The British Empire and its settlers
Sun, 2008-06-29 16:35
#1
The British Empire and its settlers
Sun, 2008-06-29 16:35
#2
In both South Africa and Zimbabwe, there are European settler groups that are hundreds of years old. But in much of the Empire(in India, Pakistan, Kenya, etc.) there isn't really a established group of Europeans that is as old as say the Afrikaner settler population in South Africa. Why is this?
I know that British settlers did live in many places around the world, so why didn't they stay? Why doesn't the Punjab for example, have an established white minority that's been there for 200 years?
[ 29 June 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]
Mon, 2008-06-30 14:55
#3
My understanding is that early on the Mughal empire prevented Europeans from too ambitious of a settlement program in India. And later when their power waned and Britain became more focused on India after the American revolution, the Second Empire's ideology was heavily influenced by Adam Smith and 'free trade' and not as into the biblical settler project that marked the Boer's imperial narrative. So Anglo Indians remained primarily urban. I think that kind of a settler is much more transient and easier to uproot than the farmer settler which set roots down in Southern Africa.
Mon, 2008-06-30 15:58
#4
quote:
Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:
[b]In both South Africa and Zimbabwe, there are European settler groups that are hundreds of years old. But in much of the Empire(in India, Pakistan, Kenya, etc.) there isn't really a established group of Europeans that is as old as say the Afrikaner settler population in South Africa. Why is this?
[/b]
Malaria. Northern Europeans don't (for obvious reasons) offer much resistance to malaria. This is also why native populations in the Caribbean were replaced with black slaves rather than white settlers.
Mon, 2008-06-30 16:29
#5
Wasn't there Malaria in Southern Africa?
Mon, 2008-06-30 19:42
#6
Fri, 2008-07-04 02:02
#7
Some say that an indigenous Canadian form of malaria had been known from the time of the first European settlers, and that FN people were unaffected. In other accounts, malaria came to Canada with refugees from the States, where it was epidemic, and the Loyalist Six Nations were also affected.
I came across this information researching the history of the Trent waterway, where I grew up. The canals were cut in heavy clay soils through marshy areas. Living arrangments were substandard to say the least, facilitating transmission, so that a majority of canal labourers developed malaria (along with widespread dysentry and other diseases). It was known as ague. York was another malarial area prior to the draining of the swamp that was the city's border with Lake Ontario.
Our Canadian malaria was apparently not as likely to be fatal although there was still a significant level of mortality especially among all those who were too poor to afford quinine.
The disease was eradicated by the end of the 19th century, I believe through the project of floating oil on pools of standing water.
[url=http://www.rideau-info.com/canal/articles/malaria.html]www.rideau-info.c...
[url=http://www.cbmh.ca/archive/00000060/01/cbmh_v1n2_fallis.pdf]www.cbmh.ca/...
[ 04 July 2008: Message edited by: triciamarie ]
Sun, 2008-07-13 14:35
#8
India was already long urbanised. South Africa, Kenya -- sub-Saharan Africa generally -- the Caribbean, North & South America, Australasia, the Oceania weren't. (Mexico was, but disease took care of that.)
Come to think of, nowhere already urbanised developed much of a settler community.
And, living in a part of the world where towns only arrived with colonisation (the South Pacific), I think urbanisation is at the root of socio-cultrual variation, much more than religion or ethnicity.