WI: Genuine Colonial "Upliftment"?

KN1

By which I mean, colonizing powers actually do the thing they say they do and educate their subjects, set up functioning societies, etc.

Reading rast's A Shift in Priorities, I was fascinated by the idea of Germany's central African colonies going from your bog-standard colony to a great power in its own right, modeled on German society but nevertheless wholly native run. It seems too good to be true, so it probably is. I don't want it to be, though!

It'd go against the grain of every "self-respecting" European colonizing nation, but would it be possible for a nation to actually treat their subjects with dignity and try to build a self-governing nation state tied to the "mother country", rather than as sources of cheap labor and stolen resources?
 

Flocculencio

Donor
So where does the profit come from? The entire point of (non settler) colonies was to lock down cheap resources and captive markets for the products of he metropole.
 

Falecius

DownrangeDowner said:
By which I mean, colonizing powers actually do the thing they say they do and educate their subjects, set up functioning societies, etc.

Reading rast's A Shift in Priorities, I was fascinated by the idea of Germany's central African colonies going from your bog-standard colony to a great power in its own right, modeled on German society but nevertheless wholly native run. It seems too good to be true, so it probably is. I don't want it to be, though!

It'd go against the grain of every "self-respecting" European colonizing nation, but would it be possible for a nation to actually treat their subjects with dignity and try to build a self-governing nation state tied to the "mother country", rather than as sources of cheap labor and stolen resources?
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It was half-heartedly attempted in some cases. LoN Mandates in the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, and island SE Asia are examples. Perhaps you could also count Austrian Bosnia and Russian Armenia. These attempts were ideologically necessitated by the hypocritical nature and bad conscience of the whole enterprise, which also, of course, guaranteed their own hypocritical, intermittent and inconsistent nature, since they in indeed went against the grain of having colonies to exploit in the first place.
The Dutch did have some honest try in Indonesia, but it was contadictory and limited. The problem is that every such politcy has to rely on long-term ethical behaviour with an asymmetrical power relationship in which the colonized had very little way to make the colonizer responsible of its policies. This is means that for it work, you need to have people in charge that are consistently willing to enact policies that have no real benefit to their constituencies on the basis of purely principled reasons. I don't think there is any known political mechanism outside Plato's Republic that could produce this.
 

Faeelin

Banned
Flocculencio said:
So where does the profit come from? The entire point of (non settler) colonies was to lock down cheap resources and captive markets for the products of he metropole.
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I think you could imagine better policies, anyway. Imagine if Britain had pursued literacy in India with the same vigor America pursued it in the Philippines, or pursued economic development the way Japan did in Taiwan or Korea.
 
Timaeus

Timaeus

Faeelin said:
I think you could imagine better policies, anyway. Imagine if Britain had pursued literacy in India with the same vigor America pursued it in the Philippines, or pursued economic development the way Japan did in Taiwan or Korea.
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Of course, considering the ill-treatment of Philippine culture in those days, and the unfair trade agreements, and the whole cultural inferiority complex we got, and the fall of an independent Philippine economy, I don't think my country's the best example.

And America is one of the more 'enlightened' ones.

Even if the imperialists tried vigorously to 'uplift' a culture in some ways, it may only leave horrible scars in others. It can't be done in a few decades.

The best fate of for the indigenous peoples is a mother country's relative indifference in doing much more to a colony than building trading stations and converting the populace.

Which was the fate of my country before America came. This is why indigenous languages have predominated here.

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I guess I'm trying to say that it takes a different viewpoint than that of a colonizer's to empathize with native peoples and actually work to truly help them.

For example, you actually have to see the natives as actual people.
 

Faeelin

Banned
Timaeus said:
Of course, considering the ill-treatment of Philippine culture in those days, and the unfair trade agreements, and the whole cultural inferiority complex we got, and the fall of an independent Philippine economy, I don't think my country's the best example.
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I don't know how you can blame the US on the fall of the Filipino economy. If anything, it would have done better to get a free trade agreement with the US back before gaining independence (which would have been hard, I grant).
 
St. Just

St. Just

Flocculencio said:
So where does the profit come from? The entire point of (non settler) colonies was to lock down cheap resources and captive markets for the products of he metropole.
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This. A Shift in Priorities is massively ASB (Rosa Luxemburg in a non-revolutionary government? Not a damn chance.)
 

EMT

You'd require a very unorthodox national leader with a lot of prestige behind them that really takes to the 'civilize and enlighten' aspect of colonization. A big driving goal being to humiliate other colonizers by calling them out as frauds and failures. Of which Germany could be considering it's relatively small colonial empire, but I'd consider it very unlikely for such a leader to arise in Germany. I'd see Japan as the best candidate for such a scenario, seeing as they themselves aren't Europeans.
 

kreepysam

Napoléon Caesar Augustus said:
You're basically burning money by doing this. What motivates the European powers to keep their empires if they're going to become such a huge money sink for no benefit?
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Viewing colonies as a (very) long term social engineering project is IMHO a reasonable and realistic view for a European power to take by the mid 19th century. One could argue that the England's investment in North America was the greatest strategic asset it ever reaped the benefits of (creation of the Anglophone, saving them in 2 world wars + Cold war ally). Even in the 19th Century it was a vitally important market for England, and an inchoate sense of the "Special Relationship" between English speaking peoples in the world was already understood to exist (T.R., Rhodes).

Yes, the NA colonies were settler colonies, but the principle of ethnic colonies can be applied to cultural ones too , where the metropole attempts to impose what it views as the "superior" parts of its culture on the colonials, in order to modernise them. Japan is an example of this hybrid, and to a much lesser extent the Chinese, Persian and Ottoman empires embodies the principle of modernisation along western lines. The only difference here is that a particular power tries to shape these people somewhat more finely in its own mould, reasoning that one day they might become a Great Power in their own right who will be ready to fight alongside the metropole (in a very loose way, French colonies like Morocco and Senegal in WWI and II come closest to representing this line of thinking and practice).
 

Strategos' Risk

Timaeus said:
Even if the imperialists tried vigorously to 'uplift' a culture in some ways, it may only leave horrible scars in others. It can't be done in a few decades.
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And if you look at the Meiji, even when a people tries to uplift themselves by their own bootstraps, things still get horribly traumatized.

Maybe modernization and industrialization comes inherently at a great cost.
 

Lateknight

Banned
Napoléon Caesar Augustus said:
You're basically burning money by doing this. What motivates the European powers to keep their empires if they're going to become such a huge money sink for no benefit?
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If you convince the natives their really French/Germans /Russians etc then you eventually could have a larger realm like the Romans did.
 

Strategos' Risk

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Gloss

Well, this is racist both against European and Africans as well, I hope at least that this was made before the Herero genocide...
 
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