More 'Anglicised' Deeply Integrated British Empire

[flaja]

Why did British Americans and British Canadians and British Australians want home rule and/or independence from Great Britain before the native peoples of places like India did?

Did the disaster in America prompt the Brits to treat colonials elsewhere as more or less equals to native Britons? It has been said that if George Washington had received the commission in the British Army, that he had wanted, he never would have lead the American Revolution. Native Britons treated British Americans as 2nd or even 3rd class citizens even though most British Americans in 1763 either were born in Britain or had grandparents or parents that had been born in Britain. Did the Brits ever treat the natives of India this way?

With their experience with America (no taxation without representation and denial of British due process rights to British Americans), why didn’t the Brits try to create a politically integrated British Empire? I realize that travel and communication would have been difficult at first, but a British Empire parliament and court system to go along with the crown would have been somewhat easy to implement once steamship and submarine telegraph technologies were available in the latter half of the 19th century.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

English is the first or second language of something like 1,000,000,000 of the world’s people. The U.S., Canada, Australia and India all have governments based on British democratic precedents.

America would claim more inspiration from Roman and Greek democratic precedents. The main contributer from Britain besides culture would have been common law. The US political system was in large part a reaction to, not an emulation of, the "British democratic precedents."

As for English... from wiki.


English Pronunciation: /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]

Spoken in: Listed in the article

Total speakers:
First language: 309–400 million
Second language: 199–1,400 million[2][3]

Overall: 0.5–1.8 billion[3] Ranking: 3 (native speakers)[4][5]
Total: 1 or 2 [6]

How much more integration could their be?

Most places that were once British colonies are stable countries with highly prosperous economies, while former French colonies are places like Haiti and Vietnam.

Which has more to do with that more French colonies came under the Soviet sphere of influence or were in the shit-regions of the world than British ones. The Middle East, Africa, and Asia as a whole were Third World regardless of who colonized it.

Another way to analyze it is that Britain got lucky and a few of its colonies (Canada, Australia) didn't have the problems of the other British colonies because the British colonizers had already more or less already removed large native populations from the board. And by "removed" I mean was either too few/too integrated to matter (Singapore), or had already wiped out the natives to a mere shadow of their former presence (the US, Canada, Australia).

I’ve seen material on BBC TV that suggests that race-relations in the U.K. are far better than they have ever been in the U.S.

Oh, , a national television service makes a favorable comparison of its country to another. Certainly not debatable, or based on a minor detail of what time period they're speaking of. Certainly not possibly tied to the fact that many countries have tended to be more progressive with tiny minorities before growing much less so when they have major minorities.

I'm sure that, say, many Indians would disagree that British garrison soldiers were less racist than Americans. Even if it's true, so what? They were still plenty racist.

The whites that established apartheid in South Africa have Dutch ancestry, not British. How long would a British white minority in places like Rhodesia have accepted minority white rule?

And it's not like they didn't more or less consider themselves British after a point, after decades of British settlers moving in as well.

Really, do you have any idea how racially motivated that sounded? There's a very easy answer for how long a white British minority would have accepted continued white minority rule: indefinitely. That's pretty much what the British Empire was: a small number of British whites governing a large number of non-white colonials.

A Hiroshima-size atomic bomb that is airburst does not produce fallout. It would expose people near the blast, but not close enough to be killed by the blast, to levels of radiation that could cause cancer later on, but a nuclear bomb causes fallout only if its detonated at ground level so it can draw soil and debris into the mushroom cloud so fallout can be distributed by the wind.

None of which has anything to do with the person's point that it's political suicide to nuke yourself. That was the main point of his post, not fallout.

The French want a universal culture only as long as it is French. The French don’t respect cultural diversity the way the Brits do.

Which ways did Britain respect cultures again? Was it when they converted the colonials to Christianity in the name of civilization, forced native cultures to forget their languages, resettled large populations from traditional areas to make way for white settlers? Or was it the subjugation of traditions and values of locals in the name of civilized views and British interests?

Why did British Americans and British Canadians and British Australians want home rule and/or independence from Great Britain before the native peoples of places like India did?

What makes you think they wanted it later, as opposed to not having the power, position, or respect to grab it until later?

Native Britons treated British Americans as 2nd or even 3rd class citizens even though most British Americans in 1763 either were born in Britain or had grandparents or parents that had been born in Britain. Did the Brits ever treat the natives of India this way?

A great deal of historical texts would say no.

After all, even second- or third-class citizens have rights that are to be respected.

With their experience with America (no taxation without representation and denial of British due process rights to British Americans), why didn’t the Brits try to create a politically integrated British Empire? I realize that travel and communication would have been difficult at first, but a British Empire parliament and court system to go along with the crown would have been somewhat easy to implement once steamship and submarine telegraph technologies were available in the latter half of the 19th century.

