I'm interested in the hunting, government and cultural history of early 20th British colonies. I'm not wanting anything too deep, just some ideas of what it was like. If you would, please PM. thanks captdavid

Start with "White Hunter"

That will get you on the right track, then get deeper and deeper, its a process that takes years, pick a country and focus on it. I think the Germans had the best go and focus on them.

Safari by
Bartle Bull

+1 for what Cal said, great book!

Also "Home from the Hill" forget the author but a fascinating account of life in Sudan

quote:

Originally posted by Manyathelo:
+1 for what Cal said, great book!

Also "Home from the Hill" forget the author but a fascinating account of life in Sudan

Wilfred Thesiger

It's a great story (the history as a whole) albeit with a very sad ending.

The even sadder part is that it easily could have ended differently.

The world was a better place...when the sun never set on the British Empire.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.z...y-some/#.WMp_8_nys2w



Paradise is finite – a lesson a long time in the learning, and yet to be learnt by some

MIC SMITH 16 MAR 2017 12:29 (SOUTH AFRICA)

Acknowledging the role that colonial hunting by Britons, Americans and other Europeans played in the decimation of rhino and elephant populations in Africa from the 1800s challenges the notion that trade in rhino horn and ivory is relatively new.
The history of rhino conservation is paradoxical. It’s tied to the very English sport of hunting. The conservation of rhino began with white hunters who were shooting them and wanted to protect them so they could continue to shoot them. These trophy hunters included the likes of Percival, Paterson and Prowse who penetrated East Africa in the 1900s. They didn’t want to protect rhinos and game only because they wanted to shoot them, they also respected them in a way that only trophy hunters understand.

Another benefit of hunting was the presence of Asian middlemen in Africa which meant that trophies could be traded, sometimes openly, sometimes not. Ivory was for carving, rhino horn for medicine and carving. Another aspect of British conservation and regulations was that the rights to hunt game leaned in favour of white hunters. In the 19th century, indigenous tribesmen did most of the hunting to supply an economically important international trade. The native kingpins reaped riches. The advent of conservation and regulations changed that. Hunting was a right that the British, Europeans and Americans sought for themselves. What happened and how the regulations were viewed by African and Asian stakeholders can’t be undone, but considering Britain and America dominate the conservation sector, they need to own the role that their founders played in the initial decimation of the rhino species and the monopolisation of hunting in trade of ivory and rhino horn.

The original pressure to protect African game such as rhino can’t be understood without first understanding the sprawling 19th century cities of elephant society. The African elephants were as crowded together in the plains and forests of Africa as houses in London or New York. Comparisons between elephants and humans are easily made. Family orientated beings of longevity, intelligence, feeling and culture, the ability of elephants to transform landscapes is only paralleled by humans. They shared the plains and the watering places with all other game including rhino. In the trade for ivory, or as one English Captain put it, “our ivory”, the black rhino grazing amid the elephant herds was bycatch – a profitable bycatch, as the horn was prized as a carving material and medicine in the Orient.

The British became accessories to the destruction of the African paradise in the 19th century, particularly the latter half in East Africa (Livingstone arrived in 1869) and earlier in South Africa. British and European explorers discovered a wealth of elephants baking on the plains and bathing in the rivers. But the explorers in East Africa also discovered a frenzy of commerce surrounding the herds. The Egyptians had thrust into the ivory resources from the north in Sudan and the Arabs and Indians had thrust in from the east coast.

The newly arrived British Consul in the ivory trading centre of Zanzibar recorded that 488,600 lbs of ivory worth £146,666 was exported in 1859. The British administrators of the colonial protectorates and British East African Company struggled in the name of the empire to wrest control of the ivory trade from the Arabs and Indians. They had mixed success as the Arabs proved to be masters of business strategy and plunder, but gradually through persistence the trade was checked, or rather it came under control of the Empire. Livingstone estimated that 44,ooo elephants were killed for export to England in 1870 with annual total mortalities up to 65,000 by 1894.

At the peak of the trade, caravans 2,000 African porters strong belonging to the Arab and Indian ivory traders bore ivory and slaves to markets in the African interior. The porters were laden with 50-80 pounds each of ivory on their heads; 18,000 pounds to 28,000 pounds were prize loads for caravans – 360 to 560 ivory porters respectively.

