Britain Didn’t Invent Progress. It Just Packaged It in a Union Jack.
A few weeks ago, Carole Malone - in yet another tired defense of the indefensible - claimed the British Empire gifted the world “sanitation, education and transport.”
At first, I rolled my eyes. Then I got curious.
Because like a lot of people who went through a British education system, I’d internalized some of that narrative. So I did some digging - not a PhD, just a few hours of reading - and it turns out, what we’re taught barely scratches the surface.
Modernity didn’t start in Britain.
It didn’t begin in a gentleman’s club in Mayfair or on a railway platform in Lancashire. What we now call modern infrastructure, governance, innovation, and trade already existed in many of the places the empire later invaded and rewrote as “uncivilised.”
China had cities before London had plumbing.
By the 11th century, Hangzhou had street lighting, sewage systems, multi-story buildings and a population over a million.
They were printing books with movable type centuries before Gutenberg. They had paper money, a merit-based civil service, and massive ocean-going fleets - all while Britain was still arguing over sheep and church taxes.
India had universities before Britain had a language.
Nalanda University, founded in the 5th century, taught astronomy, philosophy and mathematics to thousands of students from across Asia.
The concept of zero, algebra, trigonometry, surgery - all came from the subcontinent.
The British didn’t bring education to India. They dismantled what already existed and replaced it with a system designed to produce colonial clerks.
Sanitation? That wasn’t British either.
The Indus Valley Civilisation had complex drainage systems and grid-planned cities 4,000 years ago.
At the height of empire, London was still dumping raw sewage into the Thames. That’s not a symbol of progress - it’s a public health crisis.
Trains and roads? Let’s be honest.
Yes, Britain built railways in its colonies. But they weren’t built for the people - they were built to extract. Railways served mines and ports, not towns and villages.
They were pipelines for rubber, tea, cotton, gold and labour. The heart of the network was always in London.
So when people claim the empire brought modernity, what they really mean is this:
It disrupted complex, thriving societies, extracted their resources, installed infrastructure to support the theft, and called that progress.
We’ve been taught that Britain invented modernity. But in reality, it just got better at selling it - and forced the world to buy into a story where everyone else started from nothing.
Carole Malone didn’t get her facts wrong. She just repeated the version of history the empire wanted us to believe.
But that story is unravelling. And the receipts are everywhere.