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I want to start a discussion here on a historical subject I've never been able to get a decent answer on anywhere else. The question is:
What is going on with how colonialism worked in its heyday versus how difficult it seems to be to conquer and control other countries nowadays?
Back in the heyday, tiny little England controlled something like a quarter of the world, off and on during various periods, including such areas as all of India, most of the Middle East, the original American 13 colonies, Canada, Australia, sometimes hunks of China, various large hunks of Africa, etc. The somewhat larger France controlled other hunks of North America, a bunch of Caribbean islands, large chunks of Africa, and the Middle East, etc. Even tinier Belgium, with a modern-day population of only 11 million, had some pretty big colonies in Africa that they controlled. At the time, they (mostly) seemed to have little trouble controlling these colonies for centuries, sometimes with mostly peaceful means and sometimes with quite brutal violence.
Meanwhile nowadays, mighty continent-striding America can barely keep Iraq and Afghanistan under control for a decade or two. Russia had little better luck in Afghanistan and mostly hasn't done too well in controlling areas other than tiny regions on their borders already at least partially populated with Russians. China doesn't seem to be doing much better. All of the former colonial superpowers can now barely dream of controlling a single hostile city overseas. The British stretched themselves to the limit trying to take the Falklands back, and managed to hold I think it was a city or a small region in Iraq with a lot of help from America. I think France intervened briefly in Mali a decade or so ago, with only limited success.
So ahem, what the hell happened? How did it go from super-easy to super-hard to control a foreign country on the other side of an ocean? Questions about this in Reddit history subs seem to generate mostly uhhs and grunts and vague excuses. I wonder if anyone in here, with mostly more open discussion on tougher topics has any interesting thoughts on the subject?
Once one colonizes a region the colonized learn from the colonizers.
In addition most areas colonized by europeans did not have strong national identities. Thus groups could be played off each other. After colonization national identities arose.
More over most European colonization was motivated by securing trade at the expense of other european powers....not motivated by actual colonization. So many colonies were not managed by direct rule.
The point is that after "colonization" the colonized were empowered to assert thier own autonomy based on the colonizers own nationalistic logic.
Greatest example U.S.A.
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What were they faced with today as opposed to three hundred years ago?
A blunt point is that while the colonized parts of the world were not devoid of people, much of the parts that were colonized first and fastest were devoid of strong governments. The Americas endured a nigh-apocalyptic plague of new world diseases after Cortez brought them over, crippling much of the western hemisphere. Sub-saharan africa has a variety of 'it is hard to build major civilization' here factors- from river distribution to tropic diseases to rainfall inconsistency. Asia certainly had more established governments- but these were also the last to fall vis-a-vis the 'weaker' areas. Later colonization periods of Asia were about breaking apart the Chinese tributary system, and even in the middle of the colonial era a large part of colonization was playing local powers off each other for the outsider's interest. IE, a disunited political resistance, many of which would only adopt nationalistic collective identities later.
But the means of resistance also changed. Cortez, who had advanced (for the era) meta armor and guns, was leading a rebellion against a state with arrows and bludgeons. European guns and armor were often facing natives with arrows and less armor, who could only hope to gets guns... from the Europeans. By comparison, in the 2000s Iraq, Americans were facing routine use explosives that once could have been used to siege castles walls, small arms that could easily pierce the armors of Cortez's age, rocket-propelled grenades that would eviscerate the sort of mass-disciplined formations of the colonizer eras, which themselves were better than less-massed, less-disciplined formations of the less-organized governments.
The single biggest point of change, aside from the change in ideas as nationalist-independence movements began to spread in the face of European weakness after WW1, was the rise of the Soviet Union, and it's flood of support for nationalist-rebel communist groups. In colonized parts of the globes, nationalist movements and communist movements had significant overlap in opposing colonial empires. With the Soviet Union being a functionally untouchable, peer technological base, the colonial empires weren't facing tribal confederations with worse weapons and no industrial base- they were facing groups with access to contemporary-quality weapon systems and par with conventional military weapons. The Soviets were far from alone in this, of course, but once all the major powers are providing 'modern' weapons, the capabilities of any resistance group go up significantly.
While the Soviet era weapons are now considered 'old' by contemporary standards, that just means 'not as capable,' not 'incapable.' An RPG-7 can still blow up a lightly armored vehicle, or a modern helicopter, if it hits. A heavy machine gun needs serious armor to resist, and that sort of protection is uneconomical to place everywhere. 'Old' doesn't mean 'won't kill you,' but the colonial era's ability to conquer and hold key areas was predicated on their ability to not-be-killed at economical rates that made colonization profitable.
Also, huge stretches of colonized territory, compared to today, were devoid of people. Population of Egypt in around 1800, when Napoleon was romping around there, was around 4 million, and maybe 12 million when the British made a protectorate around WW1; it's now over 100 million. Entire Africa had 140 million people in 1900 and ten times that now.
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An overview of moldbug's views on this- from cromer to romer and back again, how to occupy and govern a foreign country, matthew yglesias: anatomy of an intellectual crackhead.
Interestingly enough, I went to archive.org to look up that first link given that the post felt much more uh.... tame than I remembered. And sure enough, I came up with this. Of course that is applied to the entire blog, not just that specific post. Just funny is all, given that in this case it's actually helping out Moldbug lol. I wonder if this has to do with Taylor Lor*nz? Feels strange. I've heard of things being excluded, but this is the first time it's actually effected me.
this is the guy maintaining unqualified-reservations.org, and he has edited some of the articles to remove ""misinterpreted"" passages in the interest of 'helping' moldbug.
However - unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com:80 is still up on archive.org with the original posts + comments
apparently he was the one who got them excluded. https://twitter.com/moldbug_ebooks/status/1570816842679357440 which is ... very ... strange
"You are asking me to highlight the exact passages I just said were being disparagingly quoted out of context. This means you are either naïve or engaging in bad faith. And now you’ve escalated to insults, so I respectfully decline to engage further."
snappy quote...
I've been reading adulterated Moldbug for years?! Thanks for telling us, that's really irritating.
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Don't think "small" in modern population size or modern area of country, think population share at the time when the events happened. In 19th century, Africa was less populated than Europe and was growing at slower rate.
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The answer is the how.
If 19th century Britain had been in charge of the Afghanistan war, they would have simply cut a deal with the taliban to let them govern themselves in exchange for tribute after however many battles were necessary(and coalition forces in Afghanistan won nearly all their battles against the taliban), and not worried about the taliban’s policies on women in school. Propping up unpopular puppet governments isn’t how you control territory when they’re that unpopular.
Russia in Chechnya and Syria won in the end- with lots of bloodshed, sure, but the British raj didn’t have clean hands, let’s not kid ourselves- because it allied itself with local factions that had some meaningful support, gave them a free hand on domestic policy in exchange for whatever concessions they wanted, and then won their battles for them. This is more or less what Britain did in India and Africa, and like Russia it didn’t do any house to house fighting- if the local allies couldn’t control a city after the opposing field army had been destroyed, they simply wrecked the city and didn’t worry about civilian casualties.
Isn't this pretty much what Bush actually did though? As I recall, the initial demand was, hand over Bin Laden and other Al Quada bigwigs, or we invade. And we then mostly sent the Northern Alliance that already existed some weapons, advisers, and air support. Seems pretty much like what any colonialist would have done to start. I wonder if the real mistake was trying to control it afterwards. I'm not sure what 19th century Britain would have done after they had run the Taliban out.
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Russia would've won if either place was turning a profit.
Perhaps "we pay you a billion dollars every year and you make sure no people from your republic try to explode" is a better deal than building and maintaining a wall around Chechnya (or at least the part south of the Sunzha), but the same amount of money is spent on Yakutia, which is the size of two Alaskas and full of literal gold and diamonds which Russia can and does mine. Chechnya is 250 times smaller and not even full of sheep.
The British empire didn’t turn a profit anywhere except India, either, and Russia gets plenty of benefit out of pacifying Chechnya.
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I'm going to try and synthesize a lot of points that others have brought up and also add my own analysis.
By 'colonialism' I assume you're referring to style of so-called 'exploitative colonialism' of Africa and Asia during the 19th century, I think a poor name that betrays the ideological perspective the dominates the analysis of colonialism today. I think the style of 'settler colonialism' of the Americas etc. are not possible today for more fairly obvious reasons.
I do think many of the below comments are correct that nationalism has played a significant role in making colonialism extremely difficult to enforce in the present day. In the past, there was not a huge amount of difference whether you paid taxes to or have allegiance to a 'local' lord or king, or a foreign lord or king. For example in India, for the Rajas who existed British rule, pragmatically there was not much difference between allegiance to a 'local' Islamic Persianised ruler (Mughals) or to the British. Indeed, many Rajas willingly switched allegiance to the British, which they saw as preferable. By and large, colonial rule was legitimate - the colonial powers couldn't have governed such large amounts of land with such little Western manpower otherwise. This changed with the development of a national identity in the colonial states, which ironically is a Western import. Anti-colonialism is ironically a Western invention. What you see consistently during the decolonisation period was Western educated local elites picking up Western political philosophy (liberalism and socialism too) often during their travels and education in the West, and using that as a basis for decolonisation and nationalism. It's the case for figures like Kwame Nkrumah, Obafemi Awolowo, even Gandhi. Once nationalism took hold in colonial regions, it became socially and politically untenable for a militant minority of the local population to be administered by a group deemed not part of the new national identity (anti-colonial movements usually did not have majority support), regardless of any material benefits. Indeed, many of these countries collapsed immediately after decolonisation. A matter of national pride as it were. This is really no different to the Springtime of Nations, where Italians, Czechs, Hungarians opposed Austrian rule (no matter how nominal), Poles under German rule etc.
Another major factor is that there is just no political will to do colonialism in modern societies. A major motivating factor behind the 19th Century colonialism was the Civilising Mission. While this is often the subject of contemporary revisionism like the term 'exploitative colonialism', there was a strong altruistic motivation to European colonialism. The 19th Century was a period of great intellectual and economic progress, and many Europeans strongly believed they had a moral, often religious imperative to bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia. Again, their motivations were primarily altruistic, whether you think those motivations have merit or where legitimate is up to the reader. The reality is that with a handful of exceptions, colonialism was actually incredibly expensive for European powers and largely was a net deficit for the coloniser, not a benefit, mostly motivated by colonial prestige and the moral imperative of civilising. Building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and a functioning bureaucracy all from scratch isn't exactly cheap. Otto von Bismark was famously anti-colonial, not out of any compassion for would-be colonised people, but rather he saw it as a significant waste of resources that could be spent on strengthening Germany. Germany would eventually reluctantly join the colonial race anyway due to international peer pressure and prestige. This ties into my own personal theory for why I think decolonisation took hold in not just the colonial states themselves, but also in the Western academia and elite in the mid-20th Century - postwar Europe had been devastated by WW2 and could not afford to maintain its colonies, but needed a moral justification to abandon the colonies, if at least to save face. The decolonial movement was that justification - Western elites had a genuine motivation to promote or at least passively accept decolonisation to absolve themselves of any responsibility they may have had to colonial states and people they governed. Though, this may have come back to bite them decades later, giving fuel to what would one day become the contemporary critical social justice movement and anti-Western sentiment in academia more generally. Kind of like the CIA funding the Mujahideen.
As other comments have also mentioned, contemporary Western states just don't do colonialism correctly, in large part caused by ideological and political concerns. To use the common America and Afghanistan (or Iraq) example, the 'correct' or functional way to do colonialism is to copy what the British did, ally with local elites, prop them up, arm them, and help them destroy their enemies, but otherwise keep local governance structures intact (the British were more than happy for local allied chiefs, shieks or rajas to govern their own territory as long as they kept to certain conditions. This is not what the Americans did or tried to do - instead, they tried to completely supplant local government structures by installing a completely foreign, Western style liberal democracy in those states that has no legitimacy and collapses under its own weight. Part of the reason for this is that America is so narcissistic that it thinks that remaking the world into America-style liberal democracies ("spreading democracy/freedom") is just the Greatest Thing Ever, but also because functional British style colonialism would never fly in the ideological waters the West is currently in - human rights, self determination, colonialism creating 'evil' hierarchies and so on. So the Americans have to try and do 'non-colonial colonialism' which obviously doesn't work.
Another thing to consider is that 21st century societies simply don't operate in the same way a 19th century society does, and we shouldn't expect contemporary colonialism to resemble previous colonialism. Obviously, this brings in the neo-colonialism debate. To simplify greatly, modern service economies and financial systems and multinational corporations may have made old boots-on-the-ground colonialism redundant. Why do you need to literally, physically control the governance of states in Africa when you can achieve the same effect from a distance with IMF loans? And it's not just the West - what China is doing could also be called neo-colonialism as well, least of all with the Belt and Road Initiative, where China will indebt half of Africa to China and basically have control of all their finances.
I'm not convinced by the (military) technology arguments put forward by many of the other commenters here. There are several reasons for this. First, the vast majority of European colonialism in the 19th century was not done through military conquest, but primarily through diplomatic means and gaining the allegiance of local elites. This is not to say there was no war, but there was very little compared to the scale we're talking about. You can perhaps make an argument that there was still a lot of indirect military conquest as Western powers would arm and fund elites favorable to them who would then conquer their rivals, but this is both indirect, and negates a lot of the apparent technological advantage by using an intermediary. Secondly, many of the colonised states weren't actually that far behind the Europeans in military technology. India in particular was home to the 'Gunpowder Empire' of the Mughals who were very familiar with advanced firearms long before Crown rule in India. The British defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan war is another good example of this. Third, even when the Europeans had a clear military technology advantage, it still wasn't a clearly decisive factor. The clearest example of this was the Anglo-Zulu War, where the Zulus nearly beat the British despite only having mostly iron-age technology. Fourth, it's not clear to me that the technological disparity between, for example, the British Empire and Iraq in 19th century is larger than it is between the USA and Iraq today. The Americans have a level of military sophistication that is miles ahead of anyone in the Global South. The Americans steamrolled Saddam's forces in 2003. But in my opinion, colonialism was never really a question of military might or technology, but of governance and legitimacy. This is not to say military technology provided no edge for the Europeans, but I think it is generally overstated. Which leads me to my next point:
I might be convinced that technological superiority might be a reason for 19th century colonial success if the technological superiority being described was social, political and economic technology, rather than military technology. Simply put, the Europeans were generally far better administrators, in many cases building a functioning, large-scale administrative system where previously there had only been anarchic tribal and ethnic conflict. The Europeans brought with them engineering, medicine, rule of law and so on, which did wonders for their legitimacy. This gap in social/economic technology between the Europeans and colonial states in the 19th century is still probably larger than the Europeans and even the most dysfunctional post-colonial state (e.g. Somalia) today, though I might be convinced otherwise.
To conclude, I want to link to the article the Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley, which I have previously posted on /r/theMotte, rebuts much of the anti-colonialist literature. While not explicitly about the topic at hand, its arguments are highly relevant.
What bothers me some about this is what seems to me like contradictions. Was the key to colonialism leaving the locals alone as long as they paid up ("otherwise keep local governance structures intact"), or actively trying to change their values ("bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia")?
Are we saying the Right Way to do Afghanistan would have been to let 'em keep their women in burquas and girls' schools closed and other such things, just pay us some taxes and give up any international terrorists who particularly annoy us? I guess I could buy that, though I'm not sure it's what 19th century Britain would do. (Also, 19th century Britain did fight Afghanistan, though I haven't read much on why and how it went)
I could see Iraq as being a "Civilising Mission" thing - the word at the time was, we knock off Saddam and bring 'em Democracy, Whiskey, and Sexy and they'll just love us right away and it'll go great. Was the problem the lack of widespread and long-lasting zeal about that mission, or that it just plain didn't work?
I could certainly buy something about the spread of nationalism in the would-be colonized countries being a big part of the reason. I do wonder how well the timeline for that spread matches the spread of nationalism in Europe itself.
Thanks for the article, I'll take a look at that later.
As contradictory as it sounds, it was both. The Europeans, and particularly the British, were smart administrators and governors. They knew how to adapt to local political and cultural circumstances while promoting their own political and social goals in a way that contemporary Western states seem to be unable to do. The majority of the British Empire in Africa and Asia was administered via indirect rule. In 1947, even after centuries of British rule (both Company and Crown) and the gradual annexation of many of the Princely States (including the doctrine of lapse), the Princely States still consisted of ~40% of British India by land. But the Princely States weren't just some isolationist islands in the middle of British India, however. They had railways build through them, hospitals and Western schools etc. The difference is that the British worked with the local Rajas who still had a great deal of autonomy and authority. Over decades, many of the Rajas would actually give up significant autonomy and give more authority to the British because it was simply more convenient for them. This general approach was true of other parts of the British Empire, and the European colonisers more generally.
