The British Empire is something to be Proud of

You want to debate whether the British Empire was a force for good, but you cannot have this debate without invoking some kind of moral framework to determine "what is good" and "what is bad". You yourself spent the majority of your last response constructing a moral argument, so let's just agree that the question of morality is an important one. The study of History cannot, by itself, determine what is 'good' and 'bad'. It can shed light on all of the many conflicting reasons why something happened and why people did what they did, but it cannot tell us whether it was good or bad, right or wrong, that requires a completely different discussion. I kept my historical examples deliberately vague in my opening response as I assumed we would get into them later, so I'm glad you've brought it up. Firstly you say that the British Empire was never involved in the slave trade - this is totally and demonstrably false. The British Empire was one of the biggest participants in the international slave trade and imported 1.6 million slaves to their settlements in the British Caribbean and nearly 400,000 to the colonies in North America. By the 18th century, the slave trade was a major economic mainstay for such cities as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, who were engaged in "Triangular trade" between Britain West Africa and North America. In this scheme ships set out from Britain loaded with trade goods which were exchanged on West African shores for slaves captured by local rulers from deeper inland; the slaves were transported across the Atlantic, and were sold at considerable profit for labour in plantations. Modern historians have argued that the British slave trade "allowed the formation of capital that financed the Industrial Revolution". Not only was the British Empire involved in the slave trade, the trade was incredibly important to its economic success and expansion. Secondly, you say that the British Empire never committed an act of genocide, citing Australia as your example. This is again, totally false. Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the term "genocide", and the person who set the definition of genocide adopted in the UN Genocide Convention, has explicitly stated that the colonial replacement of Native Americans by English and later British colonists is one of the historical examples of genocide. The British invasion and colonisation of Australia and the subsequent Frontier Wars fought against the indigenous peoples represent one of the most brutal acts of violence ever committed by the British Empire. According to Patrick Wolfe in the Journal of Genocide Research, the "frontier massacring of indigenous peoples" by the British "constitutes a genocide". Historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the case in Tasmania as "an event that truly merits the now overused term 'genocide'". The overwhelming historical consensus is that the British violence enacted against the indigenous Australian population, constitutes a genocide. To say that it doesn't qualify because the First Nations people were at war with the British is preposterous because for the majority of the period the official state policy did not even recognise the indigenous peoples as human beings. There are many accounts of British settlers hunting and killing indigenous people for sport. With regard to your second problem - I did not actually argue that independence from colonial rule is the sole reason for the countries prosperity, i merely used that argument to point out a flaw in your reasoning. As I have already stated, you cannot contrast a country now to the same country in a hypothetical timeline and conclude that the relative prosperity is therefore solely due to the policies of the British Empire. You keep asserting that the only alternative to British Rule was an eternity of death and corruption, but you simply cannot prove this because we cannot access alternative historical timelines and check - maybe Kenya would be worse off, maybe Kenya would be a glittering space utopia, we will simply never know. Sure, you can compare, say, modern day South Africa with, say, modern day Mozambique and maybe (mayyybbbee) conclude that the British Empire was 'better' than the French Empire. But... EVEN IF, please let me stress that I don't believe this, but EVEN IF it were true that British colonisation was more morally justifiable than French colonisation, that DOES NOT prove that the British Empire was therefore "a force for good" it simply means it was the better of two evils. Now onto the moral argument. The moral framework you have provided here can be described as a consequentialist moral philosophy. You have said that a 'moral' action is one that "brings us closer" to a paradigm in which all people are able "to be high achieving and as fulfilled and happy as possible" - this is to say that a moral action is any action that produces this outcome. Firstly lets just point out the obvious - the British Empire certainly didn't care about the fulfilment and happiness of the ethnic groups they murdered, so the British Empire fails to clear even this low, low bar for moral righteousness. Nonetheless, this framework ostensibly SOUNDS reasonable, but it begs the question, how can you possibly quantify the level of achievement and the fulfilment and happiness within a population? And once you have this figure, what do you compare it to? Lets say Kenya is a level 7 on the happiness/fulfilment scale (whatever that would mean) is that good? bad? better? worse? Then we must ask, what role did the British Empire play in this process, was it 100% causal or just a contributing factor? You have still not come close to demonstrating that the British Empire was a force for good. Furthermore, at what point can you definitively say that a particular action produced a particular outcome? As we have established, England/Britain was involved in the slave trade for hundreds of years, later on, they passed legislation that outlawed the practice. Does that mean that the previous hundreds of years of slavery were morally justifiable because it eventually lead to an historical moment where it was abolished? If Hitler had won the war, and hundreds of years later Germany was doing relatively well as a country, does that mean Hitler was morally justified? You're logic can be used to argue that literally any action is moral as long as at some point (even if it's tens or hundreds of years later on) there is some kind of positive outcome. You also pointed out that: "the ethical mindset of society and leaders of the 18th, 19th and even early 20th centuries was different from what it is today" and because of this: "we must be very careful to accuse the people of the time for being immoral. Since they knew no different, for them, what was moral was very different from now." While this is true, all it tells us is that the people in the past who committed moral atrocities did not think that what they were doing was wrong. Well duh? The KGB didn't think what they did was immoral, the SS didn't think what they did was immoral, Charles Manson didn't think what he did was immoral - does that mean all of these people were morally right? obviously not. Just because the people were able to rationalise their actions at the time, does not mean their actions were rational. You also say that "The action[s] and not the people or society is immoral. The individual cases of British brutality are completely wrong but the people who committed [them] are not necessarily immoral." Again, I agree with this, but I was never arguing that every individual person living under the British Empire was evil on a personal level - it is precisely the actions of the British Empire and not its citizens that I am taking issue with. To summarise, feel free to be proud of the English football team...? You do not have to morally agree with the actions of the British Empire in order to feel proud of an English footballer...?