Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
These arguments for how the British were more gentle than others are just a load of whataboutism and bullhonkey.
You make it sound like the people in power at the time didn't even know that an MO other than what they were doing was possible.
Well, this is debatable. Did they think there was a better way of doing things? The British simply went somewhere, contested with the natives and took over, which is what everyone did everywhere at the time, including the Indians.

Ideas of democracy, resistance against nobility and so on were certainly not new concepts at the time though and had been crushed by nobility to secure their own power. In the end it was just about cold power grabs as far as they could justify with their fake christian decency and the fact that others were worse because they faked less decency isn't an excuse for any of them.
The EIC conquest of India was essentially completed by 1800 with the remaining local rulers reduced to vassal status. That's decades before the First Great Reform Act in 1832 - concepts like "democracy" are not, as Pan said, "really a thing" yet.

I don't walk around excusing 9/11 by saying that "a lot of people in the Middle Eeast believed that America was satan at the time, he just couldn't know any better", and if I did it would be the same bullhonkey you're spreading to excuse colonial violence. The people responsible were largely serving their own personal ambition, perhaps hiding them below "service to the nation" and maybe some of them were actually deluded enough to think they were doing the right thing, but the same could be said for the other example...I mean you don't fly into a building to get a promotion in your office job, you have to believe to be doing the right thing, because it will be the last thing you do here...

Doesn't make it better though, or does it?
This is actually an important historical question, it can be applied to 9/11, revolution in Cuba, the Holocaust, the massacre at Agincourt, the murder of Jesus Christ, the Persian Invasions...

In each case the answer depends on how the actions were seen at the time AND the intention behind them.