Template talk:British colonial campaigns

Rationale for inclusion

Can someone please explain what the rationale is for including a battle or campaign in this particular template. For example I personally would not consider the Crimean War as a "colonial" war, similarly some of the campaigns in Africa during the First World War would seem to be part of the whole Great War, not a specifically colonial war or campaign. Thanks Dabbler (talk) 23:36, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. This template has major problems. Srnec (talk) 02:51, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It confuses campaigns fought in colonials as colonial, and mistakes the acts of third parties like the East India Company as 'British'.Rsloch (talk) 08:33, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Further I have/will be removing all campaigns that were, not conducted by the British, were part of a larger conflict, or not colonial in nature (eg Falklands War). Please feel free to join in or reinstate.Rsloch (talk) 11:49, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

This template followed suite from the French colonial template. The discussion of whether the African campaigns should be included is neither here nor there despite being in the first world war. The African campaigns were purely colonial. It was one colonial power against another.... Perhaps then the campaigns in the Indian ocean and the Caribbean during the Napoleonic wars should be exempt? ChristiaandeWet (talk) 20:09, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion, a colonial campaign is not a war between two colonial powers, especially when part of a major conflict also fought elsewhere such as the Napoleonic or World Wars, but a war to acquire or hold on to a colony, fought against the indigenous people. So the French-British wars in the West Indies even though colonies were acquired or lost were not colonial wars but part of the greater struggle to defeat the enemy by reducing their assets or to acquire strategic positions. Similarly a war against a country if there is no intent to take possession of the land and hold it would also not be a colonial war. Just because one society might be richer or more technologically advanced does not make a colonial war if there is no intent to colonise. The 1982 Falklands War against Argentina might be classed as an Argentinian colonial campaign, but it was not a British colonial campaign as the British were merely defending the rights of the local population to self determination against an imperialist aggressor. Dabbler (talk) 21:17, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps then this should be split into British overseas campaigns then these can surely be included. However in the context of German, Dutch and French colonial templates they should be changed to this as well? ChristiaandeWet (talk) 22:43, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

How many British campaigns have not been overseas? There is no need for such a template.

The French template, last time I added to it, was pretty consistent. I don't know about the others but I suspect they all now suffer from the same problem. There is a sense in which the East African campaign of World War II has more in common with colonial warfare than warfare of the kind taking place on the European fronts, but it did not share any of the same purposes as the campaigns associated with the extension of colonial power in Africa during the Scramble. It can be useful to see some continuity, say, from Adowa to Keren (as there was), but it is not useful in a template, where the uninformed reader (the standard kind) does not know what links these campaigns together and what doesn't. Srnec (talk) 23:42, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

It is not "your page"

I think you have made an error in your Edit Summary at this diff [1]. Please note the following Wikipedia:Ownership of articles and the text at the bottom of every Wikipedia Edit page "If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. All text that you did not write yourself, except brief excerpts, must be available under terms consistent with Wikipedia's Terms of Use before you submit it." So it is not your page and neither do you "make the rules". Like everyone else you have to follow Wikipedia policy as you have already agreed to by editing. If you have a reason for including non-colonial wars and campaigns then discuss it above do not claim ownershipDabbler (talk) 02:43, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Apologies for that I will assist in any improvements of this template.ChristiaandeWet (talk) 06:16, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Suggest split

While I understand the rationale for this page, it seems to me a bit unwieldy. For instance, might a section be split off for British colonial wars with the Native Americas in North America? That would be smaller and more focused around what were often inter-related conflicts that are as much part of American and Canadian history as British.--Dudeman5685 (talk) 17:19, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Northern Ireland, Irish conflicts

I just saw The Troubles in Northern Ireland included here following this edit (restored following reversion here) by User:Gerrynobody. I think it violates WP:NPOV to define this as a "colonial" conflict. Per Gerry's point that it is inconsistent to include other Irish conflicts while excluding the Troubles—true, since the rest of Ireland was also an integral part of the UK from 1801 to 1922, and was an effective client state of GB/England before then—I've removed prior Irish conflicts from the box too. (I've left the Fenian raids in Canada in.) Cheers, —  Cliftonian (talk)  13:32, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Have undone last edit. Please elaborate on why describing the Troubles as a colonial conflict is not WP:NPOV. The fact that the term may be distatsteful to some unionists cannot enter into our judgement surely. I will try to be more constructive than simply stating that it is colonial (and previous conflicts which were also deleted were also), because this rests on more than our own subjective opinion on the matter. A cursory glance at mainstream Irish-British historiography concerning the seventeenth century onwards will show that Ireland is almost universally considered to have been a colony, rather than a 'client state', with a population alien in culture, religion and language from the English. None of this is controversial and the article should reflect widely-accepted research on the subject rather than opinion. Gerrynobody (talk) 17:40, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Go ahead and present some reliable, scholarly sources in which Northern Ireland, 1968–98 is called a colonial conflict. —  Cliftonian (talk)  21:59, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

