You have got the jump with me but I agree with a lot of that. LK has indeed looked for only the positives and even implied it couldn't have been that bad because there weren't many British soldiers in India, ffs. (Fred West was good at patios, etc).
Of course that post you quoted is not all I've taken from the debate. I appreciate your informed posts.
There has been a theme though, that "shit happens", and also that your own family have in no way benefited from the spoils of colonial oppression. I'm no historian and defer to your expertise but that seems very unlikely to me. I gave two obvious examples. I don't think it can simply be brushed away by saying that most of the wealth had gone to the British rich. I find it a bit difficult to accept. Probably my inner idealist.
Don't think I've used the word racist or shut anything down? Just one tongue in cheek post. Your argument is more robust than falling to that.
All this is quite different from the question you asked CP of how we could make amends. I've no idea but, despite the foreign aid budget (to be cut by 29pc), aspects of exploitation continue to this day. That mainly comes from our established financial and infrastructure power, which is why China is so busy in Africa too. It's like playing a game of monopoly where one player starts with 100 times more money than the others. All the properties are available so it looks fair from the outside but who is going to put up their hotels and dominate the market? Then you have to look at the reasons for the cash inequality and put in suitable protection based on that. In this dumb analogy it's even worse because even when other players have some property, the rich player bends the rules to build hotels there as well and takes the rent.
Ok, fair enough. I dont like being called racist, I would be worried about anyone who does but I accept that was not you
I don't actually disagree with any of that.
I traced my family in lockdown last year. I was hoping for some interesting stories, and what I got was a long line of brickmakers from Sleaford with a high child mortality rate. I can't trace back that far, but they would almost certainly have been serfs under the feudal system.
So no, it's not impossible that my family benefitted very indirectly from the slave trade through some pretty distant trickling down. But that can hardly be helped, and in reality my family had nothing at any time.
More importantly, the vast majority of the English population had no involvement in the slave trade and
no agency to stop it. CP will say that is not good enough. I disagree. No one in my family had the ability to even vote until the 1880s reform act.
I don't believe it is wrong to question the extent of collective responsibiliy for evils committed by a regime in which a tiny elite ruled (MPs were not even paid until nearly the 20th century, ensuring only the elite could afford to be elected) and only a small portion of the population had any say in that.
I do not blame the Chinese population for what is happening to the Uighurs; what agency do they have? I have actually seen discrimination against the Uighurs in China with my own eyes, and the Chinese had no concept that it was discrimination. And why would they considering the information available to them?
I believe the same principal applies.
And finally, someone suggests a viable idea for his restitution could be done. I don't disagree with what you say there at all
