First of all Hungary wasnt a sovereign country between 1526 and 1920. Its ironic when a british man criticizes any other country of screwing up other parts of the world.
And the world is better for the Pax Britannica than it would have been without it as the United Kingdom did more to create the world order we see today than any other country.
We were the leading advocate of the rule of law and liberty in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries - we exported them to our dominions across the world and embedded them into the cultures of Canada, Australia and the United States amongst other countries. It was Britain's power in the early 19th century that prevented Napoleon from accessing the Americas and it was primarily Britain that defeated Germany in the First World War - it was our navy that blockaded their ports and it was our money that financed the western front - Britain outspent the commonwealth, France, Belgium and Italy combined in that war. This is without mentioning our contribution to the Second World War - without Britain's actions over that 250 year period we would not see the likes of international tranquility and democracy spread across the world today.
We were responsible for the basis of international trade, it was our navy that defended the world's shipping lanes and guaranteed the freedom of the seas. We were the biggest advocates of international trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries which is what got it going on a significant scale and we were responsible for the governing of those seas and trade and thus we kickstarted a little known idea as international law.
This is without going into what we did in individual countries under our domain - the dominions are all amongst the wealthiest and most responsible nations in the world, no other country has ever ran colonies in such a way where as a consequence 400 million people live in as much splender today in them as in the United Kingdom itself, you only have to look at the flagship colonies of the former French Empire to see that one for yourself.
With regard to the Empire it was run in as utilitarian a fashion as an empire can be, up until the 1860s most of the empire was run by trading companies until the British Government took them over as they were concerned with their wellbeing. As such the British state never built such an empire and just inherited it, when they did take it over the acceleration of responsibility to the dominions kicked in whilst Britain started looking at offloading the rest. At the zenith of the empire in its scope and scale in the twenties was when we self-induced the end of empire with the imperial conferences and later the Statute of Westminster which meant by 1945 we were already well on the way to ended it. Whilst the French, the Portuguese and the Dutch were fighting losing battles to keep their empires - see Vietnam, Angola and Algeria, Britain gave up whole swathes of Africa and the Indian sub-continent by signing a treaty and running a flag up a pole.
Though as alluded to, perhaps the greatest British achievement on the world stage was the shaping and crafting of the United States. We built colonies in North America that were so proud of British ideals of the day that they thought Britain wasn't doing a good job of working by them. As such we were instrumental in creating a superpower in our own image which is why the Pax Americana so seemlessly took over from the Pax Britannica - it essentially is just an extension of it.
Britain's history in the era is most certainly not black or white, it is extremely complex but one thing for certain is that the world is far better off as a consequence of the Pax Britannica than if it had been without it.
