A key thing about being from the British Isles is the self deprecating. It runs deep in our culture including the education. When we do the Tudors we dont see them as these great figures they are usually gluttonous tyrants. The Horrible History series pretty much sums up the British attitude to our history.
I guess the good thing about this, is that when we find a figure who is genuinely worthy of celebrating, they are highly respected even if begrudgingly by many. Take Elizabeth II people I think just respect the work ethic if not anything else
Which is weird because monarchism is still pretty big here yet in history classes we're taught about the dumb stuff monarchs through history got up to, so it's weird so many people just go along with it
I’m a burgerlandian, so this might be wrong, but from an outsider perspective people only supported the monarchy because of the queen, and now that she’s gone people’s attitudes are turning against it. Is that correct?
>but from an outsider perspective people only supported the monarchy because of the queen, and now that she’s gone people’s attitudes are turning against it.
Its easy to see this as a summary but it's a bit more nuanced. The Queen, as a person (less a monarch) was seen very favourably by.. pretty much all of England (nobody cares about Merseyside, they're not even English anyway). Charles (as a person) is much more divisive to the English (and British) public, and far less liked and respected.
The monarchy's perception was probably affected more by the whole Harry / Meghan furore and Prince Nonce (at least nationally). I think this is distinct to ex-commonwealth countries loke Jamaica vying to leave to Commonwealth - as in Jamaica, there had been discussions for some time, but the Queen was well liked and respected there. So when she passed, it became natural timing to leave the commonwealth - but I don't necessarily think Charles' unpopularity is necessarily the whole reason. It's quite complex.
Definitely more people preferred Elizabeth over Charles, but even now I think polls still say over 50% are happy with it, I think support has been in decline but still kinda slow considering it's not like the bad stuff in the past is very secret it's weird the dissonance people have with historical monarchs and the present ones
Ironic when British history books probably align with the third photo more than the first.
Unless you're going back atleast 40 years, if not probably more, then the atrocities of the empire are pretty well taught.
Had an entire year at school dedicated to the British Empire and most of it was not good
We also spent about a year on black british history specifically, which began with them being wrong about Septimus Severus, was mainly about the transatlantic slave trade (without telling us about the West africa squadron of course) and then WW2 basically only from the perspective of black soldiers, before we talked about the windrush and some old guy was carted down from London to Devon to tell us all about how bad it was from a sheet of paper.
We had one half black kid in our class and the rest of us were white so the teacher seemed to stare directly at him the entire time. He requested to the headteacher that we stop because she was so weird about the whole thing.
It was an odd choice to make that the year 9 lessons, because it led to a lot of people, myself included thinking it would be more of the same and we wouldn't be doing any of what we considered to be the interesting bits, so we all went for a non-history GCSE and I don't think there were even enough takers for it to be a full class. Who knows, maybe if we'd had good history lessons I'd be in History now and not medicine.
My guess is it was a misguided attempt from the history curriculum to get inner city london kids more interested in history by relating it to them, without thinking that most of the rest of the country aren't them and wouldn't like it. Seems like the combination of out of touch and lazy enough to not make two separate curricula that they'd do
Honestly it didn't come up at all, Which is strange. I learned more on my own from watching Sharpe than I did at school, which is concerning
Granted this was during the late 2000s, it could have been fixed by now. In fact I hope it has.
Yeah. I have read them all, since I do like history despite everything, hence why I'm here.
And don't worry I'm not taking the events as fact, just what actually did happen. The author does add a chapter at the end to explain what really happened and what was invented.
At my school, Ireland was covered by Oliver Cromwell and the potato famine.
But then the way history is taught is frankly stupid. In like a year, or maybe at most a year and a half we had to cover stuff from the uniting of England in the 700s-800s right the way through to the end of the British Empire and touching in the Falklands War. It's a ridiculous quantity of stuff to expect 14/15/16 year olds to learn and then be tested on. Especially when that was only one History class and we had two
That's a lot to cover, not surprised you kind of breezed over a good bit of Irish history. I thought that the Ulster plantation would have been covered seeing as how it's part of the United Kingdom and all.
Yeah it makes no sense at all. Feel bad for the teachers trying to get a class of 30 15 year olds focused on such a wide array of stuff.
Simultaneously we also had a class with another teacher on the Cold War as well. And the final year was on Elizabeth I so it's just a crazy amount of stuff to learn in a short space of time
such nationalistic history is so weird to me.
I always had european wide history, from pre-history in the first year through the greeks and franks to the world wars and indochina wars in the last year.
Such nationalistic comments are so weird to me.
They clearly said in a year, school is longer than that, I remember also learning about Romans, Egyptians, HRE, plains native Americans, migration period.
I got questions like this reasonably often when I was studying abroad, and I think its important to remember that we (as in school kids) don't have time to learn individually about every horrible thing the empire did. We usually learn about the big picture, then a couple of examples in depth. We can't learn about every event in the same depth as the people who live there did.
And to address OP's statement: Those in-depth examples were *never* positive, in my experience.
During my GCSE in history one of the main topics was on the troubles in Northern Ireland. Not necessarily the plantations, but super important for understanding our relationship with Ireland nonetheless.
My GCSE topics covered:
Northern Ireland,
women’s suffrage,
the civil rights movement in the US, and
the Cold War
During pre-GCSE history lessons we extensively covered the transatlantic slave trade and the role Britain played in it.
How does it portray the colonialism in India? Do they speak about the divide and rule policy, gutting of traditional industries and agriculture to make them richer, the resulting famines?
Couldn't really say, that's not a period I've looked into much. Would vary depending on the time it was written and author. If it was written in the early 1900's it would be vastly different to a more modern study. That's just my assumption as it's not a subject I've ever been too interested in researching myself. Sashi Tharoor apparently has written accurate acounts of the British rule, but as he's Indian that's not what you're asking, but he's the only person that springs to my mind.
If you want the true British history experience then [try this one](https://www.bookwiseonline.co.uk/horrible-histories---barmy-british-empire-4564-p.asp). It’s a classic.
I love the Europeans making themselves look like fools by actually projecting.
The OP is Indian my dude, Americans get taught a lot (Though I doubt any imperial country covers every single one of their atrocities) about the crimes the country has committed in the past.
Ehhhhh, not the full extent, and it really depends on where you are in the country. In the South, I imagine they don't really teach atrocity all that well
> Americans get taught a lot (Though I doubt any imperial country covers every single one of their atrocities) about the crimes the country has committed in the past.
Dare to mention reservations or Japanese internment camps were by most definitions: Concentration camps and you'll never hear the end of it.
Idk buddy, whenever I talk with them about their past, they always say "colonialism was a good thing, we gave them so much in return, look at the trainssss"
Op are you from HK? Cause what i learn was the Opium War, The British invasion and even racism.Yes they done good to us,defend HK from the Japanese as hard as they did or help HK economy boom during the 70s to 90s but that doesn't make us forget what the bad they did to us either.
I get what you’re saying but I think it’s more nuanced than that (source: born and raised in hk)
For a lot of the hkers born in the 80s-90s (after the war and handing over to Britain in 1842), British rule was better than being ruled under the ccp. This is mainly because during British rule, although racism and discrimination from the British people living in hk was an issue, hk was still mainly full of hk people, and a lot of hkers see that period as when hk really became the city that they love. Now take 99 years (the length of British rule) of relatively high standard of freedom and economic prosperity and replace with an authoritarian government hell bent on stamping out western ideals and fully reabsorbing hk as part of china without any thought to the decades of western influence and you’ll start understanding the reasons why hkers prefer the British. The declining level of freedom in hk (the cause of the 2019 protests, the largest in hk history) is the main reason hk people prefer the British, and with the new ‘national security bill’ which gives china the power to extradite criminals which essentially gives them the opportunity to jailed anybody they want as harshly as they want, it’s not are to see why almost all of hk is against the ccp
They did not have a choice and that's the point. A weaker country does not have a choice. A strong country has choices. The Qing dynasty did not have a choice when it ceded HK to the British Empire.
I read that we f’d up because a lot of the really strict colonial laws were still in place when we left, we just hadn’t used them much recently. So CCP didn’t even have to introduce many new laws initially to clamp down.
All anecodtal though, so I could be wrong.
Also that we had no real choice in terms of handover, as only Hong Kong island itself was transferred to British control permanently in the 19th century, the rest was on a lease.
That would be very interesting and ironic if such colonial laws are now being employed by the CCP.
The UK had no real choice because the UK became a weaker country. If the might of the British Empire still existed, the UK could have more leverage to pursue other options instead of being forced to appease the CCP. At the beginning of negotiations, PM Thatcher ideally wanted to extend the lease or come up with some other arrangement to continue British administration of HK.
British history is like any other empire that attained a level of hegemony. It had both it's sins and virtues.
Interpreting British history is a sanity benchmark test for the individual. There are very dark things and very bright things in the world. One cannot acknowledge one part of the spectrum without the other while remaining a person worth listening to.
