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Bearing Historical Grudges: Is It Worthwhile or Pointless?
The crimes of the British empire on my mind…
China.
The world’s biggest economy today was much poorer than Malawi and Chad — the poorest African countries — in 1980.
Its history of being a dominant player in the previous millennia was largely forgotten by 1830.
China had suffered the most extraordinary humiliation at the hands of the British and Japanese in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anyone who has read about opium wars would readily recognize the points that I am making here: Britain flooded this vast nation state with this mind altering substance, so much so, great numbers of people became addicted.
It didn’t matter that the Chinese authorities wrote to Queen Victoria at the time to get her to intervene.
The trade carried on unabated.
When the Chinese authorities had enough and fought back, Britain decided to use its vast naval powers to crush the Chinese, winning Hong Kong as a territory and getting the vanquished to pay huge sums in compensation for instigating the war.
China of 2022 is completely unrecognizable from what it was in 1980, never mind 1839.