What we support and defend

[Dayuhan]

They were much more involved in places with natural riches and decent possibilities for their transportation.

I actually wonder how profitable the Empire was to the British exchequer. I suspect that much of the profit accrued to private business, while the exchequer carried much of the cost needed to maintain the conditions that were conducive to that business. A rather good deal for the businessmen, of course. It would be interesting to see actual figures on how much was earned from the whole system on the public and private sides, both with and without the opium trade, an enormously profitable enterprise that would tend to skew the overall picture. Has to be remembered as well that the British working class was practically a colonized populace in its own right for much of the imperial period. Colonies provided cheap raw materials and extensive markets; a thoroughly oppressed low-cost manufacturing labor force kept costs down on the home front. Profitable, certainly, but in no sense replicable today... though the Chinese might be in the process of trying!

One does have to wonder about the good faith of empires in general given how many of them stood on principle rather than renegotiate the status quo.

I think there was often a quite acute sense of being heavily outnumbered, and a belief that any sign of "weakness" or willingness to negotiate might wake the natives up, with awful consequences. Of course the awful consequences arrived anyway. If you read the literature of the day, there was often a great deal of tension between home-front reformers who thought conditions needed to change to avoid revolution (or for humanitarian reasons) and those who saw the "reformers" as unrealistic faint-hearted do-gooders and believed that any change in the system (or their privileges) would be giving the wogs the inch that would lead them to take a mile.

What would it have cost the British Empire to have really and truly extended political enfranchisement to the Founding Fathers? What would it have cost the French to have extended libert, galit, and fraternit worth calling such to the Arab inhabitants of Algeria?

The British Empire in America dealt with a quite unique situation in that those who became rebellious were the colonists, rather than the colonized. Doesn't really compare well to situations in which an empire dealt with a colonized population.