Gladstone's the wrong kinda famous. He is remembered as one of the more infamous Prime Minister's of the era in Britain. Disraeli is up there on the famous side.
Would Latin America be better or worse off with a surviving Spanish empire?
- Thread starter Fatt Shea
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Infamous? Is their really much of a difference? Either way I ain't British so I can't say anything about how's he seen their but abroad he's pretty much considered the poster boy of Victorian Britain. Either way what was so bad about him in the first place? Apparently he extended the Franchise, wanted Homerule for Ireland and called out Ottoman Atrocities in Bulgaria. Really not sure why he of all people would be infamous. Maybe I am just revealing my ignorance here but he probably had less of a dirty closet than Robert Peel at least.
Oh I know he's a big influence thats for sure. I just don't think he's the only one. Plus didn't the Torys sort of drop it during the end of the 18th century or so and only really adopted it back during the rise of Communism? Also Thatcher would like a word with you.
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Nah he isn't. His policies were the foundations of much of British economic problems in the 1920s and 30s (set gold standard, absolute trade commercialisation etc) and his legal actions cause headaches to this day (Northern Ireland cough).
Thatcherism is a subset of the One Nation Toyryism whose only difference is economic policy which advocates against traditional center right line of though for right wing austerity and cutting measures. So I really don't get your point. The Disraelite ideology of One Nation Conservatism and Toryite Democracy is the main ideology of the party and has been since Disraeli became PM. There is no other ideology in the party at the moment barring itself and it's subsets - one of which include Thatcherism by the way.
.....When did I say he was a Good Prime Minister? That has nothing to do with his fame or notoriety.
Yeah, that's called infamy. Gladstone is called the infamous prime minister of the Victorian era and Disraeli is called the famous prime minister.
Eh being better at managing the economy or ruling well doesn't really make you more famous. Also why is Gladstone the Infamous Prime Minister of the Victorian Era? Wouldn't Robert "Ireland needs development and not Food" Peele be more infamous at least in how's he seen in the minds of the general public?
Peel would be a better candidate for infamy, but that is how Gladstone is mostly considered in popular historical memory.
Maybe in Britain thats the case but outside it......I have never really seen Gladstone portrayed as badly as you say. Really he's pretty much seen as just another ordinary stuffy Victorian British Prime Minister with a hard on for morality. Hell this is the first time that I am hearing about any of this. Plus Infamous as word implies less crappy manager and more somebody like Hitler or Pol Pot
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The British didn't have any laws prohibiting racial segregation because there was no need for them -- there simply wasn't a noticeable non-white population until after the Second World War. It would be more accurate to say that, as soon as racial segregation started becoming a possibility, the British passed a law to stop it with a minimum of fuss -- unlike the Land of the Free, where black citizens were legally oppressed for a good century after the end of slavery, and where banning racial segregation was an enormously controversial act.
That would hold up....If they didn't consistently apply these rules to their colonies as well. Recall the countless white only clubs that popped up in India and Burma. Even New Zealand which had relatively decent relations between Maori and Europeans had whites only clubs as late as the 1960s
The British also engaged in the slave trade, pillaged and ruined Africa for centuries and then left after drawing a few lines on a map once it started to get unprofitable to keep them and Racial Segregation was absolutely a thing in British Colonies where their was a large native population
Segregation in British West Africa (La ségrégation en Afrique occidentale britannique) on JSTOR
Thomas S. Gale, Segregation in British West Africa (La ségrégation en Afrique occidentale britannique), Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Vol. 20, Cahier 80 (1980), pp. 495-507
www.jstor.org
I thought we were talking about Britain itself, not the colonies (which had their own laws anyway).
African-Americans visiting Britain often remarked how much better they were treated there as opposed to in their own country.
I mean they were part of Britain and I count them as a part of Britain as they were under British Jurisdiction and considering these acts were carried out by British Officials who had the approval of the Government in London who could have very well stopped them if it wanted to I count them as things Britain did(Unless your telling me that the Greatest Empire on the earth couldn't govern its own colonies) and quite frankly If you let Apartheid happen under your watch then you have no right to go and call a another country racist
Which ones? Can you provide me with quotes? From what I can tell the actual European Country with really good treatment of Blacks was France and not the UK and even then their were countless cases of for example Non White Members of the Home Guard not being allowed into British Pubs. Reportedly Malcom X even once visited the UK just to see how bad things were in one town for the Indians living their and he reportedly called it worse than Harlem......
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Or, South America becomes a resource extraction colony while the metropole becomes the financial and manufacturing center, as it did with most other European empires at the time.
Yeah, I thought you were implying South America would also industrialize.
Wouldn’t that also depend on where? It wouldn’t industrialise as a whole. But certain areas would be more settler like colonies and sometimes it makes sense to have certain industry close to resources. Yes, in general the focus will be on providing resources to the Motherland, but I can see some exceptions to this general rule.
Are you unaware into how much effort Britain, once it had ceased involvement in the slave trade, then put into stopping that trade not only where they had been involved (in West Africa) but also where they hadn't been (East Africa) as well? Not only did the Royal Navy assign ships specifically for this purpose (despite the serious risk to their crews from tropical diseases), but some of the military expeditions that "progressive thinkers" nowadays label as "nothing but Imperialist aggression" were also for thepurpose of ending Slavery. For example, the last King of Benin (which was a state in coastal Nigeria, not the modern nation of that name further west...), whose overthrow has received an increase in publicity in recent years through a campaign to get 'the Benin Bronzes' repatriated from the British Museum, was breaking a treaty by continuing to practice slavery (and human sacrifice!) within his lands, but if he'd kept to the treaty's terms then Britain would also have done so and Benin could have remained just a client-state -- like various others, such as the Hausa emirates in the north or the Fon-dom of Bafut in British Cameroon -- right through until Nigerian independence.The British also engaged in the slave trade, pillaged and ruined Africa for centuries and then left after drawing a few lines on a map once it started to get unprofitable to keep them
Segregation in British West Africa (La ségrégation en Afrique occidentale britannique) on JSTOR
Thomas S. Gale, Segregation in British West Africa (La ségrégation en Afrique occidentale britannique), Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Vol. 20, Cahier 80 (1980), pp. 495-507
Also, the British withdrawal was due not just to unprofitability as such -- because some areas probably would still have returned a profit despite the costs of occupation -- but to a recognition that local demands for independence were growing too strong for a democracy like Britain to ignore ("A Wind of Change is blowing over Africa") and to the general post-WW2 malaise...
Oh sure fair enough. I know full well what the British did to stop slavery. I just don't give them much credit for it considering how they profited off it for years without a shred of conscience
Considering the First colony that declared independence Ghana pretty imedittaly became a Dictatorship and the absolute state of the Majority of British Colonies.....Yeah good job their!
Honestly, I think the Bourbon Reforms, while somewhat worked in Spain, were a negative for the colonies. The colonies really liked being ruled by distant kings (like the Habsburgs usually were) but they hated the Bourbons and their intrusive hyper-centralization measures.
Not much different to the Thirteen Colonies, everything was alright until those damn Brits with their annoying taxes imposed to finance wars at the other side of the world.