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ziq wrote

natural environment: they planted invasive thirsty plants to drain all the wetlands, cut down all the forests to export the lumber (but much later replanted some of the forests), banned nomadic shepherds to allow the replanted forests to grow, then burned them down to kill guerillas and bandits that took to hiding in them, banned growing certain traditional crops and made everyone grow crops that were valuable to the british, then seized all the crops as taxes at harvest

society: made new laws and taxes (even higher than the debilitating taxes imposed by the previous colonial government), started courts to try people who broke those laws or didn't pay those taxes, built prisons, started a newspaper to normalize british propaganda, undertook widespread archeological looting but destroyed any archeological finds that they found undesirable, started a police force and only let one of the (minority) ethnic groups be part of it (a divide and conquer tactic), which turned all the other ethnic groups against them because they were constantly being arrested, fined and beat up by them (which caused decades of war and division that continues today), forced everyone to fight and die in their foreign wars, built huge military bases (that are still in operation) to attack other countries in the region from

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JayGrym wrote

Wow, so really everything changed. Makes me wonder how many species of fauna and flora were lost as a result of all that.

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