The UK took the best of everything it encountered, and added it to it’s own, like the Borg.

The Empire was built from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, and the +15 year head start the British got over the rest of the world. The coupling of massive domestic economic growth with an international system of spoils and conquest lead to the Age of Sail and the gilded era for Britain, not an adherence to objective, rational facts and ideas.

The advantage of developing earlier lead to much of the leading research, science and practices coming from Britain, but they certainly had enough hubris to ignore better ideas that weren’t their own