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
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:
Re:Vital Wikipedia Articles
by claudiawerner on Thursday July 25, 2019 @06:02AM
(#20524062)
>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.
Re:Vital Wikipedia Articles
by kiliantics on Thursday July 25, 2019 @11:11AM
(#20526033)
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.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-did-the-British-empire...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#East_India_Comp...