I wonder if any of the colonial empires could of turned into federation. I believe french were thinking of it but will any country be willing to give the colonists control of their country?
I think this is only possible where the colonizing country imports its own population into the colony, and that population becomes the overwhelming majority. Examples include Australia, which was populated by people from the British isles and a small admixture of white Europeans.
In places like North Africa, however, it will not be possible. Here the population is mostly Berber with some Arab admixture, speaks Arabic and has deep Muslim cultural roots. Morocco was an independent country for nearly all of the last thousand years; Algeria and Tunisia are modern inventions in a territory that was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 400 years, and before that various local dynasties ruled.
These regions have a well-established civilization which is part of the same Mediterranean - Near Eastern development which included the great empires of antiquity, Greece, Rome, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, and which reached its peak around the 16th and 17th centuries. By that time, the Ottomans had conquered territories far into Europe.
The Great Divergence starting in the mid-18th century led to an imbalance of power that resulted in the French colonial state arriving in Algeria in 1830 and Morocco in 1912. This stemmed from a unique set of geographical and social circumstances. The French ruled until the 1950s, before being pushed out once more.
In retrospect, the colonial effort here was more like a temporary abberation, because it was premised on an imbalance that could not be sustained, and because the existing population and culture were too advanced. It was always going to be short lived.
The British dominions, on the other hand, represent a real chance for federation. Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Britain might just have been able to pull this off, although world war one seems to have put an end to that idea.
Last edited: