The odd thing here is that you and your critics appear to be arguing different points as though they were opposing, and they're not. You're both right.
British colonies are indeed more peaceful, prosperous, and educated than similar non-colonized areas. This is generally accepted as a fact amongst historians, if any of the stuff that I read is an indication.
However, there were also abuses of power, and although it might be hard to claim that they were truly systematic, they were also widespread and common.
Unfortunately, cheaper labor makes fast reconstruction and monumental development possible; slave labor makes it even more so. Does anyone think the pyramids could have been built by a free population of well-fed and prosperous peasants?
It's a shame you got downvoted at all. A carefully-researched and made point shouldn't be getting downvoted here in all places, even if people disagree with its conclusions.
"Does anyone think the pyramids could have been built by a free population of well-fed and prosperous peasants?"
That's actually the current theory. The theory that the Pyramids were built by slaves has fallen under question."Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levee) until the construction was completed, pointing to worker's cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...
I hadn't heard of that; that would be very interesting. At the moment though I'm somewhat skeptical of this. Given the estimated effort required to build the pyramids at the time, compensating the workers would have impoverished the rulers of early Egypt.
The rulers of early Egypt were rich enough to have pyramids built. That's an expensive proposition regardless of how you handle the labor force.
You don't actually have to pay the workers extra money, either, if pyramid labor was a form of tax payment. It's still somewhat of a mystery how they managed to design and construct the damned things, but it would have required a large amount of skilled and compensated workers even if the brunt physical labor was borne by slaves. "The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 millimeters in length. The base is horizontal and flat to within 21 mm. The sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points (within 4 minutes of arc) based on true north, not magnetic north, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza)
EDIT: Once you have enough skilled foremen, the gain from enslaving a bunch of other people to do the heavy lifting isn't as much as you'd think--especially for an already-rich civilization that already had to invent a lot of clever, labor-saving techniques just to get the damned things built.
Er, sorry -- I don't mean to dispute that skilled laborers were involved, nor that those skilled laborers were likely compensated in some fashion.
I was just questioning that the entire base of labor for the construction of the pyramids was skilled and compensated.
I think that if we were to still disagree, it would only be on the relative involvements of the two forces, and frankly I don't know enough on this specific subject to make that kind of argument.
British colonies are indeed more peaceful, prosperous, and educated than similar non-colonized areas. This is generally accepted as a fact amongst historians, if any of the stuff that I read is an indication.
However, there were also abuses of power, and although it might be hard to claim that they were truly systematic, they were also widespread and common.
Unfortunately, cheaper labor makes fast reconstruction and monumental development possible; slave labor makes it even more so. Does anyone think the pyramids could have been built by a free population of well-fed and prosperous peasants?
It's a shame you got downvoted at all. A carefully-researched and made point shouldn't be getting downvoted here in all places, even if people disagree with its conclusions.