• Wrench@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Who is defending Britain’s colonialism? I’m pushing back at some pretty extreme historical recharacterizations.

    This is all some pretty ridiculous Captain Hindsight retconning. There have been tons of agricultural blunders in humanities history. Depletion of soils, monocultures extremely susceptible to disaster, etc.

    We learn and adapt. That’s humanity.

    Resource mismanagement is certainly a factor, and colonies were obviously rife with it. And just as obviously, the conquerors historically didn’t exactly care much about the damage they did.

    In nature, species boom when there’s abundance, and rubber band back hard when scarcity hits directly after a big boom.

    At a glance, India’s population was almost 10% of the world population during WW2.

    Literally laying all the blame at the feet of British mismanagement is a pretty extreme take.

    • OBJECTION!
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      3 months ago

      So now we’ve veered into full-blown Malthusianism. You can’t treat human populations the way you treat animal populations. More humans means more people working and growing food, whereas animals simply graze or hunt on preexisting resources. Malthusian claims have been thoroughly debunked repeatedly throughout history, and have never been backed by any sort of evidence whatsoever.

      Again, if you choose to reject history and evidence in favor of knee jerk defending colonialism and using long discredited theories, then I don’t really see what I can do here. You are simply wrong and in contradiction of scholarly work on the subject.

      • Wrench@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Rofl. That’s rich coming from someone making wild claims, whose only citation was one sentence from a Churchill hit piece that contained zero justification for their assertion that Churchill was somehow responsible for India’s famines. You then deflect with “read this persons work you ignorant simpleton” without any relevant citations.

        Sure buddy. You can keep raging against this machine of yours, I’ve wasted enough of my Friday trying to reason with a dramatic husky.

        • OBJECTION!
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          3 months ago

          I haven’t made any wild claims at all and the claims I have made I’ve backed up with scholarly works, but go off I guess.