Upon hearing about atrocities during the First War of Indian Independence, novelist Charles Dickens reportedly urged that Indians be ‘exterminate[d]’ and ‘raze[d]… off the face of the earth’ (hat tip, indianoguy):

“I wish I were a commander in chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental Race with amazement… I should do my utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested… with… merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth“… [Link]

It is not often that a great novelist recommends genocide… [Link]

Shock and amazement? The 1857 uprising led to the murder of women and children after the siege of Kanpur:It is not often that a great novelist recommends genocide

… there were around 200 [British] women and children… a prostitute… put the captives to grinding corn for chapatis… an order was given to kill the women and children… But [some rebels] refused to obey the order… [The prostitute’s lover] hired some butchers, who murdered the surviving women and children with cleavers… small children… were… buried alive in a heap of dead corpses… [Link]

The British were no less brutal, though the stories Dickens may have heard were exaggerated:

… the barbarism and atrocities carried out by the British army went unreported… [A British solder] recorded witnessing 130 [Indian] men hanged from a giant banyan tree… [The British media] ran bogus horror stories, which cast the rebels as barbarians: “It was widely reported that British women had been cooked alive, forced to eat their children, horribly mutilated with noses and ears cut off and eyes put out, and stripped naked and publicly raped. These stories were untrue…”

… the Chartist and socialist Ernest Jones… wrote of Britain, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries…” [Link]

Funny the things you never discuss in English or history class.