Colonialism sure gets a bad rap, these days. Or at least, one type of colonialism does: European empires. Never mind that empire was the default political setting of nearly the whole world for the last 6,000 years or so.
Even the few exceptions that didn’t have formal empires, mostly because (nonsensical buzzwords like “First Nations” aside) they never politically evolved to the point of actually having states, spent most of their time and a great deal of blood conquering, killing and stealing as much as they could from their neighbours.
Never mind, too, that empires often bought as much benefit as detriment in their wake. The Roman Empire was fiercely resisted by its soon-to-be-subject peoples, but instituted a reign of (relative) peace and prosperity that most of their subjects would not see again for half a millennia. As historian Niall Ferguson likewise argues, the British Empire bequeathed many of its former vassal states a lasting legacy of technological and cultural benefits that at least balances its sometimes brutality and disdain for its subjects.
Other empires were not nearly so balanced. The Belgians, for example, were little more than robbers and rapists on a grand scale. But even that wasn’t just a “white people” thing. The empires of Meso-America were monsters who enslaved and used their subject peoples as fodder for their bloodthirsty religious rites.
Then there are the succession of brutal Islamic empires. Something many modern Muslims seem strangely forgetful about.
Mehreen Faruqi, born in Pakistan, has said some truly awful things about Britain and the Queen but remains quiet about the sins of her home country.
Pakistan is a nation where antisemitism is normalised along with a high degree of intolerance for religious minorities and oppression of a number of ethnic groups within the country. Many of the most vile hate speech directed against Jews and Armenians (despite Pakistan having little to no presence of either) originates from Pakistan-linked accounts on social media.
Pakistan, also an ally of Azerbaijan and Turkey, would be a clearer candidate for the most openly racist country in the world.
Pakistan literally only exists because the Muslim subjects of British India simply couldn’t bear to live alongside the Hindus. So the country was partitioned, to keep the warring factions somewhat apart. More than a million people died in the process, anyway.
Modern Turkey was founded on genocide: the Armenian genocide. A genocide it still actively denies. It funds similar denial among sympathisers and useful idiots abroad.
Modern Turkey also emerged from a preceeding brutal Islamic empire, the Ottomans.
The awful legacies left by the Ottoman Empire would easily dwarf any negatives left by the British and other European empires.
Spectator Australia
Faruqi is, for instance, wholly silent on the vast slave economy of the Ottomans. That economy includes the Janissaries and Mamluks, unique in human history as an entire army constituted by slaves. The slave soldiers were “recruited” — that is, stolen — as children from the European subjects of the Ottomans: Albanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks and Serbs. Forced circumcision and conversion to Islam was mandatory, and castration commonly used.
But, sure, what did the British ever do for us?