Originally posted by Ushgarak
Well, I'll repeat ahain what I said in the other thread...People have this vision of a vast Biritsh army going around conquering the world for the glory of the Monarchy and imposing despotism everywhere they went.
THis is a massive distortion of the truth- which is not to say that the Empire was not a tool of oppression.
But the main error is in the envisaging of that army. Britain did not have a large army. In fact it had a tiny army, in any comparison to other powers in the world. It would have been actively impossible to run the Empire on military power. Britain's forceful strength was naval, which enabaled it to keep the Empire connected and to ward off the attentions of rivals, but you can't conquer the world with boats.
The British Empire was, in fact, a greed-ridden preferential trading block. It maintained control in collusion with local authorities, rather than trying to conquer all of them, which would have been silly. It was a very simple deal; we would bring some troops over, talk to the local bigwigs, discuss with them about how much richer they would be if they worked with us, left the troops there to protect our interests, and bingo, more pink on the map.
Just look at how big India is, and how many people are there, and compare it to the 10000 or so troops we had available for disbursment there, and you have to very quickly abandon the logic of an Empire held together by force.
It was all money- everyone was in it to get rich. And by bringing in money it also brought in a lot of development and advancment for the nations concerned, and of course plenty of suffering and oppression to those that stood in the way of the cash flow.
When the money failed, the Empire did. And that was that.
😕 Ushgarak is right!!!!!!! 😕
He is ✅