| Summary/Abstract |
GREAT BRITAIN, once the biggest colonial power, steadily expanded by way of the natural resources of its controlled possessions, the export of their cultural values, and the slave trade. The empire's political and economic vibrancy required strong moral "tenets" that led to the formation of a hypocritical ideology - an alloy of cynical prosperity on the "bones" of enslaved peoples, enlightening messianism, and the heavy "white man's burden" as an alleged source of progress for the rest of the world. Colonialism was and remains, to an extent, a factor of national pride, a combination of imagined racial-ethnic exceptionalism and a condescending attitude toward others. Hence the more or less widely accepted opinion among Britons that the demands, especially of India and Pakistan, that Great Britain repent for the sins of the colonial past are untenable, since under imperial patronage, these countries enjoyed all the boons of civilization, democracy, and free trade.
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