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  3. To capture London in freeze-frame at the turn of the 19th century, Jonathan Schneer develops a single over-arching theme. In a w

To capture London in freeze-frame at the turn of the 19th century, Jonathan Schneer develops a single over-arching theme. In a w

admin2009-06-24  59
问题     To capture London in freeze-frame at the turn of the 19th century, Jonathan Schneer develops a single over-arching theme. In a work of persuasive scholarship, written with verve and insight, he analyses the tremendous impact that Britain’s imperial adventure—then at its height—made on nearly every aspect of London’s life.
    Few Londoners were unaffected by the country’s self-appointed mission to take Western civilisation to the "benighted" peoples of Africa and the East, and to extract much of their natural wealth in return for the favour. The policies that drove imperialism were made by statesmen, aristocrats and capitalists who met regularly around the dinner tables of a few influential and manipulative hostesses. Businessmen and financiers were quick to take advantage of the opportunities open to them, and used some of the profits to protect their interests by sending a volunteer force from the financial district to help fight the Boers.
    At the other end of the economic scale, dock labourers handled the products of empire but could not possess them except by theft, which was endemic and which Mr. Schneer appears to defend as a legitimate weapon of class conflict, "an act of imperial self-definition". This, the sharp end of colonial trade, had wider political ramifications, for the dockers’ harsh working conditions spawned aggressive and eventually effective trade unions. Meanwhile, the seeds of the liberation movements that were to flower in mid-century were sown by exiled Indians and West Indians, encouraged by white liberal sympathisers, who published small but influential journals and addressed impassioned public meetings across the capital. Many of them pursued the now discredited tactic of collaborating with the colonial authorities, yet their work laid the foundation for the long and often turbulent process of persuading the British that the conqueror’s role could not be sustained in the long term.
    In half a dozen entertaining pages, Mr. Schneer combs the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a rich store of imperial themes. Holmes’s London was made up of two empires, "a good one associated with England and personified by two English types, the brilliant amateur detective and his dogged amanuensis; and an evil one associated with criminality, often of non-European origin". At the beginning of "A Study in Scarlet", he describes the city as "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained".
    A century on, the attitudes expressed by Conan Doyle are self-evidently racist. Indeed racism was central to the imperial adventure. Should you judge by the standards prevailing then or by the more enlightened ones of today? Indeed, is it the historian’s job to judge in this sense at all? In this rich and original study, Mr. Schneer sometimes shows a touch more indignation than needed in denouncing racism and sexism in a society that was still to learn better.
选项 A、dark.
B、ignorant.
C、benign.
D、violent.
答案B
解析
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