Originally Posted by Steerpike

Whooda thought such an innocent thread title would contain such insightful and provocative content?!

I wonder if we'd ever have had Trafalgar Square, 'The Mall', Buckingham Palace, the "Tower of London", the 'crown jewels', and all that other crap we are all so proud of as Brits if there had been a conscience back then about who was doing the building, and ... more to the point ... where the money was coming from ... raping and pillaging half the globe for the glorification of mother England ... (but we did leave behind railway systems ... ... )

It was a defining moment in my education to learn that Ghandi came to Lancashire to protest the fact that Britain did not allow Indian cotton goods into the country ("... Lancashire's mass-produced textiles had destroyed the hand-loom industry in India. Britain even restricted imports of cotton goods from India ...") (a defining moment, in part, because I didn't realize there were places in the world poorer and shittier than my home county of Lancashire!).