Maurice Re: "British Empire" I have a whole section in my library of British Colonial topics so I am pretty much up to speed. And I have a pretty good collection of British Colonial postage stamps, some from little tiny long ago British possessions I bet you never heard of. <g> So I am well aware of how Colonial India was managed and the scale of the English exposure there and the fact remains that after all that there are no Englishmen there now, and never will be.
We are talking math here and like my China example in 1960 there was a single American in the whole country (his name was Sidney Rittenberg) and now there may be a few thousand. But...out of a population of 1.3 billion one or a few thousand is the same number, essentially zero. And the few thousand that may be there now don't really represent a trend, you might look at them as a "one time event" related to Nixon's 1971 visit there. You have a math background, right?
In all these very ancient densely populated places like China, India, Indonesia, and many others there has never really been any real assimilation in all the hundreds of years of European exposure. And because all these places are growing in population there is likely to be even less in the future. Sure that has been a little genetic exchange, but really a small amount, and genetics is not the important thing anyway. The important thing is culture.
Maurice, it works like this: if you desire to go live in one of these places then not only must learn the language, but you must literally "become one of the natives" and be willing to adopt all their folkways and social mores, if not you will be ostracised. That is a tall order and for various reasons it just doesn't happen. It is really not racism.
One really strange fact about the USA Philippine era is that when the Americans first came there there was already a revolution underway against the Spaniards. And the Filipinos had a essentially a "governnment in exile" in Hong Kong and a military and political structure of a sort. These guys met with the Americans in Singapore and later in Hong Kong before Dewey sailed to Manila and sunk the Spanish fleet. And for a time the Americans and Filipinos were allies in their assault on the Spaniards in the Intrumoros.
These original Filipino leaders, some who had been at war with the mother country for decades are now the national heroes of the Philippine nation and for a while allies with the Americans. But now the very STRANGE part: each and every one of them were Freemasons, and this in a place where the Spanish colonial authorities executed a person for Freemasonry. The really strange part is that THEY ALL were Masons, even among the American Founders there were a number who were not masons. But the Filipinos, all were, though apparently with no connection to American Masonry as they traced their Lodge origins to the Paris Grand Orient Lodge.
Slagle |
