Talk:British Empire/Archive 22

Archive 15

←

Archive 20

Archive 21

Archive 22

Archive 23

Removal of page cited, not primary source, and genocide is a word commonly used by notable historians of British empire's colonialism.

1.Two editors have removed the page cited about the work of Elkins, Caroline (2022). Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. ISBN 978-0307272423, mentioned in the current article revision. This page directly supports the article content, and in fact the article says "page needed". Here is a part of such page>

"Ordinary codes and regulations proved insufficient in quelling empire’s rebellions and Britain’s spectral fears, so colonial officials turned to legal exceptionalism in the form of martial law and states of emergency, or statutory martial law. While lawful, these states of exception granted extraordinary power to the military and to the government’s executive branch. Decision making was left to the men on the spot, and their discretionary authority was staggering. They interpreted when violence was necessary, and at what intensity level, to protect the state and preserve its laws."

Why is the page removed without any explanation?

2. Furthermore, the Independent news citation provided is not an editorial or opinion, it is in the UK politics section...not a primary source. Jon Stone is not an opinion writer. [1] There's academics who share this view like historian David Olusoga, founder of Black Studies in UK. Can I add his POV here in the article?

3. The term used by many historians is genocide, not massacre. for example, in the source removed by these same editors, here is the wording:

"” The first, most prominent in the British realm (especially the United States, Canada, and Australasia), was a legal-utilitarian justification, according to which native peoples had no right to territories they inhabited, owing to their “failure” to exploit them adequately. As Benjamin Madley has pointed out, this translated in Australasia to the fiction of terra nullius, i.e., that the territories in question had no original inhabitants in a legal sense; and, in America, to the similar concept of vacuum domicilium, or “empty dwelling.” “Genocide began to be regarded as the inevitable byproduct of progress,” as literary scholar Sven Lindqvist observed—even if its perpetrators and supporters grew misty-eyed in the process."[2]

Should we add a survey of the bibliography British colonialism here to prove the point that genocide is the word employed by historians? Magonz (talk) 09:33, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Per wp:v they may be objecting to the idea she says this was "widespread". Slatersteven (talk) 10:09, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Here are some quotes from the said book that literally have the word "widespread" in such context:

a. Churchill’s historical rescripting omitted from his condemnations of Dyer any mention of Britain’s widespread “legalized lawlessness,” a term I use to describe the incremental legalizing, bureaucratizing, and legitimating of exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control.

b. . Coupled with the effects of the estimated fifty thousand home raids since the start of the conflict, this widespread domestic destruction further terrorized the civilian population, which was precisely the point.

c. He detailed the British forces’ widespread ransacking and looting of homes, summary executions, disappearances, denial of food and water to innocent civilians, rapes of women and girls, and destruction of livestock.

d. “But widespread, long-term, cold-blooded, permanent cruelty, I’ve never experienced before, not even from the British imperialists no matter how arrogant they were.”

e. . Early morning security force raids and village burnings were widespread in Kenya.

f. Colonial officials erected a Home Guard post in each emergency village; inside the posts, rapes and beatings were widespread, as were tortures that included confinement in small cells filled with vermin and excrement.

What do you think? Magonz (talk) 14:29, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I think that none of that is from your quote in your OP, thus I can't judge context, What I can say is "what pages are these quotes from?", which does not address the gist of my point, if if does not say X on p[agve 26 we can't say "On page 26 it says X". Slatersteven (talk) 14:35, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

So then we could make the wording more general to describe the general message of the author, instead of focusing on a given sentence of the book. Is this better? Magonz (talk) 19:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Like it is ow you mean? Slatersteven (talk) 19:15, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

This is not about verifiability. I'm sure we could find sources claiming the British Empire was a banana if we looked hard enough. It's about neutrality and weighting: If a majority of sources used the term 'genocide' then we would include it. If a large minority used it then we would include it - proportionately - if the context demanded it. But since historians generally do not use this term, Wikipedia does not either. I'm sure there are reasons why most historians don't use the term regularly. It shouldn't be too difficult to guess why, but this isn't a forum. NB the first source spends a fair bit of time explaining how other historians were highly critical of the Elkins book which makes me think that even referencing it is giving it undue weighting here. Wiki-Ed (talk) 21:15, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Which point are you talking about in this section. 1, 2 or 3 ? Or some kind of combo ? Magonz (talk) 05:25, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

So funny, we know that Eugenics was brought up to the level of pseudoscience in the UK, so I like to remember this instead of believing what some self-appointed historians tell you about what happened to Britain's colonized peoples that these historians can't talk their native language or even have ever stepped outside a Western context, literally, physically. Magonz (talk) 05:40, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

But don't worry, there's lots of scholars that use the word genocide in their book's subject, and the words "British Empire" come up many times in each volume. Wan't a list? Magonz (talk) 05:42, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

The current version is asking for a page number, when it is written all over the place, literally, as I have demonstrated. Magonz (talk) 05:37, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Such claims need to be very well referenced and properly used in the article to make sure they don't take on greater weight than they warrant. I don't think you have done that. Taking snippets from a handful of books, or even taking a whole book that claims widespread genocide is not enough, especially on a topic that has numerous ongoing sources available. I noticed you have pushed this same topic before elsewhere and didn't seem to achieve much more that getting yourself blocked, hence my use of the word 'agenda'. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 06:25, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

What topic? Magonz (talk) 07:15, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

A quick search on Google Scholar shows that there are 165,000 articles about the British Empire using the word genocide. That would indicate that there is substantial debate about the use of this term in relation to the historical actions of the British Empire and that this debate should be reflected in this article. If we limit searches to articles written after 2019, the word genocide is used in 40% of the articles written about the British Empire. This indicates that the genocide debate is a significant portion of the overall literature about this topic in recent years. I have not reviewed Magonz's proposed edits, so I can't comment whether they are well referenced, but it's clearly a poor comparison to suggest this is similar to claiming the British Empire was a banana. If there are issues with the sources Magonz is proposing, we should identify which of the 165,000 available sources on this topic are the best and use those. Larataguera (talk) 12:41, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Can we see that search please? Don't you mean "there are 165,000 articles about mentioning the British Empire using the word genocide ..."? You can't really tell anything much about anything from a search like this - a huge number may be about the Holocaust and so on. Johnbod (talk) 14:14, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Well my first hit for "genocide + british empire" was about the Armenian genocide, which was nothing to do with the British empire as such. Slatersteven (talk) 14:20, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure there are some false hits. Nevertheless, I suspect that a good faith effort to review scholarship would reveal substantial use of this term to describe the Empire's treatment of Indigenous people. Even the piece Slatersteven mentioned [3] about British intervention in the Armenian genocide notes the irony that the British Empire is an institution more associated with the violation of human rights than with their advocacy.

I don't have time to extensively review the literature right now, but my point is that a cooperative and generative discussion that sincerely approaches the literature to evaluate this question might yield surprising results. Magonz may have some valid concerns.Larataguera (talk) 14:50, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

What literature? My Google search of "genocide by the British Empire" returned 9 results none of which were made by reliable sources. The same term in Google scholar returned zero results. If you don't have time to review the literature and discover for yourself that this is not how the vast majority of historians treat the topic then you'll have to accept what others are telling you. However, I take back my comment about the "British Empire being a banana" - this term also yielded zero results in my very thorough, academically rigorous review of google search results. Wiki-Ed (talk) 21:19, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Magonz: Before you shunt more meaningless statistics back and forth, please tell me what act in the long British presence in South Asia from the time of the East India Company's charter of 1600 and arrival in Surat soon after to the last British tommies walking through the Gateway of India to their waiting ship in 1948, constituted genocide. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 19:50, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Actually I don't think we want to encourage editors to tell us in their own words, we want them to find sources (specifically: the majority of sources) which say what they claim. Wiki-Ed (talk) 21:19, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

re-fowler, I too was wondering what acts of the Crown could be described properly as genocide. The vicious heavy handed tactics against certain groups does not count as genocide but it appears that many of those events that at best can be decribed as massacres are being described as genocide. Does the unintentional introduction of Western diseases count? I haven't read the books mentioned here by magonz. Google searches are at best a very general guideline. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 21:25, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Even the historian which is supposed to bring balance in the current revision of the article to the massacre accusations, even in his notable book arguing for the merits of British imperialism, even him says the following "In one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British Empire, the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land were hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated: an event which truly merits the now overused term ‘GENOCIDE’. "

Niall Ferguson [4]

Looking at British Imperialism from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples will throw vast numbers of cases of genocide perpetrated by British Imperialism. Magonz (talk) 20:13, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

The cause seems to be highly contested, with the majority view being introduced foreign diseases. Plenty of sources here - Aboriginal Tasmanians. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 20:59, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

RS of British Empire's genocides, the first one being the best by far:

1. "the British state and elements of identifiably British populations have been involved directly and indirectly in genocide in a number of different international contexts. These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. " Shaw is emeritus professor of international relations and politics at Sussex University and a professorial fellow in international relations and human rights at Roehampton University.

2. "Thus genocide has been achieved by means of summary mass murder (to cite examples already used) in the frontier massacring of Indigenous peoples, in the Holocaust, and in Rwanda." Patrick Wolfe, an Australian historian.

3. The genocide perpetrated upon Aboriginal people in Queensland was almost absolute. Introducing Timothy Bottoms (2013) Conspiracy of Silence, Raymond Evans estimates that more than 250,000 Aboriginal people lived in the area now known as Queensland before colonisation. By WW1 the population had been reduced to less than 20,000 (Bottoms 2013). In a short conference paper in 2014, Evans and Ørsted-Jensen presented research based on newly discovered Native Police files, estimating the number of Aboriginal people directly killed by Native Police attacks in Queensland at 41,000 and the number killed in violent conflict overall at over 60,000. Bottoms, T. 2013, Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

4. "the nations of the Americas remain virtually oblivious to their emergence from a series of genocides that were deliberately aimed at, and succeeded in eliminating, hundreds of indigenous cultures (Barkan, 2003; Churchill, 1997; Stannard, 1992)" David Moshman, Department of Educational Psychology , University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

5. "Genocide is further interwoven with colonialism in the phenomenon of settler colonialism. Here, the metropolitan power encourages or dispatches colonists to “settle” the territory. (In the British Empire, this marks the difference between settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and the Indian subcontinent, where just 25,000 Britons administered a vast realm.) settler colonialism implies occupation of the land, and is often linked to genocide against indigenous peoples " Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia.

6. "Ward Churchill refers to settler colonialism in North America as ‘the American holocaust’, and David Stannard similarly portrays the European colonization of the Americas as an example of ‘human incineration and carnage’." Gregory D. Smithers is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Aberdeen.

7. Deleted.

8. "...the extinction of the Tasmanians -assuming it was total- qualifes, Hughes suggests, not just as the only geno­cide in "English colonial history" but in all history, or at least in all modern history." Patrick Brantlinger​​ Victorian Studies, University of Indiana.

9. "How, then, might we attempt to understand anti-Indian violence and episodes of genocide in English colonial North America?"

10."...colonisation of Kenya by the British colonial government and the necessary genocidal effect on the ethnic group known as the Kikuyu through the lens of genocide as understood by Raphael Lemkin, the neologist of the term, and the post-liberal tradition he inspired. " Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of West England.

11. " The genocide perpetrated upon Aboriginal people in Queensland was almost absolute. Introducing Timothy Bottoms (2013) Conspiracy of Silence, Raymond Evans estimates that more than 250,000 Aboriginal people lived in the area now known as Queensland before colonisation. By WW1 the population had been reduced to less than 20,000 (Bottoms 2013). "

12. "All told, there were more than 70 bounty proclamations encouraging white colonists to kill tribal members in what’s now New England, and another 50 government-sanctioned proclamations elsewhere across the country, the filmmakers’ research found."

13. "The Australian Archives presented a national exhibition, Between Two Worlds , a study of the Federal government's removal of Aboriginal 'half-caste' children in the Territory from 1918 to the 1960s. It was a brilliant depiction of one facet of genocide, without using the word" Colin Tatz Professor of Politics at the University of New England, Armidale, and at Macquarie University, Sydney,

14. The wikipedia article List of genocides has two genocides that took place within the British Empire.

15. "In this, of course, we come back to the fatal nexus between the Anglo-American drive to rapid state-building and genocide. " Mark Levene is a historian and emeritus fellow at University of Southampton.

16, "This paper has sought to show that the term ‘genocide’ is appropriate to describe the killings that were carried out by both private individuals and public authorities during the 19th century. (Queensland) " [5]https://law.uq.edu.au/files/1263/Queenslands-Frontier-Killing-Times-Facing-up-to-Genocide-Baldry-McKeon-McDougall-2015.pdf

17. "... It is difficult to cover this up now. Australian historian Tony Barta has suggested that Australia is a nation founded on genocide. Further regional studies are necessary to accurately assess this statement, but Tasmania under British rule was clearly genocide." Benjamin Madley is associate professor of history, University of California.

18. "And therein lies the central difference between the genocide commit­ted by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal... " David Stannard historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii.

19. "In one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British Empire, the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land were hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated: an event which truly merits the now overused term ‘Genocide’. " Niall Ferguson [6]

20. "Nevertheless, the course of colonization of North and south america, the west indies, and Australia and Tasmania, Kuper observes, has certainly been marked all too often by genocide" Ann Curthoys is an Australian historian and academic.

21. "Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the geno­cide convention. In the case of the British North American colo­nies and the United States, not only extermination and removal were practiced but also the disappearing of the prior existence of Indigenous peoples-and this continues to be perpetuated in local histories." Roxxane Dunber Ortiz is an American historian, Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University.

22. Windshuttle asserted: “The notion that the frontier was a place where white men could kill blacks with impunity ignores the powerful cultural and legal prohibitions.” But, as Henry Reynolds and Charles Rowley noted, Aborigines were barred from giving court testimony, on grounds that heathens could not be sworn. Only from 1876 were they allowed to testify in New South Wales courts, and from 1884 in Queensland. Ignoring this, but citing Rowley as “the most reputable historian in the field,” Windshuttle also omitted Rowley’s many descriptions of the “massacres” and “exterminations” of Aborigines. Accusing a missionary of having in 1838 “invented the notion of …‘a war of extirpation,’” Windshuttle further ignored an 1836 official report to the British colonial secretary recalling a “war of extermination…here.” Instead, he accused Aborigines’ supporters and historians who publicized their tragedy of having “fabricated” and “manufactured” stories to further their own careers. Ben Kiernan Australian historian, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.

23. " Typical is the Native American activist and scholar Ward Churchill, who regards the English as "global leaders in genocidal activities, both in terms of overall efficiency - as they consummated the total extinction of the Tasmanians in 1876 -and a flair for innovation embodied in their deliberate use of alcohol to effect the dissolution of many of North America's indigenous peoples." Ward Churchill was professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. " It was a crisis not unlike that faced in 1622 by the British at Chesapeake Bay when, having lost a quarter of their numbers at the hands of the Powhatan Con­federacy, the settlers were advised by the British authorities to resort to a policy of extermination." "This is equally true of genocide-in two ways. For all individual German to kill a Jew or a Gypsy, just because of the race of the victim, is an act of genocide. But to accuse the machinery of State under which such killings took place as an act of policy requires proof that this is their aim. There is ample proof that this was the aim of the "Final Solution.' Jews were to be killed because they were not human, just as the Tasmanian Aborigines were hunted to death for the same reason" Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar, Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York.

24."In those territories taken over by the British and French— North America, the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand), and Africa— incidences of genocide more often followed rather than predated the influx of settlers. The colonial powers were ultimately responsible for genocide, and therefore sometimes this phenomenon is known as colonial genocide." Norman Naimark Professor at Stanford University.

25. "In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, for instance, the castration of a Mau Mau suspect, the British and their loyalist supporters maintained the illusion that their actions were the epitome of civilized behavior. It was as if by insisting loudly enough, and long enough, they could somehow revise the reality of their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide." Caroline Elkins is a Harvard professor and historian. [7]https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/caroline-elkins

26. "The crucial relevance of this to debates over colonial violence lies in the argument, made in recent years in many different contexts and with unprecedented force, that settler colonialism is inherently bound up with extreme, pervasive, structural and even genocidal violence....And quite simply, since Britain (and, before a United Kingdom or a compound British identity were formed, England) founded more and more successful, ‘explosive’ settler colonies than anyone else, so probably more alleged or potential cases of pre-twentieth century genocide occurred in the British world than anywhere outside it…" "For British North America and for Australasia, however, the case for numerous genocidal episodes –by even restricted definitions, since large-scale deliberate killing was repeatedly involved– seems to me very strong; " Stephen Howe is Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the University of Bristol, UK.

27. "In Virginia, following on the heels of the inevitable epidemics, the British initiated a relentless series of purges. They burned entire Indian towns and surrounding cornfields. They poisoned whole communities. And they capped off these homicidal enterprises by abducting Indian women and children for sale in the slave markets of the Indies, an unusually farsighted genocidal technique, since it prevented population recovery. After a half-century or so of this, Virginia’s largest Indian confederation was “so routed, slain and dispersed,” wrote one British colonist, “that they are no longer a nation.” By 1697 the native population of Virginia was less than 1,500; prior to the arrival of the Europeans it had numbered in the tens of thousands, perhaps upward of 100,000."

28. "Even before the twentieth century, population removals and, at times, deliberate genocides constituted a central theme of European colonization, from the Spanish, English, and U.S. campaigns against Native Americans,to the events in Tasmania, where British settlers managed to exterminate an entire population in the 1830s." Eric D. Weitz, Director of the Center for German and European Studies and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, University of Minnesota

29. "French officials offered fifty ecus for each Miami scalp brought to Fort Detroit in 1751, and the British promised scalp bounties in the Ohio River Valley in 1755"

30. "Over these two centuries, English brutality also reached the level of genocide in several cases, though more often it did not." "Already the Powhatans were “soe rowted, slayne and dispersed, that they are no longer a nation.” A 1669 census found surviving members of only 11 of the 28 Powhatan tribes existing in 1608. In six decades, 17 tribes had disappeared. Dispersal of the survivors completed the genocide on the Carthaginian model. Of other groups still unsubdued, Governor Berkeley wrote in 1666, “I think it is necessary to Destroy all these Northern Indians,” and he suggested defraying the costs of the campaign by selling “the women and children” abroad as slaves" Ben Kiernan is a historian.

31. Pulitzer prize winning historian Bernard Bailyn has said that the Dutch and English conquests were just as brutal as those of the Spanish and Portuguese, in certain places and in certain times "genocidal". He says that this history, for example the Pequot War, is not erased but conveniently forgotten.

32. "...while the Anglo-Americans did not commit one single, all-embracing and ongoing genocide against all native Americans any more than the British did against their antipodean aborigines, they did commit repeated acts of this kind against scores of native peoples, either directly through their military or police arms or through the usually authorised or semi-authorised agency of settlers."

33. "Starting in 1794, mass killings were first carried out by British soldiers, then by police and settlers – often acting together – and later by native police, working under the command of white officers, in militia-style forces supported by colonial governments." Journalist Lorena Allam.

34. "Some scholars in genocide studies have seen the Paxton Boys’ murder of the Conestogas as an act of genocide, pointing out that the Paxton Boys “clearly explained their genocidal intent against all Indians”..." In August 1763, four months before the Conestoga massacre, Pennsylvania governor James Hamilton authorized a bounty of ten pounds per Indian scalp, thus providing offi cial authorization for indiscriminate Indian killing. Pennsylvania’s formal authorization of a new scalp bounty in July 1764 retroactively off ered an additional measure of legitimacy for the actions of the Paxton Boys. Furthermore, British military offi cials who called for the extirpation of all Indians (and attempted to achieve it) established complicity on the part of the British empire itself."" Jeffrey Oslter, historian at University of Oregon.

35. "According to the historian Kirkpatrick Sale, 'there is not a single European nation which, when the opportunity came, did not engage in practices as vicious and cruel as those of Spain—and in the case of England, worse—with very much the same sort of demographic consequences' " This source can help establish weight. Encyclopedia.com

36. "One is that many, if not most, English colonies committed genocide against Native peoples in the Americas, thereby depopulation of indigenous peoples to take their lands and resources." James V. Fenelon is professor of sociology and director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University. Trafzer is a history professor.

