History is bad. Lots of people did bad things. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a relative hierarchy of evil.

I’m from the Soviet empire. Trust me. From my family’s stories they’d much rather have been in the British empire than where they were. I’m pretty sure a lot of Rwandans and Haitians would agree too. The British were relatively good to their empire.

Yeah, but we are talking about India under british empire. Not Rwanda and Haiti. Since you're so oblivious of what the british empire did, here's a 8 minute mini speech of things British empire did in India. India wasn't some poor country, it was actually one of the richest countries in the world before brits came along and stole everything.

This was my entire point in the initial post, it's both hilarious and a bit sad how people are so unaware what the british empire did in India.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

Stealing is a bit different to killing 30m Eastern Europeans, starving them to the point of cannibalism etc, and also killing 30m of your own people.

That’s my point. And that’s my family’s experience.

They did cause famine starving tens of millions of people. Deliberately. Among a great many other violent atrocities. Please read/watch the resources you have been given.

Even were we to accept that, the whatabout-ism is a shockingly poor taste response to someone with a personal connection to real oppression, and I don't even have words for someone labeling people "woke oppression crusaders" for pointing out that the UK committed crimes against humanity on a vast scale resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

See my comment above about my family’s experience. As an Eastern European frankly I’m fed up of this British and American bashing. These places were heaven compared to the raids of mongols, Turks, soviets, and everything else in Central Europe.

There are grades of evil.

I really don't understand your point. Mongol raids happened, so it's fine to brush the atrocities of the Raj under rug? Bit of a non-sequitor.

Let's turn it around. "I'm fed up of all the Soviet bashing. It was heaven compared to the Congo under King Leopold." See? Not a nice reply is it?

You're aware that the places the Empire conquered were all empires themselves, right? (with the exception I think of Australia/New Zealand, which weren't developed enough to have anything resembling an empire)

As a rule I find that people who take the common, simplistic, tweet-length view of British rule (i.e. that it became rich by stealing from India, that it was the deliberate invoker of India's famines, that it was racist even by its times standards, etc), assume that anyone who disagrees isn't aware of basic history.

I've also noticed that there's always an (annoying) triumphal 'gotcha' when they link to some short-form essay mentioning basic facts, denied by nobody, of the famines and loss of relative share of GDP suffered by India etc.

Again, _everyone knows this_. It comes across as naive and arrogant to assume otherwise.

The effect British rule had in India (and everywhere) was extremely nuanced, and there is a huge amount of interesting history to be debated. After all, we're talking about a subcontinent over a 350 year time period.

The British, for instance, banned the practices of Sati (burning widows alive) and of infanticide, and explicitly allowed Indians to compete on equal terms with the British in examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service.

There's very little consensus amongst historians whether or not they were responsible for the famines India suffered at the time, or if they even made any net money from India whatsoever, given their constant fear of raising taxes.

I'm not necessarily trying to take a position either way, by the way, just begging people who are nodding along to some of these bumper-sticker anti-colonialism comments to read more deeply into what is an unimaginably huge subject.

To add to your point, there’s very little consensus among people on the subcontinent about it. My mom and aunts are borderline monarchists. My dad is a republican, and growing up I heard him complain about the British dividing and conquering by creating tensions between Muslims and Hindus. But even he readily credits the British for developing the region’s laws and institutions.

As to the famines: cyclical famines were common in India: https://www.orissapost.com/this-is-why-indian-kings-used-to-.... The British didn’t cause famine in India, though it’s fair to say they mismanaged the response.