English: A map of the British Empire in 1921 when it was at its height with British Raj indicated when it too was at its height as well. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Something that has always caught my eye. We’ve been noticing over the last few years that some players in Asia are doing a good job of industrializing or even skipping a generation, some are not.
China seems almost like the Soviet Union redux, doesn’t it? Huge environmental problems, huge quality problems, and a work force that just doesn’t give a damn, or at least that’s what it looks like from here. I wouldn’t call them a valid long term threat, right now they are competitive based mostly on currency manipulation. That doesn’t work forever.
Then there’s India. They’ve got a bunch of problems as well, of course, but if we’re honest we in the US had those problems back in the Gilded Age as well, we worked through them. Britain did too. And I suspect so did most of Europe, more or less. All of us have become in a sense victims of our own success, and we’re going to have to get our act together to be competitive again. I have doubts about Europe but, in North America it’s at least possible, although I don’t think we will ever be the manufacturing power we were, we just don’t seem very interested in physically working that hard, anymore.
I think part of the reason India is progressing so well is covered here, although like the rest of us, the nascent problems concerning Islamists are giving them problems. This is from the Power Line Blog and is very interesting.
In place of the traditional Churchill meditation that usually appears in this space on the weekends, let’s take a detour to one of the areas which contemporary liberals hold against Churchill: the British Empire. For a long time I’ve been predicting that sooner or later revisionist scholarship would be begin to contest and eventually reverse much of the cliché-ridden leftist line that “colonialism” should be summed up purely as racism, conquest, and exploitation. Here and there revisionist books have appeared, and then there’s Harry Crocker’s splendid Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire, and also Kirk Emmert’s fine but out-of-print and hard to find defense of Churchill’s humane imperial views, Churchill on Empire.
Bill Kristol writes in to direct our attention to a story appearing in The Express by an Indian author on “The Remarkable Raj: Why Britain Should Be Proud of Its Rule in India.”
The period of colonial rule, spanning some 200 years, is routinely depicted as the systematic plundering of a nation. The popular view is that the Empire stripped India of its natural resources and gave little in return, leaving the place all but destitute when independence was finally granted in 1947.
Now, however, a new book written by an Anglo-Indian challenges this notion. It asserts that in fact Britain laid the foundations for modern-day India and the prosperity that it enjoys today.
The girders for every bridge, the track for every mile of railway and the vast array of machinery required for India’s infrastructure were all carried there by the same ships that helped exploit a land thousands of miles away. The engineers who laid the cornerstones for India’s development from Third World nation to burgeoning industrial superpower were British.
“The indisputable fact is that India as a nation as it stands today was originally put together and created by a small, distant island country,” says Dr Kartar Lalvani, founder of the vitamins company Vitabiotics and a former Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, in the book he has spent the past eight years writing, The Making Of India: A Story Of British Enterprise. It comes out later this year.
Continue reading The Weekly Winston: Vindicating the British Empire | Power Line.
That little island off the coast of Europe just keeps reverberating through history, benefiting the common man , seemingly forever, doesn’t it?
Related articles
- The End of the British Empire in the 20th century (aemy2013.wordpress.com)
- The Weekly Winston: Vindicating the British Empire (powerlineblog.com)
- India practical-view (slideshare.net)
- Moving Beyond our Colonial Past (nithincoca.com)
