Comments by "Andrew Wilson" (@andrewwilson9183) on "Was Colonialism Good or Bad?" video.

  1. You forget the fact that the British held slave colonies in the Caribbean And still forced half the world to end slavery
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  2.  @caleblee1780  You’re forgetting, still, the British abolitionist movement started by men such as William Wilberforce, and their persecution of slavery outside their empire. A lot of British elites such as Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Edmund Burke genuinely opposed slavery or the slave trade out of principle. The fact is that British political philosophy, with its emphasis on individual rights and freedom was primed to oppose slavery eventually. Also the British didn’t switch to importing cotton from India in force until after the American Civil War started. Prior to that they were “hypocritically” fine with buying most of their cotton from the United States. Which by the way didn’t take off until after 1807. Thought the cotton-gin which made American cotton profitable in the 1790s, it takes awhile for innovations like that to really take off. This would still be after the abolitionist movement started. As for India, Britain didn’t outright ban manufacturing in India, as evidenced by their being a few Indian industrialists, it’s simply that by imposing free trade they made manufacturing in India uncompetitive. Britain also had all the right conditions for industrialization. The most creative people in the world, the highest wages in the world, raw materials at home such as iron, coal, tin, and water. As well as a mercantile fleet that could bring anything else from trade, and an already strong manufacturing sector. Strictly speaking, with British-American trade as an example, they didn’t need to control the location where that cotton came from, they simply would have needed to tariff or ban cloth imports from other countries, which they were already doing prior to the conquest of Bengal.
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  3.  @forsetiaxe6784  I don’t know about slavery being better comparatively. It is certain that they used slaves more efficiently than anyone else, other than the United States, a Neo-British country
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  4. It’s so sad people accuse him of being a social Darwinist, “ironically” even though he was the opposite
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  5. True For those who don’t know, during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, a group of Spanish priests, the “School of Salamanca” laid down a series of moral principles that they believed should govern law and international relations. Their ideas later evolved into Classical Liberalism. The idea of universal human rights came from them. Even though they supported the conquest of the Aztecs “for obvious reasons” they did stand up for the rights of the natives.
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  6.  @abhinavgokhale6917  Much of the world industrialized leading them behind After world war 2, the United States produced about 2/3rds of manufacturing output, now its 16%, yet the economy is still larger than then, everyone else just caught up
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  7. As an American, I am grateful for British colonialism
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  8. Yes but Rome collapsed at that time Britain didn’t
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  9.  @Gillemear  The western Roman state which governed Britannia did completely collapse. Conquered by, I believe, the Visigoths. The Byzantines never ruled Britannia, as Britannia was apart of the western empire. Britain is still independent, “kind off”, and for the several decades after African independence, the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. So not the same
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  10. He did want to end slavery, he didn’t have the means at the beginning of the war
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  11.  @jedediahmyers7495  As a Texan I am grateful for that. I hate Texan separatism
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  12. I think a better comparison is like Greece. The Greeks lost their colonies due to centuries of infighting. However they didn’t collapse, and Rome “America”conquered them. Europe hasn’t collapsed like Rome, or at least not yet.
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  13. There was some homegrown industry Not a lot But it was there
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  14.  @jrd33  Yeah that counterfactual is important. For all history.
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  15.  @forsetiaxe6784  I think you meant the Quakers, and later Evangelicals. Even so, New England didn’t have the same need for slave labor than the south, so they could afford to be generous. I’m not sure if the average slave was better off than the average poor white, I think it would vary. Though certainly I give great praise to the British role in ending slavery globally. One observation that I have made, is that the British Empire was in many ways motivated and justified by Classical Liberalism and modern human rights theory. This is because individual rights are seen as proceeding collective rights. So from the British perspective it was necessary to subvert the autonomy of Africans and Southeast Asians, in order to end slavery. It’s unfortunate that Rudyard neglected that aspect of British Imperial history.
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  16.  @ayemorelocks  The VOC collapsed by the time the Dutch conquered Java You mean the EIC in India
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  17.  @vasicretu1970  As an American I would disagree We were founded by British settlers
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  18.  @vasicretu1970  Yes I am an American of British descent. Yeah I’m fine with Anglo-American colonization of North America. It was a great expansion, necessary for the advancement of human civilization. While certain aspects of it were wrong, I don’t think that all of it was immoral. Sovereignty is established over a given territory through land use. From a European vantage point the Natives were not using all of the land, and therefore lacked sovereignty over all of the land. However, it was true that the natives used the land from their vantage point for self preservation. Thus requiring the Europeans to have compensated the Natives. However, Europeans did try to compensate the natives through assimilation, yet the natives resisted, holding on to their more primitive ways of life.
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  19.  @abhinavgokhale6917  Free trade yes But also cultural conservatism on the part of the Indians
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  20. Japan was scared shirtless of being conquered That’s why the modernized
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  21. Vietnam doesn’t count, those where communists
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  22. Infinite growth is possible if we colonize space
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