A GB News regular has stunned viewers by setting out a case for why the British Empire was among the most progressive in history.
Sunil Sharma appeared on Great British Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster to put his revisionist point across, suggesting that all the land grabs, slavery and concentration camps were not that bad all considered.
Posting on X, he said: “I am sick of hearing people moaning about the British Empire and that we should feel some sort of guilt.
“It makes no sense to compare today’s social standards to standards of the past.”
Yet he conveniently overlooked the fact that even by past standards, British colonialism was characterised by some deeply immoral attributes.
Although the proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.
Millions of Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged.
By some standards, British colonialism is estimated to have killed 100 million Indians in 40 years, which is more than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.
The slave trade, meanwhile, has been described as the greatest manmade human calamity of all time by Afua Hirsch.
Between 1662 and 1807 British and British colonial ships purchased an estimated 3,415,500 Africans. Of this number, 2,964,800 survived the ‘middle passage’ and were sold into slavery in the Americas.
But sure, pretty progressive all told!
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