Empire In The Pre-Industrial World - Professor Richard J Evans

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

If you look in the description there is a link to a webpage on the lecture - it gives the date as Tuesday, 20 September 2011 - 6:00pm, Museum of London. There is a transcript and everything.

[@WildBillCox13]

A first rate lecture. Thanks for posting it, Gresham College!

[@hisredrighthand]

Sonthonax was called back in 1796 and L'Ouverture continued to liberate the Spanish east of the island and drive back British attempts to seize the profitable colony. He never proclaimed independence though and prevented acts of vengeance against the beaten white colonists. When Napoleon came to power and sent LeClerc to fight L'Ouverture, he kept his plans to reintroduce slavery a secret at first and parts of L'Ouverture's forces had separate parleys and joined LeClerc.

[@hisredrighthand]

Once LeClerc's real mission came to light, he suddenly met with fierce resistance. Disease among french soldiers accelerated his defeat. LeClerc also committed numerous atrocities against captive black soldiers and civilians alike. Hence unlike L'Ouverture, his successor Dessalines showed little equanimity and slaughtered those whites that had not fled with the French forces. He also prohibited white people from ever living in Haiti again.

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

"It explores the great empires established by the British, Dutch, French, Ottomans, Portuguese, Russians and Spanish" Well actually it didn't explore the Ottoman or Russian empires, and it hardly mentioned the Dutch.

[@GabrielFrosty]

Great lecture Richard!

[@Luzograal]

A correction,if you please: That ilustration of the time at 0:14:20 is the Portuguese Armada incursion in Jeddah (Juda) in Arabia Peninsula, near Meca, Red Sea in 1517. Nothing to do with Africa or Benin.

[@CM-bi6oy]

Interesting lecture but nothing was said about Russia’s empire. It had its differences with those of the maritime Western European empires but it developed during the same period and lasted into the Industrial Age.

[@tomj54]

If Columbus thought he really landed in India, how could he claim the land for Spain?

[@juanfervalencia]

he would have nevertheless, spaniards were on a quest for conquest, they would have declared any place without white inhabitants their own.

[@jacobgrandstaff6640]

@@juanfervalencia They would have claimed any place their own, whether they were white or not.

[@PinkkSenpai]

I honestly think he never truly believed he was in India. He just spewed lies consistently.

[@Timrath]

13:33 "In a way they thought Christians would appreciate." Epic burn. :D

[@TwelveBells]

date of lecture please

[@scenFor109]

Full details are in the link in the description. Close #ConcentrationCamps #EndGlobalApartheid #FreeAssange #BDS

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

I think Evans is wrong to paint the pre-industrial European empires as on a par with the previously existing empires such as the Chinese and Ottoman. The land area covered, the number of people affected, and especially enslaved, transported, driven away and killed, the amount of wealth generated, the inequalities of power, and especially the distances covered are all greater in the post-1500 European empires' case.

[@luckychops2162]

Matthew McVeagh, yes because the mongols killing 30% of northern China for grazing land or dropping the population of Persia by 90% or the 66% of Indians slaughtered by the Muslim invasions or the 3 million slaves taken from Europe for Ottoman boats and harems did not have near the impact. The population destruction of the mongols might have caused the disparity in power between the east and west during the age of European colonialism.

[@nuqleo]

gracias

[@108nighthawk]

I highly recommend reading Niall Ferguson's "Civilization: The West and the Rest". It is a fantastic read.

[@patriciastockdale197]

James Russell Just bought it

[@sankaragarvey5862]

Did this miss teacher say " they would employ the natives"?

[@sehrgut42]

lol imagine calling "religion and greed" an "unlikely alliance". That's been THE default alliance for all of recorded human history, from Gligamesh to the New York Times.

[@MrHammerkop]

One can't help detecting a certain disingenuous reluctance to point out the unintentional nature of the Europeans' introduction of smallpox and other diseases to which the pro-colonial peoples had no immunity. This is a long and comfortable tradition established by political progressivism, and is a counter-scientific imposition. The result has been the implication of purpose and therefore moral culpability. Disingenuous, because by analogy the 20th introduction of AIDS into the population at large by the actions originally of a minority group, often stigmatized as "outsiders", is vigorously (and of course rightly) framed as having been unintentional and bearing unforeseeable consequences. The actions of the early Spanish colonists were certainly responsible for unprecedented upheaval in South American societies, but historians and their wider academic community have to be unequivocal first in their own minds and then in their public discussions that notions of moral culpability are rooted in the relative standpoint of a modern perspective; an inescapable undertaking in the study of history is the objective investigation of the enormous and complex dimension of moral and normative value systems that underpinned the behaviour of all actors in the material and empirical processes of the past. Any avoidance is intellectually lazy and dishonest. The non-negotiable element is objectivity; any express or implicit interpretation of a sympathetic character on the one hand, or of a critical character on the other, severely compromises the validity of the academic investigation. Endeavours motivated by a desire to construct revised histories in favour of the victim, in an attempt to usurp histories "written by the victor", are doomed by their subjectivity and simply belittle the study of history to an activity on the level of propaganda projects.

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

He wanted to conquer part of India.

[@972duarte]

as an interesting topic as it may be, it was rather poorly presented.

[@eugenlitwin5887]

year 1410, "Russia" ? LOL back to school mr.

[@mankn9098]

Long live Portugal and its migthy armies