It was not the American approach of storming in to a country, creating a new Western-style liberal democratic government from nothing and expecting everyone to instantly to like it. To use another historical comparison, even when the British (under Company rule) did militarily conquer the Sikh Empire, which was their largest military expansion of the British Rule in India, they did not immediately put the whole region under direct rule, but rather restored many Rajas in the former territory of the Sikh Empire.
Yes and no. The Right Way to do things would certainly to have have more tacit, been less gung-ho about the whole thing and curb their excessive moralizing. Did you know that the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan has a provision that 25% of the seats of the Afghan Parliament are to be reserved exclusively for women? Such a provision would be extremely controversial in many Western states, let alone extremely Islamic conservative Afghanistan. The Americans should at the very least not expect to remake Afghanistan overnight, which is seemingly exactly what they thought they could do. To emphasise the point from above, European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries was a gradual process that involved slow integration and change while using indirect rule and local institutions.
A while back, I saw an interview that Condoleezza Rice gave to the Hoover Institution in which they discussed the Iraq War. In the interview, Rice basically just straight out admitted that the Bush administration and the US military has no idea what they were getting themselves into in terms of local politics. They had very little knowledge of local power dynamics, local tribal conflicts and alliances, or any kind of understanding of the local Iraqi political and social circumstances in general. The attitude of the Americans seem to literally have been more or less exactly what you describe - 'the Iraqis are just like Americans, crying out for American democracy, if we topple the Saddam and install a democratic government everything will just kind of work itself out'. I doubt the British even in the height of their power were ever so naive and arrogant. Again, you can't change a country and its culture overnight.
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Epistemological status - Straight brainstorm.
To what degree has the role of colonizer been taken over by the multinational corporation?
I've seen Steve Sailer repeat a theory (fairly certain he doesn't claim it's original to him, but I would have to do some internet searching to determine who he credits it to) that we may be past an era of conquest due to changes in what makes up the economic value of a place.
Ie, in 1850, most of the value of a place was the natural resources of a place, the farmland, the mines underneath it, that sort of thing. So you could fight a war on top of it, and if you won it, the economic value of what you won would remain largely intact.
In contrast, most of the economic value of a place these days is the human capital contained in a place. So if China decided they wanted to invade California (to pick an absurd example) they might militarily conquer it, but in doing so, all the engineers would flee, the urban centers would be destroyed, you could do it, but you couldn't do it and keep the economic value of what you won intact.
Instead, it makes more sense to try and extract what you can out of economic trade, that sort of thing.
Extending the analogy a bit, maybe political control over a place isn't particularly important as long as you have other levers to get what you want out of a place.
As long as Apple or Nike can set up a sweatshop (slightly tongue in cheek, but hopefully the point stands) in your country, and expect their property rights relatively respected [1], who cares if the local official has to write reports that need to be sent to Parliament or the State Department or not. The powers that be are able to get what they want out of a place, if anything, they're saving money having to pay for fewer bayonets.
[1] I guess at some point in the past there was real risk that multinational companies would have their investments expropriated by local governments, I guess maybe that was a larger risk when the USSR was giving support to various Marxist revolutionaries? That seems like something that's less of a risk than it used to be. Possibly due to levers like the IMF and World Bank and that sort of thing. Idk, I might be out in front of my skates in terms of knowing what I'm talking about.
Been taken over, past tense? East India Company glares at you. The wars leading to Britain's biggest colonial conquest got started when their multinational corporation got pissed about a big tax hike.
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I see where you're going with this, and it does seem different than imperialism circa 1900, but it might be worth considering that some of the first major joint-stock companies were the (British) East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, well known for governing areas that are now independent nations (India, Pakistan, and Indonesia). Although I don't think modern corporations are engaging in quite that level of governance.
Minor quibble, but what counts as a major joint stock company?
If we are talking strictly of chartered joint-stock companies, it would be at least half a century before the Dutch East India Company with the Muscovy Company; squint a bit and we can kind of say that “some of the first major” joint-stock companies were also colonial enterprises.
But if we use a looser definition, joint-stock companies - in the sense of joint ventures with tradeable shares owned by multiple people, with owners/shareholders abstracted from the management - would have existed in Europe for at least two centuries at that point, and in China for at least some three centuries, if not more. Those earlier incarnations - European or not - were very much so not colonial enterprises. Is the charteredness of the operation what you are banking on with “major”?
(I’m not sure I have a substantive issue with your point per se, just factual ambiguity.)
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Yeah, the parallel occurred to me as well,
Maybe where I'm trying to go is that original colonization was driven by economic adventurism,
Maybe that economic adventurism hasn't really gone away,
But these days involves more getting the right signatures to lock Foxconn into producing iPhones at a favorable rate, and less getting people do things at gunpoint.
Or maybe you'll miss out on the economic value of getting Foxconn to produce iPhones at favorable rates if you start by waving around guns?
Idk, I don't have a theory fully fleshed out in my mind.
I think to get into the economic and corporatist aspects of modernity and value extraction from third world countries, you want to get into leftist critiques of the IMF/WTO/proposed TPP and the Bretton Woods system more generally. If you're interested in fleshing out your theory more. To use your outline:
starts with
inasmuch as a prerequisite to Foxconn producing iPhones is membership in the overall global economic system, dominated by dollar exchange, rule of law, respect for private/corporate property, etc.
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Afghanistan certainly has been uncontrollable for centuries. Part of it is that modern Western powers don't want to get involved, due to the history of colonialism, and part of it is that countries like the US don't want another Vietnam so they want to go in fast, dispose of the Bad Guy(s), install a puppet 'modern democratic liberal government' and head back home by Christmas with flags flying and victory parades all neatly done and dusted.
