brooklyn99
Banned
Well, in this context, before the French, Algeria was a hive of Barbary Corsairs who for centuries raided Europe for slaves.
Which colonial power "improved" their colonies the most?
- Thread starter Sacer Bubonicus
- Start date
You certainly should. I think looking at the first 20-30 years after the post-colonial situation would be the best measurement.
Sigh
This again? The Roman economy was NOT, I repeat NOT based on slavery after the late republic. Slavery played a significant role in the labor market, to be sure, but it was far from the only source. Free labor was just as common during the Principate, and became even moreso after the Crisis of the Third Century. If the Roman economy was really based on plunder, slavery, and subsistence farming, how did the Empire maintain an army of 400,000-600,000 troops for centuries? How did it build all of those super impressive monuments? How did it have multiple cities with half a million people (Constantinople, Alexandria, Rome)? How is it that everyone, even in rural areas, had access to high quality pottery and textiles? In an economy based on slavery and subsistence, the Roman economy would've collapsed well before the third century, and they wouldn't have achieved nearly as much as they did.
But that doesn't answer what kind of society it was. So they were slave traders? Lots of people's were slave traders.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
This sounds like a thoughtful policy, and Denmark "went beyond mere rhetoric" in terms of making some diplomatic attempts to prevent the sale or secure guarantees or citizenship for the islanders. They gave in and took the buyout under threat of force, so they didn't go beyond mere diplomacy, so I'm not aware of what they did that ended up providing practical protection from US racial policies. Did they issue advisories on the most dangerous of the States to visit? Did they offer islanders the right to immigrate to Denmark or other Danish territories? In any case, I do not think that USA mainland style race-motivated lynchings became an issue in the Virgin Islands because, except for a thin veneer of officials, business people, and educators, there's no white community to demand/impose them, and ground level policing will have to be done by local black men at the street to street level.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Japanese are in the lowest scoring? No way.
Not saying the Japanese didn't do mean and an evil things. Not saying that the Japanese were especially great or competent administrators. Maybe the the places they colonized for long periods (like Korea, Taiwan, Micronesia), and shorter periods (China and Southeast Asia) had really higher than average resilience and human potential. But they are doing pretty good in comparison to ex-colonial world in general.
Taiwan was actually a model colony, where Japan tested out how to run a colony in general. Their treatment of the Taiwanese aborigines was undoubtedly terrible from the onset, but that doesnt explain why so many of their sons and grandsons (alongside Han) volunteered to fight for the Emperor in WWII. Even Korea was quite ok, though they did get hit by the worst aspects of Japan's assimilationist and wartime policies.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
@Alex Zetsu and @TRH
The resolution of your dispute is an easy solve.
Piracy is a bad thing, and when running amok can be a *very* bad thing - for its victims. So this was worse for Provencals in the south of France, and Corsicans.
It is not necessarily so bad - for its perpetrators, their market towns and their homeland. Certainly, in no way as bad as being brutally pacified, selectively ethnic cleansed from certain areas, and displaced or made subordinate to settler-colonizers. So this was worse for Algerians (who weren't French settlers)
It is absolutely correct that the states and many municipalities and many ship-owning, fighting, and merchant families of Algeria and the other Barbary states that got conquered by France did not have a "clean" moral record in their relations with Europe, especially southern Europe, having enslaved many of its people and pillaged coastal towns for centuries. Barbary pirate abuses were certainly enough to merit wars that European and American powers waged against them. Probably including "regime change" in case of repeat offenses. However, the Barbary piracy phenomenon was pretty well extinguished after Pan-European punitive bombardments in 1815. The French invasion/occupation of Algeria in 1830, 15 years later, probably exceeded anything that sporadic or isolated pirate threats from the region, could have required. And attempting to make Algeria France was a disproportionate response. (but still a better excuse for colonizing than most British, or anybody else's cross-oceanic colonizing). The level of measures the French (and Spanish) later took in invading, occupying, and pacifying Morocco might have gone beyond the costs of piracy. Perhaps too in the occupation of Tunisia, but maybe not, as its occupation, and especially its liberation struggle, appears to have been managed much less violently.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
This is all from the age of exploration, and settlement of the *Americas* point of view, though.