37. "Taking the long view of European colonial occupation and Indigenous dispossession, we maintain that genocidal intent has been amply established in the historical scholarship and by the words of policy makers at the time. There is a broad consensus on this point among historical experts, further evidenced by the unanimous vote of our governing Council to make this Canada Day Statement. The existing historical scholarship, based on extensive research into governmental archives, missionary records, archaeological studies, and written and oral testimony of Survivors of residential schools, the 60s Scoop, and families of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, make this conclusion abundantly clear. The burden of Canada’s genocidal policies have been disproportionately borne by Indigenous women and children. Settler governments, whether they be colonial, imperial, federal, or provincial have worked, and arguably still work, towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples as both a distinct culture and physical group." Unanimously approved by the governing Council of the Canadian Historical Association. [8]https://cha-shc.ca/the-history-of-violence-against-indigenous-peoples-fully-warrants-the-use-of-the-word-genocide/

I will keep adding references to this list as I find them. Magonz (talk) 11:24, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

When you see that there's still debate about cases of genocide like this: Black_War you know you have lots of work to do to improve that article, and many others, to introduce the POV of the colonized and more diverse non-anglosphere voices, in languages other than that of the ex-colonizer, which is very absent by the list of RS of this article. The British Empire can be seen from the POV of anyone in the world, including from places and cultures that were occupied, citing not just RS with English names. English is a de facto lingua franca, not the sole language of RS in English Wikipedia. Here is the part where denialism comes, or they will say that it was germs or it was not Britain but USA, or not Britain but Australia, or not Britain but Scotland or England. Denial was taken to a level of pseudoscience by many, perhaps I can write an article about Denials of Genocides of Indigenous Nations ? Magonz (talk) 14:41, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

We have two separate threads on including Genocide, this is making it difficult to follow. Slatersteven (talk) 13:05, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, similar behaviour to previous editors who have banged this particular drum over the years. As to the substance, or lack of, user:Magonz has offered a small number of sources and even these cherry-picked quotes don't mention the British Empire by name. Not counting the two that are the same, a few that don't use the term genocide, and the one about a country that wasn't in or near the British Empire, the majority are about Tasmania where, if I recall correctly, there are sources showing that local settlers deliberately hid their behaviour from the government. Wiki-Ed (talk) 22:18, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

These quotes are in contents with subject or even title named "genocide". There are a number of historians, scholars, professors, from reputable universities, in reputable peer reviewed journals, listed. Furthermore, there are two cases of genocide in the British Empire listed in the Wikipedia article List of genocides: Black war and Australian frontier wars. Magonz (talk) 14:01, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

So are we going to include a line about "Some historians have claimed that the British Empire committed genocide"? as this really needs closing now. Slatersteven (talk) 18:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I think it would be more: "Some historians assert that incidents of genocide ocurred during the expansion of the empire, for example during the Black war and Australian frontier wars" - or any 2-3 examples. we choose. Johnbod (talk) 18:37, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Let that be the text then. Slatersteven (talk) 18:41, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

We have enough souces now, adding more is not productive. Slatersteven (talk) 18:14, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes

• Support adding a sentence saying that some scholars have described actions of the British Empire as being genocidal. There are obviously plenty of sources to warrant a mention. It's probably best if the sentence specifically describes which actions are described this way, with links to Black War, Genocide of indigenous peoples#British colonization of the Americas (there are actually two sections in that article for British Empire!), and Australian frontier wars. Larataguera (talk) 18:53, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed the more specific text proposed by Johnbod above, and it seems reasonable to me. Larataguera (talk) 18:56, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

• Support adding a sentence along the lines I suggest above. Johnbod (talk) 00:20, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
• Support adding criticism. Recently historical archives were discovered, history is not static, more is learned and discovered, research does not stop. To not mention the word genocide, when so many reliable sources, secondary sources, are saying so directly, is to deny knowledge, be it old news to victims, or something new to others, the knowledge is there in the literature. Magonz (talk) 10:28, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

I see the arguments against ranging from a) you cannot google search a secondary source and think its not a minority view (in fact I have access to Wikipedia Library) b) your account has not been active for a while (so what?) c) you are pushing a narrative (history is narrative, some better than others, which is why some dispute if history is even a science or not, so why do you think your perception of a given view weight is not subjective?) d) none of them engage with the central argument made by scholars/historians that publish in reputable houses...they work or have worked at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and other top institutions.

In 2000s, the British foreign office had to admit it was hiding records that involved it in very serious crimes in Kenya...

Furthermore, for a genocide to take place, it does not have to be carried out by a government or state. Genocide is defined by the nature of the attack on the targets, it is not about the perpetrators. What inflammatory language is it to recognize historical facts and events? Can you quote any offensive language written ? Consider how offensive it is to see that the history does not even recognize facts and events. Anyway, this is not about feelings, it is Wikipedia, and aren't we for documenting facts and events and knowledge? If a reader wants to learn about some bad things that the empire did when it grew territorially, wouldn't some information be available? So far there is not much. There are many definitions of genocide see Genocide definitions. Magonz (talk) 16:58, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• Support adding comments where this is applicable. -Theklan (talk) 17:38, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
• Support There are too many reliable sources that this information must not be ignored. Dympies (talk) 17:50, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
• Support I am well aware of the accusation (and have been for years), it is out there and it's clear there are sources supporting it. We do not say it is true, or even universal. Slatersteven (talk) 17:57, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
• Support in principle a carefully worded sentence similar to Johnbod's proposal ("Some historians assert that incidents of genocide occurred during the expansion of the empire, for example during the Black war and Australian frontier wars"), but with more context. For example, I'd like any sentence to clarify that massacres occurred in the context of settler colonialism, and that the label 'genocide' generally only has significant traction for describing events in North America and Australia (as demonstrated by the source review above) i.e. not in other instances/locations such as Kenya, where it sometimes used but doesn't have widespread acceptance. Also, where would the sentence go? (It's not leadworthy.) As has been said already, what's also needed is a summary (several sentences, or a short paragraph) of settler colonialism and its impact on indigenous people. Throwing in a sentence with the word genocide doesn't properly do this. Whether this is added into the chronological history or a new topical section is up to others. Jr8825 • Talk 16:13, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

No

Note this is not an RFC just a straw poll to see if this has any change of going anywhere. Slatersteven (talk) 18:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

It isn't and cannot be a vote: inserting text like this is contrary to policy. The most relevant is that Wikipedia doesn't give undue weight to viewpoints expressed only by a tiny number of the total number of sources... but that's not even the main problem: from the quotes provided we can see the proposers are keen on original research - synthesising and reinterpreting what the sources say to fit with what certain editors believe. Finally, some of the wording proposed above (e.g. "some historians" - how many? - not many) is a clear example of weasel wording so running contrary to the policy on verifiability. A clean sweep of key WP policies. Wiki-Ed (talk) 23:43, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

No, as per Wiki-Ed, there is a politically motivated movement to ascribe the term genocide to the British Empire implying as it does that this was a systemic issue. It wasn't. At the end of the 19th Century the British Empire had achieved pretty much its most widespread extent and the surprising thing was it had never been planned and the British had never set out to become a great empire. It is something that happened almost by accident, with the emphasis on trade and private enterprise creating the conditions for its organic growth. Unlike other European Empires, there was never a strong central control from the UK, control was devolved to local institutions and local administrations. Events like those that occurred in Tasmania, which I would agree may meet some definitions of a genocide, were conducted by local officials who hid their activities from the British Government. So if you are going to mention that particular episode WP:NPOV would require that the latter is also mentioned. Other events such as the famines in India, which many be described by some authors for inflammatory reasons as a genocide, are not, the motivation for describing them as such are political not historical.

So to summarise, if you wish to mention that some authors mention the word genocide, WP:NPOV requires that it be mentioned that there is a political element to this that seeks to paint the British Empire in a particular light to suit modern narratives. And if you want to mention Tasmania, it would also have to be mentioned that it was the activities of the local government who also deliberately hid what they were doing.

Which is to say, what the article should do is mention the whole debate and not simply limit itself to throwing in inflammatory terms reflecting modern political narratives. WCM_email 07:53, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

All true, but this is to make any close easier by giving the closer one place to look at the arguments. Or at least give us an RFC question if we canot resolve this. 12:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

My problem is I don't see a content proposal, rather just a demand to use inflammatory terms without explaining the debate. That I oppose implacably. WCM_email 13:31, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

"Some historians assert that incidents of genocide occurred during the expansion of the empire, for example during the Black war and Australian frontier wars" -" is the content proposed. Slatersteven (talk) 13:38, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

This is a massive time sink, that is not going anywhere and in which we are not just reduced to repeated arguments (if not outright bludgeoning). It needs closing, this way (I hope) everyone can at least agree that we have all put our case. That any close will be fair. Slatersteven (talk) 13:45, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

That is not a light accusation that of bludgeoning....why are you in a hurry to close it, give time to others to weigh in?...currently, the article as it stands says "some historians/scholars..." at least five times..... I think this article has an ownership problem... not even to be able to add a page number that points to the current content... Magonz (talk) 14:40, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

This has been going on for 5 days, with the same...users going back and forth. Nothing new is being added,m we are just going round in circles. Slatersteven (talk) 14:46, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

I strongly oppose that content proposal in the strongest possible terms. As I've already said, it's simply adding inflammatory language without context, which is a clear violation of WP:NPOV. I also recognise a pattern of an account that had been dormant springing back to life to champion the genocide narrative. WCM_email 16:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• Strong No There are several issues here.

• "Genocide" has a delimited meaning: "The deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group. (OED)" Both "deliberate" and "systematic" are key. Random Google searches among reliable secondary sources for the word "genocide" does not tell us how the word has been used. So, if a secondary source has a brief mention without a discussion that brings out this particular meaning, then does not count.
• More importantly, the characterization of genocide should occur in scholarly tertiary sources such as (i) encyclopedia articles with a byline (e.g. a Britannica article written by an expert in the field) (ii) review articles on the political power in question (not review articles on "genocide" (as they typically overcount; otherwise, they don't have an article) or on a geographical region (as they may not clearly identify the perpetrator), and (iii) widely used under-graduate and first-year graduate textbooks published by academic presses. The reason for this is that these tertiary sources typically compare and contrast the various secondary sources in order to determine the dominant narrative, or the due weight in the literature. They are, moreover, vetted for due weight as they are meant to serve as benchmarks.
• In other words, we (as editors) cannot, say, find 100 reliable sources and then ourselves make the determination of what the dominant narrative is in the literature. That determination can only be made only by a tertiary source. See WP:TERTIARY—it is WP policy. For a scholarly example of tertiary sources in the context of the Bengal famine of 1943, see Talk:Bengal_famine_of_1943#Due_weight. They were collected to settle a different dispute, not genocide, but the idea is the same.
• Summing up. I don't see that the British Empire, i.e. the loose-knit political power, has committed genocide

Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:17, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• Strong No - This is a violation of WP:NPOV. On Wikipedia, a neutral point of view is expected to be taken on every article. DDMS123 (talk) 17:41, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
• No but yes under certain circumstances. It depends on the depth of the article section. Because it is likely to be only one or two sentences then no, because the word and will acquire too great a weight and therefore be misleading. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 18:37, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• After reading the discussions above, including the sources with the various boldings, I lean oppose. If that list of presented of sources is anything to go by (and one of them is a Wikipedia article mind), the statement is not supported. I looked into the "best source" here, and it does not make the broad statement being asserted. A key reason that even after extensive searching, none of the sources say something like "the British Empire committed genocide", is likely that the British Empire was a concept rather than an entity with any particular agency. That is not to say there were not incidents within the time period and territory that reliable sources have discussed within the context of genocide; this was an Empire after all. That does not mean that debate should be reflected at such a high level of summary style. CMD (talk) 07:58, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

What we are supposed to discussing (see above) is: " "Some historians assert that incidents of genocide ocurred during the expansion of the empire, for example during the Black war and Australian frontier wars" - or any 2-3 examples. we choose." Johnbod (talk) 13:31, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

I think we realise that, that is what is being rejected, because it doesn't place those claims in context or for example explain that they are disputed or cover the debate in any meaningful way. WCM_email 14:52, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Well you didn't seem to at first (above), and CMD quoted the old "British Empire committed genocide" language, which I agree doesn't fly. I think "some historians assert" is enough to alert the reader to controversy, though there are various episodes, like those in the draft, where no historian is likely to defend what happened, the only question is whether it amounted to attempted or actual genocide. I don't believe we have to choose between saying absolutely nothing at all here and 'covering the debate' more fully. That is rightly done at the individual pages for the episodes. Johnbod (talk) 15:03, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

I am not sure that the addition of that sentence would add much to reader understanding. As I said above the general broad statement could be made for any sort of Empire or large entity. What helps inform are specifics, and the article touches upon incidents/events including having the world's largest slave trade, the destruction of Aboriginal culture and territory, and the use of detention camps in Kenya. This is not nothing at all, and hopefully the interested reader can click through for more information where relvant. (On the specific examples, I would suggests the Australian examples were more a matter of entrenching settler control than expanding the empire, although this is a minor tweak.) CMD (talk) 15:09, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree I don't think that sentences aids the reader at all, it seems to be a vehicle for introducing contentious opinions without explaining the wider debate. Which is not to say it is digital decision and I didn't suggest it was. But I am wary of using and introducing contentious terminology without explanation of that wider debate. And if there isn't space to provide that context, then the appropriate place to go into that depth is via a linked article, the top level summary often isn't. WCM_email 15:53, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

On Johnbod's point about whether it's just a question of attempted or actual genocide: I don't think that's right. There's also a matter of scale: contrary to what user:Magonz believes, genocide is commonly held to mean a national community or a nation-state (or other polity) deliberately and systematically trying to wipe out another community or state. We undermine the term if we use it to cover something less dreadful - not to say murder isn't dreadful - but genocide implies something much worse. I don't think that's the threshold being used here. Wiki-Ed (talk) 20:45, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand this - what is not "right"? Are there historians defending the worst of the various examples above (Black war and Australian frontier wars for example). Who? Johnbod (talk) 04:13, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

user:Wiki-Ed says "genocide is commonly held to mean a national community or a nation-state (or other polity) deliberately and systematically trying to wipe out another community or state." Do you have any backup to this claim. I have looked at many definitions of genocide, and this seems nowhere to be found. Even the legal definition in the UN Convention on Genocide does not say anything close to this. Magonz (talk) 12:07, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

See the text of the UN Convention of Genocide, Article IV "Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals." Magonz (talk) 17:33, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps try "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group" Chalk & Jonassohn (1990) or "...the promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group" Harff and Gurr (1988). Similarly Rudolph Rummel considers the ordinary meaning to be murder by a governnent of people due to their national, ethnic, racial or religious group. I should note it took me about 45 seconds to find these quotations, so I imagine it would be quite easy to find more. Of course the main point here is that it is you who is trying to suggest that the British Empire was responsible for genocide. If you're trying to say genocide-by-random-unaffiliated-individuals who happened to live in, live near, or live during the same historical time period as the British Empire then it doesn't belong here. Wiki-Ed (talk) 20:41, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

No, it is not me who is claiming that incidents of genocide ocurred during the expansion of the empire. What I claim as a person is irrelevant, and off topic. There are many sources, experts on the topic, saying that, literally, as I have listed above 24 quotations, more or less. Historians, scholars, academics, some working at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Sussex, UCLA, etc. All listed with direct quotations, citations and links. The literature says it, reliable sources say it.

---

(((The most important working definition today, see Wikipedia article on Genocide is that of the UN Convention on Genocide. In fact, today, the United Kingdom is a party to this, legally, see this link. Since 1948. It was based on the person who coined the term, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who survived the Holocaust, lost 49 relatives to it, and lobbied the nations to create the Convention. The Soviets resisted adding political victims to the deifnition, and settler states resisted to add cultural genocide. Current or former colonial powers—Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—opposed the retention of references to cultural genocide in the draft convention. So did settler countries that had displaced indigenous peoples but otherwise were champions of the development of international human rights standards, including the United States, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia. ))) Magonz (talk) 21:29, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Have you read any of the sources you've offered up? This one (source 12) is particularly inappropriate [[9]] The only mention of genocide in the article is a single direct quote from a citizen of the Penobscot Nation (the man on the street is not a reliable source, particularly if they are obviously partisan) Across the whole of New England, the bounty was paid 375 times during an 85 year period (less than 5 times a year). I don't think any definition of genocide can be stretched to encompass that. Some of those sources don't mention genocide and some of them don't mention the British Empire. At least one is discussing the post-independent USA, at least one is discussing post-war Australia. None of the sources I've read so far indicate that the British Empire, as a political entity, committed genocide. Shaw (source 1) says, "...the British state has not practised large-scale, centrally coordinated genocide" and Ferguson (source 19) goes on to say, "Yet, one of the peculiarities of the British Empire was the way the imperial power at the centre endeavoured to restrain the generally far more ruthless impulses of the colonists on the periphery". Additionally, you cannot simply drop the word genocide into an article and expect readers to understand the definition you are using. I would guess that most people will assume you are talking about the United Nation's definition not Lemkin's nor anybody else's. Many of the sources you have given are referring to cultural genocide and the effect of colonial settlement and even those don't try to attach blame to the British Empire which is, I think, what you want to do! --Ykraps (talk) 08:03, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Source 12, which refers to a letter signed by the lieutenant governor general of the British Dominion, Spencer Phips. Did you watch the video where they read the British authority documents? There is much claimed in the current article with just one RS cited, or even none. Here is a quote from the proclamation

"I have therefore, at the desire of the house of representatives, with the advice of his Majesty’s Council, thought fit to issue this proclamation, and to declare the Penobscot Tribe of Indians to be Enemies, Rebels and Traitors to his Majesty King George the Second: And I do hereby require his Majesty’s Subjects of this province to embrace all Opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians…. "https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54f8b4cfe4b0b230c7abfe97/t/5d9ca45d8ff67304c9c17f0b/1570546782067/1755+Phips+Proclamation+Handout_2019.pdf"

The times where those quotes are mentioned are at times when those territories were under the control and administration of the British Empire. The sources have many pages, and of course they can talk about a range of periods of time. The first source states>

"These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold war world."

No this is not just about cultural genocide, which is a form of genocide, ergo, genocide. RS say settler colonialism, which removes the means of subsistence for the aboriginal populations, is inherently genocidal, as per UN Genocide Convention. Source 21: "Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the geno­cide convention. "

For a genocide to be genocide, it does not have to be complete, it can be partial. And it does not have to be centrally coordinated, as per the UN Genocide Convention. I am not using any definition. It is a definition used by most countries 152 actually, basically all of the Western world, legally binding.

This is not about blaming anyone, it is about stating what many RS sources are saying.

It is notable that there's several here that make ad hominem attacks and say that I have an agenda or I want something. I am just editing like anyone else, and I happen to know about the topic. Magonz (talk) 09:45, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

This is simply synthesis: your interpretation (sometimes quite convoluted) of a small number of sources to imply something that goes way beyond what they actually say. Wiki-Ed (talk) 11:55, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Magonz: This is a high-level article. It has room for the dominant narrative only. The Wikipedia policy for it is laid out in Wikipedia:TERTIARY. The most detailed recent tertiary source is the Oxford History of the British Empire. It has five volumes and its companion series has another three. Together the eight volumes have 4,733 pages, i.e. 16 average-sized books. I happen to have all eight volumes and I just did a search. Here are the results:

• Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford University Press
• Volume I. The Origins of Empire, published 1998, EDITED BY Nicholas Canny (554 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 1 page
• Quote: *Early contacts, which had made the settlers dependent upon native agriculture, soon gave way to policies of either segregation or, when the Native Americans seemed to threaten the existence of the settlements, attempted genocide. This need to draw and enforce a frontier between the Indian lands and the lands of the Crown, in marked contrast to anything which took place in Spanish America, was to have far-reaching consequences for the subsequent legal and political relationship between the two groups. (Chapter: "The Struggle for Legitimacy" by Anthony Pagden, p. 41)
• Volume II. The Eighteenth Century (published 1998) EDITED BY P. J. Marshall (662 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0
• Volume III. The Nineteenth Century (published 1999) EDITED BY Andrew Porter (historian) (797 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0
• Volume IV. The Twentieth Century (published 1999) EDITED BY Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger LouisWm. Roger Louis (800 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0
• Volume V. Historiography (published 1999) EDITED BY Robin Winks (756 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0
• Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series, Oxford University Press
• Black Experience and the Empire (published 2004) EDITED by Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (433 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0
• Gender and Empire (published 2004) EDITED by Philippa Levine (321 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 2
• Quote: "For women, however, the creation of two new nations came to acquire many other meanings. Although the history of the mass rape of women on both sides is by now well known, it bears repetition here. In the violence of Partition, as people fled in fear from places where they had lived and made their homes but which became unsafe as new definitions of home and nation acquired currency, thousands of women, Hindu and Muslim, were raped and abducted. Estimates vary, but about 100,000 women were subjected to rape and abduction. The large-scale rape of women as a weapon of war or genocide is now widely recognized; indeed in wars and conflicts the world over it has become an almost commonplace occurrence. Women’s mass abduction, however (for kidnapping and abduction were not new to women generally), was something that was specific to the circumstances of Partition, as was the marking of their bodies with symbols of the other religion. (Chapter: "Legacies of Departure: Docolonization, Nation-making, and Gender," by Urvashi Butalia, page 205)
• An important component of mission development was the discourse of ‘the civilizing mission’ wherein the benefits of Christianity, education, and Western ways of living in virtuous families came to be accepted as a key objective of imperial outreach. In Britain, evangelicals who had been instrumental in the abolition of slavery from 1834 gave impetus to this goal as they turned their attention to the fate of indigenous peoples of the Empire, especially in settler colonies. Humanitarians began to serve as a lobby group for the rights of these non-Western peoples, disturbed by news of appalling atrocities, including the virtual genocide of the Aborigines of Tasmania in just three decades of British settlement. (Patricia Grimshaw, "Faith, missionary life, and the family," page 264)
• Environment and Empire (published 2007) EDITED by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes (410 pages)
• Search for "genocide" Result: 0

Those three may be mentioned in the appropriate place and scale.

