{"id":4451,"date":"2017-02-12T09:49:58","date_gmt":"2017-02-12T09:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4451"},"modified":"2017-02-12T09:49:58","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T09:49:58","slug":"the-evil-british-empire-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4451","title":{"rendered":"The Evil British Empire in India"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now this blog posting is not intended to defend the wrongs of colonialism; we all now accept that territorial expansion by conquest (except apparently <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation\">Russia<\/a>) is wrong. In fact it could be argued that Britain conquered India for commercial and not colonial reasons &#8211; for example no penal transportation to India occurred. Yes, British people went to live in India, but chiefly to do specific jobs &#8211; colonial administration, soldiering, or commercial activities.<\/p>\n<p>Not mass migration.<\/p>\n<p>We need to be wary of judging the past with the moral standards of today; it was not until the 20th century that conquest for territorial expansion was universally condemned. And the evils of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/British_Raj\">British Raj<\/a> (and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Company_rule_in_India\">earlier<\/a>) because it\u00a0<em>successfully<\/em> conquered India; earlier (and there were many) attempts failed, although some were close. The very presence of islam within the Indian sub-continent is indicative of attempts to conquer.<\/p>\n<p>And as for the notion that only the British Empire acted in evil ways in India, just take a look through the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_massacres_in_India\">list of massacres<\/a> in India; many of those listed had nothing to do with the British.<\/p>\n<p>Does that excuse the excesses of British colonial rule? No of course it doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>But even if Europeans had not become involved with India, the evils of attempted conquest would still have occurred as they did occur before.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-4160\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=682%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"682\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=682%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 682w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=200%2C300&amp;ssl=1 200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?resize=768%2C1153&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones.jpeg?w=1359&amp;ssl=1 1359w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 682px) 100vw, 682px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now this blog posting is not intended to defend the wrongs of colonialism; we all now accept that territorial expansion by conquest (except apparently Russia) is wrong. In fact it could be argued that Britain conquered India for commercial and not colonial reasons &#8211; for example no penal transportation to India occurred. Yes, British people <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4451' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-history","category-7-id","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-19N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4453,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions\/4453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}