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benefits of the british empire

Kitty1996

what was the benefits of the british empire ( especially on the world trade)
thanks

(edited 13 years ago)

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Reply 1

karateworm

The British did an empire properly, not too much oppression/slaughter... and when it had outlived it's time, it peacefully fell to bits.

Colonialism with moderation, lovely. :colone:

Reply 2

Steezy

The benefits of the british empire on the slave trade? Errmmm.... That it made it happen?

Wording aside - the world wouldn't be nearly as multicultural and easily available without the british empire. America wouldn't have been a super power, so without the British empire ever existing, it's hard to predict what the world would be like now...

Reply 3

rylit91

A heightened sense of superiority :hmmm:

Not that we need much encouragement, we're British, superiority is in our genes.

Reply 4

U.S Lecce

Well i probably wouldn't be alive without it so...................... :borat:

It was still wrong though :ninja:

Reply 5

humanrights

The benefits of the british empire on the slave trade? Errmmm.... That it made it happen?

this is a racist, bigoted anti white statement. can you clarify what you mean.

Reply 6

pol pot noodles

Original post by Kitty1996

what was the benefits of the british empire ( especially on the world trade)
thanks

The industrial revolution combined with our inherently awesome shipbuilding techniques. Steamships obviously travel trade routes quicker than sail ships.
And our hardline approach to Piracy (at least post 18th century, before that we encouraged it against the Spanish) ended it's Golden Age and made the World's trade lanes safer.
If the NATO taskforce off Somalia started engaging enemy ships, showed no mercy, launched coastal raids and hanged all prisoners then the problem would be sorted quickly.

Reply 7

Chi019

Original post by Kitty1996

what was the benefits of the british empire ( especially on the world trade)
thanks

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under Western administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history.

Some benefits include; sanitation, hospitals, roads, and schools.

And look at what's happened since. The New York Times in 1991:

Nearly a century ago, when the first Europeans ventured into Zaire's vast interior, Kikwit was a small village whose people and institutions existed in a quiet, self-contained world wholly uninterrupted by the frenetic rhythms of modernity...

Today, the legacy of Kikwit's colonial past is swiftly disappearing.

"Civilization is coming to an end here," said Rene Kinsweke, manager of Siefac, a chain of food stores, as he spoke of how Kikwit has become a dispiriting tableau of chaos and catastrophe. "We're back where we started. We're going back into the bush."...

Elsewhere in town, squatters have moved into homes that once belonged to the Belgian colonials. Entire families now camp on sidewalks, in parks and even in cemeteries. Streets and backyards are littered with indescribable filth, and toward the edges of the city the roads crumble into dirty sand and then disappear altogether. Rats and flies are breeding as never before, adding to critical sanitation and hygiene problems.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11
/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html

And Time Magazine in 2008:

Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven

Le Blanc and I are into our 500th kilometer on the river when he turns my view of modern African history on its head. "We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html

I'd recommend Mencius Moldbug's excellent essay on the recent academic move for 'charter cities' which are basically a new form of colonialism.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html

(edited 13 years ago)

Reply 8

Chi019

Original post by rylit91

A heightened sense of superiority :hmmm:

Not that we need much encouragement, we're British, superiority is in our genes.

Heh, don't joke - UC Davis economist Gregory Clark:

In my recent book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World I argue two things. First that all societies remained in a state I label the “Malthusian economy” up until the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. In that state crucially the economic laws governing all human societies before 1800 were those that govern all animal societies. Second that was thus subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution.

The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of settled agriculture and stable property rights set natural selection on a very different course. It created an accelerated period of evolution, rewarding with reproductive success a new repertoire of human behaviors – patience, self-control, passivity, and hard work – which consequently spread widely.

And we see in England, from at least 1250, that the kind of people who succeeded in the economic system – who accumulated assets, got skills, got literacy – increased their representation in each generation. Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world. Modern people are thus in part a creation of the market economies that emerged with the Neolithic Revolution. Just as people shaped economies, the pre-industrial economy shaped people. This has left the people of long settled agrarian societies substantially different now from our hunter gatherer ancestors, in terms of culture, and likely also in terms of biology.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/07/social-darwinism-21st-century-edition.html

Reply 9

D.R.E

Original post by Kitty1996

what was the benefits of the british empire ( especially on the world trade)
thanks

Niall Ferguson puts forward a strong argument about the British Empire being more beneficial than it was detrimental. Obviously, one has to read that with a pinch of salt, but he's a very good historian, and you can easily access his writings by searching the internet.

As for my opinion, 'empire' in general, is never 'beneficial' at all. It's expensive for the conqueror, and is almost always brutal for the conquered. Britain spent shed-loads of cash in Africa, just on wars in the 19th century, while getting no benefits from the lands whatsoever. There were only two people making money from Africa: Leopold II and Cecil John Rhodes, and those were not good men. British taxpayers never saw a single benefit from the Empire apart from expanding their culinary tastes and maybe (if you were filthy rich), some ornaments in your house.

For Africans, they did get introduced to new technologies and got access to innovative British systems, which is fine and dandy. But in reality, by 1920, most of Britain's African colonies were heavily segregated by law, restricting the levels of education of Africans; how much land they can own; where they can live; giving them no participation in politics etc etc. Even white Africans like the Boers, who had been in Africa for about two centuries, were inevitably segregated against and persecuted by the British. The Boers fought two wars against the British, and the British invented the infamous 'concentration camp' to deal with the threat. Loads died, all because Cecil John Rhodes wanted some gold. :rolleyes:

Anyway, no one gained from Empire; most of the 'benefits' could have been created through trading and such, without the need for an expensive empire.

Reply 10

xHitmanx

Original post by Steezy

Erm I'll think you'll find that the existence of the slave trade far outdates that of the British Empire.

Reply 11

Steezy

Original post by xHitmanx

Erm I'll think you'll find that the existence of the slave trade far outdates that of the British Empire.

Well then the British empire were innovators

Reply 12

Locke54

Original post by Steezy

Well then the British empire were innovators

Not really. The slave trade had been around in various forms since the Ancient World. The African slave trade was started by the Spanish and Portuguese and the British were relatively late to it. They were just following trends, they never 'innovated' in any way in regards to the slave trade.

Hong Kong

Original post by ajp100688

People also seem to omit the part where it was mostly fellow black people that actually captured the slaves and sent them to the coastal towns. The idea of a white man running around in the jungle looking for slaves was hardly ever true.

Reply 15

Clip

Original post by No Future

Hong Kong

The Empire gave us Hong Kong.

Hong Kong gave us Canto-pop.

Sorry in that case, despite spreading the common law, defeating piracy, the Industrial Revolution and moderated counter-insurgency, I think the Empire is a net loss.

Reply 16

No Future

Original post by Clip

I agree the empire is a net loss.

Economic success of Hong Kong then

Reply 17

Shroob

I can't comment for the entire empire, but on India the most commonly cited benefits of British rule are the railways, postal system and administration.