Complicated doesn't begin to describe him! I think that, by our modern standards, I would be very unhappy to be a citizen of Napoleon's empire.
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!
I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies celebrating Colonisation Day or bemoaning the withdrawal of the British Army from their territories.
Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
> I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious!
The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.
> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.
The British Empire ended the hideous practice of Sati ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice) ). It also unified India and built the railroads. The Indians paid a very heavy price for this though. The East India compoany was rapacious. Before the British colonised India, it was one of the richest countries in the world. When it left, it was one of the poorest.
It’s based on some of the same sources describing historical economies of other countries/regions. There are a variety of sources accessible online that go into more detail, including the ones cited in the excerpt I’ve included below.
> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]
Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society. Per capita, there’s no indication India was ever the richest. They did fall behind massively due to an inability to compete during industrialization though. The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
> Of course a nation with a high population will have a high GDP in a mostly agrarian society.
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
There is some information here about the British East India company pretty much destroyed the Indian textile industry through tarifs and other measures. Turning Indian from a leading textile manufacturer into a (much less profitable) producer of raw cotton for Britain's mills:
Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.
In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.
I was surprised that I had never heard of this, but as I investigated further I found the citations were sparse. All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg. Here's an excerpt from the About section of his website:
> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.
You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?
The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.
Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:
The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?
> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.
I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.
There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.
> The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper.
I never claimed that it did.
I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.
There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".
> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.
Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.
On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.
How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?
All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.
It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves.
I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".
I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.
> I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites.
Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.
Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles and entire kingdoms being conquered and subjugated. We are certainly talking about a death toll in the tens of thousands.
They did not lose control of a protest. The Indians were not permitted to assemble. When it was discovered that an assembly was meeting, the British entered the square where the assembly occurred and massacred those present.
"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th century. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people to be unwilling to recognise that for fear of offending our neighbours to the east. As you say, it's in the distant past and not worth getting too offended about.
> Catholic church that pushed people to reproduce without limits
[Citation needed]
It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place.
Let's assume it's correct, though. The Catholic church had been one of the most powerful organisations in Europe for well over 1000 years by the time if the famine. Why did it take until Ireland in the 19th century for their population mismanagement to become truly problematic? Also why did this not also happen in a country like Spain? Hard to find many more enthusiastically Catholic countries than Spain in that time period.
The population density of Ireland at the time of the famine was comparable to England (it is now much lower). Ireland produced enough food to feed itself and millions of people in English cities at the time of the famine. The issue was not a lack of food but the "ownership" of the food.
The account of capitalism emerging from the black death is a fine theory for continental Europe. At the time of the black death, Irish society was controlled by Irish people. After the 1600s it was increasingly run as a colony, with the indigenous culture outlawed and intensive resource extraction for export to England (timber, food, etc).
You might as well ask why industrialisation didn't take off among the Choctaw or the Cherokee. Or maybe they also just have the wrong religion?
Easy peasy, famines were commonplace in Spain during the Middle Ages (not sure how about part of it that was controlled by the Muslims though, but i don't think it was much different). During the Middle Ages, famines (and epidemics) were the natural regulator of population and were seen as a normal thing. By the XIX century of course, things were very different....
In Spain at the period, there were no famines because people kept emigrating to the colonies. Ireland was itself a colony. That's the difference. In Eastern Europe where countries didn't have colonies, famines were a norm.
Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming that for the time being, provided plenty of food allowing population to build up. Then it backfired.
As for local populations pre-existing in the colonies, sure they almost all died out. To a much larger proportion than the Irish, and sometimes, went entirely extinct. That is the normal part of absorbing new lands. It's just that Ireland was Christian almost since Christianity became a thing, and was never "discovered", that made it special. But we shouldn't pretend like it wasn't normal or in any way exceptional overall. Genocide is a natural way in which nations interact.
> Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming
There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ dense than England, while having similar climate and agricultural capacity. The reason for the famine was that the food that was abundantly produced in Ireland was transferred to England to support their cities (which did have an overpopulation problem). There was more than enough food produced in Ireland to feed everyone in Ireland. That is not what overpopulation looks like.
It's also easy to say no major famines happened in Spain because of her colonies, except that by the time of the famine she had very few remaining. Spanish people had the same capacity to emigrate to the Americas as the Irish did. Your argument was that Irish people were too Catholic to control their population but you haven't addressed the fact that that wasn't a problem in any of the other Catholic countries. The same should be true of Italy, who didn't even have a former empire to call on.
That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote, [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement. It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information, and should therefore not be uncritically accepted.
> That does not indicate that it's thought to be a quote
So you are indicating that a summons is necessary? That makes even less sense...
> [Citation Needed] indicates that it needs a supporting source to validate the statement.
But, logically, the person making the comment is the supporting source. That is, after all, why you are taking time to speak to them instead of some other source. If you find another source is more valid to what you seek, why not go directly to it instead? A middleman offers nothing of value.
> It is commonly used on Wikipedia to denote statements on a page that do not have proper supporting information
Sure. The entire purpose of Wikipedia is to aggregate information about topics from external sources. Citations are needed. It would not serve its intended purpose without them. But a wiki is quite unlike a discussion forum. A discussion forum is a venue to speak with the primary source...
...which is what ended up happening anyway, making the "[Citation Needed]" of any interpretation even stranger.
I'd have offered you a citation, but repeating what someone else said seems rather silly.
> Since gaining its catchphrase status, "citation needed" has been used in online discussion forums to humorously point out biased or baseless statements made by others.
So what you are saying is that someone thought could be funny by posting a tired meme? That may be true, but still doesn't make sense.
The original post was arguing that there were too many Irish people in Ireland because of the predominant religion. The implication, as I surmise, is that Catholics believe that only those who are constantly reproducing can be real BFFs with Jesus in the afterlife. Also, Catholics are seemingly too stupid to realize that Ireland is incapable of supporting more than 5-6 million people (apparently?) and therefore their mortal sex-cult doomed them and they have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for a million people dying of starvation. The fools!
This is, at best, very fucking stupid. At worst, it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive. It is in the same category of Victorian pseudo-science that gave us phrenology and eugenics.
"[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above. I can be much less polite if that's something you're interested in.
> "[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above.
I'll grant you that it is shorter. But how is leaning on a meme that stopped being funny in 2007 to call attention to your concerns polite? That would be considered asshole behaviour anywhere else. Especially when you consider that if one is not familiar with the meme and ends up taking it at face value it is a request that is impossible to fulfill, backing one into a corner. That is not good faith participation.
If you have concerns that are worth raising with another party, surely it is worth speaking to that other party like a normal human being?
> it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive.
I'll extrapolate from this that you are really trying to suggest that the other party might be what we oft label a troll. In which case perhaps you can make a case that they are not deserving of normal human treatment, however they are also not deserving of your time, so no reply would be made in that case anyway.
Very much so. Tim Pat Coogan covers this in his book "The Famine Plot" (which is one of the major proponents that the great hunger was a genocide and has received a lot of criticism, but which covers the basic facts in good detail).
[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]
Except by your Secretary of State, who Schumer petitioned to get Coogan his visa for academic touring when it was strangely denied by the Dublin Embassy.
He is also a hero solely based on the defamation case he lost raised by Ruth Dudley Edwards, where he (correctly) posited that Ruth had 'grovelled to and hypocritically ingratiated herself with the English establishment to further her writing career'.
I'm aware that he has his detractors. I'm not a Coogan apologist! I'm just saying that the book covers the Malthusian angle well enough and it cites sources. The genocide angle is controversial to some but 90% of the book is straightforward fact.
