Talk:Pax Britannica

message: This isn't something I know much about, but the Market House Dictionary of British History seems to think it is more about a general idea of maintaining peace than it is about one  particular period. --Camembert 01:19, 10 January 2003‎ 
:Yes, the British would think that.  Well, compared to the Pax Dubya I am sure they did a better job.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.82.58 (talk • contribs) 05:25, 23 January 2003‎
::No, they wouldn't - at least not anyone who studied history. I think this article should cover some of the debates - it should certainly be longer than the one on the so called "pax americana". However... I can't remember any of them at the moment. :( However, the historical reference is definitely better known and more important than the wargame. Switched around.  Wiki-Ed 20:09, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Try British Empire... Wiki-Ed 20:09, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: 2003

message: I did the rewriting of the paragraph because the wording: "The Empire's strength was guaranteed by dominance of a Europe lacking in strong nation states," is historically false, how can someone affirm that in XIX Century France, Russia and later Germany were not great and strong national states? And about the dominance of Britain over the continental Europe during the same period? In reality the first goal of Britain foreign policy during this period was the maintaining of the peace by a balance of power, not a dominance... thank you for your attention ---kayac71- (talk) 21:12, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It depends what you mean by "great and strong". Compared to what they had been or would become they were fairly weak during this period. Moreover, it didn't say "Britain's strength", it said the "Empire's strength" - other European nations efforts to colonise and conquer overseas territories (as in beyond Europe) were much more limited. The wording was not perfect, but your edits did not change the emphasis accurately. I've adjusted it to reflect the fact that the balance of power was a key plank of the diplomatic strategy. However, the point has to be made that neither France nor Russia nor Germany were at any point pre-eminent during this period (that is, until the rise of Germany ended it). And note, this article is written in British English which means capitalisation of nouns and no 'z's where there should be an 's'. Wiki-Ed (talk) 22:23, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Rewriting of the paragraph

message: There is no direct connection between Pax Brittanica and the Opium wars, I am removing it as it is completely redundant.Twobells (talk) 15:58, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opium Wars? 

message: The lead of the article says that Pax Britannica is Latin for "the British Peace" and was the period of relative peace in Europe and the world (1815–1914). Where it says "the period of relative peace" it links to List of wars 1800–1899 which is quite a full list. It then states what major conflicts Britain was involved in during this time of British "peace", which includes the Crimean War where they used 250,000 soldiers and lost 21,097-22,000, and the two opium wars. Dream Focus 07:44, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: This is like saying there was no Pax Romana because the Romans were fighting wars. Shii (tock) 08:12, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Pax Romana had no major wars, and the 90 years of civil wars had ended.  Totally different situation here.  They didn't have to send a quarter of a million troops to participate in a war.  Dream Focus 08:48, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The key word is "relative" and your definition of "major war" may be different to that of 19th century British historians. The conflict in the Crimea posed no threat to Britain itself, nor did any of the other expeditionary wars or continental conflicts that took place during the period, regardless of scale. Also, there is a sort of imperialistic arrogance associated with the phrase: an assertion that there were no major threats to civilisation during this period, the assumption being that Britain was the centre of civilisation. Conflicts on the periphery (even if those regions are now quite important in global affairs) were not a threat to peace in the centre. Wiki-Ed (talk) 09:58, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

text:  Err ... sorry, Dream Focus, did you mistake this for a debating forum about the topic?  As you well know (or ought to, anyway), Wikipedia talk pages are for discussions about improving the article, not for polemics about whether the subject's premise makes sense.  I'm sure you can find any number of venues where you can argue whether a "Pax Britannica" genuinely existed.  Wikipedia is not one of them.   Ravenswing   17:19, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I am discussing the article here, and what it says that seems to be a contradiction.  Dream Focus 17:26, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Errr ... I just want to make sure I have this straight: you're criticizing a sourced article based around a well-known concept because you disagree with the subject matter?  Once again, this isn't a debating forum.  By way of example, I think that Holocaust deniers are the people at whom the lunatic fringe sneers, but that sentiment is irrelevant on Talk:Holocaust denial.  If you have some reliable sources which explicitly state that the concept of "Pax Britannica" is hogwash, sure, add those to the article, but that's as far as it ought to go.   Ravenswing   14:45, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: (edited to reword it)You seem to have misread or not understand what I have said.  Something in the article seemed odd, so I discussed it here to make certain it was accurate.  Now stop trying to turn this into a forum.  You start up a conversation that ended over a month ago, to mention something totally unrelated.  Dream Focus 23:40, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  contradictions in this article 

