Of course they were a colonial power. They were a minority of foreigners ruling over, and taking land from, an indigenous majority. How were they not a colonial power?
No-one said they were British colonials. They were originally Dutch colonists, then they were their own colonists. But colonists they were.
And to be specific, they weren’t fleeing British rule so much as they were fleeing the Emancipation Act of 1833 and the Equal Rights for Free Persons of Colour order of 1828.
Yup. One might point to the abolition of the slave trade as one of the brighter moments in British history - as far as I know, it went directly against their self-interest.
Not really as to the self-interest thing. I think by then British industry (with the exception of the slave trading industry, of course) no longer viewed slavery as beneficial.
Britain’s heavy involvement in slave trading was a very bad thing, and its abolition of the slave trade a good thing.
I think it is important to draw a distinction between acts that are born of evil intent - such as some of the colonial massacres, and the slave trade, which were born of racial supremact - and those which had noble or neutral intent, but which are argued to have had evil consequences - such as certain aspects of the bombing campaign against Germany. On a lot of levels, Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in August 1914 caused incredibly bad consequences, but I don’t think it comes under the heading of evil acts.
In The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, Larry Gonick describes the British East India Company’s establishment of a lucrative opium-import trade in China, and then concludes, “And now you know how Britain could afford to abolish slavery!”
Yeah, the Opium Wars don’t exactly instill national pride. We don’t teach a lot about them in school.
Not that I think national pride has any value, however.
Not quite. For the first few decades after the English arrived in Tasmania, there were occasional skirmishes between natives and colonists, but no organized violence. By the 1820’s, as the English were pushing into the interior, conflict waqs becoming more and more frequent, and the colonists appealed to George Arthur, the notorious governor of Tasmania to do something about it. Arthur’s plan was to set up a reservation on the Flinder Island (on the south coast of Tasmania) and move the aborigines there by force. To do this, amazingly enough, he had soldiers and armed colonists form a line all the way across the island and march, roughly from southwest to northeast, supposedly covering every inch of Tasmania and capturing all the aborigines along the way. This plan didn’t work, as with the exception of an elderly cripple, the aborigines simply slipped past the line. Violence continued until the English abandoned the policy of forced relocation. George Robinson, a Methodist missionary, eventually moved in with the aborigines, learned there language, and convinced them to move to Flinders Island. However, due to their high susceptibility to disease, they eventually died out in the late 19th century.
All this taken from The Fatal Shore, for those who need a cite.
They weren’t a colonial power because they weren’t. The Trekboers weren’t acting on behalf of anybody else. They were migrating, and the migration led to them taking over the lands of the people they were migrating into, but that doesn’t make them a colonial power. When the Visigoths moved into Spain and took the lands of the Romano-Celts there, or the Xhosa moved into the Eastern Cape and took the lands of the Khoi-san there, were they colonial powers? They were migrating peoples. Just because one group takes land from another or rules over another doesn’t make the ruling group a colonial power.
There’ve been a few references to the Boer War, but I haven’t yet seen any to large-scale use of concentration camps - a British innovation. This was part of the “scorched earth” policy of the British during the guerrilla phase of the war, in which large areas were “swept clean” of Boers, whose homesteads, farms and crops were burned and who were herded into the camps where they lived in squalor.
“The conditions in the camps were very unhealthy and the food rations were meager. The wives and children of men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000).”
There were protests over this policy in Britain, but not enough to prevent the tragedy.
The setup here is hard to resist, but I remind myself that this is not the correct forum for obvious rejoinders.
For a more practicla argument, the slave-trade was vastly more helpful to their rivals in the Americas. Weakening or stopping it weakened commercial rivals of Britain, as well as their continental militaries. It hurt Britain almost not at all, and they caluclated that British posessions in the Caribbean would fare better than the Spanish and Portuguese without slave trading. Not that idealistic motives were absent, mind you - but it wasn’t just their niceness coming to the fore.
Truth be told, the English (and we’re mostly talking about English people here, with some Welsh or Scots thrown in on the side) are capabel of being extremely nice much fo the time. But they have a bad habit of being very shortsighted, and historically have had an odd practice of almost forgetting their neighbors are human beings. They are Affably Evil, but still calable of very evil actions.
I don’t agree - slavery was mostly used by the Brits to make sugar production in places like Jamaca profitable. That’s what it was used for in the past. Why would that cease to be so?
From The Lion and the Unicorn, by George Orwell (1941):
Sorry - I didn’t intend to mean that no other industries other than the slave trading industry saw slavery as beneficial (though that is the way it reads because of my ineptness). I meant that industry as a whole had evolved to the point that dominant forces within it were not beholden to slavery as they had been. Hence there wasn’t the opposition to abolishing the trade that existed earlier.
And smiling bandit, before his went on his ludicrous racist (or nationalistic, or xenophobic or whatever) tirade, makes a good point about slavery being comparatively beneficial to England’s enemies. Hey, even a blind squirrel, you know.
I’m curious, other than the Monthy Python reference, do you really think that’s the worst thing ever to happen in Spanish history? Or was the joke too evident to let it pass you by?
A criticism you could pretty much apply to any nation on earth.
Baah. By this measure, the American Western pioneers weren’t colonialist either.
They weren’t anyone’s colonies, no, but they were colonialist, in spirit and in deed.
It does when it is a clear continuation of a trend that has its roots in a colony. The Boer republics were established by breakaway Europeans who formed their own governments. This makes them just as much a colonial power as, say, Americans were when they travelled into their hinterland.
Hmm . . . Well, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492 definitely was one of the worst things ever to happen in Spanish history – bad for the exiles, bad for Spain. Whether it compares with the Spanish Civil War is debatable.
Yeah, I can agree that other industries were comming into prominence, rendering slavery (and the industries dependant on it) comparatively less important. But it was still the case that the Brits took an economic hit ending slavery, and mostly for reasons of sentiment/morality.
It may certainly be the case that enforcing a slave-trade ban hit others as well, but I disagree that it hit them harder than the Brits. The reason, as pointed out in Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild, was a brutal one: sugar slavery in places like Jamaca needed steady imports of slaves, because it was so deadly - the slaves there died, worked to death in only a few years, without any attempt being made to allow them to reproduce.
In contrast, slavery in (say) the US was run differently - while brutal, at least the owners did not generally literally work them to death without allowing them to reproduce - the population of slaves in the US was self-sustaining.
I don’t know if the American Western pioneers were colonialists, although they’re closer to the definition that the Voortrekkers, because the western pioneers at least had a metropole they were in relation to.
And you can’t be “colonialist” without being someone’s colonies, or the country establishing the colony. I’m not condoning the Boer States or their government. I’m just saying they weren’t colonialist.
I’d also disagree with you that the Emancipation Act was one of the main motivators behind the Great Trek. I mean, the Vortrekkers weren’t happy about it, and found the concept of greater equality between races as perverse and unholy, but most of the Vortrekkers didn’t own slaves, and the ones that did, didn’t own many of them. I think the primary motivation was the high price of land, and fear of the Xhosa and the belief that the English weren’t willing or able to protect them from the Xhosa.
The issue here is* British Colonialism*. It was a distinctive system of stealing the land belonging to others for the benefit of the Empire. Other forms of colonialism existed, with their own distinctive characteristics. The Boer migration was similar to the American appropriation of land. The intent of the practise is irrelevant. The results are the measure of the morality (unquantifiable until someone builds a new evil meter).
It is a little unfair to pick only on the Brits here. They certainly didn’t maintain the exclusive franchise on evil. Maybe we need the debate on the most evil nation.
As did the Voortrekkers - not every Afrikaner trekked, and many families ended up in both the Cape and the Republics.
I disagree. But that’s irrelevant, since the Boers *were *someone’s colony. That they chose to move around afterwards doesn’t stop them from being European transplants speaking a European language and practicing a European culture.
I differ, strongly.
Yeah, and most of the CSA army were poor farmboys, too.
You weren’t taught South African history in the 70s, were you? Afrikaners used to be quite proud of their reasons for trekking. It’s only post-'94 that there’s been the least semblance of backtracking.
And seriously, if they were scared of the Xhosa, d’you think trekking to the lands of the *Zulu *was a smart move? Naah, they were running away from increased liberalisation of the Cape, in all its forms. the Act was only one of many they objected to. I actually think the 1828 Act was harder to take.