naturalplastic wrote:
peaches to pears.
The Britain became an empire around 1600, grew, had its high plateau from maybe 1870 to 1945. Then it gradually disappeared after WWII as its colonies became independent, and when Britain became eclipsed by the US and the USSR as powers.
Four centuries of the British Empire vs the 12 years that the Third Reich existed.
Hitler managed to cram a lot of evil into those 12 years. You might argue that the evil he did was about the same as the amount of evil done by the Brits over their 400 years as an empire. But the Brits did a lot of good as well. Hitler didn't cram very much good into his 12 years to offset the evil.
But was the British Empire worse than any other empires in history like the Romans, the Spanish, Alexander the Great's empire, Persians, Ottomans, Napoleon's empire, Russians or the Mongols ? Where do you drawn the line ?