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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (22087)	8/15/2001 9:27:46 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

English and French remain the dominant languages of the elites in former colonies........ I'm not sure if this is the case with French, but English is often a special case. Generally the boundaries imposed by empire ignored previous demarcations, so previously distinct cultures with their own languages were ruled together. In India, for example, there was no common language before British rule - partly because there was no 'India' as such. Previous rulers had certainly claimed great swathes of land, but had not particularly sought to impose their own uniform laws, etc; nor did they have the infrastructure to do so for long. The British standard of dealing overwhelmingly in their own tongue, with common practice, meant that English became a requirement for officials etc: and since the offices of government were handed over, there was no obvious replacement for English when we left... Hence it wasn't just that the 'elite' were Anglicised (although this certainly did happen, in India more than most); but that the only generally understood language, structures and laws were those left by the departing power. The Raj was also unusual in that many existing rulers simply continued under British overlordship, and were accepted as (lesser) nobility - certainly on a par with, or above, the merchant princes of the time; and the cultural swap ran both ways. Polo was (is?) even more elitist in the UK than in India... I'd say Australia, where the aborigines were simply dispossessed; or Africa, where natives were largely ignored or used as cheap labour with puppet tribal leadership, were more common models. [Sadly]. There were relatively few African scions at Eton until very close to independence - I suspect this was actually subconscious racism, in that the paler, Caucasian peoples of the Indian subcontinent were more acceptable and accepted than the blacks of Africa. Incidentally, you mentioned German colonists in pre-Independence days; don't forget that these may well have come from 'British' areas of what is now Germany (and was then still the 'Holy Roman Empire', a mish-mash of 360+ feuding statelets...). Hanover (which didn't have its 'modern' boundaries) was the home estate of the then monarchy, and in fact George III was the first of his house to speak English before German. I think the colonies then tended to be very much segregated by language/culture; the French colonies were certainly very distinct from the British, or the Spanish. But I'd certainly agree that few of the founders of the US would have felt purely British - I'd be surprised if many of them had even been to the UK much prior to the rebellion, given the arduousness of trans-Atlantic travel then. Also, 'Imperialism' as a doctrine had not really evolved in the UK at this point - so schooling, acculturisation of leaders, etc., would not have been a big factor IMO.