mryounggun
OG
I hear what you're saying, but you have to be careful about examples like that. "Christians civilizing savages" was the narrative given to justify actions in the Americas, but was never really the truth. It's just the story that was told. Columbus wasn't sent to the Americas to civilize the Natives. He was sent to find gold and riches to help Spain maintain supremacy.
There is a difference between building an empire where all the conquered territories have rights and reap the benefits of the empire and something like the British Empire where all the conquered territories were basically just fodder to feed the conqueror.
It is a tricky thing for sure, but again, history is full of successful empires that thrived for hundreds of years.
Ok. Let's use GK and the Mongol conquest as an example. All the things you mentioned in the underlined is present there. Every civilization that was conquered by GK and absorbed into the Mongol empire benefitted from them building roads, and having a single, unified currency, religious reforms where they wanted them and maintaining their own religion where the didn't want reform, etc, etc, etc. They reaped the benefits of the Mongol empire. But if we were to ask them if they would rather go back to how things were before GK came and they get back all the people who were massacred to make that new life possible...I think they'd choose to have their people back.
Whatever though. This is prolly a conversation that's too in-depth for a forum.
Salute.