Was the British Empire Evil?

When people, like in Ireland or in India, were starving to death while tons and tons of grain were being shipped away by the British, it's an open and shut case: YES, the British Empire was evil.

And Yes, the Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by specific actions by the British and not only by 'disease' as the article purports to state: such as the 'Black Line' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War#Black_Line,_October%...). A people who had occupied the land for nearly 20,000 years was wiped out in less than one hundred.

> Biggar also contends that British rule in India, initially under the auspices of the East India Company (EIC) from the 1750s and direct colonial rule after 1857, was far from the rapacious affair that Whigs at the time (Burke springs to mind) or later historians, like Theodore Dalrymple assert.

That is a tall claim, if there ever was one.

> EIC officials like Ernest ‘Oriental’ Jones and Warren Hastings showed a profound interest in Hindu culture and went to great lengths to accommodate Indian custom to utilitarian understandings of law and property. Biggar suggests that, Edward Said, the author of the 1978 book Orientalism which spawned post-colonial discourse theory and decolonise campaigns in education, distorted the character of European and British interest in both India and China.

Warren Hastings presided over the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 and reported back to the EIC about the wipeout of 10 million humans in Bengal.

Damodaran, Vinita (2014), "The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal", in V. Damodaran; A. Winterbottom; A. Lester (eds.), The East India Company and the Natural World, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 80–101, 89, ISBN 978-1-137-42727-4, writes:

> Before the end of May 1770, one third of the population was calculated to have disappeared, in June the deaths were returned as six out of sixteen of the whole population, and it was estimated that 'one half of the cultivators and payers of revenue will perish with hunger'. During the rains (July–October) the depopulation became so evident that the government wrote to the court of directors in alarm about the number of 'industrious peasants and manufacturers destroyed by the famine'. It was not till cultivation commenced for the following year 1771 that the practical consequences began to be felt. It was then discovered that the remnant of the population would not suffice to till the land. The areas affected by the famine continued to fall and were put out of tillage. Warren Hastings' account, written in 1772, also stated the loss as one third of the inhabitants and this figure has often been cited by subsequent historians. The failure of a single crop, following a year of scarcity, had wiped out an estimated 10 million human beings according to some accounts. The monsoon was on time in the next few years but the economy of Bengal had been drastically transformed, as the records of the next thirty years attest."

So, yeah. The empire was evil.

It's called "white washing".

What a load of horse shit

>However, in none of these cases was there any evidence of a systematic attempt to commit genocide, destroy local culture or conduct a state licensed reign of terror.

The evidence is still there until today, it’s called the British museum, where they had a souvenir for each atrocity done through out that time.

You can write all books you like, claim whatever you want, it won’t change the fact it was systematically evil and the intention is to exploit these resources in other countries, spain and France did it, in fact, france is still doing it until now in Africa.

Saying these are “isolated cases”, or “no systematic attempt” was there is like blaming a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of the ones who sent him, provided all the support, logistics, communication, intelligence to be there, and brainwashed him that he’s there as a savior from some local evil terrorist, and gave all the green lights to “do whatever it takes” in that operation, while in reality it’s just after the oil and resources.