What, and let the non-white majority dictate the policy of a civilized christian European nation? Let the population mass of India dictate policy over the enlightened views of the British minority in London? Let the funny uncivilized brown people rule for themselves?

Clearly you jest. Everyone knew that the White Man's Burden was Britain's to bear, to lift up the backward people of the world with enlightened government, which could only come from Britain.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

I don't think you can really generalize about any of the colonial empires because the structures of their rule varied so greatly according to conditions.

I think it is definitively false that the French or anyone else considered native elites as their equals. You might look at Algeria as a pretty conclusive case in that regard.

Fiji is not really a representative example - a really small place with a small population overwhelmed by more politically sophisticated newcomers. Fijians aren't even a majority there.

That could never happen in a place with a large and overwhelming native majority, like say Nigeria. And you'll note that even Fiji had no interest in staying in the British Empire. Heck, none of the Anglo majority states, like Australia, had any interest in remaining in the British Empire.

I really don't see any way you'll ever get anything like and integrated empire unless you can build teleporters that remove the barriers of time and distance. And even if you did build an integrated empire, it would cease to be the British Empire and become the Indian Empire which would have more votes than all the rest of it combined.

I would have to agree that much of the close connection between France and its former colonies is due to realpolitic more than anything else. However I do think it could be said that in many of the 'black' former French colonies in Africa there is a fairly close cultural connection.

I would think that it is a lot to do with the fact that the French had a far greater tendency to look on the native elite as (almost) equals (so long as they were fully integrated into French norms) compared to the British.

There is one or two examples of the British Empire doing this. One would be Fiji (I know this as I'm half indigenous Fijian). There the indigenous population is very deeply Anglicised, especially the elite. In the lead-up to independence in 1970. most independence movements were heavily Indian-dominated.

The indigenous elites were highly integrated into the economic structure of Fijian society, it was (and is) law that most agricultural land is owned by indigenous land-owners and it was leased on 99-year terms to Europeans (and Indians). This helped to create a co-opted 'rentier class' among the indigenous elite. Perhaps if in places like Kenya, Zimbabwe and other former British colonies, such a system of land ownership prevailed, it would have similar effects?

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

America would claim more inspiration from Roman and Greek democratic precedents. The main contributer from Britain besides culture would have been common law. The US political system was in large part a reaction to, not an emulation of, the "British democratic precedents."

I have to disagree with you on this. Our system of government is almost wholly based upon the British. If anything, we were rebelling against the lack of application of British political values rather than reacting against them. "No taxation without representation!" If the British had been treated as we were, they would have revolted too.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

I have to disagree with you on this. Our system of government is almost wholly based upon the British. If anything, we were rebelling against the lack of application of British political values rather than reacting against them. "No taxation without representation!" If the British had been treated as we were, they would have revolted too.

I was intending to refer more about the structure of the government post-Revolution. While you definitely have a very good and accurate point in regards to the lead up to the Revolution, and even a good point at the Convention, when they started looking for new ways to remake the government they looked especially hard at Rome.

Perhaps it might be better to say that they considered both, and took ideas of British government and mixed it with Roman government, and tried to balance the two to cover the flaws. No one wanted the Consul situation to rear its head again, after all, just as much as most of the explicit restrictions mentioned in the Constitution are reactions to British policies before independence.

But in my view, and this is purely my view here, I would view it as the former British colonials trying to build a republican system away from the British system, rather than just emulating the government they left behind.

 

[Nicomacheus]

I was intending to refer more about the structure of the government post-Revolution. While you definitely have a very good and accurate point in regards to the lead up to the Revolution, and even a good point at the Convention, when they started looking for new ways to remake the government they looked especially hard at Rome.

Perhaps it might be better to say that they considered both, and took ideas of British government and mixed it with Roman government, and tried to balance the two to cover the flaws. No one wanted the Consul situation to rear its head again, after all, just as much as most of the explicit restrictions mentioned in the Constitution are reactions to British policies before independence.

But in my view, and this is purely my view here, I would view it as the former British colonials trying to build a republican system away from the British system, rather than just emulating the government they left behind.

I'm gonna have to side with Abdul on this one, though I will preface this by saying this argument is the American constitutional equivalent of angelic pin-dancing. There's no hard and fast answer and a huge number of sources to cite in support of an array of opinions.

The colonials liked to talk about Classical analogues for their state, but Rome and Greece had little impact on government structures. Indeed, the American Republic's best features are precisely where it refutes the Graeco-Roman examples.

The easiest example here is the simple belief in the ability of a continental state to be a republic. Madison has to invent wholly new ground here. His best precedent is probably the 1707 Act of Union.