Even these three qualify only obliquely as a genocide perpetrated by the Empire (the first is an attempted genocide by individual settlers; the second rape and killings in India during the Partition of India, and the third says "virtual genocide." But beyond that nothing else would be warranted in this article. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:08, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

We could even say, "according to Anthony Pagden ....or according to Urvashi Butalia ..., or according to Patricia Grimshaw ... but the language would need to faithfully present each historians view.

Virtual genocide can't be changed to genocide, nor attempted genocide to genocide. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:22, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

In other words, I do not see room for more than three oblique mentions. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:23, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• Volume V. Historiography (published 1999) EDITED BY Robin Winks (756 pages)
• Search for "genocid" Result: 1

"Feminist historians who contested the over­whelmingly masculine character of Australian historiography presented the oppression of women as intrinsic to the national story. A forgotten history of genocidal expropriation of Aboriginal Australians was rediscovered. New stud­ies of migration emphasized its exploitative and discriminatory effects. These attack on the established order at once employed the framework of national his­ tory and contested it." (page 178, Chapter 9, by Stuart McEntyre, Australia and the Empire) Magonz (talk) 07:02, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

See this on claim that genocide has to be carried out by a state:

"This chapter starts by examining whether the definition of genocide under international law requires any collective entity involvement in the crime. It shows that, strictly speaking, this is not the case." citation

"With the crime of genocide not requiring state or collective entity involvement, there is no question that genocide can be committed by a non-state entity. "citation

So the argument that the genocide practice was not centrally coordinated from London, for it to have happened in British Empire controlled territory, has no place. Magonz (talk) 09:21, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Magonz So it's exactly as I said: the only person who refers to the term genocide in that source, is a partisan member of the Penobscot Nation, and 375 people were killed in an 85 year period. In addition to reading your sources, you might also want to familiarise yourself with WP:SYNTH because you appear to be trying to combine multiple sources to support an opinion that isn't held in a single source. And let's be clear, saying genocide (if there was genocide) occurred within the British Empire isn’t the same as saying the British Empire committed genocide. The latter definitely insinuates that the central power had a deliberate policy of such. Oh, and some of your 24 sources are repeated (sources 3 and 11 for example). --Ykraps (talk) 13:43, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

And one's a Wikipedia article. --Ykraps (talk) 13:57, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

One is too many. Anyway, 50 such proclamations were added elsewhere.

My sources include publishers like Oxford and Cambridge. Some sources may be repeated, but I am pointing to different sections, where there is mention of the topic directly. Anyway, a number of sources is not stated in policy. Jut a "dominant" view? A British encyclopedia? No, balanced view is important, and several POVs are necessary. It is a high level article, but no need to pretend there was nothing bad done by the empire, specially when these are known facts. The article has grown over time, and can continue to do so.

------

It´s there to illustrate that history is not such a black and white thing, and there are interpretations, and many interpret the British Empire was involved in Genocide. So read between the lines, for example here:

“No nation has more carefully prepared its economic conquest with the sword with greater brutality and defended it later on more ruthlessly than the British”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925 (New York, 1940), pp18 Magonz (talk) 14:13, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

wp:v and wp:or a very very clear, we do not "read between the lines" A source must explicitly say it. ANs Mien Kamph, seriously? Slatersteven (talk) 14:18, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

I have given many RS stating what is proposed. That was my opinion only. What matters are the RS I have been giving since day 1. Are we going to pretend that any empire article cannot have some criticism on the argument that there is no space for it, or it is not a dominant view? If so, this article has a huge ownership problem and lack of other POVs. I can only imagine the reaction if I start to cite indigenous scholars in other languages. Magonz (talk) 14:25, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

"Historians such as Caroline Elkins have argued against perceptions of the British Empire as a primarily liberalising and modernising enterprise, criticising its widespread use of violence and emergency laws to maintain power." " Common criticisms of the empire include the use of detention camps in its colonies, massacres of indigenous peoples,[280] and famine-response policies.[281][282] Some scholars, including Amartya Sen, assert that British policies worsened the famines in India that killed millions during British rule." this reads like criticism to me. So,m yes, this does start too look like just an attempt to include the word genocide (after all we already say massacres). Slatersteven (talk) 14:38, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Ykraps has twice now explicitly stated that a source is "partisan" because of that person's race. All other arguments aside, please be careful not to make statements like this!

More generally, I don't think this argument is going to resolve itself easily, so I advocate for a well-formed RFC that includes specific text and specific proposed location for that text. Larataguera (talk) 19:15, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Larataguera Umm, no. I refer to her as partisan because she both features in and directs the film. What exactly are you accusing me of? --Ykraps (talk) 23:46, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Caroline, the historian mentioned currently in the article, says in source number 25, the word genocide.

"In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, for instance, the castration of a Mau Mau suspect, the British and their loyalist supporters maintained the illusion that their actions were the epitome of civilized behavior. It was as if by insisting loudly enough, and long enough, they could somehow revise the reality of their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide."

To say that the bad things the empire did and not mention any war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocides is in fact not a neutral POV. Again, I can list tens of RS stating these. What is the agenda of listing Caroline's first book, and not the second one based on new evidence of 2005 in Kenya, where she wrote the quote above, and dropped the word of the crime of crimes, genocide. Magonz (talk) 19:23, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

As you can see, the actual current citation in the article (number 26) uses the word genocide, not massacre. Magonz (talk) 20:07, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

No, it talks about 'alleged genocide' and then goes on to discuss how 'British' the annihilations actually were and how many were carried out by private enterprise settler initiatives rather than state-led forces. Just because a source contains the terms genocide and British Empire it doesn't automatically support your point of view. Earlier in this discussion, User:Wiki-Ed likened it to entering British Empire and banana into a search engine and presenting the results as proof the British Empire was a banana. I had hitherto thought that your misinterpretation of the sources was due to your less than perfect understanding of English but I'm beginning to think it is a deliberate. --Ykraps (talk) 09:17, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Why do you think the author says "alleged genocide"? Is he claiming there is no genocide? No. He is saying that others are claiming this.

And he joins them:

"For British North America and for Australasia, however, the case for numerous genocidal episodes –by even restricted definitions, since large-scale deliberate killing was repeatedly involved– seems to me very strong; "

"The crucial relevance of this to debates over colonial violence lies in the argument, made in recent years in many different contexts and with unprecedented force, that settler colonialism is inherently bound up with extreme, pervasive, structural and even genocidal violence."

When some here think that saying "virtual genocide" means that it did not happen, when what is meant is that it was almost a complete process. Attempted genocide is genocide. "Almost complete" genocide is genocide. Read the legal definitions signed by 152 countries. This is article 3 of the Genocide Convention:

Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention:

(a) Genocide; (b)

Conspiracy

to commit genocide; (c)

Direct and public incitement to commit genocide

; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e)

Complicity in genocide

.

Now if you want to discuss my English skills... that is off topic. Magonz (talk) 14:38, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

You are continually missing the point. First: you have found just 26 sources - some of which are not reliable and should be discounted - which represents a tiny fraction of a percent of the total number of academic sources available on this topic. Even if they all said the same thing, they do not represent a majority or large minority view. Secondly, none of those sources say "the government of the British Empire had a genocidal policy" or "the British Empire was responsible for genocidal activity" or "a genocide was carried out by the British Empire" or some other equivalent form of words. They all avoid that kind of specific formulation. The formulation I am seeing is much vaguer: something along the lines of "[some people] [in/nearby/contemporaneously with the BE] conducted [directly/indirectly] genocidal [activity/effects] indepedently of central government policy". Although that last bit is often left out. There's no way to include that sort of statement without using weasel words. Thirdly - to add my interpretation to this discussion full of interpretations - the opinions they're putting forward are so open-ended they'd probably catch most or all human beings who have ever lived on this planet - apparently we're all guilty of genocide - so why would we single out any single person/institution/government - the word becomes meaningless. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:06, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Are you happy with the paragraph in its current form, language, message, meaning, with its sources? Magonz (talk) 22:56, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

The last paragraph, are you happy with it? Magonz (talk) 22:59, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

1.To assess what is the majority view or large minority view of one of the largest empires in history, Fowler here pulled the volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford University Press, as a way to seek consensus on the dispute of POVs, a tertiary source. He found 3 hits for genocide. I found an addtional one. See above. Furthermore, before the concept of genocide was invented by Lemkin, equivalent language like extermination, extirpation were words used by historians that are almost equivalent. These words were stated in official writing by British colonial administrators on a number of occasions.

2.The first source, source number 1, is very clear and states this explicitly, such as many others listed. If some author says, in colonial British North America, there was genocide, it is obvious to any rational reader that colonial English north America was under the control and administration of the British Empire. We know when Australia became independent, we know when USA had a revolution, we know when Canada became independent, we don't know for sure when the British Empire was officially ended.

3.I think that the word massacre misrepresents what actually went on. yes there were massacres, but there was much more than that. Which is why I edited it. Magonz (talk) 08:34, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Some more synthesis. Just what we needed. As for your interpretation of the meaning of words: genocide and extermination/extirpation do not mean the same thing. We already discussed this - although I hadn't missed the fact you went quiet on this point - "genocide" implies intent to destroy by a state, not your average massacre or murder. Finding one more source doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of historians avoid the term in the context you want to use it - presumably because there is no British equivalent of the Wannsee Protocol - and talk instead about massacres and murders by individuals or groups. Wiki-Ed (talk) 22:10, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Just like this article, most British historians are mostly silent about the colonized natives..., and if they do talk about it, they talk with outdated paradigms like doctrine of discovery or terra nulius, or how they allied with the British against the American revolutionaries...and if there is evidence of genocide, they enter definitional debates and seek explicit proof of intent. What you have to see is other thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre or indigenous scholars. But if you won't even acknowledge source from Ivy League universities, and publications from Oxford and Cambridge, with up to date current research, then I don't know what to say now. Magonz (talk) 10:30, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah, well if you're not going to say anything, perhaps you could do some background reading. Could I recommend this interesting article here on neutrality and balancing? In particular this bit: "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, it does not belong on Wikipedia, regardless of whether it is true, or you can prove it, except perhaps in some ancillary article." Whether we believe it or not, Google scholar says there are 3,060,000 articles which mention the British Empire; you have 26 sources (and even that number is a stretch) which make - at best - vague claims. Wiki-Ed (talk) 21:21, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Even by that measure, if you look at British Empire genocide in Google Scholar, you get 167,000 hits, that is 5.4%, which is way less than this article covers 0 %....