message: There seems to be a bizarre set of comments above that pick on relatively minor wars and suggest that therefore the Pax Britannica did not exist.  Contributors should contemplate the period 1914 - 1945 or the eighteenth century/19th C to 1815 and compare the global warfare that prevailed with the period 1815-1914.  We have recently had a Pax Americana for similar reasons - any attempt at global war after 1945 would have been crushed by US military might.
Come on people, just put Pax Britannica into Google Scholar and have a look at a few of the couple of hundred thousand articles! Here are a few "off the top":
http://www.academia.edu/2013776/Pax_Britannica
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5301360
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-rise-and-fall-of-england-8-pax-britannica
http://www.hudson.org/research/10136-pax-britannica-a-nautical-chart-for-pax-americana-  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.171.235.151 (talk) 11:15, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: The "Pax Britannica" did exist and is relative to the 18th and 20th Centuries

message: I am reading this article, and I feel that the introduction doesn't explain what the Pax Britannica actually did for continental Europe.
Relative peace doesn't mean much, if it isn't explained which kind of conflicts disappeared. Reading the article, it would appear that Pax Britannica simply means "no British soldiers were deployed in Western Europe" and "GB ruled a lot of lands outside of Europe, as well as the seas themselves, and had the economic upper hand".
There were many European wars in this time, and they did redraw the political map of Europe. Just think of Italy and Germany coming up, with continental power shifting to Germany, or the Russo-Turkish war, changes in the Balkans, Greece, and so on. Many of them were part of larger series of wars. There also were the years 1848-1849. Maybe the definition "relative peace" should be changed to "lack of wars in Europe comparable in size to those of Napoleon".
There is a good paragraph from this page which could be used here: The entire era had a general lack of major conflict between the great powers, with most skirmishes taking place between belligerents within the borders of individual countries. In Europe, wars were much smaller, shorter and less frequent than ever before. The quiet century was shattered by World War I (1914–1918), which was unexpected in its timing, duration, casualties, and long-term impact.
The global police force meaning also isn't explained in the article, with the exception of impeding slave trade in West Africa (which alone isn't enough to be described as global).
If there will be edits to this article I suggest a read of this paper, which has a very balanced structure and shows with detail both strength and limits of the concept, and what it actually meant at the time from a practical and ideological point of view.
I think there is a mistake in the opening paragraph, in not limiting the definition to a certain area of use. "was the name used in XXX/ is the name used in XXX storiography/by XXX to refer to..." 
Viny 95.237.98.109 (talk) 01:33, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  What Was Pacified? 

message: The article is clearly biased, lack of information about criticism about the term. And about the affirmation that Britain helped the United States with the Monroe Doctrine i think it should not be here. How they "helped" USA is not clear, and this is controversial, Britain allegdly tried to stop American advance into the West, supporting natives, and there was a lot issues about territory between America and UK, that were peacefully resolved, but the "help" is not clear. USA was not a major ally how it is today, USA was a former colony expanding fastly, this "help thesis" is at least controversial, after all. I think it should not be in this article, and this is not oftenly cited as a major factor in the use of the term Pax Britannica.
:There should be a criticism section, since that is consistent with the standard practice with looking at terms on Wiki that describe events or interpretations of events. On a related note, the article gloats about "stopping slave traders", which has zero to do with Pax Britannica as a term. It has more to do with what happened in the period of Pax Britannica, from that person's view. It's not clear why the part about slavery is in there otherwise, although it seems to be more of the same self-aggrandizement that permeates academia, based on a thick coat of gloss that hides power imperative under the illusion of moral imperative. I say this because stopping other countries from importing labor and producing with less overhead was going to help keep the UK on top, with no country with the wealth to build a fleet to challenge its own and take away its markets. How convenient. Actually, if anything is to be sourced and included, that bit should because at least instead of saying what happened during Pax Britannica, it reveals the sort of strategy that explains Pax Britannica's duration until the dreadnought era. What the article needs is a scrub, an explanation as to what Pax Britannica was, why it lasted and a criticism section which challenges the idea that there ever was peace to begin with - i.e. because everyone was figuratively chained by these imperialists, like those in the asbestos mines or diamond scam (ironic when we talk about "but they stopped slavery1"), or there was plenty of fighting going on, like putting down occupied populations.  --Asdf12345sixseveneight (talk) 18:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biased