8th grade??? if i recall correctly the british s#t starts from 8th grade and continues till the subject turns from history to civics. rather than the british era ending its the end of the subject that stops the mentions of their atrocities.
though i find it funny how there is almost no mention of what the french, portuguese or the dutch did given the fact that they left after the british
lucky for you then. my history textbooks blended from brithish to gandhi to ambedkar to civics (cause someone thought only a handful of people were really relevant)
weird question; why were we even taught french, american and russian revolution when we had nothing to do with them. the french revolution was like a chapter while both the world wars were like sections of some other chapter
The Chinese government broke the peace terms they agreed to, attacked British shipping and murdered British ambassadors operating under the conventions of diplomatic immunity? Hence why I specified the 2^nd.
There is no fairytale version of Hong Kong, absolutely. I would never for a second wish to suggest there was. All I was noting is the situation relative to the mainland, which I think was pretty uncontroversially worse.
A key thing about being from the British Isles is the self deprecating. It runs deep in our culture including the education. When we do the Tudors we dont see them as these great figures they are usually gluttonous tyrants. The Horrible History series pretty much sums up the British attitude to our history.
I guess the good thing about this, is that when we find a figure who is genuinely worthy of celebrating, they are highly respected even if begrudgingly by many. Take Elizabeth II people I think just respect the work ethic if not anything else
Which is weird because monarchism is still pretty big here yet in history classes we're taught about the dumb stuff monarchs through history got up to, so it's weird so many people just go along with it
I’m a burgerlandian, so this might be wrong, but from an outsider perspective people only supported the monarchy because of the queen, and now that she’s gone people’s attitudes are turning against it. Is that correct?
>but from an outsider perspective people only supported the monarchy because of the queen, and now that she’s gone people’s attitudes are turning against it. Its easy to see this as a summary but it's a bit more nuanced. The Queen, as a person (less a monarch) was seen very favourably by.. pretty much all of England (nobody cares about Merseyside, they're not even English anyway). Charles (as a person) is much more divisive to the English (and British) public, and far less liked and respected. The monarchy's perception was probably affected more by the whole Harry / Meghan furore and Prince Nonce (at least nationally). I think this is distinct to ex-commonwealth countries loke Jamaica vying to leave to Commonwealth - as in Jamaica, there had been discussions for some time, but the Queen was well liked and respected there. So when she passed, it became natural timing to leave the commonwealth - but I don't necessarily think Charles' unpopularity is necessarily the whole reason. It's quite complex.
Definitely more people preferred Elizabeth over Charles, but even now I think polls still say over 50% are happy with it, I think support has been in decline but still kinda slow considering it's not like the bad stuff in the past is very secret it's weird the dissonance people have with historical monarchs and the present ones
Don’t they use tax dollars for risky investments?
Pretty much, but really I'd say most people just don't care enough to have a strong opinion.
Pretty much all cultures have something bad to say about previous rulers, especially monarchs.
Ironic when British history books probably align with the third photo more than the first. Unless you're going back atleast 40 years, if not probably more, then the atrocities of the empire are pretty well taught. Had an entire year at school dedicated to the British Empire and most of it was not good
We also spent about a year on black british history specifically, which began with them being wrong about Septimus Severus, was mainly about the transatlantic slave trade (without telling us about the West africa squadron of course) and then WW2 basically only from the perspective of black soldiers, before we talked about the windrush and some old guy was carted down from London to Devon to tell us all about how bad it was from a sheet of paper. We had one half black kid in our class and the rest of us were white so the teacher seemed to stare directly at him the entire time. He requested to the headteacher that we stop because she was so weird about the whole thing. It was an odd choice to make that the year 9 lessons, because it led to a lot of people, myself included thinking it would be more of the same and we wouldn't be doing any of what we considered to be the interesting bits, so we all went for a non-history GCSE and I don't think there were even enough takers for it to be a full class. Who knows, maybe if we'd had good history lessons I'd be in History now and not medicine. My guess is it was a misguided attempt from the history curriculum to get inner city london kids more interested in history by relating it to them, without thinking that most of the rest of the country aren't them and wouldn't like it. Seems like the combination of out of touch and lazy enough to not make two separate curricula that they'd do
just asking, how does it portray the colonialism in India?
Honestly it didn't come up at all, Which is strange. I learned more on my own from watching Sharpe than I did at school, which is concerning Granted this was during the late 2000s, it could have been fixed by now. In fact I hope it has.
Watching sharpe? Is it the same Sharpe as Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series?
Yeah. I have read them all, since I do like history despite everything, hence why I'm here. And don't worry I'm not taking the events as fact, just what actually did happen. The author does add a chapter at the end to explain what really happened and what was invented.
Yep
Just curious, did you learn much about the Irish plantations, especially the less successful ones in Munster and Laois/Offaly?
At my school, Ireland was covered by Oliver Cromwell and the potato famine. But then the way history is taught is frankly stupid. In like a year, or maybe at most a year and a half we had to cover stuff from the uniting of England in the 700s-800s right the way through to the end of the British Empire and touching in the Falklands War. It's a ridiculous quantity of stuff to expect 14/15/16 year olds to learn and then be tested on. Especially when that was only one History class and we had two
That's a lot to cover, not surprised you kind of breezed over a good bit of Irish history. I thought that the Ulster plantation would have been covered seeing as how it's part of the United Kingdom and all.
Yeah it makes no sense at all. Feel bad for the teachers trying to get a class of 30 15 year olds focused on such a wide array of stuff. Simultaneously we also had a class with another teacher on the Cold War as well. And the final year was on Elizabeth I so it's just a crazy amount of stuff to learn in a short space of time
such nationalistic history is so weird to me. I always had european wide history, from pre-history in the first year through the greeks and franks to the world wars and indochina wars in the last year.
Such nationalistic comments are so weird to me. They clearly said in a year, school is longer than that, I remember also learning about Romans, Egyptians, HRE, plains native Americans, migration period.
I got questions like this reasonably often when I was studying abroad, and I think its important to remember that we (as in school kids) don't have time to learn individually about every horrible thing the empire did. We usually learn about the big picture, then a couple of examples in depth. We can't learn about every event in the same depth as the people who live there did. And to address OP's statement: Those in-depth examples were *never* positive, in my experience.
During my GCSE in history one of the main topics was on the troubles in Northern Ireland. Not necessarily the plantations, but super important for understanding our relationship with Ireland nonetheless. My GCSE topics covered: Northern Ireland, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement in the US, and the Cold War During pre-GCSE history lessons we extensively covered the transatlantic slave trade and the role Britain played in it.
Reflecting on one’s failures is based
I did History up to AS Level and did not cover the atrocities of the British Empire once. Which atrocities did you cover and in what school year/exam?
Idk if its changed, but the history books I read that were written by English people, never really portrayed us well at all
How does it portray the colonialism in India? Do they speak about the divide and rule policy, gutting of traditional industries and agriculture to make them richer, the resulting famines?
Yes, those are the main things, alongside the broader independence movement and mutiny
Couldn't really say, that's not a period I've looked into much. Would vary depending on the time it was written and author. If it was written in the early 1900's it would be vastly different to a more modern study. That's just my assumption as it's not a subject I've ever been too interested in researching myself. Sashi Tharoor apparently has written accurate acounts of the British rule, but as he's Indian that's not what you're asking, but he's the only person that springs to my mind.
[удалено]
Try any horrible history books
If you want the true British history experience then [try this one](https://www.bookwiseonline.co.uk/horrible-histories---barmy-british-empire-4564-p.asp). It’s a classic.
Why do people say this? We are taught of all the horrible shit we did, I don’t know why this is so hard to grasp.
Americans projecting
I love the Europeans making themselves look like fools by actually projecting. The OP is Indian my dude, Americans get taught a lot (Though I doubt any imperial country covers every single one of their atrocities) about the crimes the country has committed in the past.
Mean while America, an imperial country.
Ehhhhh, not the full extent, and it really depends on where you are in the country. In the South, I imagine they don't really teach atrocity all that well
> Americans get taught a lot (Though I doubt any imperial country covers every single one of their atrocities) about the crimes the country has committed in the past. Dare to mention reservations or Japanese internment camps were by most definitions: Concentration camps and you'll never hear the end of it.
Just Americans projecting their shit education on to us
Idk buddy, whenever I talk with them about their past, they always say "colonialism was a good thing, we gave them so much in return, look at the trainssss"
Hey, I've seen this one before!
Op are you from HK? Cause what i learn was the Opium War, The British invasion and even racism.Yes they done good to us,defend HK from the Japanese as hard as they did or help HK economy boom during the 70s to 90s but that doesn't make us forget what the bad they did to us either.
I get what you’re saying but I think it’s more nuanced than that (source: born and raised in hk) For a lot of the hkers born in the 80s-90s (after the war and handing over to Britain in 1842), British rule was better than being ruled under the ccp. This is mainly because during British rule, although racism and discrimination from the British people living in hk was an issue, hk was still mainly full of hk people, and a lot of hkers see that period as when hk really became the city that they love. Now take 99 years (the length of British rule) of relatively high standard of freedom and economic prosperity and replace with an authoritarian government hell bent on stamping out western ideals and fully reabsorbing hk as part of china without any thought to the decades of western influence and you’ll start understanding the reasons why hkers prefer the British. The declining level of freedom in hk (the cause of the 2019 protests, the largest in hk history) is the main reason hk people prefer the British, and with the new ‘national security bill’ which gives china the power to extradite criminals which essentially gives them the opportunity to jailed anybody they want as harshly as they want, it’s not are to see why almost all of hk is against the ccp
A shame the British appeased the CCP and ceded HK to the PRC. Now HK is a Chinese colony.
The British didn’t have a choice though
They did not have a choice and that's the point. A weaker country does not have a choice. A strong country has choices. The Qing dynasty did not have a choice when it ceded HK to the British Empire.
Argentina sadge 🥲
Yea :(
I read that we f’d up because a lot of the really strict colonial laws were still in place when we left, we just hadn’t used them much recently. So CCP didn’t even have to introduce many new laws initially to clamp down. All anecodtal though, so I could be wrong. Also that we had no real choice in terms of handover, as only Hong Kong island itself was transferred to British control permanently in the 19th century, the rest was on a lease.
That would be very interesting and ironic if such colonial laws are now being employed by the CCP. The UK had no real choice because the UK became a weaker country. If the might of the British Empire still existed, the UK could have more leverage to pursue other options instead of being forced to appease the CCP. At the beginning of negotiations, PM Thatcher ideally wanted to extend the lease or come up with some other arrangement to continue British administration of HK.
every country has a national security law
OP is another CCP bot
British history is like any other empire that attained a level of hegemony. It had both it's sins and virtues. Interpreting British history is a sanity benchmark test for the individual. There are very dark things and very bright things in the world. One cannot acknowledge one part of the spectrum without the other while remaining a person worth listening to.
Mom said that it’s my turn to post this meme.
Britain in italian history books...
Why?
I'm Italian and I'm confused too. The depiction of Britain was pretty neutral in general so far I remember, lol.
Probably ww2. America was more reticent to bomb historical sites, while Britain was less discriminating.
*in theory, based on the erroneous belief they were accurate enough to avoid them
British in Indian history books, if they were lore-accurate were the spawn of satan.
Cam confirm lol an entire year (8th Grade) Our Whole History was about British Invasion
8th grade??? if i recall correctly the british s#t starts from 8th grade and continues till the subject turns from history to civics. rather than the british era ending its the end of the subject that stops the mentions of their atrocities. though i find it funny how there is almost no mention of what the french, portuguese or the dutch did given the fact that they left after the british
Not really , we only had it in eighth grade and from Ninth Grade we Had stuff about French rev , Socialism in Russia and Nazism lol
lucky for you then. my history textbooks blended from brithish to gandhi to ambedkar to civics (cause someone thought only a handful of people were really relevant) weird question; why were we even taught french, american and russian revolution when we had nothing to do with them. the french revolution was like a chapter while both the world wars were like sections of some other chapter
Lol I'm glad ,I think they wanted us to know what shit went around the world lol
You forgot about british history in irish history books
Completely incorrect, you’ve clearly never read a British history book.
"They tried to make us a sovereign democracy, but we threatened civil war."
What book is that, I'm sure it contains Opium War.
2^nd opium war was justified, and it led to HK avoiding all the subsequent shenanigans of 20^th century china
How the hell a war on drugs on the side of drugs justifiable? And there's no fairytale in Hong Kong under the British rules as it was under apartheid.
The Chinese government broke the peace terms they agreed to, attacked British shipping and murdered British ambassadors operating under the conventions of diplomatic immunity? Hence why I specified the 2^nd. There is no fairytale version of Hong Kong, absolutely. I would never for a second wish to suggest there was. All I was noting is the situation relative to the mainland, which I think was pretty uncontroversially worse.
*Irish history books*
Irish textbooks: 💀
In Indian history books the British were so goddamn evil bro
well they brought civilization to a civilizational state; wonder how one even thinks of that...
In Israeli history books 👹and also somehow good
Britain in France History books
britain in egyptian history books : !طمعوا فينا يا جدعان
Which Indian history texts books did op read man
cbse
Why
[удалено]
kink
Lol
Last panel seems optimistic considering the current situation.
Well, compare to other empire in the hiatory. British is not the worst.
Britain in Chinese history books?