Some more:

British Empire crimes against humanity 349,000

British Empire war crimes 575,000

British Empire ethnic cleansing 86,300

British Empire massacre 226,000

British Empire crimes 621,000

To say that the colonized were not on the end of these, is to just not cover a big part of history.

But this article focuses on the POV of the empire´s and rival powers, and that narrative does not bring out the whole picture. Magonz (talk) 00:37, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Your narrative of the searches you've carried out does not "bring out the whole picture". Try putting those phrases you used in quotation marks: the first three get 0 hits; the fourth gets 1; the fifth has 0; the sixth gets 9. Even a quick skim of the summary results on Google using your lazy search terms should have indicated that many of the articles aren't event talking about the British Empire. Your original research misrepresents the facts. That's not to say we should trust Google either - we know there was crime in the British Empire, and a fair few massacres - but your focus on loaded terms, poor use of available tools to produce contorted results, and ignorance of Wikipedia's content policies suggests you shouldn't be trying to edit this site. Wiki-Ed (talk) 21:55, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

This ad hominem is uncalled for....

But for the record, other Wikipedia articles do talk about genocide in the British Empire, so it is not an unorthodox view.

It is just a matter of time until this article catches up to current literature, specially genocide scholars.

If anyone is curious of learning from the POV of the colonized, and wishes to produce articles that are less whitewashed, here is an example>

https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/iipj/article/view/7519 Magonz (talk) 07:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Ad hominem would be directed at you, the person, not your behaviour on this site. Rather than trying to deflect with spurious claims about personal attacks and whataboutism, perhaps respond to the substance of my last post and explain why you tried to misrepresent search results. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:08, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I do not engage with those who focus on personal attacks, instead of the article's improvement.

It seems that you think there's more than 3 million scholarly articles discussing the atrocities of the British empire. Not true. There's a number of historians, scholars, academics, public intellectuals (listed here) that support RS claiming atrocities by the British empire that go way beyond "massacres" (for example, Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods; Author(s): BENJAMIN MADLEY Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2015), pp. 98-139; Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association; Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43696337).

ps. I see the article's last paragraph still "needs" a page number for the work of Caroline Elkins. Magonz (talk) 08:49, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

References

Value

Am I the only person who sees nothing of any value coming out of this circular discussion? It has been dominated by one editor who seemingly feels WP:GREATWRONGS have been done and Wikipedia exists to right them. I honestly can't see a reasonable way forward and perhaps WP:DR or perhaps even WP:ANI is next given the antagonism being generated. WCM_email 10:55, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, to gain something from the discussion, it's clear that the mention of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 needs some tweaking. CMD (talk) 12:17, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps but at the moment I don't see an environment that encourages a meaningful discussion on what exactly to tweak. WCM_email 12:27, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

It does seem like the conversation is just going in circles, but I don't think it's fair to say that the conversation is dominated by one editor. And btw, Right Great Wrongs is about adding unsourced information, so it doesn't apply here when sources are being offered. There is a debate about due weight for those sources, which is sometimes difficult to assess. I still think a clearly phrased and specific proposal for changes to the article would help. Maybe starting with a tweak for the 1857 rebellion, because there's probably consensus that this needs changing. Larataguera (talk) 16:41, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Genocide has a specific meaning which does not seem to be met here. The mass deaths of indigenous peoples in the European empires were mainly due to disease (that is the arrival of novel pathogens to which the natives had no resistance), in particular smallpox. This was accidental, even if useful to the colonists, and the only known deliberate attempt to infect North American Indians with smallpox, with the gift of blankets taken from smallpox wards as part of peace talks during the siege of Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh) by the Shawnee and Mingo in 1763, didn't work.

Incidentally, the article is wrong to suggest that the Royal African Company was the biggest shipper of West African slaves to the Americas. A greater number, over four million, were shipped to what is now Brazil by the Portuguese. And while the article may be correct to say that one in seven of the transported slaves died on the ships of the Middle Passage, this is to overlook the 'death march to the slave ports'. The slaves were people of the interior rounded up and shackled and put on the death march to the ports by other West Africans. According to a BBC online article which I now can't find, the death rate on the march was two in ten. But according to this PBS article it was a still more depressing five in ten. All this before any Europeans were involved.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr4.html

And, while Britain abolished slavery a very long time ago and fought a naval war (mainly against the Americans, though also against the Barbary Corsairs) to suppress it, West Africans still practise it without shame or regret, both in the form of child slavery on cocoa plantations and in the form of the export of young adult slaves as domestic servants to certain other parts of the world. The United Nations believes that there are now more people in slavery, mainly due to this practice, than at the height of the Atlantic trade in the 18th century. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:00, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

This can establish some context to the point of view of the colonized, which is a great percentage of the world population. For example, in British North America:

https://slate.com/technology/2023/02/wikipedia-native-american-history-settler-colonialism.html

BTW, Britain may have abolished slavery, but is did by compensated emancipation, that is, compensating slave owners, not the slaves themselves. Would be good to add some content about the role of slaves themselves in fighting against slavery...this article makes it seem like they were just passive spectators..... this when I get time.Magonz (talk) 20:33, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

"End of empire"

The article reads "The handover ceremony in 1997 marked for many, including King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, who was in attendance, "the end of Empire", though many British territories that are remnants of the empire still remain." The article uses the past tense throughout. However, if remnants still remain, is it accurate to say the British Empire no longer exists? Doesn't it still exist in a much diminished form, and therefore present tense should be used? McPhail (talk) 14:42, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

No. Even by 1997 no one (including RS) still called the current form that. That was over by the 1960s, as vast numbers of commentators said at the time. Johnbod (talk) 14:59, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

It is impossible to determine a date for the beginning or end of the Empire. It never formally dissolved, but was renamed the Commonwealth, colonies were renamed overseas territories and British subjects were renamed Commonwealth citizens. This change in legal terminology reflected the granting of full independence to the vast majority of its territories. TFD (talk) 16:27, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Not an empire

'Colonial empire' is a colloquial term, and the definition of what actually is an 'empire' and what is not, is a disputed subject. The British Empire, as well as many other colonial powers, was a monarchy, however it was not ruled by an emperor (That said, modern-day Japan could be considered an empire by this definition as it is ruled by an emperor, however it is not). Other colonial powers were not monarchies nor empires at all, and were instead democratic, usually a republic (For example the French colonial empire), while others were actual 'true' empires such as the German and Russian colonial empires. While I could be writing this in the Colonial empire as this is an issue for the term in general, the British Empire, being the most well-known colonial empire as well as the largest suffers from this issue the most, due to it's large size, not to mention that colonies had some degree of autonomy, in that they were neither fully independent, nor a part of the coloniser. So if we go by the definition of the traditional empire, the only colonial empires to actually be, well, empires would be: Germany, Russia, Spain, France, and Austria. Æ's old account wasn't working (talk) 09:59, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

RS call it an empire. Slatersteven (talk) 11:02, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

I checked a number of dictionary definitions and they say a group of countries ruled by a single sovereign (either a person or a state). None of them say that they must be ruled by a monarch styled an emperor. Where did you get your definition? TFD (talk) 12:46, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, plus of course there was the Emperor of India, and the French had the Second Empire (France), not to mention earlier regimes. This is just playing with words. Johnbod (talk) 15:04, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

The definition of 'empire' is a muddy term leading to an deep rabbit hole, best we not argue over which definition of dozens is the correct one. Æ's old account wasn't working (talk) 01:51, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Editing the infobox, and succeeded by: Commonwealth of Nations

Hi all, I made an edit today adding 'Preceded by: British Empire' to the Commonwealth of Nations infobox. This was based on my observation and understanding that the machinery of the British Empire became the basis of the Commonwealth. Some limited examples:

• Royal Commonwealth Society (formerly, "Royal Empire Society")
• Association of Commonwealth Universities (formerly, "Universities Bureau of the British Empire")
• Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (formerly, "Empire Parliamentary Association")
• Commonwealth Games (formerly, "British Empire Games")
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission (formerly, "Imperial War Graves Commission")

There is also the transition from "British Subject" to "Commonwealth Citizen" which has legal importance with respect to residency and voting rights.

I was about to add "succeeded by" to this page and I saw the note on the infobox not to edit it, and though I'm confident this edit makes sense I wanted to have at least one other person agree that this was a reasonable thing to do. Zemnmez (talk) 01:19, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

It wasn't succeeded by, it was renamed. The new name reflected the changed reality. The same with Commonwealth Citizen. The 1981 Nationality Act stated that British subjects would now be referred to as Commonwealth citizens. The same also with colonies: they were renamed overseas territories. The organization of the Empire/Commonweatlh also changed, but not when the name did. TFD (talk) 02:58, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

That wasn’t really what I was asking and I’m left also wondering if this is a point for or against. I am not talking succession in terms of British statute, but what makes sense in a Wikipedia infobox. Zemnmez (talk) 08:19, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

To me, succeeding something means a fresh start with a new entity taking over from a previous one. That isn't what has happened with the British possessions but you seem to be saying it did. If something changes its name (especially in stages) it isn't taking over. Can you elaborate your position ? Roger 8 Roger (talk) 11:03, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

I removed "British Empire" & flag, from the aforementioned infobox. The British Empire evolved into today's Commonwealth of Nations. There was no sudden end of one entity & begining of another. GoodDay (talk) 18:27, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we've given a straight answer to User:Zemnmez's question although User:GoodDay's action might have made the point through action rather than words. We have maintained a firm position against adding additional information to the infobox. In every case that has come up, the additional information is in some way contentious or debatable. Generally I see this article as being about a period/place in history rather than a fixed, formal institution with 'official' data points proving its whole existence can be fitted into a nice, neat box. So no, please don't add that. Wiki-Ed (talk) 14:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Should protected states and mandates be shown in a separate color

Would it really be harmful to show the protected states and mandates in a separate color? These territories were not a formal part of the British empire, according to the Wikipedia articles about “British Protectorate” and “League of Nations Mandate.” So I propose a separate color to indicate that they were not treated the same as other British territories. And for the record, I am talking about protected states, not protectorates as there is a distinction between the two terms. RedStorm1368 (talk) 06:28, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

If you go back in the archives, you'll find I suggested some time ago that things like the League of Nations mandates didn't belong. The UK did not have sovereignty, the territories were held in trust leading to independence. However, sources do include these territories as part of the British Empire, we're guided by sources not personal opinion, which is why I reverted you. I still don't disagree with your point but it needs the current consensus to change. I'm open to change, lets see what other editors think. WCM_email 06:51, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

What if they were coloured in a different shade, say light red while the empire proper was in dark red? That would mark the distinction but still keep them all within the empire and not going against what sources say. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 10:16, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Isn't that what print atlases always used to do? I would expect different colours, and shades of pink would be traditional. DuncanHill (talk) 10:21, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

