With any pre-20th century pod you want, make the European colonial empires as equal as possible to their nonwhite subjects. I imagine that we'd need to limit the slave trade incredibly, to prevent the association of black people with chattel slavery. Not quite sure what to do about the natives elsewhere though.
AHC: Least Racist Colonialism Possible
- Thread starter AltoRegnant
- Start date
God damn it, not another one of these threads. The fundamental purpose of colonialism was to extract value, resources, and labor from the colonized territories at the expense of the people living there. It was never going to be not racist. Even if you take the edge off and eliminate the worst atrocities, it’s still control and subjugation of vast swathes of land and people to benefit the powerful.
Fair point. There is however, the fact that many empires like the caliphates, Perisa, the Mongols, etc (which land based or not, have those same goals) managed to enrich themselves without apartheid, genocide, or deliberate starvation of millions of people for the benefit of capitalism and cash crops to be sold in britain.
They did still fight repeated wars of conquest, make use of slave labor, and (in the case of the Mongols) invent biological weaponry, though. “Empires are bad” should not be some sort of scorching take.
The closest I could think of would be an adoption of the system proposed by Bartolomé de las Casas in South America. It wasn't successful, would've continued the spread of disease amongst Native Americans, and would instead practice religious imperialism as opposed to... normal imperialism, so it wouldn't be that much better.
It's a start, though, I guess.
It's a start, though, I guess.
Deleted member 114175
If those empires existed in the 19th or 20th centuries they definitely would have been considered racist. In addition the Mongol Empire quite clearly committed genocide from the massacres of other tribes to the sack of Baghdad.
Fair enough. Tbh after @Kirook 's comments and some thought I realized this was a stupid idea at best and arguably kinda racist itself so I was kinda just letting it die. Might pm a mod to ask them to delete it
Ellis MacVey
Donor
One could make an argument that imperialism isn't inherently racist (though I think it probably is), but Colonialism is inherently very racist, and there's no way around that fact.
i do agree with scorpio retindar except that it is inherently racist for colonialism. the reason i say this while colonialism and to a lesser extant imperialism though it could be argued they are heavily intertwined in their status. does not need to be racist but rather is prone to and encourage racist tendencies or full blown racism. an example i often like to point out though there are a few more, is that of the attitudes of the Italian empire in their colonies and while extremely ruthless in how they approached it was not driven by race and this is in a time where we see modern racism really form and is at its most potent in society.
while incredibly difficult to do to have the race driven empires not develop its manner it is possible. one of the requirements would be too kill the slave trade in its crib as that profit from slavery helped motivate such ideas. so that would need to go, i do know that in most medieval kingdoms of Europe slavery was very much outlawed a was not even considered as a state that a person could be in. of course there was legal loop holes that allowed the trade to develop so if you can get the European nations to maintain and enforce those old laws then you would see a much lower degree of racism. another would be the European approach to the colonies that would be make the Spanish method of conquest and enslavement of natives. if the empires were forced to work with natives to maintain their position then you would see this effect.
however, too achieve this requires a lot of changes that would struggle to achieve with a late pod. another problem is that slavery provided a massive amount of manpower available to the empires to work those fields for cheap which would see a fair few of the enterprises in OTL go bust. from lack of workers especially cheap. a way too fix this would be with a much much larger European population to provide cheap labour or pray the natives don't die off. one way to get a larger European population would be no black death or at least one not so severe.
while incredibly difficult to do to have the race driven empires not develop its manner it is possible. one of the requirements would be too kill the slave trade in its crib as that profit from slavery helped motivate such ideas. so that would need to go, i do know that in most medieval kingdoms of Europe slavery was very much outlawed a was not even considered as a state that a person could be in. of course there was legal loop holes that allowed the trade to develop so if you can get the European nations to maintain and enforce those old laws then you would see a much lower degree of racism. another would be the European approach to the colonies that would be make the Spanish method of conquest and enslavement of natives. if the empires were forced to work with natives to maintain their position then you would see this effect.
however, too achieve this requires a lot of changes that would struggle to achieve with a late pod. another problem is that slavery provided a massive amount of manpower available to the empires to work those fields for cheap which would see a fair few of the enterprises in OTL go bust. from lack of workers especially cheap. a way too fix this would be with a much much larger European population to provide cheap labour or pray the natives don't die off. one way to get a larger European population would be no black death or at least one not so severe.
zhropkick
Banned
I would say have the coloniser have a belief system that demands it be evangelised to everyone on Earth, but that didn't seem to work either. The outgroup will always end up being shat on in that sort of arrangement it seems. I wouldn't say going to some place with good soil for growing tobacco and gold in the hills to plant your flag and subjugate the natives for economic reasons is inherently racist but it always seems to turn into that, just like diasporas always seem to get pogrommed because people inevitably end up not liking them. It must be tribal mentality or something.
Whoever says the caliphates weren't racist a) doesn't know about East African slave trading and b) has never heard of the Zanj rebellion, which involved sugar plantations in Mesopotamia, let alone c) Muslim writers at the time using the same anti-black tropes as European slaveowners did to justify slavery hundreds of years later. And while the revisionist "Mongols multiculti, Mongols good" take has stayed in vogue for a while, they also wrecked the Middle East so bad that it took centuries to recover -- and propped up an ethnic caste system in China that eventually fueled the forces that overthrew them.
The closest OTL ever got was the Portuguese in Asia, and that was solely because the Portuguese had so few European Portuguese available to man their far-flung empire that you had Euro-African landowners in Mozambique and Eurasian sailors/priests/whoever in Portuguese India and Macau considering themselves Portuguese, and even those relied on slavery and the horrific crimes of the Catholic Church against non-Catholics.
The closest OTL ever got was the Portuguese in Asia, and that was solely because the Portuguese had so few European Portuguese available to man their far-flung empire that you had Euro-African landowners in Mozambique and Eurasian sailors/priests/whoever in Portuguese India and Macau considering themselves Portuguese, and even those relied on slavery and the horrific crimes of the Catholic Church against non-Catholics.
Butterfly away modern-style racism (which didn't really get going till the 17th century anyway) and keep the previous religionism/culturism view. Under the former system, some people are just inherently inferior, no matter what they do; under the latter, somebody from the colonies who was raised in European culture and practises the same religion as the metropole would be considered an equal member of the empire.
Not really, no. What happened in the Malêverse was not the result of colonialists being less racist, but (a) the racism being differently directed, and (b) more of the colonized peoples, for various reasons, being in a position to force better terms from the colonial powers. It wasn't about colonial powers having the good of Africans and Asians at heart; it was about West Africans having artillery in the 1840s and the early Great War draining European powers' resources to the point where they had to make concessions in exchange for colonial industry and manpower.
I thought that the forcing of better terms caused the colonialists to accept West Africans, etc., caused the colonialists to be less racist towards them.
Eventually, yes, but the reduction of racism was effect rather than cause, and the ultimate result was the end of colonial rule.
Maybe have the French actually keep their word of bringing liberte, egalite & fraternite to the colonized peoples.