British imperial moderation, not cruelty, enabled the empire’s dissolution

Evidence

The happy fact is that although British imperialist rule sank to some level of vulgarity, cruelty played a lesser role between the two World Wars than ever before and a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded. It is this moderation in the midst of plain insanity that paved the way for what Churchill has called “the liquidation of His Majesty’s Empire” and that eventually may turn out to mean the transformation of the English nation into a Commonwealth of English peoples. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 568

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the standard Islamophobia-field narrative of unrestrained colonial violence; a nuance worth carrying forward.