Ivory was a household item to the people of Europe and America in the 19th century, like plastic is in the 21st century. And like the Chinese manufacturing of plastic goods in the late 20th and 21st century, 19th century China bought raw African ivory off the Arabs, Indians, Britons and Europeans and manufactured ivory goods, games and trinkets to be exported back to the chief consumer nations of America, Britain and Europe. Marco Polo wrote in a journal, “Most of the ivory is carried to Oman whence it is sent to India and China.”

The ivory the Chinese bought was for ivory carving, both for the export market and their domestic market. The Chinese in Africa didn’t get their hands dirty (or bloody), they just brokered deals for ivory and rhino horn between the traders and the buyers and ivory carvers at home. In 1894, 80% of the ivory that went through Africa’s main port for ivory, Zanzibar, was headed for America. Billiard balls and handles for Smith and Wessons. The English steel and silversmiths in Sheffield bought sizeable quantities of ivory for cutlery handles.

Ivory was almost a currency. Everything in the East African ivory markets was bartered; the traders gave everything from blue beads to beautiful women to the African suppliers. They avoided trading arms to the tribes for security reasons, and if they did, they offered antiquated weapons. But some traders weren’t so scrupulous. A savvy Arab trader could turn $3 worth of copper into $1,000 of ivory with a series of clever barters. Ivory was the world’s most valuable commodity and travelling with it in the caravans and the ivory markets in the East African interior was rhino horn. A much lesser commodity in terms of national economies, but pound for pound more valuable.

The economic importance of the ivory trade (and rhino horn) needs to be emphasised. Written accounts since the second century and the Middle Ages show the ivory trade was more prominent than the slave trade. It was more lucrative than slaves for one obvious reason: ivory didn’t deteriorate on long marches like slave women and children did. The tribes were keen to supply it for the riches and wages it earned them. They speared the elephants, sometimes using grass fires to herd huge numbers, sometimes dropping heavy spears from trees to pierce between the shoulder blades of big bulls; 100-pound tusks had 3-foot of ivory embedded in the elephants’ skulls. The embedded tusk was difficult for the Africans to get out, but the Arab hunters had axes that made it easier. The potential for imagining brutal scenes is an unfortunate fact of history. Get that extra 3-foot out in one piece and you could trade a big tusk for a beautiful slave, a cow or a new shirt.

In the 1800s Arab merchants such as Muhammad Ali and Tipu Tib from Egypt and Sultan Said from Zanzibar were known at the ivory trading centres at Khartoum on the Nile or at Ujiji or Unyanyembe in Tanzania. Asian middlemen set up residence in Ujiji in the 1860s, the rice grown in a nearby swamp an important staple for them. Two thousand people would attend the markets daily for a trade in scissors, opera glasses, cloth, picture books, gunpowder, handkerchiefs, slaves and beads for ivory.

An Indian, Musa Mzuri, was among the Indians who monopolised the trade at Zanzibar. The Indian agencies had been operating 200 to 300 years. They dominated the main trading centre at Zanzibar. The soft ivory for carving, which was the ivory of choice for the Chinese, came from East of the Congo, while harder, more translucent ivory was from the West of the Congo line. Zanzibar, which was the ivory market for all of East Africa, supplied 75% of the world’s ivory in 1891. European agencies such as Hansing and Company, O’swald and Company, Wiseman and Company, Roux, Frassinet and Company and Meyer and Company were keen to wrestle the trade from the Indians in charge at Zanzibar. Not an easy task.

These companies, including the British East Africa Company, made sustained attempts to impose their order on the lawlessness. The chaos that swept the African plains saw gluts of ivory rot in the mud and African tribesmen become masters of bling, pictures of debauchery surrounded by beautiful female slaves and objects of debasement. The plains and forests were fetid with the rotting corpses of elephants and rhino. The trade was a free-for-all. An estimated 170,000 black rhinos were killed for the trade in their horn between 1849 and 1895 to supply 11,000kg/year to Asia, entire horns, pieces or shavings from Yemen dagger handle carving, it didn’t matter. Then the trade gradually transformed into a sport, with the losers supplying the trophies. The image of the white hunter sportsman began to dominate the frame but the trade undercurrent still ran strongly, with large profits. Then the sportsmen noticed incredulously that they’d put more than a dint in Africa’s bounty. As hunting was important to the British elite in the Victorian era, the first European regulations came around 1890, calling for hunters to “play fair”.

