Excellent comment. While the American revolution and American Civil War is well known[1], the British Civil War and the Glorious Revolution are probably not given the attention they deserve. If you look closely at history, you can see similar patterns: despotic monarchs run out of money, give more power to the nobles in return for taxation rights. Nobles use their new power to restrict the absolute powers of the monarch and then the monarch and nobles struggle. Britain was the one country where the nobles were successful in restricting the absolute power of the monarch and continued the tradition of sharing power, bringing democracy to Western Europe after a long time.

Anyway, that was completely off topic. I agree that the British Empire, while most certainly not the most moral or fair, cannot be characterized as despotic.

[1]: Perhaps I hear more about it because I currently live in the US. Not sure about how popular that part of history is in the rest of the world.