Lighter Skin = Better?

[Red Celt]

Canada still speaks French as well. But considering a massive population of the world does NOT speak English, I suggest you pick another indicator.

Some of Canada speaks French.

My point is/was, English is the world's lingua franca (and I love the irony of that statement). When 2 foreigners need a common tongue, that tongue is English.

For Britain, it was rather remarkable, for the small island nation where that language was born. And it isn't a polyglot language so much as it is an evolved language from several sources: Angles, Normans (who were Vikings, rather than true French) with Latin & Greek for more technical words. The last successful invasion was in 1066, so the polyglot claim is a lost one.

If you think that the British influence in North America was a marginal one, then you're not very well informed with your history... and you'd be wise to compare North America with South America, to see how Spanish/Portugese colonists did when creating their colonies, with their coup-ridden banana republics.

Frankly, the whole idea of comparing empires is a nonsense one. They were born at very different times in very different consequences.

And Rome wasn't a vast unchallenged empire. West of Athens, the northern Europeans (Germanic and Scots) were never under their full control. East of Athens, they largely had Alexander to thank while they took control of the Hellenic East Mediterranean.

The British Empire was stopped in its tracks by a thin little man in a loincloth... compare Gandhi's treatment with that of Vercingetorix. If you still think that Rome was a greater empire, then I'd suggest that blood-count is a poor measure of such comparisons... and of the people who value such things.