The 19th century South African ivory market was not as free as East Africa’s. The tribes didn’t get their piece like they did further north. The Boers saw the game as a valuable resource from first settlement, but the 1830s marked a new era of bloodlust: English visitor hunters en-route for military or civic duty in India. Englishly enthusiastic for natural history, hunting and lunch money for cucumber sandwiches from selling trophies, the white hunters and their guests shot South Africa almost out of elephant and rhino except for in a few areas, by 1860. Addo was one of those areas. Smooth bore rifles meant death for the pachyderm was never quick, but the visitors still glorified it in British best-sellers. No one, colonial or tribal, was blind to the difference just a few decades of trophy hunting had made to biodiversity.

As far as Britain was concerned the herds of its African territories were a treasure of the Empire. By 1870, colonial hunters worried about the disappearance of game, the result of “reckless shooting of excessive numbers of animals”. In 1903 UK hunter and conservation activist Edward North Buxton helped form the world’s oldest international conservation society, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, now called Flora and Fauna International (FFI). Buxton believed many European hunters lacked “true sportsmanship”. Buxton described Africa’s herds as “a precious inheritance of the Empire, something to be guarded like a unique picture” and Africa as “a paradise of varied life which is now irretrievably lost through the carelessness and wastefulness of white men”. The accounts of the losses were the same in Sudan, South Africa, Somaliland, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. Elites and hunters who wished to protect their resource made up a large part of Buxton’s society’s membership.

Early conservation initiatives responded to the disappearance of game. These included the establishment of the Sabie Game Reserve in 1892, the Cape Act for the Preservation of Game in 1886, the establishment of game reserves and hunting licences in German East Africa in 1896 and game regulations in Uganda in 1897, hunting licences for hunters visiting Somalihand and quotas for elephants and rhino, reserves in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Malawi and Somilaland, with set limits on each species and special protection for slow breeding species like rhino and female and young. A conference of stakeholder nations including Germany, France, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Belgian Congo resulted in the 1900 Convention for the Preservation of Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. Hunters objected but Buxton said “the legitimate sportsman has no reason to fear it and the mere butcher should be gibbeted”. British conservation delegate Captain Keith Caldwell denigrated subsistence hunting by the natives or hunting for profit, especially when it was trophy hunting for profit. “The quickest, most certain way of wiping animals off the face of the earth was to commercialise their trophies,” Caldwell said.

The Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, which was principally a pressure group whose two main concerns were the establishment of “sacred” game reserves and regulating the ivory (and rhino horn) trade, had to fight against its image as a club for “rich sportsmen” and reframe itself as a scientific society. Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Crewe said in 1909 that the society was not just representing the interests of hunters. “It is not with you simply a question of preserving game for sportsmen, although that is a side of the matter in which many members no doubt take interest; but you are here, as I say, as a scientific society in the main and it is on those lines and in those interests that you wish us to help you.” However, hunting was central to Buxton’s philosophy as he extolled the model of species protection in which the revenue from hunting licences be used for conservation. The model that has persisted till today.

Kenya became an emotional pivot point for white colonial hunters in the early 20th century. The 19th-century caravans of the Arab and Indian ivory traders had dared not cross the Masai’s land for they feared losing their lives and treasure. The Kenyan game had been spared the ivory trade for a century so when ex US President Theodore Roosevelt cemented the legend of the safari hunt with his 1909 visit, he had plenty of carcasses to enjoy his lunch beside. He shot everything he could find, hundreds of animals, keen to pot specimens for the Smithsonian Museum.

The white hunters that followed the trend that Roosevelt started saw herds of game so huge they thought they were endless. It was a “prehistoric utopia” in a “tropical Neolithic slumber”. They mistook the occasional goring of a white hunter or a black porter by an angry elephant, rhino or lion as sign of fair sport. The Empire and the American industrialists had the taste for hunting safaris in Kenya. They didn’t want Kenya to change, but they soon despaired. They gazed forlorn at lakes where elephant and rhino had abounded and saw not a single animal. Why didn’t they understand that their guns were strangers in paradise?

They mourned, poetically passing down their tears in literature like Out of Africa. The white hunters, who were British, European and American elites and royalty, were no strangers to the study of history, but they were blind to the fact that endless elephant herds had already been decimated for a century in the lands north and west of Kenya. Had they not learned from Livingstone’s journals, or the account books of the ivory trading British East Africa Company, that paradise is finite? They loved paradise for sport, but the sport was spoiling, so they renamed the sport “game control” to clear land for the Empire’s cattle, sheep and railways. It was “our ivory”, according to Captain Keith Caldwell.

Roosevelt said game laws should reject animal rights philosophy. “Game laws should be drawn primarily on the interest of the whole people, keeping steadily in mind certain facts that ought to be self-evident to anyone above the intellectual level of those well-meaning persons who apparently think all shooting is wrong and that man could continue to exist if all wild animals were allowed to increase unchecked.”

Despite the sentimentality and new regulations, Kenya welcomed thousands of white hunters from Britain, Europe and America. They supplied a good portion of their ivory and rhino horn trophies to Asian markets. Ernest Hemingway and the Prince of Wales were famous examples. An ivory trading centre was set up about 1900 in Mombasa in Kenya. By 1960 Mombasa took over as the centre of the world’s ivory trade from London, evidence of the role elite white sport and game control played in the ivory and rhino horn trade.

The Game Control Officer in Lariak in Kenya’s Rift Valley, Samaki Salmon, shot 4,000 elephants. In Uganda Captain CRS Pitman shot 3,992 elephants in the name of game control. A few months of hunting for the Game Department killed 600 rhinos. From 1944 to 1946 one man, J.A. Hunter, shot 996 rhinos in Kenya. His records show he collected their horns; no doubt he traded them through the markets at Mombasa. Kenyan safari hunter and documenter Peter H. Beard sold his trophies. “Three hundred thousand square miles of unspoiled hunting lay before us – and the chance to profit from trophies!”

Beard said the era of “adventure unlimited” for “gentlemen” came to an end as Roosevelt toasted the “gentlemen adventurers of Central Africa” on his safari. Beard regretted that those early hunters had showed “natives and the Asian middlemen how to kill for profit on a large scale”. Records of three East African countries – Kenya, Uganda (a British protectorate from 1894 to 1962) and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) – show exports of 1,600kg/year or the deaths of 555 black rhinos per year during the 1930s, 5,000kg/year during World War 2, 2,500kg/year after the war, 1,800kg/year in the 1950s, 1,300kg/year in the 60s and 3,400kg or 1,180 rhinos per year (similar to today’s poaching numbers) in the 1970s. Many of those horns were from hunting trophies or game control. For the century between 1880 and 1990, only three Asian countries – Taiwan, South Korea and Japan – kept rhino horn import records. Taiwan’s main supplier was South Africa, South Korea’s was Tanzania and Japan’s Kenya, all of which were British protectorates.

Until the mid-1970s, when CITES entered the picture, the trade between countries in rhino horn was legal and somewhat documented. The records from exporting nations mismatch, with importing nations as traders at both ends under-reported to avoid customs duties. During the 1960s and ‘70s, three countries took fairly even shares of East Africa’s rhino horn: Yemen, Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong was a known entrepot for China.

History shows Britain’s dual role in conservation and hunting in Africa. Historical records also link British, European and American hunters to Asian middlemen. For 100 years, western conservation efforts disenfranchised indigenous owners, barring them from joining the commerce in hunting and wildlife. Britain’s role and the role of the conservation section in Africa for over a century must have left impressions for Asian middlemen and indigenous African hunters. Impressions that may still linger.

