The British Empire is something to be Proud of

It seems that the negative position I should be arguing would be: 'The British Empire was a force for bad in the world', but I feel like this constructs an overly simplistic narrative that I reject, what I wish to argue instead, is that: the practices of the British Empire were immoral and unjustifiable. Not only did the British Empire commit dozens of horrendous atrocities and enslave millions of people over the course of its existence, it extracted the resources and wealth of colonised territories all over the world, systematically disenfranchising native populations and imposing systems of governance that consolidated power into the hands of the ruling classes and subjugated the colonised peoples. In regards to the 2 questions - i reject that there even is an "objectively good" - we can only debate the morality of a given topic, and in my eyes you have not made a particularly strong argument for why the actions of the British Empire are morally justifiable. In response to your second question - can we be proud of the British Empire? - short answer, no, we can't be proud of an empire that killed, enslaved, displaced, detained, and disenfranchised millions of people worldwide. But I feel like this question is really a proxy for a debate about whether its ok to be proud of ones history and heritage - and to that I say - you can choose what to be proud of? like, yeah, I'm proud of the achievements of Isaac Newton? I think Jane Austin was pretty cool? I like a lot of the theatre and art and music and science and philosophy that was produced under the British Empire - but I'm just not so keen about the slavery and the genocide and such - actually, I'm deeply ashamed that my ancestors did that, and I'm pretty ashamed that I continue to benefit off these historical atrocities and I think that's pretty healthy and reasonable. In regards to the body of your opening statement, I think this could go one of two ways. 1) We could go into pedantic detail about each of the cases that you have brought up, and have a scholarly historical debate about whether or not the actions of the British Empire were justifiable on some abstract level. 2) Or, and this is the direction I'd prefer to go - we could have a more philosophical discussion about ends/means rationality, in which I would take the position that even if we could definitively prove that conditions for people in former British colonial nations are on some abstract level 'better', it would not justify the moral injustices that I have outlined. It is simply not sound reasoning to consider the state of a place before colonisation, compare it to the present day, and conclude from this, that the British Empire was either good or bad. For one, we just simply do not have a control group - we can't compare present day Nigeria to a Nigeria from a different timeline where it never came under colonial rule. Secondly, all of the countries you have brought up have declared independence from the British Empire ages ago, India (1947), Sudan (1955), Nigeria (1960) Kenya (1964) and Uganda (1962). To say that they are relatively prosperous now could be arguably attributed to the fact that they LEFT the British Empire. Finally, your argument about Britain's cruelty in comparison to the French or Dutch empires proves nothing. I concede straight away that they were ALL immoral and I'm not particularly interested in arguing which was better or worse. The question is whether Britain's actions were morally justifiable, and the definitive answer is no. In your final paragraph you say we need to: " judge the British empire on its contextual merits", but what are these merits again? that they weren't AS genocidal as Belgium or Holland? That the colonised people were all savages anyway? that there was no better option than to be enslaved and genocided? Was there nothing good about the British Empire? obviously not, cricket is cool if you're into that? they made a lot of cool looking hats? they did the whole train thing? they put all of the worlds artefacts in one convenient location in central London (no wait, i mean). The point is, nothing comes close to justifying the worst of what the empire did, and I feel like if your unconvinced of that, we will need to rake through the mud a bit more in round 2.