But things in reality don't work that way, and to control Iraq and Afghanistan means going out and fighting a war over an extended period of time that will involve grinding away until you overwhelmingly kill the enemy, then sticking around, again probably for an extended period of time, while you oversee the transition to something that can be considered, if you squint in the twilight, as a modern government. Very probably there is no one Bad Guy or set of Bad Guys that if you take them out, all will be rainbows and roses when the democratic peaceful liberal local alternative government steps up to take over. See Libya after Gaddafi, or the Taliban being driven out in Bush's time and then rolling right back in, in Biden's time.
The natives will, understandably, not like the process. They won't be grateful, or not as grateful as you expect them to be, because who likes strangers coming in and bombing the hell out of their country, even if there's a war going on or Bad Guy(s) in charge? The peaceful liberal alternatives are either carpetbaggers who are only interested in making sure theirs is the Swiss bank account the revenues of the nation end up in, or so Westernised that they are out of touch with the locals and can't effectively govern.
There's no easy, quick, in-and-out victory achieved and Democracy Whiskey Sexy established. And modern societies don't want and don't have the stomach for what it takes to hold power the way it was held back in the old day.
Plus, now the natives can get Maxim guns too, so the balance is not as uneven as it used to be when it comes to "our modern army strolls right over the spear chuckers".
The phrase comes from Hilaire Belloc's poem of 1898 called The Modern Traveller which is scathing about the kind of "wrote a popular account of my adventures in Darkest Africa" adventurers (and also less than modern in references to the natives, reader beware):
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I'd echo a lot of the answers already given in terms of the buy-in of locals being the turning point. Europeans didn't, for the most part, physically win the wars of conquest themselves with great armies of white men. They relied on allying with local factions to provide the manpower and local knowledge. Sometimes this turned out to be a mistake for the local faction, sometimes it did not. The local peasantry might care or might not, might know or might not.
But, I want to point out, how different is "Local Indian nobility now owes vague allegiance to an Empress sitting in London, the peasantry only knows they owe allegiance to the local noble, England extracts some economic surplus from controlling trade relations" from "Local Democratically Elected^tm government signs on to international economic and security treaties designed and run by westerners, the local peasantry only knows they owe allegiance to the Democratically Elected^tm government, western owned/operated corporations extract some economic surplus from controlling trade relations" in the final analysis? Democratically elected governments that go against the economic interests of their sponsors among the great powers have a tendency to suddenly collapse, new movements pop up out of nowhere to take them over. Neo-colonialism isn't just a cutesy slogan, it's the world economic system. How different is a few white plantation owners extracting surplus from the peasantry, from a few white engineers designing a plant that the peasantry labors in to extract surplus value?
In the long run no modern state survives without at least mild sponsorship from one of the Great Powers, which I'd put as the United States, European Union, Russian Federation, People's Republic of China. The sponsoring Great Power's corporations typically then have the dominant economic role in the sponsored country. Think it's easy to avoid that? Ask Allende or Mosadeq how that goes. The Taliban can keep control of a state, its modernity is questionable, but in the long run without trade with at least one of the US/EU/RF/PRC Afghanistan is not going to amount to much anyway.
The experience for a UK citizen is the same. Take Kipling, the bard of British imperial glory, writing for children Big Steamers
“Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,
With England's own coal, up and down the salt seas?”
“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,
Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese.”
“And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers,
And where shall I write you when you are away?”
“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver.
Address us at Hobart, Hong-kong, and Bombay.”
“But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,
And suppose you was wrecked up and down the salt sea?”
“Why, then you'd have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,
And you'd have no muffins or toast for your tea.”
...
“Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,
Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?”
“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,
That no one may stop us from bringing you food.
For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers
And if any one hinders our coming you'll starve!”
How different is that today? The UK citizen experiences the big steamers bringing in the needs and wants of the people of England from Melbourne, Quebec, Vancouver and Hong-kong and Mumbai (the natives renamed it, but what's the difference really?). The UK citizen pays taxes that pay for a great navy, both some actual taxes to their own Royal Navy and the seignorage of being part of the US lead alliance system pays some "tax" towards the maintenance of the US Navy. Overseas that Navy periodically has to bombard a local potentate that gets too uppity, but generally just maintains order so the Big Steamers can bring goods from all over the world to English ports.
ETA: Empires trying to obtain and maintain control over resource-poor tribal backwaters is just the inevitable hubris of a rising empire that's run out of economically productive wars to fight, but has leaders who want to participate in a martial tradition of conquest [read: liberation after 1945]. From Cyrus and Darius meeting disaster against the Scythians, to Roman generals launching various ill-advised campaigns into Germany, to most of the scramble for the interior of Africa and a place in the sun to prove national prestige, to modern Britain, Russia, and the United States all invading Afghanistan one after another to no obvious benefit; claiming ownership of the hinterlands is a luxury good, which normally costs more than it yields.
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Nationalism and technological catch-up. @johnfabian has already explained the former. As for the latter, Europe has had a leg-up over those societies it colonized for a few hundred years. From the times of Afonso de Albuquerque's plate-clad marines all the way to Maxim guns, Europe could rely on overpowering local elites and their armies.
Then the Germans and the Japanese started arming local nationalists, and the Soviets continued the process. You can't really beat an insurgency armed with AK's with colonian troops armed with M4's. The PRC think they have found a new level of technology that can keep insurgents under control, but it only works because the Uyghurs are inside China. I doubt they will be able to replicate it if they try to colonize, say, Uganda.
Was going to say, better infotech, international logistics, and the loss of domestic manufacturing to cheaper overseas labor would make it very hard to maintain a serious technological edge over the intended target.
Russia is sort of finding this out.
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For those who noticed my city’s name, please note that’s a Portuguese general who saw massive success in the Middle East, known as the Caesar of the East.
