Brits Behaving Badly Abroad

by Liberty and Power

Go here to read about the drunken antics of British tourists abroad.

Of course, the British sometimes behaved worse when Britain ruled the waves and a large chunk of the planet, except they spoke with more refined accents and asserted themselves more forcefully.

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Sudha Shenoy - 8/5/2007

The East India Company paid for Sanskrit colleges. They had to pay Indian students to attend. Indians paid for instruction in English, however. There was a considerable _demand_ for the learning of English.

Have a look at the scientific & other disciplines only then getting under way. Why would Indians _not_ want access to these?

Mark Brady - 8/5/2007

"We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect."

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).

"Macaulay left his mark on British administration, less in actual change than in memorable arguments on disputed issues. These have been taken as more typical of British attitudes to India than the work of more hardened but more obscure men. His most famous contribution, in which he joined Trevelyan, was to the controversy between orientalists and Anglicizers over the allocation of a sum of money to native students in higher education, one party favouring instruction in Sanskrit and Arabic, the other pressing for all instruction in English. Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education (2 February 1835) argued vigorously for the latter, on the grounds previously advanced by James Mill, that instruction in English would convey the findings of a more advanced culture and so the money would be more usefully spent. The Minute has become famous as a landmark in the dispute, but it owes its fame mainly to the fact that G. O. Trevelyan printed it in an appendix to his book The Competition Wallah (1864)."

(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Macaulay.)

Sudha Shenoy - 8/2/2007

It is necessary to malign all previous centuries. We, enlightened as we are, simply cannot be worse than the backward types found in previous ages.
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1. The whole of what is now India, Pakistan & Bangladesh was ruled from 1858 to 1947 under one administration. At the top was the Indian Civil Service -- a maximum of 3,000; in practice, fewer.

2. The British armed forces (navy + army) _declined_ (declined) at the height of Empire. It expanded only with the Boer War.

3. In the entire territory of what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,over the 89 years 1858-1947, how many 'Jallianwala Baghs' were there? Surely an empire must've produced hundreds every year -- look at the hundreds of thousands killed by the American Empire: the Brits are simply Americans with a posh accent; otherwise all is the same.
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4. There is ample material -- at least a large library -- on the British 'Empire'. One acute observer says "England has shown by her acts that she regarded her position in India,...the Crown Colonies,...the Protectorates, as a general mandatory of European civilisation. [....] The wars waged by england during the era of Liberalism to extend her colonial empire and to open up territories...laid the foundations of the modern world economy."

And earlier: "England....conceived her colonial policy in a spirit quite different from that of....France, germany, the United States, Japan, Belgium,...Italy."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p. 234. Also see fn.