Here is another example of how the British built another prosperous and successful nation. http://www.know-britain.com/general/commonwealth.html

"There were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows" Universally, what most nations disseminated/borrowed was from The Roman/Greek Civilizations. -------------------------------------------- No nation has ever been able to do this, the British military presence in the 13 British Colonies in the South were forced to pull out due to the fact the French defeated a Royal Navy fleet in the Atlantic" No, the British withdrew from the colonies in America due to something called the American Revolutionary War. -------------------------------------------- The World also has never been as relatively peaceful as in the period of the British Empire from 1880 to 1914. This represents the calm before the storm. As I have pointed out, former British occupied nations, to this day, continue to serve as areas of instability and threaten the safety of other. Case-in-point Palestine. -------------------------------------------- The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee is British so you could say this is another British contribution to modern Globalisation. Yes & the television was also invented by the English, however, this debate is about the ill affects of the British Empire and the present day implications. Besides, it has been America who has been revolutionizing the internet and making it what it is today. -------------------------------------------- It was by far the least bloody path to modernity unless you would have preferred Hitler, Mussolini, Napoleon, Hirohito or Lenin. In terms of a single lead, I prefer Ronald Reagan's. Collectively, I prefer the path blazed by America.

?Universally, what most nations disseminated/borrowed was from The Roman/Greek Civilizations.? Clearly the term ?progression? isn?t in your vocabulary. ?No, the British withdrew from the colonies in America due to something called the American Revolutionary War.? Which with out French aid, as has been explained, you wouldn?t have won. Better leadership on the part of Britain, would have made French involvement irrelevant. The fact was that America didn?t win, Britain lost it. Notably in the clubs of London. ?This represents the calm before the storm. As I have pointed out, former British occupied nations, to this day, continue to serve as areas of instability and threaten the safety of other. Case-in-point Palestine? Don?t be so blasé, you can?t simply dismiss a point because it doesn?t fit with your argument. Are so naïve to believe that if there were no grievances over Israel, that Islamic extremists wouldn?t exist? Its simply and ends to a means. ?Yes & the television was also invented by the English, however, this debate is about the ill affects of the British Empire and the present day implications. Besides, it has been America who has been revolutionizing the internet and making it what it is today.? Actually it was a Scotsman, John Logie Baird. Oh and yes, we can thank the Americans for the wonderful advancements that they have made on the Internet, of which 77% is porn. What a marvellous and lasting imprint that has had on the world. Truly one of the great cultural achievements of man. How sad that your cut up with hate.

As I have said before apart from largely ignoring most of what I have said, these problems regarding African Nations have only occurred in the wake of the British leaving and the Soviet Union pushing Socialist leaders like Robert Mugabe into power who have decimated the region. The Commonwealth is an enduring and tangible symbol of Britain's continued and in my opinion largely unwarranted support to African Nations scarred by regimes and Soviet sponsored terrorist groups like the like the Mau Mau in Kenya. I believe that the problems created in Africa today were indirectly created by the British leaving Africa prematurely and not properly securing a successive administration.

Africa is only part of the mess the failed British colonization caused. You must also include: Burma India Northern Ireland Jamaica Cyprus Iraq Not to mention British failures in Afghanistan.

So your position pretty much is that any problem in the world today can be linked to the fact an englishman has been there in the past at some point? The empire had it's faults but compared to the good it did they were pretty modest ones. you really need to take the blinders off and read some competently written histories. you do your credibility no good at all ranting away like this. have you ever actually checked into the facts around the american revolutionary war for instance? without the french support and in the end military aid the american cause was doomed to sputter out in a few years for lack of guns and gold.

"the mess the failed British colonization caused." -No failed Brtish evacuation is a more appropriate phrase.

Without the spread of British rule around the World, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted different models - the Russian and the Chinese - imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world?s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet. Of course no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early ear of enslavement, transportation and the ?ethnic cleansing? of indigenous peoples. Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before of since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is questionable that Britain could have withstood them. There would have certainly not have been as much free trade between the 1840s and 1930s had it not been for the British Empire. Relinquishing Britain?s colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century would have led to higher tariffs in their markets, and perhaps other forms of trade discrimination. The evidence for this need not be purely hypothetical: it manifested itself in the highly protectionist policies adopted by the United States and India after they secured independence as well as in the tariffs adopted by Britain?s imperial rivals France, Germany and Russia in the 1870s and ever since. Britain?s military budget before WWI can therefore be seen as a remarkably low insurance premium against international protectionism. According to one estimate, the economic benefit to the UK of enforcing free trade could have been as high as 6.5% of GNI. No one has yet ventured to estimate what the benefit to the world economy as a whole may have been; but it was a benefit and not a cost seems beyond dispute, given the catastrophic consequences of the global descent into protectionism as Britain imperial power reached it?s apex in the 1930s. Nor would there have been so much international mobility of labour - and hence so much global convergence of incomes before 1914 - without the British Empire. True, the United States was always the most attractive destination for nineteenth-century migrants from Europe; nor did all the migrants originate in the colonising countries. But it should not be forgotten that the core of the US had been under British Rule for the better part of a century and a half before the War of Independence, and that the differences between independent and British North America remained minor. It is also worth remembering that the significance of the white dominions as destinations for British emigrants markedly after 1914, as the US tightened restrictions on immigration and, after 1929, endured a far worse Depression than anything experienced in the Sterling bloc. Finally, we should not lose sight of the vast numbers of Asians who left India and China to work as indentured labourers, many of them on British plantations. And mines in the course of the nineteenth century. There is no question that the majority of them suffered great hardship; many of them might well have been better staying at home. But once again we cannot pretend that this mobilization of cheap and probable underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold had no economic value. Consider too the role of the British Empire in facilitating capital export to the less developed countries of the World. Although some measures of international financial integration seem to suggest that the 1990s saw greater cross-border capital flows than in the 1890s, in reality much of today?s overseas investment goes on within the developed world. In 1996 only 28% of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1913 the propo

Burma- Fair enough, a dictatorship is in power and the British ideal of liberty and democracy did not survive there. India- Peaceful, Democratic nation Northern Ireland- Peaceful, Democratic nation Jamaica- Peaceful, Democratic nation Cyprus- Peaceful Democratic nation although division caused by Greece and Turkey, British presence on Island contributes to continued stability Iraq- Historically Iraq is one of the most proud nations in the Middle East with little actual Iraqi separatist movements between the Sunni, Shiah and Kurdish cultures only greater autonomy. This would seem in contradiction to the reaction to the Balfour Treaty. Eventually will become a Democratic nation with the considerable aid of the British who control Southern Iraq with the removal of a regime which overthrew the original British installed Constitutional Monarchy.

"ccooke, in the age of iron ships, please describe a war in which the Royal Navy dominated hands down. " Remember the great Italian fleet in the Med? Most of that was sunk by naval air and sea born commando raids. With the exception of the German air force Britain dominated the Med. Even in the Atlantic there was a reason why the great Tirpitz spent most of its life tied up in a fjord. Anytime they sortied out they were hunted down by the Brits. I would call that domination.