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Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cul

Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cultivation of Opium to sell to China. Instead of relief from Britain the locals received aggressive tax collection to make up for the losses due to the famine. Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.

lmm 11y ago
> Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII. How do the positives and negatives compare to self-governing nations of the same time period? Life in those eras was (to a modern mind) unimaginably cruel, and plenty of rulers plundered their own populations into starvation.