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Conclusion to Part II: An Empire of Civilisation?

from Part II - 1857: The Year of Civilisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2020

Alan Lester
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Kate Boehme
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Peter Mitchell
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

The events which had their genesis around the year 1857 saw some 40 000 amaXhosa starve to death on the borders of the Cape Colony; around 2300 British and allied soldiers and 30 000 Chinese killed in the Second Opium War, and some 3000 British and more than 100 000 Indian soldiers killed in the Indian Uprising and its aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of civilian subjects of colour, whom the colonial authorities never counted, were killed by British forces in the ‘Devil’s wind’ in India and the shelling and ransacking of Chinese towns and cities. What can only be described as British imperial hubris had played a major role in bringing about each of these simultaneous crises. These casualties were the unacknowledged cost of Britain’s newly assertive, mid-Victorian, civilising mission – a mission more usually associated with the endeavours of the anti-slavery missionary-explorer David Livingstone, to whom we will return in Part III.

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Chapter
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Ruling the World
Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
, pp. 269 - 272
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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