There's only a rhetorical difference between colony and client state, ask the Palestinians. You should offer RS on why it isn't a colonial war, rather than putting the onus elsewhere.Keith-264 (talk) 22:29, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

No, Gerry is the one wanting to add this, therefore the WP:BURDEN is on him to verify. —  Cliftonian (talk)  22:38, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Came here via notice at MH talk. The burden is on Gerry to produce the reliable sources that describe it as a colonial conflict. As it stands (without such sources), the contention is OR. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 23:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Concur. Northern Ireland is (and Ireland was before it) a constituent part of the United Kingdom with full representation in the House of Commons. How can it possibly be regarded as a colony without being POV? -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:16, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Okay, it's been a week and neither Gerry nor anyone else has come forward with sources to back this up. I'm putting it back accordingly. —  Cliftonian (talk)  08:02, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry I am just seeing this now. I seem to only get notifications when the page itself, as opposed to the talk page, is modified. To be honest I am surprised that this is even considered controversial but how and ever, I will cite some sources. Can I assume there is no argument about Ireland being described as a colony in the early modern period? Especially from the time of the plantations in Munster and Ulster onwards (‘plantation’ was a synonym for ‘colony’ then-the words were used interchangeably to refer to both Ulster, Munster, Virginia, Barbados etc.). These were state-sponsored projects with the explicit objective of replacing much of the indigenous Gaelic population with English and Scots; you can’t get much more ‘colonial’ than that. This has been firmly established in the work of D.B.Quinn and Nicholas Canny (see practically anything they published on the subject), and more recently the foremost academics in the field (Raymond Gillespie, one of whose many books is entitled ‘Colonial Ulster’). Even the doyen of anti-Republicanism, Roy Foster, writes on the first page of his widely-read ‘Modern Ireland’ survey: ‘the English colonial presence in Ireland remained superimposed upon an ancient identity, alien and bizarre.’ It is true that there has been a debate about the uefulness of comparisons to English colonies in North America, but even the most critical of these comparisons have accepted that ‘colonisation became the preferred option in Ireland’. (Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, No. 11, p.51) Can we agree that this holds for the eighteenth century? Certainly the editors of the Oxford History of the British Empire volume on the eighteenth century deems Ireland worthy of a chapter. This was a society in which a colonial settler class, usually termed the Protestant or Anglo-Irish ascendancy, a minority but legally, militarily and economically privileged, differed in language, religion and social origins to the native population of disenfranchised Catholic Irish, who constituted about 70% of the population in the middle of the century, and who were excluded from any role in administering the country. Perhaps the best proof that Ireland was regarded as a colony at the time is the indignant protests by this Anglo-Irish class that Ireland was being treated as a colony from London. As many unionists continue to argue, they wanted to be treated as if they lived in any other part of Britain. Works like Molyneux’s ‘The Case of Ireland...Stated’ (1698), however, would not have been necessary if Ireland had not been, in fact, a colony. The widespread use in the scholarship of the term ‘colonial nationalism’ to describe this movement again attests to the fact that Ireland is considered a colony by researchers in the field. See for example the standard work on the period: ‘A New History of Ireland, Volume IV’. So this leaves us with the period after 1801 that the term ‘colony’ is being disputed I guess. Necrothesp has pointed out that Ireland was a constituent part of the United Kingdom with seats in the British parliament. This is true in a formal, legal sense, although this was only the case from 1801 onwards. Was it a colony before that? Again, formally-speaking, it was a separate kingdom, but it would be seriously misleading to take this legal status on face value, and few historians do so. (I should also add the fact that most Irish weren’t allowed to vote until the mid-19th century, rendering the fact that Ireland had seats in the London parliament somewhat meaningless from their point of view). I am getting to Northern Ireland, but seeing as all the Irish conflicts have been removed from the template list now, I feel I have to make some kind of extended justification to cover their inclusion and therefore the last 500 years of history! So...in the nineteenth-century Ireland, despite its formal incorporation into the UK in 1801, is still widely referred to in academic texts as a colony. I would be the first to admit that this description is not without its caveats and detractors. David Fitzpatrick (not known for his sympathies towards republican or nationalist interpretations either) writes in the ‘Oxford history of the British empire vol 3’, (p.494): ‘The formal Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain masked a hybrid administration with manifest colonial elements, allowing variant interpretations of the character of Ireland's dependency. Was Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom, a peripheral, backward sub-region, or a colony in all but name?’ There were, therefore, some anomalous features about Ireland that made it unique among Britain’s colonies. The fact that it is included in Oxford’s standard reference work on the empire, however, suggests to me that there is a considerable body (notwithstanding dissenting voices) of opinion in academia that views Ireland as a colony up to independence, and by extension, the conflict in Northern Ireland as rooted in the tensions inherent in settler colonial situations. Despite formal incorporation into the UK, Ireland’s status as a colony is most often argued in terms of its actual treatment by the ‘mother country’ as oppposed to legal status or avowed intentions. The retardation of southern Irish industry, the disdain for the native population and the social engineering that exacerbated the famine-these are all things that bespeak a colonial form of rule over a subject people who are widely deemed by the metropole to be inferior. From everything I’ve read on the subject, Michael Hechter’s book, ‘Internal Colonialism’ (1975) describe best the way Ireland was economically ‘condemned to an instrumental role by the metropolis’ which, Hechter argues, is the ‘pattern of development characterising the colonial situation’. (p.30) I can provide a raft of further citations to support this if necessary, but this post is getting long enough already. Terrence McDonough (ed.), ‘Was Ireland a colony?: economics, politics, and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland’ (2005) is an excellent introduction, and includes critique of this colonial analysis as well as support. Finally, to the part of Ireland that remained a constituent part of the UK after 1922, Northern Ireland. Once again, it has to be stressed that to argue simply from the area’s de jure status that Northern Ireland is not a colony but a constituent part of the UK is insufficient and not reflective of academic discourse on the subject. To take the same logic would be to argue that Algeria was not a colony from 1848 onwards when, technically, the area consisted of three départements, legally-speaking as integral to the French state as Paris was. The same is still true today of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte and Réunion. Are these places not colonies? As for Northern Ireland, I would again acknowledge a description of the Troubles as a colonial conflict is far from universally-accepted, but it is widespread in the scholarship. David Miller, a professor of sociology at the University of Bath, has written extensively on Northern Ireland and the Troubles, and his work consistently argues for a colonial paradigm in understanding the conflict. A bibliography of his work is here: http://www.dmiller.info/ Pamela Clayton’s essay ‘Religion, Ethnicity and Colonialism as Explanation of Northern Ireland’ in Miller, ‘Rethinking Northern Ireland’ (1993), pp.40-54 is a sustained argument for the colonial context. Lustick, ‘Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria’ (1993), passim, also discusses Northern Ireland (and Ireland as a whole before 1922) as a colonial conflict, as does MacDonald, ‘Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland’, (1986). In my experience, the argument that Ireland/Northern Ireland was/is not a colony is often based on nothing more than the geographic proximity of the two countries. This once again suggetss comparisons with French Algeria, which the French also displayed a reluctance to refer to as a colony, even in the fifties when they were fighting tooth and nail to hold on to it, see: Lustick, Ibid., p.113. Other books that make the comparison with Algeria are : Hugh Roberts, ‘Northern Ireland and the Algerian Question’ (1986) and Frank Wright, ‘Northern Ireland: A comparative analysis’ (1987). Given that this template is about British colonial campaigns, I think it is most telling that, in the seventies especially, the British army itself approached their operation in Northern Ireland as a colonial insurgency, see: William Beattie Smith, ‘The British State and the Northern Ireland Crisis’, 1969-73, pp.153-4, 197, 307. Smith on p.377 describes direct rule after 1972 as a ‘colonial system’. Likewise Weitzer, ‘Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe’ (1990), who analyses Northern Ireland throughout his work as a colony, states: ‘Direct rule in effect installed a system of colonial rule [which] has no roots in civil society and has precarious authority at best. As in other colonial states, the British administration is superimposed on society and institutionally detached from local social forces.’ (pp.197-8) O'Leary and McGarry, ‘The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland’ (1993) argue extensively about the colonial nature of the conflict. McGarry and O’Leary are about as authoritative you can get on the subject of Northern Ireland. In their volume ‘Comparing Northern Ireland’ (1995), p.141, they write: ‘The international community largely accepts the colonial analogy’. I must say this is my impression as well. I have only ever encountered resistance to the idea from British unionists. I have my own ideas about why that is but let’s not get into that. They are of course entitled to their opinion, but that does not mean that this exclusion of Northern Ireland from the ranks of Britain’s colonies should take precedence on wikipedia. One of its principles is that it should reflect a global POV, after all Wikipedia:Systemic_bias. It has been suggested that to regard N.Ireland as a colony is not NPOV; I would suggest that to exclude it is not NPOV, given that NPOV means ‘representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic’. Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view I would argue, therefore, that the Troubles be included in this list of British colonial templates, notwithstanding dissenting views. Certainly to exclude the other Irish conflicts in the list would seem to me to constitute OR. 21:49, 10 March 2016 (UTC)