The British Empire was imperialistic in its endeavour. The will of the people was overlooked as the British Empire plundered the country. Pogroms and the incitement of xenophobia was inherent in the Empire. As an Irish man, reprisals and torture are the legagy of occupation. A fact compounded by the miasma that is the North, where racial tensions were exacerbated by the British, who often projected an image of ambivalence - fatiqued by the 'barbarous' Irish. The Empire mentality is a scar on the British people. Ergo, the British Empire was wrong.

I wish I could have attended this. Although the debate avoided some of the parallels to modern helicopter diplomacy, it's clear that the audience were able to infer them.

Ferguson's 'Empire' series was, I thought, highly flawed as the argument here suggests. If you try to raise China as a parallel with India in the C19th - as he seems to have done here - then you run smack into the fact the British Empire, via the East India Trading Co., created millions of opium addicts in China in order to maintain the Indian opium industry and thus reducing China's productivity. China was then impoverished further by the millions of taels they were forced to pay Britain in reparation costs for the Opium Wars, and again in the 1860s and 1900s.