The toll on rhinos and elephants in the years prior to the current discourse on rhino horn and ivory since 2007 was collectively in the millions, thus tinging the current poaching crisis and conservation efforts with hypocrisy. Perhaps that needs amending in order to move forward. DM

Ledvm, I must disagree. I'm really glad that I'm not a British subject! Although I consider myself somewhat of an anglophile, I'm really glad I'm an U.S. citizen. Captdavid

There is an online magazine: Old Africa Magazine which you can subscribe to and which has many interesting articles, mainly about Kenya. There are also book recommendations.

There are hundreds of books on this subject, do search on Amazon - one better still, get an Amazon Kindle and you can down load so many for free or very little outlay.

You can also get a Kindle app for your iPad and read them on it.

Look for the following authors:

WILLAM YORK
DENIS LYELL
ARTHUR NEUMANN
WILLIAM CHARLES BALDWIN
ROUALEYN GORDON CUMMING
FREDERICK VAUGHN KIRBY
JOHN BOYES
FRANCIS BARROW PEARCE
PARKER GILMORE
PAUL BELLONI DU CHAILLU
PAUD NIEDIECK


And many others.

Lots of choice including free ebooks HERE

quote:

The world was a better place...when the sun never set on the British Empire.

100% correct...The Golden Age 1837-1901

Queen Victoria, with her 63 years on the throne, is one of the longest reigning British monarchs. In 1877 she was also proclaimed as Empress of India. Her reign from 1837 to 1901 is named the Victorian Era or Victorian Period. This period coincides with the peak years of the British Empire.

Throughout the Middle Ages, England was a medium-sized, moderately wealthy country. When the New World was discovered, Britain used its naval advantage to establish colonies and assist trading companies wherever they sought foothold.They became the number one world power. Whole groups of citizens were exported to populate foreign parts of the world. North America, Australia, South Africa and Ireland are examples of settler colonies. In addition, trader colonies such as India, Nigeria and Jamaica were established. One trading company of great importance to the Empire was the East India Company. It was founded in 1599 and secured India as a colony, actually governing there until 1858. During the industrialisation of Britain, the trading colonies developed into providers of cheap raw materials for her industries.

The Empire peaked around 1900. Britain ruled about a quarter of the world, in both land and population. It was the biggest empire the world had ever seen, and it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire.

Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution which started in the late 1700s. Queen Victoria reigned during a time when industrialisation made the country the richest in the world. Britain had an advantage since they were first off the mark. Countries like the USA and Germany, however, soon caught up.

Victoria’s reign can be seen as the Golden Age of Empire although there were conflicts in many of the colonies. The new industries at home demanded huge amounts of raw material much of which was taken from Britain's colonies around the world, without the local people seeing much of the riches that accumulated at the centre of the Empire.

quote:

Originally posted by Heym 450/400:

quote:

The world was a better place...when the sun never set on the British Empire.

100% correct...The Golden Age 1837-1901

Queen Victoria, with her 63 years on the throne, is one of the longest reigning British monarchs. In 1877 she was also proclaimed as Empress of India. Her reign from 1837 to 1901 is named the Victorian Era or Victorian Period. This period coincides with the peak years of the British Empire.

Throughout the Middle Ages, England was a medium-sized, moderately wealthy country. When the New World was discovered, Britain used its naval advantage to establish colonies and assist trading companies wherever they sought foothold.They became the number one world power. Whole groups of citizens were exported to populate foreign parts of the world. North America, Australia, South Africa and Ireland are examples of settler colonies. In addition, trader colonies such as India, Nigeria and Jamaica were established. One trading company of great importance to the Empire was the East India Company. It was founded in 1599 and secured India as a colony, actually governing there until 1858. During the industrialisation of Britain, the trading colonies developed into providers of cheap raw materials for her industries.

The Empire peaked around 1900. Britain ruled about a quarter of the world, in both land and population. It was the biggest empire the world had ever seen, and it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire.

Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution which started in the late 1700s. Queen Victoria reigned during a time when industrialisation made the country the richest in the world. Britain had an advantage since they were first off the mark. Countries like the USA and Germany, however, soon caught up.

Victoria’s reign can be seen as the Golden Age of Empire although there were conflicts in many of the colonies. The new industries at home demanded huge amounts of raw material much of which was taken from Britain's colonies around the world, without the local people seeing much of the riches that accumulated at the centre of the Empire.

