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Answer me this: It is the 18th or 19th century. You are in a less technologically advanced country. Your fate is to be colonised. I will allow you the choice of
by wycx 13y ago
Answer me this:
It is the 18th or 19th century. You are in a less technologically advanced country. Your fate is to be colonised. I will allow you the choice of which European power will colonise you. Who would you choose, based on observations of how countries fared with different colonisers?
I think you can make the observation that countries that were colonised by the British (i.e. the Anglosphere) ended up stronger legal, administrative and educational infrasrtucture and traditions than countries that were colonised by other European powers (i.e. Portugese, Belgian, French, German, Spanish and Dutch).
I am not implying that they ended up better off than if they had never been colonised at all. I am not implying that colonisation did not take a terrible toll on the colonised. Nevertheless, the era of colonisation has left a legacy. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. We do not get to live in the counterfactual world where there was no colonisation. We do get to see the results of various approaches to colonisation.
Does this legacy tell us anything of the colonisers?
- jleyank 13y agoThere was one country that managed to get through this period without being colonized: Japan. However, they tried to play the role of the colonizer in some places and pay the price for their actions today.