I do find that an optimal route to take. Perhaps we can also leave a caption to remind readers that mandates and protected states were still part of the empire. RedStorm1368 (talk) 13:57, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for being flexible. My intent was not to exclude these territories from the British empire, but simply to deter viewers from assuming they were treated the same as any other colony. Though I now agree that they can be considered part of the empire, so do you think different shades of the same color would be preferable on the map, as suggested by the other editor? Or does the current consensus only allow for one particular shade of color? RedStorm1368 (talk) 13:54, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

I think it should be fine as long as you're using the base map (which we're confident was well researched and sourced by the original editor 15 years ago). I would suggest two things: (a) retaining the existing light pink - it's the traditional colour as has been pointed out - but hashing protectorates/mandates rather than using a stronger (red) block colour (which suggests a stronger affiliation rather than a weaker one). Antartica already has this. And (b) if you're adding a layer of complexity it might benefit from a key rather than just the caption. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:50, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm fine with that - I had thought the mandates would be the lighter shade btw). I see you've raised Antarctica and the FIDS. I agree we should not have too many special categories and that these areas are already treated as somehow different. I do wonder if that should be the case though. This is another topic, but the more I think about it the more I think they should simply be treated the same as the other colonies. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 20:39, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

I have lightened the color of those territories by 25% to accentuate the contrast and indicate a weaker affiliation to the empire, if that's ok. Notify me if the changes won't suffice and should be reverted. RedStorm1368 (talk) 00:09, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

I have published the changes in accordance to your former suggestions - the retention of light pink and hashing the mandates/protected states. I also lightened the color of those territories by 25% to accentuate the contrast and indicate a weaker affiliation to the empire, if that's ok. Notify me if the changes won't suffice and should be reverted. RedStorm1368 (talk) 00:09, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Along these lines, Britain itself should be specified in dark red. Presenting it in light red suggests that its position was no different than that of any other part of the Empire, which is obviously incorrect. 021120x (talk) 05:01, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

It's not obvious. Canada for example had more autonomy than Ireland, which was part of the UK. TFD (talk) 12:44, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

If Britain is clearly defined on the map (distinct from Ireland) then it can be clearly designated in dark red. This is a page about the British Empire after all. 021120x (talk) 17:17, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Not sure Britain needs to be dark red. Makes it too complicated (as per TFD comments). I think the current version looks good actually. Discreet but clear. Should the top right box-out have the same style for consistency? Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:23, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

There will be numerous exceptions: we have to keep it simple. I think the only differently coloured exceptions should be the mandates and protectorates. I notice again Antarctica and islands are coloured the same as the mandates. This might be the place to raise this topic again. I assume they are so coloured because of limited acknowledgement of the UK claim, or because they are under the 1959 treaty. However, that doesn't change their position within the empire. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 20:45, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Would you suggest Antarctica to be in the same light pink as the formal British empire, or should the territory have a different colour exclusive to itself? RedStorm1368 (talk) 21:53, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Fixed the top right box-out. RedStorm1368 (talk) 21:50, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

@RedStorm1368, I would colour Antarctica the same as the rest of the empire - it belongs more to the darker shade than to the lighter shaded mandates. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 00:07, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Done. I have, however, left the hash marks intact. RedStorm1368 (talk) 03:27, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Lead needs fixing?

I think that the lead for this article in its current revision might need some work. I don't think it gives much of a description of what it is in the first sentence. It simply says that it is "composed of" the various states under the control/influence of the United Kingdom. Shouldn't it saying something like, " The British Empire was a political entity " or something like that? Professor Penguino (talk) 00:41, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

The British Empire was not a political entity, it is a collective term, hence the current lead description. CMD (talk) 03:41, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough. Professor Penguino (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Backing of Indigenous American Hostilities

British support of Native American attacks and raids on American settlers was one of the primary reasons that the war was deemed necessary and should be mentioned. 021120x (talk) 17:33, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

As it is one book the best you can say is "according to Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies, Western Americans claimed the British were arming the Indians, and this was used as a justfcation for the war", and that assumes this does not fail wp:undue. Slatersteven (talk) 17:40, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

As it is exceptionally well known that this was a cause of the war, there is no reason to provide more sources in line with WP:OVERKILL. 021120x (talk) 17:49, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes it is a cause = the consensus of reliable sources. the War Hawks therefore had strong support in western states Rjensen (talk) 18:09, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

The source says, "Western Americans continued to claim... that only British support allowed... leaders of the Algonquian Confederacy to continue to resist U.S. traders and settlers who sought their lands.... The Indians bought their weapons from British merchants. This perception fueled demands from such westerners as Henry Clay of Kentucky that Canada be invaded."

Notice the frontiersmen's claim is not presented as established fact. Also, "British merchants" (the North West Company, which operated without a charter) did not work for the UK. It's not surprising that the fur trading company would sell Indians tools for hunting. And many of these furs would be shipped openly from New York so that the company could evade British taxes. No wonder the British would soon shut them down. TFD (talk) 01:00, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

WP:V the edit in question fails verification, selling weapons for hunting is not funding Native Americans to attack American settlements. Merchants are not the British Government. It seems the sources would support a comment that invading Canada was also a means to defeat Native Americans hostile to Americans invading their territory by denying their source of arms. But it certainly doesn't support the claim made. WCM_email 06:17, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Exaclty it was a perception, not a fact. Slatersteven (talk) 13:11, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

None of the claims made in this discussion have any sources or citations. What is the basis of your claim that items were simply being traded for "tools and hunting", when it has already been established historically that weapons were being provided in support of raids?

Furthermore, that factual "perception" was widely held and was one of the primary reasons that the war was deemed necessary. Again, nothing discussed here has even remotely disproven that this "perception" was not a cause that led to the war. 021120x (talk) 19:01, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

That must be why such this is a crucial part of the article on the War of 1812 right? Oh no, wait, it's not. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:46, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

The War of 1812 saw invasions across the border in both directions, but the war ended with unchanged borders. The border was demilitarized, as was the Great Lakes region. The British ceased aiding Native American attacks on the United States, and the United States never again attempted to invade Canada. Apart from minor unsuccessful raids, it has remained peaceful Canada–United States relations 021120x (talk) 10:48, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

And actually, now that you've drawn my attention to it, that entire section is POV and needs rewriting. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:55, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Yet once again, do you have any sources or citations?

The only POV here is being introduced by editors that are refusing to acknowledge information they dislike. 021120x (talk) 21:03, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I do not need a source that the rifles and knives were sold for hunting, but am merely pointing out that the assumption that they were provided for military purposes must be sourced before adding it to the article, since other explanations are possible.

That this was a popular perception among Americans does not transform it into a fact. Propagandists frequently exaggerate or create facts in order to justify war. During the war for example, Butler's Rangers were accused of massacring hundreds of women and children following the Battle of Wyoming and this was the popular perception for over 200 years.

The British Indian alliance fell apart after the U.S. Revolutionary War and was only revived once the U.S. declared war on the UK. In the meantime, the British asked the Indians to avoid conflict with the U.S. TFD (talk) 22:18, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Aside from no evidence having been provided thus far disproving the widely held consensus claims that this was factual, the point is that this "perception" is one of the primary causes that fueled war sentiments, along with the maritime and trade issues. That is undeniable. 021120x (talk) 22:47, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Report, or manifesto of the causes and reasons of war with Great Britain, presented to the House of Representatives by the Committee of Foreign Relations. June 3, 1812 -

It is known that symptoms of British hostility towards the United States have never failed to produce corresponding symptoms among those tribes. It is also well known that on all such occasions, abundant supplies of the ordinary munitions of war have been afforded by the agents of British commercial companies, and even from British garrisons, wherewith they were enabled to commence that system of savage warfare on our frontiers 021120x (talk) 21:45, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

The Causes of The War of 1812 -

Ultimately, British policy in the Northwest was channeled through two small outposts—Amherstburg, near Detroit, and St. Joseph's, near Michilimackinac. Amherstburg, the post near to the main American line of settlement, was by far the most important of these, and it was from this spot on the Detroit River that the official British policy was disseminated to the Indians of the Northwest. It was here that the Indians came to receive supplies.... It is not surprising that American records of this period are filled with references to the British agents working among the Indians. These activities of 1808, which culminated in the visit of some 5,000 Indians to Amherstburg in the fall, were apparently very satisfactory to Elliott. In February, 1809, he estimated that with only one regular regiment Detroit and all the country between it and the Ohio would soon be in British hands, and the Indians actively in support.... As Anglo-American relations worsened in the period after the Chesapeake affair, the British began active interference with the Indians in American territory, with the object of winning them over to the British cause and using them for the defense of Canada in the event of war with the United States. 021120x (talk) 22:12, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Your first source is not rs.

Your second source doesn't say the British supported Indian "attacks and raids on American settlers." It doesn't even say what the supplies were. TFD (talk) 22:25, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

The first source is the official declaration of the need for war directly from US Congress, which clearly shows their reasons for going to war. What is unclear about that?

The second source both clearly states that the British were actively organizing the Indians (which was denied - again without evidence) and doing so in preparation for military activity (which was again denied without evidence), with one British official openly stating that he had hopes of taking over "Detroit and all the country between it and the Ohio". 021120x (talk) 22:33, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

The first is a WP:PRIMARY source, as such we need secondary sources to interpret it and cannot draw our own conclusions from it.

The second doesn't support the edit you made. WCM_email 06:12, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

And the U.S. went to war with Iraq because, according to the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives, he had weapons of mass destruction. They went to war with Spain because the Spanish blew up the Maine. They went to War with North Vietnam because they had torpedoed their ships. None of this of course actually happened and we don't treat them as facts just because Congress said so. TFD (talk) 11:24, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

There was a "perception" among the Thirteen Colonies that they were being unfairly taxed by Parliament, which the British denied. Yet, no one disputes that this was a fundamental cause for the War of Independence. 021120x (talk) 12:43, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The evidence of British intrigue in this matter has been described by historians as 'flimsy' (Troy Bickham) to 'paranoia' (Jeremy Black) and everything in between. John Randolph called it 'propaganda concocted by Republican expansionists'. Sources tend to say that Indian attacks were the result of outrageous land cessation treaties and territory incursions by hostile settlers from the US, (Donald Hickey) and not because of any encouragement from the British. The British Government, which was desperate to avoid war always strongly denied interfering in Indian affairs, and Brock directed the Indian Department to exert its considerable influence over Native Americans, in order to maintain peace. As late as May 1812 Brock was still telling Native American leaders that the British could not help against American encroachment. Thomas McKee noted that '...the discontent of the indians arises primarily from the unfair land purchases by the US but the Americans sought to attribute the discontent to the machinations of the British'.

