Nobly diplomatic of you m'lord Adrian II but, IMHO, a tad too positive about the French side of things.

Oh, and I know that there were a few worse dictators than Napoleon. Stalin for one! But I picked Boney and Hitler because, unlike Stalin and some others, Napoleon and Hitler tried to take over the World - and I'm only talking in terms of true World-politics of the kind seen during the development and duration of the British Empire, and the fact that at times we stood alone against these two regimes.

As to French imperial asperations, I read somewhere that the main reason the British Empire succeeded and the French did not, was because the British inherited and ever afterwards built on the Dutch East India Company trader-system approach and most British colonies made a profit and attracted people to them. By contrast the French approach was primarily about territorial gain and hardly any were successful in business terms, nor attractive to emigrants.

That's not to say I think the British Empire was all good. If there's one distasteful "event of Empire" I would pick out of our past it would be when, after defeating the Boers in South Africa, we then gave them hegemony over the country and the blacks therein - blacks who had fought freely for us (and for the liberty they'd enjoyed with us at that time) - when we knew damn well that the Boers were a deeply racist group. We did the biggest ever dirty, when we could have ensured equality