Was Britain the cause of the most deaths during the years of empire building?

British imperialism and deaths

The British Empire lasted from perhaps the days of Cromwell till a little after the end of WW2. Nobody kept a headcount of the deaths.

Some of the very worst bad deeds were done very close to home, namely in Ireland. From the mid 1690s onwards the British systematically reduced the Irish to extreme poverty and wretchedness. When the potato blight (NOT Britain's fault) struck in the late 1840 about a million people out of eight million perished. The famine hit a people who were already living at about subsistence level ...

As for the most deaths, German attempts to set up an empire in Europe led to a very high death toll.

It's perhaps also worth considering the death toll in relation to the size of the colonial power. One of the least known and most appalling holocausts was that caused by King Leopold II of Belgium in the misleadingly named "Congo Free State" between 1885 and 1908. What is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire) was under his personal rule as his very own personal property. The population fell from about 30 to 20 million. This doesn't necessarily mean that King Leopold's men slaughtered 10 million people - as some people fled and/or the birth rate fell) but most estimates are in the range 5-8 million killed.

I think that some countries have behaved much worse than Britain ever did.

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First answer by ID3425386753. Last edit by Joncey. Contributor trust: 1987 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 97 [recommend question]