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What were the long term effects of Western colonialism on the technological development and social stability of the societies they ruled over? Are there any sources discussing this in a non-ideological manner? Counterfactuals are generally pretty hard to discuss or explore, but my intuition is that the long term effects of colonisation would have been on the balance positive.
In many of the colonised areas the technological disparity seems obvious - the Aztec and Inca for example completely lacked beasts of burden and did not put the wheel to use in any significant way, they did not have knowledge of advanced metallurgy (the Aztec made limited use of copper and bronze, but never learned how to use iron), nor were there technologies like the printing press etc all of which the Spanish already had when they made contact at the time. In the case of the Inca they simply did not even have a written language to print - and quipu doesn't count as a writing system, the current consensus seems to be that it was simply an accounting system and not a written representation of Quechua. There was a translation of a quipu in the village of Collata that apparently represented information phonetically, but that quipu was made after the Spanish conquest and was likely influenced by contact with them.
An analogous situation is Mughal India, which as far as I know could be described as "proto-industrialised" at best and significantly fell behind Britain in the face of the massive manufacturing boom that the Industrial Revolution brought to Europe (additionally, the Mughal Empire had already begun to disintegrate pretty rapidly from the eighteenth century onwards). And British contribution is pretty visible today even to your average Indian, the Indian railway system being a big example. I'd wager it's pretty plausible that colonisation by a more technologically advanced society generally confers long run material benefits.
I suppose a potential counterargument that could be offered up would be to posit that perhaps their situation would've been better had Western powers not occupied them and traded with them instead, but that argument encounters the obvious issue of the natives perhaps not being able to access these resources - a huge amount of the resource extraction and manufacturing was after all organised and sponsored by Westerners. I highly doubt that, say, South American natives had the wherewithal to build massive gold and silver mines like the Spanish and Portuguese did - production on that scale was probably outside of the ability of even the societies that did do basic mining, like the Inca.
The most serious attempts I've seen at quantifying colonial legacies mostly focus on one comparison where the empires had enough colonized countries as data points to at least hope to draw tentative conclusions:
"One strand of this literature suggests that colonization by the
British led to better outcomes than colonization by the French or by the
smaller colonial powers, because of either the adaptability of British legal
institutions to the market economy or the higher levels of personal freedom
provided by British political institutions and culture"
But even in that article there's a laundry list of difficult confounders.
How much worse must the question be if we try to compare the handful of uncolonized countries? Japan did very well on its own, adopting and adapting many Western ideas and institutions (ironically including the "set off and try to colonize everyone" one, right at the time when the West itself was starting to realize that was at least a bit gauche...) without having to have most of those institutions externally imposed (with the one big exception of "wait, DON'T set off and try to colonize everyone", post-WWII). Ethiopia (for whom we'll ignore WWII; they were about as "colonized" as France was) is seeing some fast catch-up growth in the 21st century, but has a long way to go and didn't make so much progress in the 20th. Similar for Nepal and Bhutan. Tonga is doing better than those three, but not notably better than its post-colonial neighbors. Thailand is doing better than Tonga, but it's in between the Philippines and Malaysia.
And ... is that all the data? You might count Scandinavia doing well, but being right next to the Industrial Revolution's epicenter is a hell of a confounder. You could say that China or Iran or others have never been technically colonized by Europeans for long, but the technicalities kind of pale before the Century of Humiliation or even just the downstream effects of the 1953 Iranian coup.
Where does the Perry Expedition fit into this? "On its own" kind of ignores how the Americans forced Japan open to the West and to adopt Western idea.
That's fair. I think the way it fits, though, is the lack of micromanagement. "You have to allow your people to trade with us" and "we completely rule you now" seem quite different to me ... but you're right that they're on the same spectrum, and historically the former tended to lead to the latter in the long term. Would you really say that's enough to claim Americans forced Japan to adopt Western ideas in general, though? The adoption was fast, on a historical scale, and it was not the kind of adoption that was forced on ruled colonies, where e.g. massive expansion of an independent military would be frowned on, to say the least. Even though the Iwakura Mission etc. were encouraged by the west, the Japanese modernizers weren't under orders and weren't hostages ... except in the long-term sense, I suppose, where it was obvious that they wouldn't be treated with as a political equal by modern powers (and thus would constantly be at risk of another power going too far) until/unless they became an economic and technological equal.
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There is quite a bit of literature on this. Two books that I have read on the topic are Lineages of Despotism and Development (which is well worth reading just for the methodology) and Colonialism and Postcolonial Development. The first book in particular, IIRC, discusses various standard theories in the introduction.
You can also go to the web page for past meetings of the American Political Science Association. If you click on each, you should be able to search for colonialism and development and find relevant papers.
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It is obvious colonization ironically massively sped up those countries IDH/economic growth over long term however that should not occlude the probable fact that most colonizers don't wanted to significantly invest in the growth of their colonies, especially education.
Had them significantly tried to have an utilitarian impact on those countries their economic development gradient would have been far different and with difficult to quantify but not necessarily unknowable ramifications such as e.g. say, make the third world reach occident economic and IDH parity before the 21st century.
It is interesting in that regard, to follow the increasingly war-like economic agressions the hegemonic U.S are making towards China.
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