The Duke City, as we’re nicknamed, is named for the Spaniard line of dukes who culminated in Francisco V Fernández de la Cueva y Fernández de la Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, founder of the town in 1706, second colony in the area which swallowed up the previous larger town of Barelas.
The name shares etymology with the Latin for “white oaks,” the cork tree, but it’s much more probably Romance language for “apricot.” The region in Spain is still known for its stone fruits.
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Scott's old "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" post summarises the Reactionary viewpoint on this: try being an actual coloniser rather than a chickenshit one, and you might get somewhere. If you respond to rebellion by going home, that's an incentive to rebel. If you leave institutions in place, let alone allowing the conquered to elect them, that makes rebellion easier. If you admit to being there temporarily, that disincentivises people from helping you since they might be shot as collaborators when you leave.
This sound like too much work and/or morally wrong? Well, then, I guess you're not cut out for occupations. Try some other means of affecting world politics.
The occupations of Germany and Japan went well despite being admittedly temporary and leaving some institutions in place (particularly in Japan), but there was definitely no hope of getting the West to go home via hostility and also the existence of the Soviet Union and China made even a successful rebellion obvious suicide.
By what metrics?
Certain people are always lecturing me that "the only reason the west is rich is because of all that silver that Spain expropriated from Bolivia"; if we accept that profitable resource extraction / trade windfalls was both the objective and a successful objective of colonial occupations, where's my silver dollars made out of Axis bullion?
Given that a plurality of the Bolivian silver wound up in China and not Europe, I think certain people really don't have an accurate view of colonial trade flows.
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Don't listen to certain people. But more seriously, in the time since Bolivia everybody learned that trade windfalls can be wildly positive sum, so now from Japan we get efficient cars and giant TVs instead of shiny discs and resentment.
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Seignorage. The US is able to finance it's colossal debt expenditures at relatively low interest rates because the monetary system based on the dollar allows it to finance a huge current account deficit by printing $100 bills and "selling" them abroad. The Japanese and Germans, two very productive peoples, will accept $100 bills in exchange for their actual industrial goods because they have to, they were forced into the Dollar System as part of their post-war occupation. So everything the government does with that debt, that's the occupation of Germany and Japan in action.
Changing emphasis, it's never been that way
The plebs never shared in the wealth of empire, certainly not equally. Marx details the conditions the Victorian English factory laborer endured, in many ways worse than slavery, 12-16 hour work days, 6 days a week, for starvation wages. Where were their mountains of Indian loot?
Cato the Elder and Younger, among many others, famously argued against imperial aggrandizement because it created inequality in Rome itself, creating a bifurcated society where before relative equality had reined. Cato the Elder passed numerous laws against luxuries which had appeared as Rome had grown rich on plunder; it was not Rome that had grown rich but Rome's upper classes who could afford such luxuries, and Cato's Republican virtue wanted to see that kind of ostentation stamped out, and Rome's elite refocused on good relatively-egalitarian Republican Stoic farm virtues. The plebs made do with bread and circuses, that was what they got from empire.
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By the metric of "created enduring friendly sphereling", and by the metric of "didn't crater military morale", at the least. Whether you want bullion more than the first is a matter of taste (getting both trades off against each other to some extent), but I don't think there's anyone who'd claim the Vietnam/Afghanistan occupations went better than Germany/Japan (Iraq didn't fail nearly as hard as Afghanistan and Vietnam - no more strong, hostile Iraq - although I still think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thought it went better than Germany/Japan).
I ask this in all seriousness, don't think I'm being facetious: what good does that actually do (a) the West/USA as a whole, and (b) me, some pleb in the West, personally.
Because I don't feel like I am deriving much advantage from the "privilege" of these "friendly spherelings" allowing my leaders to spend my tax money on giant boondoggle bases on their land while Germany doesn't pay it's NATO contributions.
I really would rather that Russian citizens were paying their taxes for Russian bases in Germany and Japan, and I am very happy that I don't have to fund Afghani bases any more. Happier than I was when my taxes were paying for Afghan tribal leader's boy sex slaves.
After you've already won the Cold War? I'm not sure, maybe it's no longer useful.
Didn't do me any good during the Cold War either. The reason we work a 40 hour week instead of an 80 hour one is because Soviet tanks scared Western capitalists into making concessions to labor. If those bases hadn't been in Germany the Western capitalists would have been more scared and we'd be working a 20 hour week now instead.
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The answer to this question from neoreactionary luminary Moldbug was (and this isn't even a paraphrase, because it's so pithy I remember it distinctly) that from 1900 onwards, European Marxists started yelling at every non-European they could see:
Basically nothing material about the conditions in the colonies or the nature of the colonial regimes changed (certainly not for the worse; possibly for the better) but the colonial powers themselves sprouted a class of ideological fifth columnists who proceeded to agitate until colonial empires became simply too unpopular amongst the governed peoples to be worth supporting. And this very same strand of early 1900s anticolonialism is exactly the same thing that makes similar adventurism impossible today. The meme that "I'm not governed by someone from the same nation as me AAAAAA I'm going insane" has been hammered so hard into the global consciousness that whenever anyone tries, Molotovs fly.
As opposed to how it was in the good ol’ days, when the Aztecs and Inca didn’t know any better?
Fighting back against the dudes who want to loot your silver and rape your women isn’t a Marxist invention. It’s the fundamental duty of a sovereign, even. Give the locals a figurehead or a folk hero that they can see and all that schlock about the divine right of kings starts to sound less important.
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This seems like a pretty ahistorical theory. To take just one example, indigenous Amerindians were, a lot of the time, pretty unhappy about Spanish rule throughout their presence, and they did resist, but in more passive ways that we don't remember because they aren't as exciting as open rebellion (though that did happen as well). They were certainly not friends of colonial administrators, indeed they did practically everything they could to stop themselves being administered effectively, deceiving them about where people lived, how many there were in particular places, refused to comply with requirements of forced labour, resisted Christianisation, etc. etc.
