Britain Owes Reparations

Independent |  The British people suffer "historical amnesia" over the atrocities committed by their former empire, an Indian MP and author has claimed.

Former UN under-secretary general Dr Shashi Tharoor said the British education system fails to tell the real story of empire.

He said: "There's no real awareness of the atrocities, of the fact that Britain financed its Industrial Revolution and its prosperity from the depredations of empire, the fact that Britain came to one of the richest countries in the world in the 18th century and reduced it, after two centuries of plunder, to one of the poorest."

A previous YouGov poll found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, while 21 per cent regretted it happened.

The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, while 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was neither good nor bad. 

At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area. 

Although proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.

Here, The Independent looks at five of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire.  Fist tap Bro.Makheru.