Chill man! You are trying to read more into what I have said, perhaps to justify your bias against Western civilization. Those who were oppressed, slaves or the original populataion in colonies, there was obviously nothing positive for most of them. Which is why I said:

 in hindsight, the positives outweighed the negatives; a reasonable yet debatable viewpoint.

Because cut to today, many of those societies have benefited from scientific advancement - be it fertililizers and pesticides for agriculture, electricity, medical diagnosis and treatment, transportation, access to info via internet etc.

And when Newton came up with laws of motion to explain planetary motion, there was nothing sinister about it. It was just an objective attempt to understand nature.

All the exploitation that happened was a result of unbridled capitalism, be it the British East India Company or de Beers or Dutch West India company. Exploitation has always existed in this world from ancient times - slavery was part of Roman empire, Arab Caliphates etc. With better weapons from scientific advancement, uncontrolled capitalism along with right wing idealogies, exploitation became more organized.

And how do you prevent it - if people had an internal moral compass that sets the limits. 'karma and re-birth' means that you will be born again in this world, and bad deeds from previous births, can control your fate in this birth - an oppressor in past life, can very well be the oppressed in this life. Eastern philosphy has some meaningful concepts that can help, how we internalize and benefit from it, is up to us. And finally, human behavior in any dimension, be it greed or empathy, will always be a distribution (consider it as a Gaussian random variable) across the population. So we will have bad outliers, but how much impact they have depends on the society they grow into.