The other half of moldbug's claim was that the socialists, communists, liberals, etc agitated within european states and within the colonized states for independence - providing material support, media support, etc to third world states. Amerindians had internal resistance, yeah, but didn't have that significant external support of many kinds. The first alone wouldn't be enough.
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It's worth noting that for large periods of time "formal" colonialism was basically colored sections on the map, with the local inhabitants still living under traditional arrangements and often quite literally not knowing at all they were "colonized". For instance, the colonial period in Africa often lasted well under a century, and it was, as far as I've understood, quite possibly to live in your local village without ever seeing an European man or being particularly aware you're now technically living under the "protection" or suzerainty of an European king. Or you're the subject of the local king or prince, but that king or prince is responsible for dealings with the Europeans - that's one of the reasons they talk about postcolonialism, the idea that even though colonized countries are now technically independent in the end their ruling regimes are still under similar arrangements and their staying in power depends on European countries or the US.
Very true and very important. When colonists tried to extract taxation from colonies, it (usually) wasn't British/French/Spanish taxmen going door to door demanding payment, they just dealt with local elites at the top level who passed some of the proceeds from the payments they themselves obtained from their communities to the colonists.
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What changed, so as to bring this knowledge into the local's cognizance?
And why do you think that cognizance was then negatively received? If you're a Congolese tribesman only dimly aware that you're technically a subject of the King of Mbanza, I don't image it would be a terrifying shock to the system engendering armed rebellion if someone tells you "Oh btw instead of the King of Mbanza it's now the King of Lisboa".
State capacity has increased a lot. The Congolese tribesman wouldn't have cared much either way 200 years ago, because his life wasn't impacted.
But once the government starts inserting itself into your life, you start caring. When they come to your village, and fence off your pastures, and make you learn a different language just so you can fill in the form for the grazing permit just so you can hopefully put your cows where they've always been, you'll start caring. Or when they forcibly send your kids to government school, and tell them to spit on everything you hold sacred, and then make you utterly dependent on them because they've learnt the language and can fill in form whereas you can't, you'll start caring. The King of Mbanza couldn't have done any of that if he wanted.
Case in point: the US-backed government in Afghanistan tried to push gender stuff on the locals to the point that it literally caused rebellions (archive link).
Of course this is true of all governments, not just colonial governments. The expansion of state power caused plenty of strife in Europe too. On the other hand it was worse in the colonies, because in Europe it was developed gradually, and then in the colonies it was imposed all at once.
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I wasn't claiming it was necessarily negatively received, my point was that there's no reason to think about either a negative or a positive or any sort of a reaction to colonialism - you'd need at least one of them to oppose it, after all - if there has not been anyone to even visit your village to tell you you've been colonized in the first place.
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But it gets nasty once we get to Leopold...
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I've got a deep enough knowledge base that I think I can wade in with an answer. First thing to note: what you are describing as "colonialism" is, very roughly speaking, three very different types of colonialism.
In the first instance, you have what I'd call "merger" colonialism. This was the kind practiced in central and south America by the Spanish. When the Spanish landed in the New World, they found themselves two large, urbanized, literate, complex, and populous states in the Triple Alliance and Inca. Both probably had a larger population than Spain itself at the time (Mexico probably had something like 2.5-3x the population of Spain), and both had expanded very rapidly in the century previous. They were big, overstretched empires with lots of internal and external enemies, who were very glad to help these strange dudes in shiny clothing who happened to show up just in time for serious strife. It's hard to overstate just how lucky the Spanish conquest of the Americas was in retrospect, and difficult to understate the degree to which aid from rival indigenous groups helped topple the Aztec/Incan empires. In any case, the Spanish did not wipe out the previous governmental or state structures; rather they placed themselves at the top and married into important local dynasties. The subsequent Spanish crown colonies had a Mestizo elite (that Castile often tried to push back against).
In the English/French colonization of North America, the situation was quite substantially different. Serious attempts at colonial ventures began roughly a century after the Spanish entry into the Americas, and somewhere on the order of 60-80% of the indigenous population of North America had died off from introduced diseases in the interim. The east coast of North America had already seen a fair amount of trading and interchange even if there had been no serious attempts at settlement, and the tribes living along the coast (and somewhat less so into the interior) were ravaged with disease. Somewhat more amusingly you have anecdotes like how when the Plymouth Colony landed the first native they met greeted them by asking in English if they had any beer. Unlike further south there were no large states to conquer; even the Iroquois Confederacy which gave European settlers such a hard time peaked at only slightly more than 10,000 people. This was in large part a virgin land with the large bulk of the pre-existing population destroyed before arrival. Settlement did not face the same military response, nor were settlers obliged to marry into indigenous families. The climate was also much more favourable to Europeans and largely lacked the (imported) African diseases that made the Caribbean so deadly to settlers post-1600.
In the subsequent European colonization in Africa, India, China, etc. the ratio between the colonizers and the colonized was even more extreme. By the time the East India Company had taken control over most of the Indian subcontinent, its administrative functionaries (~1,500 men) ruled 300 million souls. I've just finished reading a book on the East India Company's takeover (The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple) and it is kind of mind-boggling to try and process how a few men in dingy offices in London can effect the conquest of a region so much vaster in wealth and population. It's hard to nutshell exactly what caused the "Great Divergence"; there are various ideas, namely with respect to the burgeoning industrial revolution, Enlightenment principles of rationalism and liberalism, and the revolutions in military science (both theoretical and technological). But I think it is important to stress that it was not for the most part Englishmen who conquered India, but rather largely Indians assembled, trained, and organized by Englishmen. Other colonial takeovers were similar to varying degrees; they tended to be small European expeditionary forces that, once landed, trained and organized local forces to do the bulk of the conquest/occupation. Which I think is getting more along to the point you were wondering about: what changed?
