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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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.

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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