'The British Empire, we can observe that it contained its fair share of errors, failures, and evils—both innocently inadvertent and culpable. But that is only half the story.'

"[T]HE BRITISH EMPIRE ... CONTAINED ITS FAIR share of errors, failures, and evils—both innocently inadvertent and culpable. That should not surprise or horrify ...

"But that is only half the story. For ... the British Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s. It then spent the second half of its life leading the campaign to suppress slavery the world over ... all during a period when the British government’s resources were but a quarter of what they are now.

"In addition, the Empire suppressed the self-immolation of widows and female infanticide in India and female genital mutilation in Africa.

"It moderated the disruptive impact of the inevitable arrival of Western modernity upon very unmodern societies in North America and especially Australia.

"It created regional peace by imposing an overarching imperial authority on multiple, warring peoples—unifying, for example, much of the Indian subcontinent.

"It promoted a worldwide free market, protected by the Royal Navy, that gave native producers and entrepreneurs in India and West Africa new economic opportunities. It made foreign investment attractive by reducing risk through establishing political stability and the rule of law. Consequently, Australia’s gross domestic product per capita became the highest in the world by 1890, and by 1914 India was the world’s fourth largest textile-producer.

"The Empire built canals in India, bringing five times as much land under irrigation as the Mughals had in the 18th century. By 1900 it had figured out how to prevent food shortage escalating into famine there and went on to fight disease in tropical Africa.

"It provided a civil service and judiciary that was generally and extraordinarily incorrupt.

"It introduced liberal ideas and liberal institutions of a free press and representative government to places that had never known them. New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant the vote to men and women on equal terms, in 1893, and by 1935 electoral democracy had been established in Indian provinces.

"From May 1940, when France fell, to June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, The British Empire offered Nazi Germany the only military resistance—with the sole exception of Greece.

"Inspired by the ideal of the Commonwealth, it helped to plan and realise the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations after 1945.

"And it brought up three of the most prosperous and liberal states in the world—Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and gave birth to one more, the United States. ... 

"SO, HOW CAN WE MAKE OVERALL ethical sense of the British Empire? Can we say that it achieved more good than evil or vice-versa? No, because the goods and evils that the Empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable. How much chalk is worth so much cheese? How much racial prejudice is worth so much immunisation against disease? How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace? How much humanitarian anti-slavery would make up for the evils of slavery? Such varied good and evils as to conclude that one set ‘outweighs’ the other. Here, as often elsewhere, a utilitarian calculation cannot be conducted rationally. ...

"What we can say, however, is that, notwithstanding its very human mixture of virtue and vice, good and evil, the British Empire did display something of a “progression in virtue”.[vii] First came the movement to abolish slavery in the late 1700s. Then came the extension of humanitarian concern to indigenous peoples in the 1830s. With the granting of ‘dominion’ status to Canada in 1867, the idea of the Empire evolving into a voluntary association of independent states began to take root, acquiring the title of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ in 1917. From 1919 India was put on track to become a ‘dominion’ and by the mid-1930s it had acquired the beginnings of representative democracy. In 1939, the British Empire showed its mature, liberal character by committing itself to oppose the massively murderous, racist, totalitarian regime in Nazi Berlin. And after 1945, Britain did not use violence to resist the demand for independence in India and Africa. ...

"THE BRITISH EMPIRE'S HISTORICAL LEGACY CONTAINS virtuous people, noble deeds, and major humanitarian achievements. To admire them is not to indulge in ‘imperial nostalgia’. It is to do them justice."

~ Nigel Biggar from his post 'Empire and Identity'