Strongly agree. I have been doing data engineering for 14 years and, in my experience, new grads need a lot of on-the-job training. There are a lot of real-world problems (e.g. consistency problems, scale problems, distribution problems) that benefit from a little bit more than just theoretical knowledge. A lot of data systems are full of problems because they were designed and implemented by inexperienced people. People don't know what they don't know and there are a lot of teams that say things like "oh yeah, this takes 3 days to run because it's pretty big" or "we release code daily but it would be too expensive to re-process past data to fix bugs" or even "what's a schema?".
YMMV, though. Some data engineers are writing basic SQL or playing with Azure Data Factory and there isn't too much complexity. Read Designing Data Intensive Applications. If that sort of thing resonates with you then find someone to work with who has experience with those kinds of problems!
[Edit: no disrespect to ADF! Just pointing out that the data engineering discipline is broad and different practitioners will have different expectations of complexity]
I had a visceral reaction to this comment! I once joined a company doing ETL with Apache camel and a half dozen underpowered pet machines. Ingesting their entire dataset and running a suite of NLP models took 3-6 months (estimated; it was so slow nobody ever reprocessed the data to fix bugs or release improvements). I drew up a simple architecture using Kafka, hbase, and MapReduce to implement a lambda architecture. The CTO very patronizingly told me that just because something is shiny and new it doesn't mean we need to implement it. This was 2017 :laugh-cry:.
But maybe this isn't really what they felt that they needed at the time? I don't mean to defend bad practices, but your comment makes it sound like nobody had tasked you with re-architecting the business, and you took it upon yourself to show them how it should be done (in your opinion), without having earned the necessary trust. This might have also come across as patronizing, or at least antagonistic, and in any case unbeneficial. Not saying that's the case as I obviously wasn't there, just something to think about.
Fair comment. And I'm usually suspicious of young engineers wanting to implement the new hotness and I'm also a fan of "if it ain't broken don't fix it". In this case, though, the system was in very rough shape. Our customers were complaining about data problems which we had no way to fix (short of manually editing the prod db, which was the SOP). I definitely took it upon myself to do something that nobody had asked for, but it was because the people in charge were entirely asleep at the wheel! They did not last long in their positions.
It's a shame the CTO was patronizing. I've generally found this to be the attitude of many IT workers in similar positions. I would recommend trying to allocate (work) time to prototype and get important back of the envelope metrics that they think are valuable along with those that you think are valuable.
At least that's what I would ask of anyone who was trying to improve a system (And not just the developers circumstance which I think is perhaps what they CTO is cautious of)
I confess I laughed at this (you're good at the sarcastic takedown), but it's a bit mean-spirited and not really in keeping with the discussion guidelines. Belittling someone like this discourages dialogue and learning.
One aspect of the problem here is the difficulty in running a clinical trial, particularly at the recruitment stage. The covid-19 trials all had a surfeit of participants because of a pandemic, but with modern cancer treatment trials the qualification requirements significantly cut down on the eligible population.
This, in itself, isn't a huge obstacle. The problem is the state of healthcare data systems. It's next to impossible to perform high-quality search (even by individuals approved to do so by the IRB). The state of the art in most places is regex searching in SQL.
This is something we have the power to contribute to. Bringing modern search capabilities to important datasets like health (while maintaining HIPAA-conpliance) is a much better use of engineering time than mining spyware data for creepy insights...
[Disclosure: I contributed heavily to one of the major medical search products on the market. We dealt with organisations that expended tens of thousands of dollars and many months per candidate for recruitment. Using some very straightforward IR tech we literally found all their candidates in a few minutes, plus many more. But there is so much more to do!]
Yes, very true. Beyond just access to clinical data there are often major differences between how the same conditions are recorded between different provider organizations based on EHR data models and local practices. Researchers who want to use data from multiple organizations typically have to put a huge amount of work into their data pipelines for cleansing and normalization. Some standards development organizations such as HL7 (including their various FHIR accelerators) are now writing more detailed and specific implementation guides to improve data quality and consistency so I would encourage technologists to contribute to those projects.
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!