As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury he was placed in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine in the 1840s. In the middle of that crisis Trevelyan published his views on the matter. He saw the Famine as a "mechanism for reducing surplus population". He described the famine as "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people".
In Ireland this man was responsible for administering famine relief, and I respectfully disagree with your contention. Perhaps he felt he was doing net good. What he then felt he was doing and what he actually did are different things. He changed his mind later on, but his policies are believed to have lead to the death of over one million three hundred and eighty five thousand Irish.
Right, no-one was disagreeing that the British did many bad things in their colonies. But the point lionhearted is making is that they did more good, overall. Picking a specific example of bad doesn't counter that argument effectively.
sure, but what would counter that argument effectively? How would you do it? How do you say that all of the histories of all the other peoples touched by the British Empire would have actually been just fine, thank you very much. Many of lionhearted's plusses are assumed to have come from the Brits delivered as if into a vacuum. Who's to say that these plus' wouldn't've naturally developed, given enough time, or maybe in ways that don't end in millions of colonized peoples dying? All those other alternate histories are silent.
I would suggest that picking a specific example -- a whoppingly large example, in this case -- is a very good beginning of a counterargument.
Lionhearted saying "here is all the good that happened" needs to be weighed against a reasonable summation of all the good that would have happened. And a "here are all the bad things that happened" likewise should be totaled against the bad things that would have continued to happen.
They're both very, very hard positions to make briefly.
There are entire generations of british historians since WW2 dedicated to the PR propaganda of how good the british were for the colonies and until very recently the western opinion has been entirely shaped by this propaganda - almost any book written by a British historian of which you'll find countless in your library have the same basic point of view.
Opposing viewpoints are not hard to find if you actually take the time to look. See Mike Davis' Late victorian holocausts and the making of the third world which I think is the best explanation of why the differences between east and west are now so great.
Or R.C.Dutt's "Early economic history of the british empire". It's seriously astounding how much money was funnelled out of India and used to build modern Europe and America, while the native Indian industry was killed off.
All this makes the British PR effort entirely justified of course.
Indians came across the 3 monotheistic religions in reverse of order of their birth and their ethos being completely different from their own, did'nt realize their aggressive nature - India had become pacifist since the time of Buddha and Ashoka. By the time the british came, India had already been weakened by the Muslim rules which itself had fallen out of dominance because of new trade routes. So India was doubly weak and this allowed the British to use their resources to easily win and weaken India even further.
The fact that a few Indians were able to leverage the internal dissensions within Europe to their advantage gets very little coverage but was the real story of how the course of history was overturned.
> There are entire generations of british historians since WW2 dedicated to the PR propaganda of how good the british were for the colonies and until very recently the western opinion has been entirely shaped by this propaganda - almost any book written by a British historian of which you'll find countless in your library have the same basic point of view.
That's odd - I grew up in Scotland and our history lessons were mostly about how bad the British empire was and how evil our imperialistic ancestors were. We weren't taught anything about the instilled systems of law and governance, the ending of the slave trade, the breakthroughs in science and engineering, etc. - I've discovered all these things afterwards, by myself.
Generally speaking, I would say that the majority of the British public have a negative view of the empire and are pretty much blind to the fact that it did a lot of good as well as harm.
But the whole fascination with idol and temple breaking which Indians can't fathom about Islam turns out to have its origins in the Judaic story of the golden calf.
I deliberately picked that example, where they thought they were doing net good, but in fact they were not on further consideration. Some descendants think still that the Empire did net good, but they are ignorant of many of the details.
The example I gave shows starkly their attitude towards those they subjugated, and if you go to the wiki linked, you will see it was a popular viewpoint. It's an effective example exposing the views popularly maintained by those holding power in the Empire. How can people holding these views do more good than harm, overall?
A famine on the doorstep of a superpower is not forgiveable, no amount of scientific progress or engineering prowess can forgive it. Many of the things they credit themselves with improving they initially instigated and promoted, e.g. opium trade, slave trade, penal colonies, regional wars arising out of 'divide and conquer' tactics. They were not a civilising force.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Trevelyan,_1st_Baro...
In Ireland this man was responsible for administering famine relief, and I respectfully disagree with your contention. Perhaps he felt he was doing net good. What he then felt he was doing and what he actually did are different things. He changed his mind later on, but his policies are believed to have lead to the death of over one million three hundred and eighty five thousand Irish.