Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"[I]t is during arduous struggle to become free by their own efforts" that a people are most likely to acquire those "feelings and virtues" that are conducive to the maintenance of freedom. — John Stuart Mill . The very same Mill who defended the British empire!

Enlightenment! The London School of Economics has just named a building after Emmeline Pankhurst. From John Stuart Mill to Emmeline Pankhurst. J. S. Mill: The gigantic "federation" albeit "unequal", that was the British empire "has the advantage, especially valuable at the present time, of adding to the moral influence, and weight in the councils of the world, of the Power which, of all in existence, best understands liberty—and whatever may have been its errors in the past, has attained the more of conscience and moral principle in its dealings with foreigners than any other great nation seems either to conceive as possible or recognise as desirable." —Mill, Utilitarianism , London 1972 ed. p. 380 E. Pankhurst: "Some talk about the Empire and  Imperialism  as if  it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of  an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth...If w...

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."...