When you compare 19th century and 20th century British and French colonialism in *Asia* for example, your chosen model of Britain sending many or *enough* people and the French sending too few people gets flipped on its head. Comparing India and Indochina, a reason for both better postwar outcomes in India, and a less conflictual separation from the colonizing country and violent political history afterward that has been cited is that in India the British made sure to not send *too many* British people over and used native administrators, civil; servants, and elites in many roles, providing practice in all but the apex positions. By contrast, as part of jobs through colonialism program, the French sent "too many" people to Indochina reserving all but the very lowest rungs of colonial administration and related institutions for expat Frenchmen and leaving far too few opportunities for native educated Indochinese.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Great observation. I would argue that since independence in Malaysia, native Malays have recovered some benefits from this system by recovering control of the instruments of political coercion, affirmative action programs for Malays, the tax system and transfer payments. Malays keep political superiority but allow ethnic Chinese political participation. The Malay political class early on wanted to ensure there would be no chance of Chinese domination, by expelling majority Chinese Singapore from the federation. In Singapore, the ethnic Chinese have the leading political role, control of the coercive powers of the state, and the economy. But it is multi-ethnic, with representation of the Malay and South Asian populations. But no doubt, Singapore is a settler state while Malaysia is more a super-heavily immigrant influenced state.Goodness, starting that thread's pure arsonThough I don't really like the framing of conquest as "improving" a place or not, I thought I'd step in and ask consideration for a particular case : Chinese-European co-colonisation in the Nanyang.
It's a particular configuration that sprang up around the South China Sea, in "Dutch" Formosa, peninsular Malaya, Batavia, the Philippines, Singapore of course, and arguably Hongkong. What characterise it is a situation where a European power held de jure sovereignty and controled the means of coercion, while Chinese settlers and merchant moved in after the imposition of European control until they made up the bulk of the non-native situation and held most of the economy. Arguably, it was a kind of mutually beneficial arangement whence the Chinese supplied the workforce, regional connexions & wealth the Europeans couldn't import from back home, while the Europeans supplied the Chinese with the political protection the Imperial State couldn't/wouldn't supply them with outside of mainland China. There were hickups in that symbiosis, such as massacres of Chinese in Manilla, and Europeans wasted no occasion to flout their supposedly senior status in the "partnership".. And, well, to this day neither Europeans nor Chinese would acknowledge it was a partnership at all, even though it clearly was. And, of course, one primary usefulness of European muscle to Chinese settlers was getting the Malayan/Javan/Aboriginal owners of the land to bugger off.
Broadly speaking, this sheds light on some economic "success stories" of colonialism in Asia; within this thread, it is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it is an useful reminder that even "prosperous" colonialism e.g. in peninsular Malaya could well go hand in hand with routine violence, depossession and displacement for the (Malayan) natives; second, it's interesting that the political constellation re:the legacy of colonialism today doesn't even really allow this centuries-long cooperation to be even discussed.
Indonesia has Indonesians clearly in charge of coercion and politics, but still with a remaining Chinese business class in many economic sectors. It has been subjected to generational massacres but persists and bounces back to a degree. Taiwan is a settler state, with Austronesian aboriginals numerically overwhelmed but persisting.
This co-colonization concept is an interesting one. A parallel to it in Europe was probably the Polish szlachta and ashkenazic Jews. In much of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the politics and land-controlling szlachta nobility had a particular economic use for Jews in organizing existing land worked by west or East Slavic peasants into estates, or bringing steppeland into cultivation as part of estates. Emigration, pogroms, the Holocaust have undone a lot of the "colonization" for the bulk of the regions Jews and for the most eastern Polonophone residents.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
In comparative perspective Japanese treatment of Korea and governance of Korea was however bad as it was. There were certainly things that seem nasty and unfair to me as a non-Korean and non-Japanese. Things like the combination of forcing cultural assimilation but still treating the Koreans like they are never good enough. The assassination of Queen Min. Military rule, etc.
But good luck convincing the Koreans that in comparative perspective, the Japanese were competent, and left a decent educational, organizational or physical infrastructure, that the Japanese occupation wasn't the worst thing ever done to anyone in the world by the worst country ever. . For a very universally human reason- they didn't like it, and it happened to *them.*
British rule in India was NOT good for India in the slightest. It went from 23% of the world's GDP in the early modern period to 4% post indepencence. Some estimates say that over 100,000,000 people died avoidably from British policies. Poverty shot up under British rule. And the partition of India by the British is one of the reasons for the more extreme, radical Islam in Afghanistan today. It has also resulted in decades of conflict and competition between India and Pakistan.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Was this anything that sending *more* British administrators over to occupy civil service positions would have improved?
If that's not the point you're making, its beside the point.
Hard to say they left decent physical infrastructure when most of the infrastructure was destroyed in the Korean War, which occurred due to the Partition of Korea that in turned happened because Korea happened to be part of the Japanese Empire when they lost WWII.
Education-wise, Korea had a 22% literacy rate at independence, after 3 decades of Japanese rule, and rose to 80% by 1970, so clearly the increase in education attainment amongst Koreans was a post-independence phenomenon. In fact, according to Seung Cheol Oh,
Plus, the SKY universities (Korea's Ivy League) were also established prior to colonization (by royal decree and missionaries) and were only either co-opted by the Japanese or hampered by Japanese rule.
