Claim: the French-Indian War (by England) was justified

The Catholic countries were just as bad as the Protestant ones when it came to colonial genocide. I would say that the main cause was capitalism or mercantilism. The first three major atrocities in modern history (a term I use to say from the renaissance onwards) were commited by Catholic Spain and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain as part of the Reconquista was a major act of effective genocide, since it resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocents. It was perpetrated by the Spanish crown as a way of confiscating the estates of the Muslims and the property of the Jews. The second atrocity committed by the Spanish was the genocide of the Mesoamerican peoples. This was partly to gain new lands to exploit, since they had nowhere left to conquer now that they had completed the invasion of Al Andalus; but a deeper reason was the rise of mercantilism. Mercantilism is based on bullion reserves, which form a gold and silver standard to regulate currency value. In Europe, almost all gold came from the Balkans, which were under the control of the Ottomans, or were under threat of becoming under Ottoman control. A new source of gold and silver was needed, and they found huge reserves of gold and silver, both in the form of treasures to melt down and in ore mines. In Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there was a circular trade in wheat and gold. Wheat was grown in Northeast Europe, and was then moved to Central Europe where it was traded for gold. This is why cities such as Frankfurt, Vienna, Strasbourg and Zurich are financial centres now. This caused Spain to be Europe's preeminent power until the reign of Louis XIV of France caused it to drift into obscurity, as well as the fact that the Spanish Royal Family was getting increasingly narrower in terms of its genepool, culminating in Charles II, who was impotent, among other things, which caused the extinction of the dynasty as I mentioned in R1. Contrary to what you say, no apology has ever been issued by the Spanish or Portuguese governments for their actions in the New World, the effects of which have permeated to the modern era. The Ottomans also carried out several horrible crimes in North Africa at this time, namely the North African Slave Trade. This was largely based in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and it is estimated that privateers from the countries captured and sold a million people into slavery, one million being a very conservative estimate, over the course of three hundred years. The nineteenth century also saw a large number of genocides committed by non-protestants, as well as the more gentle forms of colonisation you describe such as missionary work being carried out by protestant countries. People such as Dr David Livingstone, who embarked on an Anglican mission to Central Africa to convert the indigenous populations. This was done without a drop of blood spilt, as was Britain's annexation of Uganda, which was largely done by protestant fundamentalist lobby groups that saw it as their aim to convert the peoples of the 'dark continent' to Christianity. Conversely, the Catholic French carried out huge atrocities against Algerians, Moroccans, the Tuareg and pretty much every other ethnic group contained within the French Empire. These atrocities continued right up until the 1960s when France relinquished most of its colonial empire. France issued no apology or compensation to the victims of its colonialism, and there are still people with the atrocities against the people, especially in Algeria, the supposed crown jewel of the French Empire, which endured a hundred and thirty-two years of constant French occupation. There was a backlash in one of France's colonies, Haiti, when it declared independence during the chaos of the revolution, forming a black nationalist state. The religions there were chiefly Catholic and Voodoo, and they embarked on a persecution and eventual mass murder of the white and creole inhabitants of the island. This still continues in many parts of the country, two hundred years later. Catholic Belgium also committed probably the most heinous atrocities in the Congo Free State, a state owned privately by the King as part of the Royal Estate. The main export of the Congo Free State was rubber to Europe to be processed into electronics and car tyres and etcetera, and he carved out many vast plantations from the jungle. With the help of the Force Publique, a militia group composed of local natives, mostly from the warrior tribes that had a history of inter-tribal warfare with the others, and led by Belgian army officers. They were armed with rifles and machetes, with the former seeing far less use than the latter. They were infamous for brutality, and committed mass murder, rape, mutilations and burned whole villages and fields to force the locals onto the plantations as their only livelihood. If they failed to produce the rubber quota, they would lose a limb, or one of their close family members would. It was by no means a secular occupation either; they built hundreds of churches across the Congo Free State, and in one offshoot, Rwanda, the Catholic Church played a major part in the genocide in the 1990s there. No apologies or compensation has been made either by the Belgian Government, Belgian Royal Family or the Catholic Church for the incidents there, and the Belgian Royal Family are perfectly happy to live in their vast and numerous palaces across Belgium blissfully ignorant or uncaring about the means for production there. There is also the Chinese destructive imperialism that has lasted since the Ming Dynasty and still continues in western China and Tibet. The main religion in China is Confucianism and its offshoots such as Taoism, and no apology has been issued, and the atrocities go on. So the main cause of aggressive colonial expansionism is capitalism. People want more money, and they are willing to do all kinds of horrible and disgusting things to acquire more of it. With regards to what you said about Pitt being the only Germanic influence in Britain at the time, it is a complete untruth. The Royal Family was the Hanoverian Dynasty. George I, the father and grandfather of George II and III respectively, was from Hanover. In fact, for the duration of his reign, he never even bothered to learn to speak English, and in court, the chief language spoken was German. Most of the haute aristocracy was German, and Britain owned a huge chunk of northern Germany called Hanover. That was why it made the alliance with Prussia - to get Prussia, Europe's land power, to protect it against the French. Pitt was not a general, he was a statesman. Pitt the Elder did serve briefly as military paymaster in the 1740s, but this was an honorary title. Pitt the Younger did annex Ireland in the 1801 Act of Union, but it had been under effective British control since the 1150s. The English invaded it under Henry II, and while only about two thirds of Ireland were owned by England and later Britain per se, the third that remained was barren wasteland, ruled by fiefdoms that were effectively vassals of Britain. The hardships began in the 16th century during the Reformation, when Protestant troops put down a Catholic Rebellion in the region, killing many locals. In the War of the Three Kingdoms, Oliver Cromwell did a sort-of ethnic cleansing campaign against the Irish, razing towns such as Drogheda and killing thousands of people. The English and Scottish landowners ran Ireland like a Medieval feudal society, and the harsh conditions prompted Jonathan Swift, the Irish author of Gulliver's Travels, to write the essay 'A Modest Proposal', in which he said that the best way to deal with the Irish problems was for the landowners to breed the Irish to eat their young. This was, of course, a satire that drew attention to the fact that the landowners were treating the Irish people as little better than chattel. Capitalism was again responsible for the Potato Famine, which caused first of all as a cost-cutting exercise, the landowners used imported guano as fertiliser. Guano is basically semi-decomposed seagull excrement, and was a very cheap and effective fertiliser. However, since it was full of all kinds of pathogens that existed in the seagulls' digestive system, as well as the pathogens that flourish on fecal matter, it brought over a fungus that spread like wildfire across the potato crops. Since Ireland's main crop was the potato, the farmers had nothing to eat or sell, and about a million people died. The crisis was exacerbated by capitalism also, as the Invisible Hand was supposed to prevail, and the rising cost of food was supposed to inspire farmers to grow more of it, instead, the farmers in England burnt excess crops en masse, since it had been an incredible harvest there and the price of wheat and oats plummeted due to supply and demand, so as to raise their prices and make more money. Humans' greed is what motivates them to do ghastly things to others, not cultural or religious differences. Greed is universal, as are the problems created by it.