theft". If it is supposed to mean the same as "conquest", it goes about it in a confusing way, by including the word "theft" which is a crime, whereas as we saw, "conquest" cannot be a crime in the traditional sense. It's also unclear to me why use "theft" rather than "robbery" which seems more appropriate given the violent nature of conquest.
I guess the point of using "land theft" instead of "conquest" is to imply that in an ideal world there would have been a supranational law enforced on all human groups that forbids violent displacement of one group of humans by another (i.e. conquest), which I guess most people would agree would be a good thing.
So, assuming conquest and land theft are synonymous, with the latter being used to express disapproval, and going back to your first comment: "To say that it was anything but utterly disgusting is an understatement". I suppose this is true, but the reply from refurb seems appropriate: humans have engaged in warfare long before we have written record. Our cousins, the chimpanzees do abominable things to each other in war, and so did our ancestors, of every race and every culture, including the native people that were the victims of the British empire.
"What hypothetical American indigenous tribes may or may not have done is not the subject of this thread" is a silly reply, as far as I can tell. American indigenous tribes engaged in warfare and conquest [1] like every other human group in history.
The British Empire did not, as far as we can tell, come up with new and particularly hideous ways to inflict harm upon other humans, that we had not considered in the hundreds of thousands of years we've been harming each other.
They have the distinction of being the first ones to do it globally. The true harm of the British empire is the delta between the harm they caused to humans in the places they occupied and the harms other humans (the ones conquered, others in the region) would have caused in the same area over the same period of time. Unfortunately, I don't have a way to estimate what that delta is. But I am sure the answer is not "all the harm the British empire caused minus 0 because everyone they conquered was a peaceful post-warfare civilization, disturbed only by the British savages".
Ok, firstly I am unsure how any of the above refutes my statements about the British Empire.
You have decided to get into the semantics of conquest vs land theft. My reading of your reply is that conquest is an excusable activity?
My understanding of your argument rests on that everyone does it (conquest) so what the British Empire did was only unique in its scale.
I think your question and argument takes on more a personal morality question and I will present you with the way I think about it.
A couple of questions, if you have different answers to me then we just have different personal belief systems and we can leave it at that.
Do you excuse murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery in your current life as just being something people and chimpanzees do?
If the answer is no (I am sure it is) then why do you say conquest is excusable? Which by my definition is just larger groups of people engaging in the above mentioned crimes?
I do not want to be celebrating an organisation which is responsible for those crimes.
Finally, indigenous people's violence (and remembering there are 1000s of nations across the world which is kind of ridiculous to be saying them all at once) does not culturally define them in the same way mass violence defined the British Empire.
Violence, oppression and misery was the modus operandi of the British Empire.
> My reading of your reply is that conquest is an excusable activity?
No, I believe you have misread my response. I said: "in an ideal world there would have been a supranational law enforced on all human groups that forbids violent displacement of one group of humans by another (i.e. conquest), which I guess most people would agree would be a good thing."
> Do you excuse murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery in your current life as just being something people and chimpanzees do?
No. Your prediction is correct.
> I do not want to be celebrating an organisation which is responsible for those crimes.
That's reasonable.
> Finally, indigenous people's violence (and remembering there are 1000s of nations across the world which is kind of ridiculous to be saying them all at once) does not culturally define them
I agree.
> Violence, oppression and misery was the modus operandi of the British Empire.
Agreed. It was the modus operandi of the British and every empire before them, and most organized groups of people with power before them. Which is the reason why "violence, oppression and misery" does not define the British empire culturally, as it does not define any of the indigenous peoples' culture.
The main difference in the modus operandi of the British empire is they replaced other groups exerting this violence globally because they were the only ones with the technological advantage that allowed them to do so at the time. Does not excuse the acts, but does not make the British empire any different than most organized groups of humans that have ever lived either (as far as willingness to perpetrate violence and oppression goes).
I see we agree on most points except the final point which is ok because I was not arguing whether or not the British empire supplanted a culture that had violence - that topic of discussion would is incredibly complex and I wouldn't be able to make sweeping statements on it. But I can see that you have proven that perhaps some indigenous nation's in North America had a culture of violence.
Well, it’s trying to find a set of standards that are equally applied to everyone no?
If I kill someone and call it “self-defense” and someone else kills someone under the same circumstances and I call it “murder” that doesn’t make sense does it?
But this thread is not about other people, I haven't said that it was ok if Spanish or some indigenous people's were carrying out violence or just the British carried out violence.
I have made a statement that the British Empire is absolutely / objectively bad - what's the comparison aiming to do?
I'm trying to connect the dots in a logical way. How else does one arrive at a logical conclusion?
You seem to draw a distinction between the British conquests (which you refer to as "land theft") and the native conquests (which you do not label as "land theft") and I'm trying to figure out why.
