I should also add that the Brits took up the "only fight the weak" policy of France during their imperial period, when natives attacking with sharpened fruit were more their speed. This of course was usually after they let corporations, like Cecil Rhodes' DeBeers or the East India Company, do most of the slaughtering and land-stealing first. (The first use of Maxim guns, the first true military machine guns and fearsome, savage weapons they were, was not by the British military, but by Cecil Rhodes' own men against the Matabele in what became Rhodesia, and is now Zimbabwe.)