Nationalism is the easy answer, if somewhat of a simplification. In some cases it is less nationalism and some other method of pan-identification, but the principle is simple: Europeans were able to leverage significant technological advantages wielded by small groups of men to exert control over massive numbers of people because most of those people did not care who they were ruled by. In fact, when intervening in regional affairs, many groups would prefer to have foreigners be in charge rather than their rival; especially ones so self-evidently powerful. Why would some tribe in Gabon prefer to stand in solidarity with the tribe next to them they've warred with for a thousand years, instead of the guys with Maxim guns? If you're some local noble in the Laotian highlands what does it matter to you if you're ruled from Paris instead of Hue? And if you're a peasant why care at all as long as the harvests are good?
This is the kind of thing you could write 100k words on easily and not get anywhere so I'm trying to keep things simple. Before mass literacy there is no mass politics, there is no nationalism, there is no reason to care about the guy 30 km down the road, there's no reason to worry about who rules over you except for how it matters to the here and now. There is no class consciousness, there is no sense that you, a farmer, has more in common with a farmer a few towns over than the priests or tanners or dyers who live in your town.
Why didn't Indians unite against the British? Because they didn't know they were Indian. Various polities tried to cobble together anti-British alliances with the help of the French (the most successful being a Maratha-Mysore pact that inflicted a few crushing defeats). But this was all elite squabbling. There was no larger identity to draw on.
Now there are other elements here. These different forms of colonialism wasn't all that profitable in the end; go have a look at the GDP per capita rankings of western European nations and look how neatly it fits to their colonial pasts. Would the USA want to colonize the Philippines or Liberia like it did in the past? Would France really retake Algeria if it could? The west is still plenty able to extract wealth out of these places without requiring armies and colonial administrations. And we could if we really wanted play at war in these regions. We could kill millions. But it would be brutality with little benefit, and a lot of international backlash.
Regarding India as well, it wasn't (despite any nationalist ret-conning) one unitary state, or even a collection of states that recognised themselves as making up an entity called "India". You have several feuding sets of empires, and states that were familiar with strangers coming in and setting up as local power brokers.
Oh, this set are from somewhere called 'England'? And they want to trade with us? And they're happy to help us fight our traditional enemies, the big Maratha/Rajput/Muslim empire that is currently encroaching on our borders? Sure, let's make a deal, why not?
Even "Hinduism" is sort of a retcon as a religion; it's really just a jumble of dozens of local Dharmic traditions rather than a unified confession.
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To nitpick, the Inca were not literate and the Aztec were arguably not literate either. The Inca had no writing system, they were a pre-literate society. They did have the 'Quipu', a system of knots on cords for recordkeeping, but it is a real stretch to call this a writing system. The Aztec did have pictogram/ideogram 'writing' system, but it debated whether this represents a 'true' writing system. It doesn't have seemed to have reached the complexity of late Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters (becoming logographic) which also started off as pictograms, for example. It's not clear if there was any 'real' written literature or prose like epics or poems (colonial destruction is an issue), the writing was mostly used for record keeping, they seemed to have a primarily oral tradition. Mayan writing system was a bit more complex however, but does run into much of the same issues.
IIRC Mayan hieroglyphs are confirmed to be writing and at least one book has been recovered in it. The Spanish conquered several complex societies, including the Aztecs and Incas but not limited to them(the purepecha empire says hi, and the various maya states took centuries to conquer them all), and all of them were pre-literate except for the Mayans.
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Africa has a lot of resources, which made it attractive. For India, it was trade routes. Rather than colonizing, it's easier and cheaper to just set up a factory and extract the resources, minus taxes. It's mutually beneficial for both parties: one gets revenue and the other gets resources.
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Short answer. Buy in
I'm on record as having said that if you really want defeat radical Islam what you you need to do is say "fuck realpolitik", bulldoze every al-Wahhabi mosque in the area, and build a McDonalds and a school for girls on the empty lot. Anyone who objects gets a visit from 1st MEF.
Back in the day such an approach was seen as just good sense, these days morality is a bit more relative, the public a bit more squeamish, and ironically this makes violence more likely.
Hanging Indians who went against western moral sensibilities is not how the British have conquered India. It’s rather an obsession from the period when their hold on the country was already waning. The people who actually conquered India were either pirates who just wanted to loot and couldn’t care less about Indian widows, or people like Fraser who had great respect for the Indian way of life and almost assimilated with the local elite.
Same with your analogy of fighting against something called “radical Islam”. When the west was making its successful inroads into the Arab world they didn’t make much fuss about the fact that many of these countries were theocratic kingdoms with literal slavery. It is a 2000s phenomenon that the west tried to settle on a civilisational mission to fight against Islam, and it has catastrophically failed. It made westerners lose a lot of influence and self confidence and is ultimately abandoned at this point.
The 19th century French invasions of Algeria was justified (partially) on the basis of ending the Barbary slave trade by force. It was also referenced in Napolean's adventures in Egypt and Syria. I think "literally slavery" is something the West is (too) often willing to overlook, but not universally so.
Important to note here in the context that Barbary slave trade included raiding European/Christian ships as well as European coastal villages. This is not as big of an anti slavery crusade as you imply, but more specifically European naval powers defending their own people.
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But it didn't work. Look at the Goa Inquisition. The Portuguese went to every length they could to extirpate Hinduism in Goa and, while there obviously were lots of conversions, in general it didn't really work.
Didn't it? Are you seriously making the claim that Sati is still practiced in modern day India?
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