The only evidence offered to support British interference is that Native Americans were found to have British-made weapons but they also owned American ones; both British and American settlers traded with the Indians. There are reliable sources confirming everything you have been told here but it is not the job of other editors to find references for you. There is no consensus for your proposed additions so lets all move on. --Ykraps (talk) 07:08, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

There is clear consensus that the Natives received support from the British. The Horsman book dedicates an entire chapter to describing this support, which he explicitly refers to as "support", and did not simply amount to giving them supplies. The reference above from that book very clearly states that the British military officials were 'actively interfering' with the Indians.

Regardless, the paragraph is discussing the causes that led to the war, one of the most fundamental of which being the US view that the British were inciting the Indians. Every single source has reaffirmed this, and nothing any opposing editor has suggested has disproved that this view was not a cause of the war. 021120x (talk) 10:46, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

021120x I have moved on and so should you. This sort of behaviour will only alienate you from other editors. --Ykraps (talk) 09:12, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Full citation of first source, which was not given above:

Difficulties on the western frontier did contribute to the escalation of British-American conflict and had implications important for understanding subsequent U.S.-Canadian relations. Western Americans continued to claim... that only British support allowed... leaders of the Algonquian Confederacy to continue to resist U.S. traders and settlers who sought their lands.... The Indians bought their weapons from British merchants. This perception fueled demands from such westerners as Henry Clay of Kentucky that Canada be invaded, as did the deaths of two hundred Americans killed when General William H. Harrison won a fiercely fought battle with the Indian Confederacy at Tippecanoe Creek in November 1811.... In June 1812, President Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war against Great Britain. The president emphasized maritime issues, relegating British incitement of the "savages" to an afterthought, but the congressional votes that carried the war declaration came from the West and the South, with a reluctant commercial New England — the region to which maritime issues should have been most important — pulled along in the wake of nationalist pro-war sentiment. For the "war hawks" of the West and the South, an attack on Canada seemed not only a logical way to defeat the Indian confederacies and open the way for westward expansion, but also the only strategic means by which the United States could counter British naval supremacy. 021120x (talk) 13:25, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Full? odd as after "Western Americans continued to claim" is not "..." but the word "inaccurately", I suggest you read wp:cherrypick and WP:DROPIT, as you are now misrepresenting sources, and that is a policy violation. Slatersteven (talk) 13:36, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps you should read the entire source and also avoid making ad hominem remarks. The author's argument was that British support was not the only reason that the Indians launched their attacks against American settlers; he does not dispute that they did receive support from the British, again openly stating that they received their weapons from British merchants. 021120x (talk) 14:00, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

INcorect "Although the Indians brought their weapons from British merchants they were, in the words of Richard White, "independent political agents" who needed no encouragement from the British...". Slatersteven (talk) 14:15, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

That reference from another author does not dispute that they received British incitement, only that they did not need it.

Niles shared with many of his countrymen the belief that Upper Canada could and should be captured, but that this should be done not for territorial expansion but to expel the British, who manipulated the Indians and imposed authoritarian European values and institutions upon British North America. (Ibid) 021120x (talk) 14:32, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

The British openly provided food and clothing to Indians who visited their bases, whether they lived under British, U.S., French or Spanish jurisdiction. They also discouraged attacks on American settlers and offered them land in Canada in compensation for land lost in U.S. territory. But where is your evidence that any of the assistance was weapons? Why would the British provide rifles to Indians when they couldn't even properly arm the provincial militia? And why would they provide weapons to Indians whom they feared would join with French and Spanish to invade Canada? TFD (talk) 23:49, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Also what your source says "The interpretative consensus emphasises the maritime tensions between the United States and Great Britain as the determinate in the US decision to go to war", it adds that in invasion of Canada was a secondary consideration. So it does not say that British support of Native American attacks and raids on American settlers was one of the primary reasons, it says (at best) it was a secondary one. Slatersteven (talk) 13:56, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

From the nonprofit CFR - The settlers believed the British in Canada plotted with the Indians to massacre them. This caused many settlers to join the cry for war against Britain. They hoped to end Indian hostility by invading Canada and driving out the British. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 021120x (talk • contribs) 14:06, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

There is a distinction between what people believed and what actually happened. TFD (talk) 11:27, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

References

References

Remove the map in the infobox

The map claims to show all territories that were at one point part of the British Empire, yet it fails to do this. The Thirteen Colonies, Mosquito Coast, and Ionian Islands are shown, but not:

The Occupation Zones in Germany, Austria, and Japan, the Concessions in China (some like Hong Kong and Weihai are shown, others are not), the other Antarctic territories like the Ross Dependency and Australian Territory, Occupation of Libya (and the Libyan territory held by Britain pre-WWI), Eritrea and Italian Somalia, the Oregon Territory (Condominium with US, but Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is shown so it counts), British Togoland, Occupation of Southern Iran, I could go on and on.

No offense to the person who made the map, but it is not accurate. It would be far better to have a map of the British Empire in 1921, as that was the peak of its territorial extent, and conveys more useful information. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 11:04, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I have always been reluctant to add personally created maps to articles. Although some are useful they are all original research. Why these maps are generally allowed but written original research is not is a conunbrum. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 21:06, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

The map is based on reliable sources, so it is not original research (not any more so than editors writing articles using RS). It doesn't include places that are not mentioned by reliable sources, and the sources don't mention temporarily occupied places hence none of the places listed by OP are covered. The suggested 1921 map (a) doesn't have any notation (b) includes places that were not part of the British Empire (c) includes places that don't even exist (d) misses historically signficant places that were part of the British Empire (but not in 1921). So no, it would not be "far better". Wiki-Ed (talk) 12:08, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

The 1921 map was only an example, it has many problems and wouldn't be fit to put on the article. But please elaborate on point b and c.

As for d, while it does miss historically significant places part of the British Empire, so does the current map. What counts as historically significant? The Oregon Territory is a big part of the history of North America, and the history of the British Empire. Yet it is nowhere to be seen...apart from an earlier version of the map I found (here). This map does contain many of the territories I listed, though still missing a lot. Which begs the question, why? The map is not consistent at all, despite citing the same sources.

If occupations don't count, then why are mandates shown, like South-west Africa and Tanganyika? Why were so many other territories taken off? What is the methodology here? PrecariousWorlds (talk) 15:27, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

THis is why (maybe) we shouldhave no map that is user generated, as how do we define what was part of the British empire at one time? Slatersteven (talk) 15:34, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

We don't. We use what reliable sources tell us. And in doing so we also avoid lots of pointless debates on the text of the article about places that simply weren't a part of the Empire (Bhutan, Oregon territory, Afghanistan, swathes of Antarctica etc). Wiki-Ed (talk) 16:38, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

"swathes of Antarctica etc" So why is the British Antarctic Territory still shown? What makes it different from other Antarctic territories that were previously British? And the Oregon Territory was indisputably part of the empire as much as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was.

And these aren't pointless debates. My point is that people's interpretations of these reliable sources are not consistent and are constantly changing, and I would like to know the methodology behind why some territories are included and others are not despite citing the same sources. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 12:04, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I would agree, but I do think well-made and fact-checked user maps should be allowed. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 15:01, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

@Wiki-Ed, about your reply above, I take your point that the map is based on published sources, making it acceptable, but with this map, on what sources? There is no reference which makes it original research. Even if it were based on a real map, it is likely to have been altered so much that it is not backed by a RSS, making it OR. There is also something inherently different between representing text and representing a map. I think there are very few occasions when a user created map can be treated acceptable. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 19:08, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm a bit puzzled by this. Are you referring to the switch from the longstanding map to the current, slightly-updated version of the same map which you (seemingly) approved of not six weeks ago? And you're saying the original was okay? IIRC from discussion with the author at the time, the 2008 map was based largely on the Oxford History of the British Empire. Having checked, I see he also referenced a couple of other sources, including historical atlases. If you're unhappy with the sourcing of the current version you could have taken it up with the editor who made the changes and suggested he added a reference. (When I suggested the map would be okay if they copied the original I had had it in mind that they would copy the references over, but I didn't check, so my bad too)

On the second point on the acceptability of user-created maps: There are a huge number of user created images on Wikipedia. Some of them are indeed rubbish (e.g. the 1921 BE map and several others that random editors have tried to insert over the years), but in principle an image which draws on images in reliable sources is no different to article text which draws from text in those same sources. In fact I'd argue it's inherently more reliable - it's difficult for a map to have more than one meaning; words can carry several. Wiki-Ed (talk) 22:39, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

The earlier versions and the current version of the map are wildly different while citing the same sources, and no reasons are given. Until there is consensus and this can be resolved, the best solution imo is to put up a map showing a snapshot in time of the British Empire, ideally 1921 as that was the territorial peak. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 12:11, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm beginning to think you're trolling. They're almost exactly the same bar the small changes to shading that we agreed in the discussion further up the talk page. We certainly won't be replacing it with an image you yourself have agreed "has many problems and wouldn't be fit to put on the article". Wiki-Ed (talk) 18:53, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Please Assume Good Faith. I'm not trolling here, just trying to improve the article.

As I said before, I only used the 1921 map as an example, I didn't intend for it to be posted right then and there (though I would point out its already in the article).

Anyways, my argument is that the task of showing all territories held by the British Empire is too big to create an accurate map. This very article starts with "The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states", and so this implies to the reader that the map will show all of these, but it doesn't. Why are the other Antarctic territories not shown, indisputably part of the empire? Why not the other, undebatably British parts of the empire not included above, when there are reliable sources easily avaliable that state them as such? What about the English/Angevlin Empire? Or the Scottish Colonial Empire? Surely military administrations held by the British for decades at times are worth an inclusion?

It is much simpler, more accurate, and more understandable for the reader to put up a map of one snapshot in time. A map that aims to fulfill the arbitrary goal of showing everything will fail at informing readers. PrecariousWorlds (talk) 19:59, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I see where you're going wrong: "...so this implies to the reader that the map will show all of these, but it doesn't". Yes it does. It doesn't show what you think it should show, but what you think and what reliable sources think are different things. If the majority of sources stated that Antarctica, the Angevin Empire and Scottish colonies were part of the British Empire then they would be included. They don't (rightly so because it would be nonsensical) and so they're not. Wiki-Ed (talk) 19:35, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any rational reason for removing the current map from the infobox, picking apart the reasons stated none stand up to scrutiny. TBH this seems like an editor unable to accept their offering is rejected for good reasons so wishing to remove everything else. The current map has stood the test of time, I see no compelling reason for change. WCM_email 23:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree the case for removal has not been made. Note it is the "British Empire", so we don't need to worry about Calais or Angevin or Scottish territories. Time to drop the stick. Johnbod (talk) 04:27, 4 October 2023 (UTC)