Did some reading last night, you guys. It turns out British History was much more than Harry Potter, rock music and romanticized Dickens scenes. Here are five British achievements that somehow missed the Opening Ceremony smorgasbord.

Opium Wars: Britain wanted to trade with China. China had no particular interest in British goods. How did the British solve this conundrum? Producing opium in India and selling it to Chinese drug dealers. When Chinese officials, sensing the problem of growing addiction, sought to crack down on the trade, the British government sent in the expeditionary forces and gun boats. The resulting Treaty of Nanjing forced open five trading ports, fixed tariffs, ceded Hong Kong, extracted reparations and gave Britons the right of extraterritoriality.

Concentration Camps: Not a German innovation. Facing a sustained guerrilla campaign during the Second Boer War, the British introduced a “scorched earth” policy, razing farms and homesteads to the ground to deny sustenance to the guerrilla campaign. The men were sent off as POWs. The women and children were rounded up in poorly supplied camps. Around 28,000 Boers, 85 percent of them children, died of starvation and disease.

Maxim Gun: “Whatever happens we have got/the Maxim gun and they have not.”The conquest of Africa was completed with British pluck, and the ability to mow down a frontal assault with a self-powered machine gun that used its own recoil effect to reload. Best example is the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Twenty-six thousand British, Sudanese and Egyptian soldiers took the field against 40,000 Mahdist warriors. Mahdist casualties? 10,000 killed and 13,000 wounded. British casualties? 47 killed and 382 wounded.

The Battle of the Somme: Upper crust British generals in 1916 still presumed the Western Front was a pesky prelude to the heroic cavalry charge that would end World War I in July 1916. They just needed a breakthrough. The first day of the sustained offensive, with 60,000 casualties, was the bloodiest day in the British Army’s history. It kept going until November resulting in more than 1 million casualties on both sides. Total territory gained? Six miles. Never underestimate man’s stupidity.

Eugenics: British scientist Sir Francis Galton introduced the concept of Eugenics in the late 19th Century. Basically, if traits were inherited, social engineering through selective breeding, as in animals, could promote desirable traits and diminish undesirable traits. This led to horrifying treatment of people with physical and mental disabilities and had even more disastrous consequences when eventually applied, by the Nazis and others, to race.

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