Pointing out the existence of the side effect of triggering/accelerating industrialisation is in no way apologism for all the awful things that were inflicted on the countries in question (being English, I've spent a fair amount of time digging in to what we did and every time you think you've found the worst there turns out to be yet another layer of even more awful underneath.)

As an analogy: I grew up in NW England during the troubles, and the nearest big city was Manchester. After the IRA blew up the city centre, the rebuilt version was much much nicer and attracted substantially more commerce. That can be true without in any way having any interest in defending the IRA's explosive terrorism and extrajudicial murders (possibly my favourite exchange on twitter was Gerry Adams posting about feeling like the grinch going around his house turning off all the christmas lights before he went to bed and somebody replying "surely you know somebody who can fit a timer.")

In the spirit of hacking the site guidelines: I feel like writing a comment to declare that you're leaving the argument has to be anti-intellectual-curiosity in some nonzero way.