In his travelling lecture tour, Explorers: the Age of Discovery, James May makes an unfashionable point: the British Empire wasn’t all bad. In fact, it did an awful lot of good. Niall Ferguson makes the same point in his book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Like Ferguson, May doesn’t minimalise the evils of colonialism (although he oddly refrains from pointing out that it was the default mode of international relations for nearly 5000 years), but he rightly points out that the British did an awful lot of good. The Pax Britannica, enforced by the Royal Navy, for instance.
