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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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