Like introducing opium use into China (from Turkey and Afghanistan) because the country did not need to buy anything Britain had to sell.

I hesitate to get into the subject of European colonialism, it was all over half a century ago, and it really can't be blamed any more for the problems of the third world except in the most indirect way. But no one should think it was a benign institution, either. The Europeans did not only occupy and enslave primitives and tribal societies, they also occupied and exploited ancient and sophisticated civilizations and cultures such as China, India, Arabia, and the civilzations of the New World. They tried it with Japan too, but they escaped that fate by becoming just like the Europeans. They were pretty good at it too.

The motivation was at first sheer theft, but it soon became more sophisticated as the West went after labor, markets and raw materials. The English experience in India is a good example. They found a society perfectly capable of clothing itself, and they took its fiber, shipped it to England where it could be woven into cloth by English industrial workers, and then shipped it back to India again to sell it to the natives, causing massive unemployment in the process. They even had the audacity to tell India, a country surrounded by the sea, that it had to buy its salt from Britain.

THe funny thing about it is that it wasn't even good business. The cost of Empire, both in administration and the militaries needed to secure it, far outweighed the mercantilistic benefits. The British Empire was not only supported on the backs of Indian agricultural serfs, but English Industrial workers as well as the taxpayers of both colony and metropole. After World War II, they couldn't cook the books any longer, Europe couldn't even afford to finance their own little adventure at Suez, the last gasp of the Empire.

As for the humanity of colonialsim, it was always someone else's colonies which were evil. The French thought the English were barbarians (read Jules Verne), the English thought the Spanish were cruel (read Charles Darwin), and no one even knew what the Dutch were doing in Indonesia, or the Portuguese in Brazil. It was always the other guy. The US got into the game late, and it was a lot more decent than the Europeans (I've talked to Filipinos, Cubans and Puerto Ricans who do not remember the US as particularly harsh masters, we were certainly better than the Spaniards), but we made up for it in economic imperialism in Central America and what we did to Mexico militarily and with brutally unfair treaties and annexations.

Yeah, it wasn't all bagpipes and Gunga Din on the frontier.