As an Australian, this came to mind.

100 years of massacring Indigenous Australians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou...

This is probably one of the best examples of modern white-washing of our history ..

I did not get your comment and I would like to understand it better. Isn't "whitewashing" the process of forgetting about the contributions or tribulations of non-white people in our history? Acknowledging atrocities committed by western civilizations seems like the opposite of that (and I do think we should hold ourselves to a very high standard and being aware of these atrocities is part of that).

What I mean is that Australians sweep the details under the rug about the genocide of the First Nation people that occurred in order to make their modern nation .. its not at all near as well acknowledged as it should be, and Australia continues to build tourist traps on sites of mass murder as if its nothing.

Australians prefer ignorance over acknowledgement, generally. Its not something we should be proud about .. in fact, there is a lot of shame in being an Australian with NO CLUE about the civilization that was swept away to make way for White Australia. Australia's first inhabitants were far more advanced than we care to admit.

EDIT: some things all Australians should know about the first people:

* They have been on the continent for at least 65,000 years * The current biosphere is a result of their management of the land and wildlife for the duration of those 65,000 years * They used cryptographic techniques to keep the peace between tribes * They have the oldest confirmed oral history of any human society, ever - scientifically proven to stretch back 40,000 years. (We in the west can't keep our oral traditions sane for 100 years, by comparison..) * They had a version of the Hippocratic Oath long before European medicine * Their medical culture had an understanding of antibiotic and antiseptic materials in their environment and were using them to great effect at a time when European medicine still believed in miasma theory

.. and there is much, much more. Alas, the hubris around what has been done to the First Nation people (see for example White Australia policies continuing into the 1980's... forced castrations... forced re-settlement of children... etc.) has resulted in a general ignorance of the situation among current Australian culture...

I was looking this up just now. It seems 29 million died in India alone under British rule due to famine. [1] However there was widespread crop failure in the late 19th century. [2] I don't know how much control they had over what and how every set of deaths occurred, so it's not yet clear to me you can just directly compare number of deaths between empires without taking into account the surrounding context.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-did-the-British-empire...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#East_India_Comp...

While it wouldn't be wise to attribute all those deaths to the British Empire, it's important to note that British agricultural practices led to widespread famines and crop-failures. Diversion of food crop land to grow Opium and Indigo led to famines[1]. And the risk of crop-failures was often beared by the cultivator[2].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation_in_India#History

2. http://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_364.pdf

The Bengal Famine is a well-studied case where, AIUI, the current consensus is that imperial policies contributed significantly to the suffering and death toll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

>so it's not yet clear to me you can just directly compare number of deaths between empires without taking into account the surrounding context.

This is true, but perhaps in a way you weren't anticipating; this point was made decades ago by Herbert Marcuse in response to people attempting to compare, for instance, Nazi death tolls with Soviet ones. This mode of argumentation reduces concrete matters of policy and motivation (quality) into mere numbers to be thrown about (quantity). But authoritarianism is not a quantitative matter - a nation with harsh laws under which only few are convicted is still an authoritarian nation.

And yet such nuance is never afforded to the other empires mentioned in GP's comment. "Communism killed 100 million" etc. being widely held views.

This is a good start:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

Of particular recent relevance are the opium trade and the opium wars, which led to the creation of Hong Kong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars