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The British Empire and the United Kingdom are not the same entity. The UK was a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy that ruled a non-democratic
by Veen 5y ago
The British Empire and the United Kingdom are not the same entity. The UK was a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy that ruled a non-democratic empire.
- ch4s3 5y agoI've always found that to be quite the hair to split. Quasi-democracy in the narrowly defined homeland and crushing authoritarianism for all other subjects. Separating the UK and the British Empire that way feels like a bit of a fig leaf, a polite fiction.
- openfuture 5y agoIt's basically the same situation as the USA has w.r.t. the world until maybe very recently, they basically inherited the UK organizational structure.
- vinay427 5y agoThis sounds like it fails to recognize much of colonial governments, which were typically in the case of the British a very far cry from simply installing an unelected leader or otherwise manipulating leadership through extortion and other means, as the US (among others) is now known to do. There’s an entire wing of cultural, linguistic, and legal imposition that doesn’t seem to exist in what might more accurately be called imperialism by the US, and these changes still have ramifications in how people in the ex-colonies see themselves, their society, and their relationships to the world.
- ch4s3 5y agoThey're quite different things in practice. The US has never had an arrangement like the British Raj in India.