[donall]

I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies celebrating Colonisation Day or bemoaning the withdrawal of the British Army from their territories.

Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.

[lurk2]

> I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious!

The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.

> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.

Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.

[hermitcrab]

The British Empire ended the hideous practice of Sati ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice) ). It also unified India and built the railroads. The Indians paid a very heavy price for this though. The East India compoany was rapacious. Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.

[lurk2]

> Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.

I've never seen any convincing evidence that it was one of the richest countries in the world. What are you basing that off of?

[vinay427]

It’s based on some of the same sources describing historical economies of other countries/regions. There are a variety of sources accessible online that go into more detail, including the ones cited in the excerpt I’ve included below.

> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India

[bitsage]

Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society. Per capita, there’s no indication India was ever the richest. They did fall behind massively due to an inability to compete during industrialization though. The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.

[vinay427]

> Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society.

It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.

> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.

The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India

[hermitcrab]

There is some information here about the British East India company pretty much destroyed the Indian textile industry through tarifs and other measures. Turning Indian from a leading textile manufacturer into a (much less profitable) producer of raw cotton for Britain's mills:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cotton

[hermitcrab]

"In 1820, India's GDP was 16% of the global GDP. By 1870, it had fallen to 12%, and by 1947 to 4%." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...

[gadders]

It was also mostly already conquered by the Mughals.

[hermitcrab]

IIRC it was discussed in the 'Empire' podcast by British historian William Dalrymple. But I might be misremembering that.

[defrost]

Who didn't eat other people?

Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.

In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.

* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannibalism

[lurk2]

I was surprised that I had never heard of this, but as I investigated further I found the citations were sparse. All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg. Here's an excerpt from the About section of his website:

> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.

You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.

[defrost]

> All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg.

You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.

I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?

The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.

Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:

* https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1083320

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.300.5617.227a

are links to a paper (2003) and commentary that goes down that path looking at genetics.

The more troubling to some is recent history during which attitudes towards using body parts have changed, even in Europe.

Many accept evidence of cannibalism 1,000 years past in the Americas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691637396/pr...

Some are uncomfortable about contempory reports of human flesh used in Asian medicines: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-made-infant-flesh-caps...

People can be forgiving of survival cannabilism in European famines (even in the 1930s) and among castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Europe

A number are just unaware that human bones were used to make beet sugar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/skeletons-from-battle-of...

> You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.

You're excused.

[lurk2]

> You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.

The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?

> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.

I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.

There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.

[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345912

[defrost]

> The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper.

I never claimed that it did.

I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.

There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".

> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.

Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.

On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.

How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?

All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.

[donall]

It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves.

I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".

I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.

[mibes]

> I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites.

Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.

[donall]

Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles and entire kingdoms being conquered and subjugated. We are certainly talking about a death toll in the tens of thousands.

[lurk2]

> Lost control

Dyer gave explicit orders to fire into the crowd.

[mibes]

That sounds like loosing control of a protest to me

[lurk2]

They did not lose control of a protest. The Indians were not permitted to assemble. When it was discovered that an assembly was meeting, the British entered the square where the assembly occurred and massacred those present.

[gadders]

Native Americans in the US also practised cannibalism. Evidence has been found in coprolites.