Author Topic: Colonialism as viewed by Westerners  (Read 2360 times)

90sRetroFan

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Re: Colonialism as viewed by Westerners
« Reply #30 on: July 21, 2022, 08:12:48 pm »
Our enemies reminisce their past through literature:

https://vdare.com/posts/vanity-fair-by-william-makepeace-thackeray

Quote
I finally finished reading the 1848 novel Vanity Fair. A few comments:

It’s extremely enjoyable.
...
One thing I noticed again in reading Vanity Fair about English society is that up to a certain point in the 19th century, you could get very rich in positions of authority with nobody questioning it. For example, Amelia’s brother Joseph is a tax collector for the British East India Company and has gotten very rich at it.  (Obviously, the chance of dying of fever in India was quite high, which was some justification for the lavish fortunes made there.)

The English liked giving large financial rewards to people who succeeded in positions of authority. For example, John Churchill was rewarded for winning the War of the Spanish Succession with a Dukedom and the promise from Parliament of 250,000 pounds, enough to get started on building a 300,000 square-foot palace at Blenheim. About the last example I can remember of this is General Douglas Haig being granted 100,000 pounds after the Great War. After WWII, in contrast, Field Marshall Montgomery got many honors but little cash.

England had kind of a piratical culture (as illustrated in the Aubrey-Maturin novels by the incentives given Royal Navy captains to capture enemy shipping).
...
In Evelyn Waugh‘s novels, every young man of fashion owes a fortune to his tailor but is putting off the day he’ll have to go butter up his disapproving father to get him to pay off his tailor.

It seems as if tailors and landlords in pre-WWII England had to stay up on society gossip over whether their customers and tenants still had good prospects of inheriting fortunes someday or whether they had fallen out of favor with their rich elderly relatives. Becky Sharp and her husband, a baronet’s son, live like lords on debt for a number of years despite little income beside what Becky’s husband can win as a poolshark and cardsharper. But small businessmen were willing to bet that their knowledge of the Crawley family inheritance dynamics was accurate enough to guesstimate that they’d eventually be bequested enough to pay off their landlord and victualers without having to flee to Europe to avoid debtor’s prison (with the accompanying ruination of their small creditors).

Life was full of interest back then.

Life (for "whites") was full of "whiteness" back then.