Okay, I'll say it: The accusation that the British have behaved in a perfidious, manipulative manner in world affairs, from Continental Europe to their colonies, is true. But that manipulativeness, that divide and rule mentality, does not make Britain bad, just effective.
"Divide et Impera," which means divide and rule, was the maxim of the Roman Senate. It's nothing new, and it's what effective empires do to remain on top. It's not evil.
Britain has brought more success and progress to the world than perhaps any other country, through both the Industrial Revolution and, even earlier, its liberal tradition of thought, focusing on rights, economic growth, trade, and humanism. Yeah, I said it: liberalism is not evil, and people love it. It's why the West is where everyone not in the West wants to go.
They want our freedom, and Britain did more to give the world freedom than any other country ever has.

>>509609272 (OP)
Colonialism and imperialism are just natural mechanisms whereby a more advanced civilization spreads its progress to more backward cultures. Humans are not saints, so we in advanced countries do not just give our progress to others out of the goodness of our hearts. Instead, we conquer the more backward cultures and use their resources and people, but in the process of doing so, our advanced civilization spreads to them and they begin to advance too.
Imperialism is just a mechanism for diffusing concentrated progress, both technological and social progress.

>>509609272 (OP)
If it wasn't us, it would have been France. Imagine how much worse that would have been.

>>509609617
France developed differently than England did. It goes all the way back to the time of King John and his counterpart in France.
John's failures in warring with France led to a weakening of the British monarchy that enabled the lords to force the Magna Carta upon King John, and of course the commoners got the Charter of the Forest.
English liberalism begins there: in a weak English Crown vs. a strong French Crown. Since John's reign, Englishmen, and then later on, all Brits, have held more rights and freedom than the French have had, at least until 1789.
I don't know if France would ever have been able to gift the world such an ideal of freedom as the British have, just due to their more autocratic history and development.