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Comment by littletimmy | Hacker News Reader

If you are talking about India, it wasn't a "country" before the British. It was a mixture of disparate kingdoms and sultanates. Not to mention that before the British, most of India was under Muslim colonizers i.e. the Mughals.

The Indians have always been a conquered people, it is only in the last 70 years that they have had freedom; you should thank the British for it.

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The Mughals were not colonizers. The definition of a colony is: "country or area under the full or partial political control of another country". The Mughals were ousted from Central Asia; India was the only country they ruled. So, by definition, they were not colonizers.

India had been ruled by kings who were not originally from India. But, nothing in the history compared to the "loot" of the British (see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-comp...)

Your comment may be factual, but you could have skipped the "you should be thankful" bit. It's quite a rude thing to say to someone you don't know.

That's not the context the OP used... It was: "you should thank", not "you should be thankful". A very subtle difference, but in this case (to you), it's the difference between offending and not.

I think both wordings are rude, particularly because of the word "you". OP doesn't know anything about his family's history. It's different from making a general argument that talks about the benefit to the whole country.

Yes. I am thankful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

Define "country". To make your statement above to be true you will need a pretty narrow and tautological definition.

I presume you are not the brightest bulb as far as Indian history is concerned so it will help a bit if you read up a bit on Indian history, even Wikipedia would be a good start.

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