Really the only term used is Senator and then the practice of the US Senate and the Roman so widely divergent that it's just architecture. Equally impactful was the experience of governing churches and corporations...hence the term President.

I would say it's a British system (of the early 17th and 18th centuries, in which the King / Executive is strong and the doctrine of responsible government weak) in Republican clothing adopted to the unique demands of the British Colonial / American experience, heavily influenced by the precedents of Church governance and the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

Probably the most important influence of Roman and Greek constitutional model was the fixed term of elective office, rather than the Parliamentary model of being summoned and hence floating terms. That point is admittedly muted since British reformers sometimes called for more frequent elections. And it's true import is questionable since the Americans abandoned annual terms -- a sine qua non for Graeco-Roman free government -- in favor of fairly long terms of office.

And even though the US has a single President, the original elections for the VP produced a very dual executive, one whose capacity for chaos was so great it had to be quickly scraped.

Last point: the US has a written constitution, true. That tradition is very important and distinctive and in modern eyes singularly republican. Such a tradition drew heavily on the experience of colonial charters and church covenants. What's more, despite the import of the constitution itself, there's vast amount of "constitutionally important law and precedent" that is not contained within the document. Much of that precedent flowed from British common law (recognized in the Bill of Rights) and practice in communal government (Robert's Rules and the like).

 

[Nicomacheus]

With their experience with America (no taxation without representation and denial of British due process rights to British Americans), why didn’t the Brits try to create a politically integrated British Empire? I realize that travel and communication would have been difficult at first, but a British Empire parliament and court system to go along with the crown would have been somewhat easy to implement once steamship and submarine telegraph technologies were available in the latter half of the 19th century.

First, I'm a big dreamer about what-if about pan-Atlantic / global British Empires. I agree that there's a lot of potential.

However, the unfortunate answer is this: the British resisted such moves because they didn't think the white settlers living across the seas were British. An Empire that granted a large amount of say to such folks is no longer British in the sense that we understand the term. Or in the simple geographical sense of having its main political gravity emanate from the British Isles. In this sense, I've always though that Americans' identity and aspirations to wield a large continental empire of liberty stem in some way from a transmuted sense of British Imperialism.

Read Benjamin Franklin's Papers from 1754 (when he's a devout Imperialist) to 1776 (when he's a Patriot through and through) and one gets the sense that it's the Americans who in a way are thinking about the globe-spanning Empire while the British are being narrow-minded island-dwellers.

Also, I think Edmund Burke's speech "On Reconciliation with the Colonies" delivered in 1782/3 pretty much sums up the British reaction to the American Revolution and its impact on later colonial policy. I seem to recall that it was one of those things that British schoolchildren memorized in the 19th century.

 

[flaja]

America would claim more inspiration from Roman and Greek democratic precedents. The main contributer from Britain besides culture would have been common law. The US political system was in large part a reaction to, not an emulation of, the "British democratic precedents."

What world are you living in?

 

[Susano]

What world are you living in?

Funny - thats the boards collective opinion about you.

 

[flaja]

I have to disagree with you on this. Our system of government is almost wholly based upon the British. If anything, we were rebelling against the lack of application of British political values rather than reacting against them. "No taxation without representation!" If the British had been treated as we were, they would have revolted too.

Americans were fighting to retain the rights that Britons had under the British Bill of Rights and Magna Charta. If Crown and Parliament had done to residents of Britain what they tried to do to residents of British America, George III would have indeed had his Cromwell. Americans rebelled against tyranny because the British taught us well.

 

[flaja]

Probably the most important influence of Roman and Greek constitutional model was the fixed term of elective office, rather than the Parliamentary model of being summoned and hence floating terms.

Parliament hadn’t meet solely at the crown’s summon for more than a century when the U.S. Constitution was written. The Parliament that Charles I summoned after he had dissolved the Short Parliament passed a law that mandated that Parliament had to meet at least once every 3 years.

 

[flaja]

First, I'm a big dreamer about what-if about pan-Atlantic / global British Empires. I agree that there's a lot of potential.

I have extensive British ancestry both royal and commoner. I think of myself as English as much as I do American. There are times that I think I might someday like to live in England, but then I see Bucket Woman on TV and think better of it.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

What world are you living in?

The one in which nearly all the grievances of the Declaration of Independence were explicitly addressed in the Constitution and its Amendments. That would make them rejections of the British democratic tradition as applied to the colonies, rather than emulations of. And when the Constitutional Convention set up a federal republic in the (idealized) image of the Romans with distinct separation of powers, as opposed to a more British parliamentary system with a more vague separation between Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, it can be called following a different path.

 

[Tyr]

Oh, , a national television service makes a favorable comparison of its country to another.

To say this shows quite a lack of knowledge of the British media...

 

[flaja]

The one in which nearly all the grievances of the Declaration of Independence were explicitly addressed in the Constitution and its Amendments. That would make them rejections of the British democratic tradition as applied to the colonies, rather than emulations of. And when the Constitutional Convention set up a federal republic in the (idealized) image of the Romans with distinct separation of powers, as opposed to a more British parliamentary system with a more vague separation between Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, it can be called following a different path.

If Americans were rejecting British political tradition, explain the Magna Charta and the British Bill of Rights.

 

[flaja]

To say this shows quite a lack of knowledge of the British media...

Zoom! Right over your head.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

If Americans were rejecting British political tradition, explain the Magna Charta and the British Bill of Rights.

Explain things that happened well before American colonization even started? As in, things that happened completely independent of American political development?

 

[Superdude]

If Americans were rejecting British political tradition, explain the Magna Charta and the British Bill of Rights.

Just. Stop. Posting.

 

[mtg999]

America would claim more inspiration from Roman and Greek democratic precedents. The main contributer from Britain besides culture would have been common law. The US political system was in large part a reaction to, not an emulation of, the "British democratic precedents."

As for English... from wiki.


English Pronunciation: /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/[1]

Spoken in: Listed in the article

Total speakers:
First language: 309–400 million
Second language: 199–1,400 million[2][3]

Overall: 0.5–1.8 billion[3] Ranking: 3 (native speakers)[4][5]
Total: 1 or 2 [6]

How much more integration could their be?
Which has more to do with that more French colonies came under the Soviet sphere of influence or were in the shit-regions of the world than British ones. The Middle East, Africa, and Asia as a whole were Third World regardless of who colonized it.

Another way to analyze it is that Britain got lucky and a few of its colonies (Canada, Australia) didn't have the problems of the other British colonies because the British colonizers had already more or less already removed large native populations from the board. And by "removed" I mean was either too few/too integrated to matter (Singapore), or had already wiped out the natives to a mere shadow of their former presence (the US, Canada, Australia).

Oh, , a national television service makes a favorable comparison of its country to another. Certainly not debatable, or based on a minor detail of what time period they're speaking of. Certainly not possibly tied to the fact that many countries have tended to be more progressive with tiny minorities before growing much less so when they have major minorities.

I'm sure that, say, many Indians would disagree that British garrison soldiers were less racist than Americans. Even if it's true, so what? They were still plenty racist. And it's not like they didn't more or less consider themselves British after a point, after decades of British settlers moving in as well.

Really, do you have any idea how racially motivated that sounded? There's a very easy answer for how long a white British minority would have accepted continued white minority rule: indefinitely. That's pretty much what the British Empire was: a small number of British whites governing a large number of non-white colonials.

None of which has anything to do with the person's point that it's political suicide to nuke yourself. That was the main point of his post, not fallout.

Which ways did Britain respect cultures again? Was it when they converted the colonials to Christianity in the name of civilization, forced native cultures to forget their languages, resettled large populations from traditional areas to make way for white settlers? Or was it the subjugation of traditions and values of locals in the name of civilized views and British interests?



What makes you think they wanted it later, as opposed to not having the power, position, or respect to grab it until later?


A great deal of historical texts would say no.

After all, even second- or third-class citizens have rights that are to be respected.
What, and let the non-white majority dictate the policy of a civilized christian European nation? Let the population mass of India dictate policy over the enlightened views of the British minority in London? Let the funny uncivilized brown people rule for themselves?

Clearly you jest. Everyone knew that the White Man's Burden was Britain's to bear, to lift up the backward people of the world with enlightened government, which could only come from Britain.

I don't think even in a politically integrated Empire the non-Anglo majority would be give a majority say in political affairs. There would be significant malapportionment in electorates and parts of the Empire. This would be biased toward the UK and other predominantly white areas.

Also I think that in a more 'French' style of British Empire in places such as S Africa rather than racial categories being used there would be categories such as 'civilisied' and 'non-civilised'. I believe that the French used such categories in some of their colonies.

 

[Jaded_Railman]

American political tradition draws itself from a lot more than just one source. British and Continental political theory of the Enlightenment is the main one. The Roman Republic was the inspiration for the balance of powers, but then again, so was the British Kingdom (only Parliament can levy taxes and approve spending, etc).

There was a pretty explicit rejection of Constitutional Monarchy as it existed in Britain at the time, as well as the concept of aristocracy. Likewise, the idea of a complicated constitution spread across hundreds of documents was also pretty hardily rejected. The Imperial Presidency that we ended up with was in no way intended. The President was meant to simply be the chief officer of state, not the sole source of sovereignty as a monarch would be.