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Hmm. I've always nursed a small grudge against the US because I was always under the impression it had a greater influence on accelerating decolonization than it seems is the case, at least from reading your effort post.
Why would an Indian be against the end of colonization you might ask? Well, for one, I think that a counterfactual world where India didn't become outright independent in 1947, or had self-rule phased in over decades, with full independence in the 60s or later, would have been a far wealthier and more stable India. Of course, they burnt their credibility by reneging on promises of enabling Home Rule in the 20s as a treat for our WW1 contribution, so who knows how that might have worked. I still think they could have dragged it out a little bit longer if they really wanted to.
Call me a congenital optimist, but that might have mitigated our brush with socialism for an odd 40 or 50 years, which at the very least would have made it likely that we could have liberalized earlier since all the real economic growth happened after that happened in the late 80s or early 90s.
Given the way that Indians run the place, I'd put more faith in distant, slightly bored bureaucrats who at the least aren't corrupt or beholden to identity politics. And I am speaking English here, and moving to the UK, at least for a while, so you can see where my personal loyalties lie.
It's such a fascinating counterfactual, I often fantasize how it would have gone had we had one European power that kept a small colony, in Africa or LatAm or the Indian Ocean, so we could see how it went. Bigger than Hong Kong, but smaller than India. Malaysia, or Algeria, or Kenya. I wish the USA had given Cuba and the Phillipines statehood rather than cutting them loose.
It feels like decolonization happened just as European countries were, at the very least, becoming more tolerant of ethnic differences.
The Caribbean has a good mix of former colonies and present overseas territories of various European nations, so it's probably the best bet for a head to head comparison under similar circumstances. My impression is that the independent islands do worse, but I'm not familiar enough with living standards and economics in that region to be sure. France also has some of the most populous remaining colonies in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and they seem like nicer places than most of their neighbors.
Puerto Rico is the richest place in the Caribbean, I believe. French Guiana is richer than its closest neighbors Brazil, Suriname, and Guyana.
I was gonna say Puerto Rico as well but I realized it had less people than Hong Kong. Still maybe the closest example though. Greenland easily the most prominent former colony in size but the population is like a small city or a large town.
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Well, with the Philippines you'd have to enfranchise some 110 (and rapidly growing) millions — a voting bloc an entire third of the entire US population. If you're opting for state-hood, and not some sort of Puerto Rico-tupe non-representative colonial rule, anyway.
Granted, it'll probably be lower in a counterfactual where the Philippines is annexed relatively early on, and receives the "benefits" of modernity (the demographic transition, etc.)—but not infinitesmally smaller; likely the population will still be in the high tens of millions.
I don't really see Americans accepting that: tens of millions of icky brown people with voting rights and significant sway over US politics inherent to their population size alone. I'll note the US has often been wary of directly annexing territories full of non-white people (densely populated, anyway): one of the main arguments against taking more of Mexico historically, besides just the Cession, was that other areas had too many Mexicans to drive off.
(That's not even asking whether Filipinos want US statehood to begin with. Actually, they might, especially if the US dumps a lot of money into investing in the place, and making it a model example of how Murica Gets Shit Done TM, but then you circle again to Americans, running into the same generalized xenophobic arguments over tax monies going to not-properly-non-melanated Americans.)
The Philippines, assuming they were one state and maybe throw in some other islands, would have been the most populous state circa 1950, but were more like 15% of the total population.
Of course in my totally crazy counterfactual, the USA encourages white migration into the Philippines, and allows free migration from the Philippines to the mainland, balancing the ethnic questions a little differently. Hawaii made statehood despite a lack of whites.
Imagine the strategic history of Asia with tens of millions of American citizens right there.
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Interesting idea...
Was going to mention French Guiana but it only has a few hundred thousand people.
If only, then we'd have a better comparison of the before/after colonization thing
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While I'm bringing up a bunch of stuff from the past, a while back I tried to do a deep dive into colonialism's impact on India. My takeaway was that Britain performed worse than either the independent princely states or post-colonial India on pretty much every factor we care about: economic growth, literacy, life expectancy, etc.
I think the idea that Britain would have kept India from socialism is less likely considering that postwar Britain was also diving headlong into mass nationalizations of the economy, expansive welfare, industrial licensing, high taxes on income and capital, etc.
We did have a productive debate in the comments to that post:
My reply is readily visible, but link for the lazy: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sgv76g/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_31/hvnwsgw/
For the even lazier, the points I brought up were:
No Britain=No unified India, or an India that wasn't unified under another Great Power.
The Brits were doing better at the whole uplifting a subcontinent thing towards the end of their regime.
When people point out that India did a lot better on measures like agricultural productivity and life expectancy in the decades post Independence, that is hopelessly confounded by the fact that most of this was the Green Revolution and the advent of cheap and effective antibiotics. I personally think they did all the heavy lifting.
Yeah, fully agreed the health stats are pretty confounded by general advances in agriculture and medicine - I gave you credit in the original for that point! :) Other stats like growth, literacy, access to roads, hospitals, and schools I think are harder to fudge.
I can easily imagine another colonial empire being worse than Britain (many were), and I even agree in some ways they were improving, or at least planning to improve (like the Dawes Plan for literacy). But I just don't see a good enough record for them pre-war in India, or post-war in Britain, to assume things would really be better.
Your personal experience gives you some insights into this that I don't necessarily have though.
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