The Roman Empire
conquest
slavery
The British Empire
the slave trade
legitimized piracy
the opium trade
the Amritsar massacre
the Bengal famine
divide and rule
broken promises
social division and prejudice
The Terran Empire
defense against interstellar barbarians
modest taxes
trade opportunities
autonomous planetary social organization
- except when things go wrong
The Terran Empire borrows trappings and terminology from earlier empires but differs fundamentally because planets are self-sufficient and separated by interstellar distances.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
However brutal the Romans were, they was more to them than slave trading, tax farming, or sadistic games, as we see Manse Everard thinking in "Star Of The Sea."
And I remember S.M. Stirling's own comments about the British Empire, which were nowhere as negative as Michael Portillo seems to have painted it. I.e., the British had as much high minded idealism and benevolence as cruelty and brutality. So Portillo's one sided portrayal needs some modifying.
No objection, mostly, to your summing up of Anderson's Terran Empire. I would have added that Terra also provided protection from a civilized aggressor, Merseia.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Portillo recognized that some (many?) British Imperialists in India thought that they were doing good by civilizing the heathens but they were making the mistake of thinking that an ancient civilization was not civilized simply because it was different from theirs.
Paul.
Sean,
Michael Portillo is a cheerful, urbane guy, a former Conservative MP and contender for the Conservative Party leadership. He uses words like "glory" when describing Imperial architecture, pageantry etc. He mentions that Britain gave India railways (albeit for its own ends), an administrative structure with trained administrators and a unifying language. However, he interviews and heeds Indian scholars who tell him about British insensitivity and injustice.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
In fairness to those Britons who thought India needed "civilizing," it was, along with all the other Oriental cultures, backwards when compared to the huge advances made by the West. Japan, for peculiar reasons of its own, became an exception to that rule.
Were many Britons insensitive and arrogant? I have no doubt that was the case. To say nothing of sometimes being cruel. But, I think Indians themselves were no better, the hatred many Muslims and Hindus have for each other makes that plain. To say nothing of the disgusting caste system.
While Kipling probably idealized the Raj in many of his stories, I also strongly think there was a good deal of truth in them. So I suspect some of those Indian scholars were biased.
I am also skeptical the Bengal famine was a particularly British atrocity. A major cause of the famine was the stopping of rice imports from Burma due to first the devastating losses caused by Japanese attacks on Anglo/Indian shipping in WW II. Made even worse when the Japanese invaded and occupied Burma.
As so often happens in arguments like this, the real story is more complicated and messy than one side or the other might care to admit. I remember reading of how Nehru himself admitted around 1960 that he and the Congress Party were ruling India by precisely the same methods as the British, but with LESS efficiency. And the post 1947 Indian civil service became notorious for its corruption as well.
Ad astra! Sean
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