You seem to be fall for the myth of the "noble savage"[1]. The myth is basically that before the white man arrived, the natives lived in some "natural, uncorrupted" form of life that was inherently superior. This is a myth.
At least with some native American Indians, conquests involved things like rape, slavery and the murder of non-combatants. And warfare not because of some dire need for resources, but rather just for conquests sake.
So I would argue that what the British did is not exactly unique (except for the breadth of it) and thus doesn't deserve a label of "land theft" unless you're willing to apply that with any type of conquest and in that sense, it's a pointless distinction.
This is precisely what I have realised is my special skill as well!
I can read the manual / docs and I can cast an eye over third party packages to see how it works it astounds me that so few people take these simple steps.
Having a total of 20 supersonic airlines wasn't exactly common place.
And spending 1.5% of your GDP to send like ten people to the moon probably isn't that great an achievement from a cost benefit analysis (I know there will be fierce disagreement).
Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.
That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.
Yes but this is my point is there are great reasons why concorde failed but equally it's technology was not enough of progress to overcome the fact that 747s could do things at much greater scale and more economically.
The reach of aeroplane travel is far more impressive now than flying under a 100 people at supersonic speeds.
I also dispute that there was mass transport plans - the total passenger load was tiny.
Not to take away that the plane itself is an amazing piece of technology.
Concorde failed because of politics, not technology. The US wanted to make way for its own SST project so it limited Concorde's access to the US market.
A Concorde B variant with an even longer range and quieter engines was already being developed, and airlines were very interested in it. if the US market had been more open it's likely other markets would have followed suit.
Once it was stabilised in the market other improvements would have followed. Concorde was always a first class for the first class market, not an air bus. But if supersonic travel had become established there would have been market pressure to commoditise it, and we might have seen a continuing supersonic long haul market working in parallel with the smaller more local subsonic services we have now.
Concorde failed because of the technology. It was hugely expensive and consumed mass amounts of fuel (13x the fuel per passenger of a 747-200). It used 2 tons of fuel just to taxi to the runway for takeoff!
I dispute that airlines were actually interested in a Concorde B. The economic problems of supersonic flight would have remained.
There's a reason Boeing abandoned any pretense of interest in SST after Congress declined to fund it.
I'd like the option of supersonic travel for transoceanic voyages. I'm looking at plane tickets back to the East Coast from Japan.... Tokyo to Dallas alone is ~12hrs, total travel time ~24hrs across 3 flights. Flying to the other side of the planet faster would be far more valuable to me than even browsing HN while airborne (I tend to sleep through my flights, no matter how long, anyway).
Given that Concorde's maximum range is less than the distance from Tokyo to Dallas, I suspect you'd end up saving little time on that leg with it, as you'd add an extra stop. The rest of your trip sounds like mostly waiting in airports. How does an SST help with that? If anything, the lower traffic on expensive SST flights would tend to make the flights less frequent, increasing those waits. It might end up taking longer.
Doubling the price of the peasant seats would be roughly equivalent to the price of business class. If that cut my total travel time in half...yeah, I think I would fork over the money for that.
All the resources that went into the moonlanding could have gone into something else. Eg could have stayed in private hands.
For a different example:
Yes, in the real world WW2 sort-of gave us computers. But IBM (and similar companies) would have invented electronic general purpose computers anyway, and probably sooner, if there hadn't been a war going on.
Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.
The 70s looks at your example of progress, thinks of it as a big ARPANET and is not impressed.
We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network.
But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.
To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.
I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant, but when I think "precarious economy", I'm thinking about things like wage stagnation and rising costs of healthcare, housing, and debt, rather than the fact that people now have iPhones (which for many are only affordable if paid for in monthly installments over years).
> To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.
No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.
There is now more inequality inside of China then there was when everyone was really poor in Mao's time. Yes. Hence the emphasis on global: the vast mass of Chinese people are closer to eg American standards of living than ever in the past.
(American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.
> No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.
Sure, that's true. The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.
> (American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.
Obviously it's more nuanced and complicated than this, but even if I grant you that wage stagnation is a myth, what about the other (majority) parts of what I said and cited? Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?
> The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.
I don't know how inequality came into the discussion?
The original point I commented didn't mention anything about equality, did it? "But many people also live in a far more precarious economy [...]" sounds like a complaint about poverty, not at all about inequality?
> Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?
I don't live in the US, and don't care too much about that country. Even its poorest inhabitants are already rich and well off by global standards and are offered opportunities many can only dream off.
From what I absorbed over the Internet, it seems the answer to the US specific question depends a lot on exactly how you operationalize it:
I (and many economists) prefer measures of consumption (in)equality, because people don't eat money. Presumably income is only a means to the the end of consumption.
Though to be honest, I suggest we should care much more about the absolute welfare of poor people than about whether rich people have slightly more than they did yesterday (ie inequality).
