Balance and reasonableness and playing fair on the rich imperialists is only right (“playing cricket” as they instilled in the colonised!)
Hence, generous Sathnam wrote, “British imperial history was long and complex. Lots of good and lots of bad things happened.” (p 45 “Stolen History”, pub 2023)
GOOD THINGS:
“... by trading with them we made the local people wealthier too. Many of the colonized people were happy the British were there looking after them.” (p 43 ibid)
In 1948 or ‘49, Cinnamon Gardens Baptist Church in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) asked the Baptist Missionary Society to recommend a white English pastor to be the Minister of their church. My dad got the job when I was a one year old.
We gave India cricket and their railways sooner than they would otherwise have had them.
We gave them the East India Company that “was established in 1600 to trade in silk and spices from Asia.” The British government gave it powers to colonise and run countries like India. It printed its own money and had its own army that was twice the size of the British Army, Sathnam noted.
We got really rich on the backs of the poor unpaid but still forced to work very long hours, press-ganged, imprisoned, branded like cattle and abused slaves over 300 years. How good of them.
BAD THINGS - outnumbering the good!:
Tim Weller
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