Sorry Pete but more British citizen immigrated to US, Canada, Australia, and even Argentina than went to the Indian subcontinent the jewel of the empire.

These were not irrational decisions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Cawnpore

When things go pear shaped they are much more like the Congo than like Rhodesia transitioning to Zimbabwe.

The British were smart or lucky to get out of their colonies and because of general sense of law and order and British decency got out well. Unlike the French and then us who inherited a mess in Vietnam.

Most English colonies have good relationship with the U.K. And in next 50 years some will be much more relevant countries than the U.K. In their economic footprint.

Hunting is finished in most of them. When human population expands 10-50 times - hunting suffers.

Mike

It's anyones guess as to what Africa would look like today if it were still under British, German and French rule but I'll take a guess it couldn't be any worse than the current debacle

Other than all the Bunny huggers in Europe would have most likely closed down all hunting....perhaps it is "better"?

quote:

Originally posted by karamojaman:
There is an online magazine: Old Africa Magazine which you can subscribe to and which has many interesting articles, mainly about Kenya. There are also book recommendations.

I ran across this a while ago - neat magazine!

quote:

Originally posted by Heym 450/400:
It's anyones guess as to what Africa would look like today if it were still under British, German and French rule but I'll take a guess it couldn't be any worse than the current debacle

Other than all the Bunny huggers in Europe would have most likely closed down all hunting....perhaps it is "better"?

Just as there would be millions of buffaloes roaming the plains states if the Comanche apache Sioux crow and other Native American tribes still governed them.


The reality is Africa hunting has to be looked at in the context of black Africans running Africa and human-animal economic tradeoffs in a property rights world.

I don't see a better example than bubye or save in zim.

Mike

A new book on British colonial rule

https://www.ft.com/content/188...e7-97d1-5e720a26771b

India share of global GDP

1750 - 23 percent
1947 - 3 percent

China will be similar number

Now there is a 800 pound gorilla that has moved the global GDP number and that was us

But china and India are catching up to their original positions in the world economic order - this massive mean reversion is being done with 1.4 and 1.3 billion people - hunting becomes a irrelevant joke in this real world.

Look at Africa demographic and human economic activity level (economics outside of the basket case of zim)

Hunting in the old sense of unregulated activity in vast un owned lands is gone.

What remains is the save or bubye on the high end and South African farms hunts on low end. Look at tanazia population growth and see how hunting areas remain. Population goes from 53 to 137 mil in next 33 years.

Mike

I'm a retired world history teacher. I'm certainly no expert on Africa, the Middle East, nor India. I do have a somewhat broad but shallow knowledge.

The problem we see in Africa has it's basis in slavery and colonialism. Slavery, because for hundreds of years, probably the best and the brightest of the population were removed, leaving behind a disrupted social order.

Next came non-native colonialists, who divided the continent, with very little regard for native tribes. These colonies were used to enrich the the power, through natural resources and to a lesser degree through sales of manufactured goods. This was much as what happened in North America, but there the non-native population soon outnumbered the native, demand, fought for and won independence. The leaders had been educated buy the colonial power and owned much of the land and what little manufacturing there was. They also had been given the opportunity for, at least, local self governance.

In the African colonies, things were quite different. I don't think it was planned, or thought through. Decisions were made at that the time by people living far away on a different continent. I believe it falls under the 'Law of unintended consequences.' The natives remained in low level agricultural, manual labor and minor civil service jobs. Only a few were educated above the very basic level. They had little or no opportunity for governance. The non-natives owned most of the land and held all of the upper level and most of the middle level civil service and non-governmental jobs. The government came from the colonial power. Many, perhaps most of these did their jobs and returned home. They weren't 'invested' in there colony. I'm sure many did their best. It must have been wonderful to be white and privileged during colonial Times, especially if one was wealthy or even not so wealthy. Not so if one were of color. A common man could enjoy the life of an Aristocrat in Great Britain, Germany etc. I would have loved to be one of the elite, it's only a dream.

