Were there any positives to European Colonialism?

European imperialism created the modern world

Question: Were there any positives to European Colonialism?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, there are positives to European colonialism
Argument‹2 of 2: European imperialism created the modern world

Empires were vital in spreading global norms which allow for our modern economy and way of life.

The argument

This position is drawn from the work of the historian Niall Ferguson, who argues that European, and particularly British, colonialism has created the modern world in which we live. In his numerous books and TV programmes Ferguson details what the British Empire spread: Protestant Christianity, capitalism, "Western norms of law, order, and government," and the English language. The claim is not that these were transmitted benevolently, but that their transmission was a consequence of empire, and that the world which followed was organised around them. The evidence offered for the scale of that inheritance is the present distribution of those institutions. Almost the entire world has embraced democracy and free trade, both ideas spread by European colonial regimes, and English has become a global lingua franca. On this reading these are not parallel developments that would have arrived anyway, but the legacy of the imperial networks along which law, commerce and language travelled. The institutions most states now run on, and the language in which most international business is conducted, reached their present reach by those routes. The argument's most contested step concerns coercion. Imperialism, Ferguson argues, was a vital step both in allowing these ideas to flourish and in ending more coercive forms of labour like the slave trade, so the account he gives includes an abolition alongside the conquests. The overall claim is causal rather than moral: imperialism was the midwife to the birth of the modern world, the mechanism by which a set of ideas confined to one part of Europe became the common furniture of global politics and economics. Those who hold this view therefore answer the question in the affirmative, maintaining that whatever else European colonialism did, it produced effects the modern world continues to depend on.

Premises

[P1]The historian Niall Ferguson argues that European, and especially British, colonialism spread capitalism, Western norms of law and government, and the English language across the world. [P2] Ideas now embraced almost everywhere — democracy, free trade and English as a lingua franca — were disseminated by colonial regimes. [P3] Imperialism was, on this view, a vital step in allowing these ideas to flourish and in ending more coercive systems such as the slave trade. [C] Therefore, there were positives to European colonialism, which helped create the modern world.

Counter-arguments

This argument really depends on how one sees the modern world, and whether its position is positive or negative. It is also very Eurocentric. Global trade was not a European invention.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] These are not universal values.