Was the British Empire worse than the Nazis?

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Exactly.

If the British had never ruled India the Indian subcontinent would be like pre WWI Europe. A dozen nation states. And not just one. But they would be naturally evolving nation states, and not the artificial constructs of European colonialism that European ruled Arab nations like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, are. They would fight each other, like the nations of Napoleonic Europe, but would not disintegrate from within like the above Arab states either have already done, or in danger of doing.

I imagine that The British Empire was horrible to people with disabilities. Nazi Germany was horrible to people with disabilities. I wouldn't want to be thrown into a dungeon or burned in an oven.

Germany gave us Bach and Beethoven.

Stalinist Russia, Maoist China and Pol Pot's Cambodia weren't as bad as the Nazis.

what does "worse" mean, anyway?

Not to mention Kraftwerk. I forgot to mention them.

and franzl lang...

I don't know why you say that like it's some sort of refutation of what I said. The British conquest and build-up of India is centuries older than British influence in the middle east, and at least two regions (Palestine and Iraq) fell under British control by mandate to help them not implode after the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman empire following WWI (and, super-coincidentally keeping the road to India under British control). The region has always been an unstable powder-keg, and the fact that the Brits didn't manage to stabilize it in the 70 or so years they had control over parts of it doesn't mean that they didn't manage to have a stabilizing effect on what is now India during the 300 odd years they spent expanding their control there.

One interesting excersise one can do is looking at the relationship between former colonized nations and their colonisers. As far as I'm aware, Britain has pretty good relations with the USA, Australia, India, New Zeeland, Canada, Malaysia, the Bahamas, Jamaica and a host of others that I'd have to look up. How do Iraqis or the Romanians feel about the Turks? Is Hong Kong happier being Chinese than they were under the British? How about the former Soviet states?

“Stabilising effect on India”
Erm... think it was us who destabilised India in the first place. East India Company and so forth.

Didn’t we force China to hand Hong-Kong over after starting a war when they wouldn’t let us peddle opiates there?
(And whisper it: HK was never a democracy under British rule)

I love him. He was such a Sweet Pea.

I'm no fan of private companies with their own armies to be sure, and I've no doubt they didn't exactly help, but what was then India was perfectly capable of being volatile and unstable all on their own, not least owing to 400 years of muslim conquest and colonisation.




Probably, and I never said it was. But Britain handed over HK to Chinese control in 1997, and the recent mess there suggests they're not exactly happy about it.

Well, yes, it is true that historically empires have, in general, been more stable polities than most other types (with notable exceptions)
Tend to leave quite a mess behind though.

East India Company was set up by the British Government, and then subjected to virtually no effective regulation or oversight: so more a case of ‘irresponsible for destabilisation’, or ‘sin of omission’.
Aha! That’s the why of Nazi’s being the worst: everything awful was ‘sin of commission’, they consciously planned to do it all.
Is that actually unique?
Could be: I’m not sure if it’s possible for one human to know enough to definitively call it so...

And no, HK’s return to China doesn’t seem to be working smoothly to the satisfaction of all concerned.
Rather the reverse in fact.

Yep. Those Chinese had the audacity to act like they were... a sovereign country, or something!

And tried to outlaw Britain pedaling dope in their country. So the Brits had to beat the crap out of them in a war. And Hong Kong was part of the spoils of victory.

A sovereign country Empire.

^ hah! Yes, I prefer the phrase ‘autonomous polity’ to ‘sovereign country’... it neatly includes all independent territorial hierarchies, without implying any similarity beyond the relatively free agency of whatever system of rule there happens to be in any given case.

BS.

During the Opium Wars China acted like a "sovereign country" minding its own business the way that you expect a country to act. And the Brits were being imperialistic by extorting from China via force of arms. The fact that China called its ruler an "emperor" at the time has nothing to do with it, and is beside the point.