Wow. That's some disassociation with reality you have there... Firstly no British colony had any kind of elected self-government.
...loads of them did.
And before you say that was only the whites I would advise you read up on the history of the Indian Empire.
Secondly, war was endemic to the whole empire-building business.
Not nessesarily.
And once the empire was there the constant tribal wars were reduced greatly.
Meritocracy? Well yes, so long as you were from the British middle classes. And yes, I would include picking even the best of the best to rule over a foreign country as a very bad thing.
Not really no, have you never heard of Tata?
There are many other examples like that too.
The empire of course wasn't pefectly equal, it was the 19th century afterall, but it was much much better than what came before.
The British Empire existed to better the lives of its captive subjects? That opinion was naive even in the 19th century! The British state involved itself in the affairs of its colonial corporations for a share of the profits, not to regulate corporate affairs. What altruism did exist towards the colonies was almost entirely misplaced, consisting of people who thought the only way to civilise a negro was to wipe out his native religion, drive him off his ancestral lands, enforce middle class Victorian gender values onto his women (destroying communal economies that relied on delicately balanced division of labour between the sexes), et cetera, et cetera. The British Empire did as much harm when it was trying to do good as when it didn't care.
I'd direct you to read about the Indian mutiny and its after effects.
Britain was fundamentally at the core a progressive democracy.
Just look at all the unrest today over American and British involvment in the middle east; we're just there to steal the oil, we don't care about the people, etc.... Its a major political issue.
In the 19th century it was much the same. Maybe a bit less due to the media being less well developed and maybe a bit more due to it being the progressive age. Certainly comparable.
I refer you to the works of
Eduardo Galeano, who identified two types of rail network, the one type is designed to connect major population centres, to allow the easy transport of people, and a second type designed to be extractive, to go from the mines and the forests straight to the ports, bypassing completely the places where people actually live. I'll give you
one guess which type of railway system the British built for theirselves, and which type they built for their colonies.
...sorry to tell you to read something again but: the history of railways.
The first major steam railway in the world was that of George Stephenson. What was its purpose? To help the people of London go on holiday to Brighton? No...to connect those two major population centres of Darlington and Stockton. Its initial purpose was entirely just to get Durham's coal to the coast so it could be sold and shipped away.
And anyway, the railways generally weren't built by the governments but by private companies.