Organizational, well, all the big chaebols were established after independence. On the Japanese zaibatsu model, sure, but 1. that didn't require colonization for emulation and 2. the social, political, and economic price of having such massive monopolies can't be understated.
In terms of general economics, the Japanese didn't cultivate Korea's local economy or education except to help them extract more resources, same as all the other colonizers.
As per Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw:
There's also the issue that North Korea's cult of Kim seems to have borrowed heavily from Imperial Japan's veneration of the Emperor as a divine entity (such worship and deification was absent from Korean history and other communist countries, so it doesn't seem to have come from those influences) and Korean ethno-nationalistic chauvinism has its roots in Japanese assimilation policy (the term 'minjok' was coined over in Meiji Japan as 'minzoku' and Korean nationalists emphasized the differences between Koreans and the Japanese/Chinese to maintain their identity in the face of Japanese assimilation).
Institutionally, philosophically, and economically, Japan damaged Korea with little benefit after the fact, both since Japanese rule was inherently exploitative and built to exploit more than uplift and because the Korean War ravaged and impoverished the entire peninsula. South Korea's success came after Japanese rule and in spite of it, not because of it, while North Korea still languishes due to the geopolitical conditions that Japanese rule and defeat in WWII resulted in.
Independent Korea likely would've stayed neutral during the World Wars, as it had tried in every major conflict in the 1800s, and so would not have been partitioned and undergone a war that split the peninsula and all the families in it indefinitely.
Really, the only major contribution Japan made to modern Korean success was annihilating the old institutions (the last remnants of the caste system, the dominance of the landed gentry (yangban), the monarchy) so that it could start fresh. And, I suppose, the introduction of modern medicine, which helped increase the population growth rate, but did that really require all the other costs of colonial rule?
Were they the worst colonizer? Well, they weren't quite into population-decimating flavoured genocide as some of the European powers were, so perhaps they weren't the WORST. But saying they were competent, left things behind for independent Korea to benefit from, and the extent of their oppression was cultural and political (not even discussing the sex slavery, which is a common grievance lodged against Imperial Japan that you seem to have omitted) and so were good colonizers is far too generous in the face of what they actually did. At best, they were middle of the pack when it came to Korea. Which says more about the other colonial powers than it says about Japan, really.
My father-in-law was in the Takasago Volunteers, Taiwan aborigines recruited as scouts for the IJA in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia due to their familiarity with jungle terrain. He served in the Philippines, but he didn't like to talk about it (largely, I suspect, because the issue of "war crimes" would have arisen). My wife's tribe, the Amis, were comparatively well-treated by the Japanese (her brothers, sisters, and friends- people in their 50s-70s- all have Japanese 'use-names'). I think why they appreciated the Chinese Empire, the Japanese, and later the Kuomintang, is that they all pretty well put the boot to the local Han Chinese settlers.
I think this is a recurring pattern in settler colonies- natives appealing to the imperial power against the local settlers who are stealing their lands. Often the metropolitan government just wants to restrain the settlers; otherwise they have to pay for expensive wars against the natives. Of course, the settlers have their own political allies in the home country, who often stirred up support by invoking "massacres by savages of innocent women and children" to disguise their own predatory designs.
You can see this pattern today with people in the big cities generally sympathizing with indigenous peoples, while the inhabitant of, say, rural western states of the US, northern Canada, outback Australia, and eastern Taiwan- places where there are large native populations- grumbling about all these 'handouts' the central government is giving the native peoples.
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Not sure I agree here, many Indochinese colonies were notoriously under administered and Annam was a protectorate under the Emperor, with its administrators. So there was a base.
However, a lot of skilled administrators were pushed aside/emprisonned by the French in the 20's and 30's when they wanted more rights within the French empire, and more leeway in their territories (Cochinchine, Tonkin...). So you kick all the competent and "centrist" aside until all you got is the communist radicals
When that piracy facilitates the slave trade, it can get pretty iffy, to be fair.
When it comes to Japanese colonialism... TBH, it's just a speedrun of what the Europeans and their descendants did over the centuries.
You do know those estimates have been made up out of thin air by the same Indian Internet Nationalists who also made up out of thin air that the British Empire has stolen 'trillions of dollars in today’s money from India'?
For example this falsehood filled opinion column here: How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years
Look, I am not a British Empire apologist at all, I have even argued with them on the internet. However, I have concluded that the accusations against the British Empire made up by certain people are so absurd, so false that they make those British Empire apologists look like honest people closely connected to reality by comparison.