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Chesterton was bitter because he saw that a certain traditional Englishness was subsumed by Empire. But the joke was always on him; most of that ‘traditional Englishness’ was itself less than a century old and the product of the first age of mass media in the early 19th century, before which much of rural Britain practiced an ancient, barely-ritualized, quasi-pagan kind of Christianity about as far as its possible to get from the orthodox Roman Catholicism Chesterton ultimately adopted. The Canadians who invented Empire Day were, in large part, ethnic Britons. It was conceived by one Thomas Robinson, likely of British extraction, in Winnipeg. The Lancashire merchants were ethnic English. Chesterton’s distaste for Jews like Disraeli and the Rothschilds obscured how profitable the Suez Canal was for Britain; it was India alone that was the whetstone around the empire’s neck, and if India had been jettisoned after the mutiny the entire enterprise would have been largely self-sustaining moving forward.
A century on, we can see that his distaste for empire was flawed. In truth, Britain is no worse off than those other Northern European countries that never pursued far flung imperialism, like Sweden. England’s cultural and civilizational decline is therefore likely unrelated to empire.
Cecil Rhodes was prescient. The only hope for Britain’s economy in the long is ultimately full economic union with the United States, and this has been clear since the 1890s. Of course, the less Anglo America gets, the harder it will be to convince them to let the British in.
I assume you're referring to the mutiny of 1857-58. Why exactly would jettisoning India have been a good idea in your view? I'd guess that anything that can reasonably be called a problem stemming from holding onto India could have been averted simply by turning it into a dominion, as the independence movement leaders wanted.
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