@Lazarou @skinnylatte It's understandable. History, as I was taught it in a good school in England:

The stone age happened. Then a few other ages involving metals, which were a bit better. No one had a flag and so they probably didn't matter. forging Iron was probably invented in Britain because who else would be clever enough?

The Romans invaded Britain. They invented plumbing and were generally awesome. Pay no attention to the slaves or the fact that it was often worse to be plebian than a slave: in theory the punishment for killing a plebian was worse than for killing a slave, but who would enforce it? The slave owner at least was rich enough to get some form of justice (killing your own slave was fine, of course). The good ones stayed and became British.

Some time passed, and Britain was ruled by baddies. William the Bastard, uh, sorry, Conqueror came along and defeated them. We got an amazing new ruling class of Normans. Anyone who can't speak French is a peasant and not worth paying attention to. For some reason, Alfred the Great was omitted.

And then the Tudors and Stewarts happened. There were some things in between William and Henry VIII (presumably six Henrys, if nothing else) but they weren't important. There were some exciting wars, but the important thing is that we're better than everyone else. Mostly because of Queen Elizabeth I, who worked out that taxing people who didn't go to church made more money than burning people who went to the wrong church. Oh, and then we discovered most of the world and put flags on it. It's ours now, sorry. Oh, and Shakespeare demonstrated that we're better culturally than everyone else, it isn't just that our navy was better.

Did I mention we beat the Spanish? They thought they had a better navy, but we set fire to them. By being awesome. And the best at everything. Including bowling, apparently, which was important for some reason.

Then, shortly after that, we demonstrated that we were the best democracy in the world by chopping the head of the King. It turns out that Puritan fundamentalists weren't actually the best rulers, so we also chopped the head off our non-royal dictator and put control of the country back where it belonged: with the aristocracy.

Then the French chopped the heads of their monarchs too, but because they're less good than us they got carried away and their revolution was just not really cricket, so we had to put them in their place. We single-handedly defeated Napoleon (okay, some Russians were there too, but they mostly ran away and let the winter kill off his soldiers). We didn't do it quite right the first time, so we had to properly defeat him again at Waterloo, but the important thing is that Trafalgar and Waterloo are when we showed the French we were just better than them, repeatedly. We have squares and things named after the battles, so they must have been good!

Around this time, we revolutionised agriculture and pretty much everything else too. We invented all technology.

After that, nothing bad happened for about a hundred years. We definitely didn't exploit India or profit hugely from the slave trade. Oh, and you probably imagined the opium wars (and we definitely weren't the drug pushers, if you did hear something about that). Pay no attention to the Anglo-Afghan war[1], for example.

But then the Germans started causing problems. They didn't have an empire, because they were less good than us, but they wanted one because they were bad people. So we had to defeat them. Some Americans turned up at the end of the war to take credit, but it was mostly us. Definitely not the ANZACs or any Indians, they weren't involved at all.

And then the Germans did it again! Apparently it was slightly our fault for the Treaty of Versailles that helped Hitler come to power, but it has a French name, so it's probably the fault of the French (who, once again, needed us to come and rescue them and should be grateful today). Oh, and there was a depression in the middle, but that wasn't our fault (and we can blame that for Hitler as well, so the second world war was definitely not our fault!). So then we had to defeat them again! This time because our air force and navy are better than everyone else's. Our army was pretty good too. Some Russians and Americans helped out a bit but it was mostly us. Oh, and we invented computers as a side project while winning the war. Everything in the rest of the 20th century is basically built on stuff we did because we're that awesome.

With this kind of history teaching, it's understandable why someone might have a somewhat rosy view of English history and a slightly skewed perception of international relations.

[1] Okay, this is the one that makes me honestly think history might be entirely made up. On our side, the ruler was Queen The Winner, their side was led by King The Greatest. You'd never get away with that in a novel.