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Do we need to accept that decolonization was good? Or that decolonization is a lot of places had negative effects? South Africa current situation just makes me conclude that colonization in many places was better than self rule. Didn’t Scott have a post we he looked at wealth and per capita income today and in Africa the more colonization equates to more income and better governance today.
I believe I’ve just concluded that Western European civilization was good and spreading and enforcing it elsewhere led to better rule.
The only place I’ve really come across that crushed decolonization in Mena would be the Saudis.
You do you but I'm generally pretty dubious. I think the quote you're thinking of from Scott is below:
Maybe he takes a closer look elsewhere but he doesn't actually compare wealth or gdp per capita or anything here, just kinda picks some good sounding ones. Most of these countries are spread across the continent's HDI and gdp per capita rankings except for South Africa (which was a self governing dominion) and Botswana (which was maybe the least heavily colonized country on the continent - the British basically left the existing monarchy in place and just demanded taxes). I could counter that other heavily British-colonized areas remain basket cases at the bottom of most relevant rankings: Sierra Leone, Malawi, the Gambia, Uganda, etc.
I did take a deeper look at India at least and found the British record pretty dismal. A while back I had ambitions of doing one of these for each of a bunch of the larger colonies, like Indonesia, Algeria, Malaya, Egypt, but got too duanted by the size of the project.
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Self-determination counts for a lot. People getting to rule themselves makes people happier. No taxation without representation, after all.
I think the idea of "White man's burden" could've been true, the Brits could've altruistically given good government and institutions to weaker peoples and raised their quality of life. In practice, there was a lot of resource extraction with minimal effort to raise the quality of life for the masses.
I think decolonization was also handled horribly though. I think ideally it would've been a longer process with a slow but consistent withdrawal as institutions are built up and colonial leadership trains their successors as they hand off the reigns. But I'm sure it was a tricky situation when the locals look around, see that their poor and the whites are rich even though they live on the same sort of land, and they know for a fact that there's been a decent amount of exploitation going on, so they not unreasonably conclude that exploitation was 100% of the reason their lives sucked and want the whites out of their ASAP.
I think what I’m really getting at is an HBD argument. Africa never developed for Garret Jones style low average IQ making it difficult to build state capacity. And some sort of colonial aristocracy was better and providing functional government - even if it wasn’t Democracy.
It’s seems like the old trope
White people move in - gentrification
White people leave - white flight and we don’t have resources. White people stay resource extraction. White people leave no development. It seems like the only constant is a poorer dysfunctional underclass regardless of which policy choices are made. Now if colonials want resource extraction they are still building railroads, infrastructure, and enough state capacity to make sure militias aren’t raiding their mines.
People on the left would cite like “Why Nations Failed” and if we just did these policy rules everything would work out. But it’s feeling a lot more like Garret Jones world where some areas just always fail.
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We don't need to, but if you're going to take the opposing counterfactual you need to frame it in light of what was likely to have actually happened rather than simply assuming that things would have continued along in a sort of empire at its height best case scenario. This is the fallacy Niall Ferguson points out with regard to critics of the British Empire; if the British hadn't colonized, say, Malaya we can't just assume that the alternative was Malay civilization continuing to develop nicely on its own terms. The more realistic scenario is that they would have simply been colonized by the French, or the Portuguese, or the Dutch.
With regard to decolonization, I don't think there are any rosy scenarios where the bulk of the colonies continue to happily be British subjects indefinitely. A lot of the places that were decolonized saw increasing amounts of political violence during the 1950s and 1960s as their inhabitants grew resentful of foreign rule, and there's no indication that any of these could have been forcibly suppressed without stoking additional resentment and violence, especially if it were made clear that there was no intention of ever leaving. Had the decolonization project been delayed by even ten years we would have likely seen the Soviets funnel money into any anti-imperial forces, much as they did to their preferred sides in the civil wars that followed independence in many areas. This would have all happened at a time when Britain was still reeling from the economic malaise that marked the decades following WWII, and it would have had to justify to its own public ever-increasing expenditures of money it didn't have and the lives of its young men to hang on to whatever benefit they got from controlling a place like Nyassaland that most people can't point to on a map.
Now, I'm sure there's some alternate reality where WWII and the Cold War don't happen and everyone likes being a British subject and they get to hold onto their colonies indefinitely, but there's also an alternate reality where Africa is never colonized and its tribes organically form modern states that trade and interact with the rest of the world. But by that point you're moving too far into fantasy land to make a legitimate counterfactual.
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