As horrible as they were, the British Empire probably was a positive influence on the world. Without them I doubt we would be able to have a conversation 1000s of miles away right now.

The same argument can be made for the Roman Empire. Empires of the past are looked down on because they are a unified machine of violence, a center of evil we can point to and hate.

Creating civilization is brutal, but the alternative is much scarier. A world of tribes and decentralized violence & oppression toward no end. Just as much pain, but not recorded, all in vain.

This sounds very much like the 'white man's burden' of having a moral obligation to 'civilise savages'.

Isn't it? Should we have allowed the Indians to call on such savage practice as suttee? One of the greater horrors of post colonial sub continent africa is how little education reached the populace and the savage beliefs that perpetuate atrocities even now. Imagine if we had been able to teach them that they didn't need to kill and mutilate albinos for example?

The West was still full of savage practices when suttee was outlawed, and the millions killed by colonialism outweigh the lives saved by this "education."

In these countries, as the population trends towards the billions, we will see the ongoing benefits of education.

If you're talking that kind of time frame, education did not require colonialism.

Is civilization even good? Civilization seems to be on track to destroy everything and everyone: http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fly...

Please don't post unsubstantive comments or (especially) take threads in generic directions. Signal/noise gets steadily worse when you do that because people have fewer substantive things to say and get louder about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you glossing over the uncomfortable parts of the empire that had nothing to do with the British? The world wasn't great before the Empire came (a lot of it was under some other empire anyway) - The Brits did record a lot of their atrocities though, meaning there is an informational bias.

It is amazing how uneducated a supposedly educated population can actually be. I know a lot of people here who would only have a vague idea that we even used to have an empire, most likely based on some period drama they watched on television.