After two world wars, the world powers believed that people should have the right to govern themselves. It's called 'Popular Sovereignty.' Due to this idea, the expense of ruling colonies that were no longer economic 'cash cows' and wanted to be independent anyway, the powers began giving the colonies their independence. Did they want it, yes. Where they ready, no. Was that the colonial powers fault, yes, but I don't think it was intentional. Would the natives have given up independence for years to be taught self governance, even if it had been offered, probably not.

The United States is not the same, but similar.

The United States was blessed with probably the greatest liberal thinkers of their time. We ended up with one of the greatest political governance documents, The Constitution. Yet it took until 1865 to end slavery, and another one hundred years to officially end the affects of it. Let's hope and pray the former colonies don't take as long.

Feel free to comment, please just be civil!

Captdavid

Quote "After two world wars, the world powers believed that people should have the right to govern themselves. It's called 'Popular Sovereignty.' Due to this idea, the expense of ruling colonies that were no longer economic 'cash cows' and wanted to be independent anyway, the powers began giving the colonies their independence. Did they want it, yes. Where they ready, no. Was that the colonial powers fault, yes, but I don't think it was intentional. Would the natives have given up independence for years to be taught self governance, even if it had been offered, probably not."
_________________________________________

Just a little modification on that idea:

The colonial powers after WW2 were broke. Germany because it lost the war, France and Belgium were pretty much the same and Britian even though it won owed huge debts to the US.

Management of the colonies belonging to any of these countries was simply no longer possible. They gave them independence because they really had no other choice.

Oh sure there may have been a feeling at home that coloninization wasn't ethical any more but if they had the resources to continue a while longer and if it was worthwhile monetarily I think they would have.

quote:

Originally posted by Cougarz:
Quote "After two world wars, the world powers believed that people should have the right to govern themselves. It's called 'Popular Sovereignty.' Due to this idea, the expense of ruling colonies that were no longer economic 'cash cows' and wanted to be independent anyway, the powers began giving the colonies their independence. Did they want it, yes. Where they ready, no. Was that the colonial powers fault, yes, but I don't think it was intentional. Would the natives have given up independence for years to be taught self governance, even if it had been offered, probably not."
_________________________________________

Just a little modification on that idea:

The colonial powers after WW2 were broke. Germany because it lost the war, France and Belgium were pretty much the same and Britian even though it won owed huge debts to the US.

Management of the colonies belonging to any of these countries was simply no longer possible. They gave them independence because they really had no other choice.

Oh sure there may have been a feeling at home that coloninization wasn't ethical any more but if they had the resources to continue a while longer and if it was worthwhile monetarily I think they would have.

But if you look at history the French fought tooth and nail to hold Vietnam and Algeria and were defeated in both. The French fought a lot harder to retain their colonies than they did the Germans in 1939-1940.

The Portuguese an irrelevant country in military terms fought to hold it colonies in Africa and Asia. This must truly be a crazy act but they did it.

The British gave a India up cause reality stepped it. The reality being the Indian military would not be depended on to protect British interest. After World War II even though the allies won there was universal support in Indian subcontinent for soldiers of Indian army who as POWs switched sides for the axis. If the Indian army could not be trusted the Indians could not be trusted it was time to pack on and move on.

The English fought in Kenya to hold on til 1956.

Rhodesia was probably the last vestige of British colonial rule. If you look at the numbers for that war - .55% of the colonial male population was killed in combat and another .20% of civilian colonial population was killed as a result of terrrorist activities. .75% population loss and people rationally started deciding life might be better in us, U.K., Australia, South Africa ect its time to move.

In the context of hunting I don't think people realize how controlled firearms were in the colonies. There was constant fear of firearms falling into politically questionable native hands. 450-400 came around cause the British wanted to get rid of carriages for a caliber of rifles they though had gone into native hands.

Soviet Union after World War II flooded the colonial world with the most dealdly weapon created Ak47. The ak47 changed the political landscape forever.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...t-changed-everything

The ak47 will also account for the destruction of the most wildlife in Africa.

Mike

Thanks for your critique, rather than obnoxious ad hominem criticism. I touched on the economic side, briefly, by using the 'cash cow's statement. I was afraid that I was getting a little long winded, and wanted to draw it to a close. I also see history from the social studies point of view, not the economics point of view. I'm not saying that they aren't equally important, just seen from different points. Captdavid