Falkland Islanders to hold referendum over sovereignty

[regexcellent]

ahem SOUTH AFRICA

CIRCA 1900

I would go with the Portuguese as the most benevolent colonial power, at least post-Brazil (I have no idea about before that).

[Tupac Shakur]

ahem SOUTH AFRICA

QFT

It takes some real retardation to think that the British Empire was the "least brutal" colonial power; they were too busy stealing land, pushing drugs, and inventing concentration camps to have time to be nice.

[kentonio]

QFT

It takes some real retardation to think that the British Empire was the "least brutal" colonial power; they were too busy stealing land, pushing drugs, and inventing concentration camps to have time to be nice.

That's right, just take a deep breath and point at the places on the doll.

[Sava]

So you admit British are child molesters?

[Tupac Shakur]

That's right, just take a deep breath and point at the places on the doll.

I was never molested by British man as a child. You have to go to a British boarding school for that.

[kentonio]

So you admit British are child molesters?

If the Saville debacle is anything to go by, pretty much everyone who worked at the BBC in the seventies.

[Alexander's Horse]

ahem SOUTH AFRICA

CIRCA 1900

I would go with the Portuguese as the most benevolent colonial power, at least post-Brazil (I have no idea about before that).

You are joking, aren't you...Angola, East Timor....

[Tupac Shakur]

You don't really want us to start in on all the terrible **** the British/Australians did to the Aboriginals, do you?

[Alexander's Horse]

go right ahead but the Brits were amongst the best, if not the best, closely followed by the French

[Tupac Shakur]

The Portuguese weren't stealing indigenous children as late as the 1970's.

[Tupac Shakur]

And let's not forget that the British managed to drive the Tasmanian aboriginals to extinction.

[Tupac Shakur]

In your defense, you might not know about this since you probably didn't learn about it in school.

The existence of armed resistance to white settlement was generally not acknowledged by historians until the 1970s. In 1968 anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner wrote that historians' failure to include Indigenous Australians in histories of Australia or acknowledge widespread frontier conflict constituted a 'great Australian silence'. Works which discussed the conflicts began to appear during the 1970s and 1980s, and the first history of the Australian frontier told from an Indigenous perspective, Henry Reynolds' The Other Side of the Frontier, was published in 1982.

Australian frontier wars

[regexcellent]

You are joking, aren't you...Angola, East Timor....

I'm specifically thinking of Angola and Mozambique. The indigenous population in those colonies had more rights there than in pretty much any other African colonial empire.

Yes, I'm aware that bloody wars against communist guerrillas were fought in each. I doubt they would have succeeded were it not for bankrolling by the Soviet Union.

[Alexander's Horse]

My reading is Portugal is amongst the worst because they did very little over very long periods of colonisation and then left suddenly in the seventies, causing many of the colonies to slide into civil war, some of which like Angola went on for decades and destroyed even the very little Portugal left behind.

The big exception here would be Brazil. It got independence quite early and on its own terms.

[regexcellent]

The thing about Portugal is its government was overthrown and just pulled out of its African colonies which it had held for like 400 years. There were ethnic Portuguese people living there who had been there for generations and they just had to pack up and leave. They were the ones with the education and skills and so forth and as a result Angola and Mozambique were doomed.

The funny thing is, Portugal hasn't really gotten a lot better since that revolution either, economically speaking.