The Bengal famine was a terrible example of British incompetence and indifference, and one that gets little mention (though it's being recognized more now) but

The Bengal famine was a terrible example of British incompetence and indifference, and one that gets little mention (though it's being recognized more now) but I'd say it's qualitatively different than most active genocides. The British didn't purposely try to kill those people, they just facilitated the kind of stupid mismanagement of food and food production incentives that allowed for it to happen unintentionally, then took their sweet time before finally doing something to fix it. The nearby Japanese occupation of Burma and a year of exceptionally bad natural disasters in the region also had some fault. Furthermore, if they get something of a free pass it might also be because the UK was at the time desperately fighting almost alone in a huge war and barely succeeding at providing for the needs of its own domestic population, let alone diverting shipping to feed millions of people on the other side of the world. One consolation is that the Bengal famine contributed to the disintegration of the British Raj in India after the war. It had been a catastrophic catalyst for tolerance of malignantly, and as it turns out, falsely paternalistic English rule.