[OkieDoke]

Anyone especially interested in this subject might check out Niall Ferguson's `Empire'. (Conservative Book Club, on sale) I was surprised to learn that one of Ghandi's favorite poems was Kipling's 'If'.
Did you know that the Dutch sailed up the Thames at one point on time, causing the English to merge economically with them?
Not to defend them, but a couple outstanding Indian practices the British prohibited was burning widows on pyres and leaving female infants exposed to die.
And one of the legacies of the empire upon which the sun did not set, as the Viceroys ground their heels into the faces of our poor little brown brothers sitting in darkness: representative democracies.
Right, then.

[Cronos]

Not to defend them, but a couple outstanding Indian practices the British prohibited was burning widows on pyres and leaving female infants exposed to die. And one of the legacies of the empire upon which the sun did not set, as the Viceroys ground their heels into the faces of our poor little brown brothers sitting in darkness: representative democracies.

Aye, that's true -- and those are the positives. Teh negatives are that they did systematically impoverish the country and further exacerbate the differences. However, I did say that on the whole the positives outweighed the negatives. But that doesn't mean we should forget about the negatives.