No Decolonization

Could education do anything, get enough generations of the colonized to consider themselves French, British, etc. even second class?

Of course if it even has a chance it would be in places that didn't already have a national identity of their own.

That's the thing with education; when you start teaching your average African or Asian how to read, at one point he'll stop just reading the books you give him and start searching for other influences.
That's what happened in Senegal. The French had a strong paternalist connection to that colony, believing it was their "burden" to civilize it, so they educated the locals, and ended up creating an indigenous intellectual elite, with its own agenda. This agenda happened to be decolonization and the creation of a strong, "national" culture for Senegal.
So, yeah. Education tends to actually decrease the power of the colonizers in the long run.

I, for one, have another theory: a few British scholars seem to consider that the West Indies were the most loyal part of the British Empire. It even shows today, when apparently 60% of Jamaicans think they would be better off if they were a British colony. Now, as far as I know, during the, what, 300 years in which the British ruled the West Indies, what did the West Indians get? They didn't get shit. The one thing that I can see as a rallying point for the West Indians was the figure of the King/Queen. Perhaps countries with more paternalistic(and I mean paternalistic not in the Senegalese way, the "let's give them schools" way; I mean just generally postage stamps exhalting the colony, with the monarch in the background) figures, or perhaps downright authoritarian ones like Wilhelm II, could hold on to their colonies better.
 
That's the thing with education; when you start teaching your average African or Asian how to read, at one point he'll stop just reading the books you give him and start searching for other influences.
That's what happened in Senegal. The French had a strong paternalist connection to that colony, believing it was their "burden" to civilize it, so they educated the locals, and ended up creating an indigenous intellectual elite, with its own agenda. This agenda happened to be decolonization and the creation of a strong, "national" culture for Senegal.
So, yeah. Education tends to actually decrease the power of the colonizers in the long run.

I, for one, have another theory: a few British scholars seem to consider that the West Indies were the most loyal part of the British Empire. It even shows today, when apparently 60% of Jamaicans think they would be better off if they were a British colony. Now, as far as I know, during the, what, 300 years in which the British ruled the West Indies, what did the West Indians get? They didn't get shit. The one thing that I can see as a rallying point for the West Indians was the figure of the King/Queen. Perhaps countries with more paternalistic(and I mean paternalistic not in the Senegalese way, the "let's give them schools" way; I mean just generally postage stamps exhalting the colony, with the monarch in the background) figures, or perhaps downright authoritarian ones like Wilhelm II, could hold on to their colonies better.

I agree with the essence of what you're saying. Historically revolutions don't break out just because people are poor and their living conditions are horrible. Revolutions occur when people have hope for change. The Peasants' rebellion in Germany was inspired by Martin Luther ad his demands for religious change. The French Revolution was sparked by the meeting of the Estates General. The collapse of the Soviet Union came about came about because of the reforms of Gorbachev.

People don't revolt when they are miserable and expect to always be miserable. People revolt when they are miserable but have hope things might improve.

The problem is that most colonies are established in the hopes of making the mother country wealthier. So do you deliberately keep a territory as poor, ignorant, and underdeveloped as possible? Or do you slowly build up the economy and infrastructure and create a class of local intelligentsia?

Now in the first case that might make the colony easier to control, however it will also make it harder to make a profit. If the roads are unpaved, if there are no modern port facilities, if engineers and other needed professionals refuse to live in an uncivilized back water, then production and transport will suffer. Providing necessary services add to the cost of running things and the colony will just not be as profitable as it could be.

On the other hand, if you create a higher living standard and well educated workers the colony is likely to be much more valuable. But then you are indeed creating a class of locals hwo are going to start to wonder why exactly all the wealth of the land should be skimmed off and sent overseas.

So pick your poison. The more modern and 'civilized' and successful you colony is the more opposition you're going to encounter. (India, Egypt) The poorer and less developed and less valuable the colony the less opposition you may have. (West Indies)

So basically the colonies that are the least profitable are the easiest to hold on to. The ones that are the most precious the hardest to hold on to.
 
I think some form of decolonization was inevitable in the long run, but it could end up taking much, much longer than in OTL. As others have mentioned, the most important step is avoiding the World Wars that bankrupted European powers.

Let's say Franz Ferdinand doesn't get assassinated and the world is lucky enough to avoid any other war-beginning sparks. The 20th century is peaceful and boring, with most European nations occupied with a slow transition towards Democracy, or at least Constitutional Monarchy. Without WWI there's no communist revolution in Russia, and Communism remains mainly an ideology of workers and intellectuals in industrial countries agitating for better conditions and more rights, not a revolutionary ideology for the third world.

The colonial powers may be able to make a bargain with their subjects similar to what we see in modern China: the people get economic growth and increasing standards of living so long as they don't challenge the government's right to rule.

By the present most colonies would probably have a greater degree of self-government in the past, and there might be significant forces starting to demand either full integration or full independence, but for the average person life would just go on, with no pressing reason to rebel or seek change outside accepted channels.
 
Could education do anything, get enough generations of the colonized to consider themselves French, British, etc. even second class?

This did happen- British agencies specifically set up schools for the Indian upper classes along the lines of Eton with the aim of producing brown Englishmen.

The trouble with this was that what they got was a class of extremely highly educated intelligentsia who then started asking themselves why they weren't being treated equally to their white counterparts and then started looking into this whole "nationalism" idea.
 
Just wondering what thoughts are about the maintenance of European empires to present day through a lack of decolonization. What could cause such events? Or is it impossible to avoid? However what I don't want to see is only one or two global superpowers controlling everything, I mean more like French, British, German, Russian, and American empires being maintained or similar.

I don't think the Americans would have wanted to hold onto an empire. This was considering the fact that they tutored the Filipinos in the finer points of democracy and government administration. They were preparing the Philippines to receive independence when it was granted to them in 1944 or 45. That was, until the Second World War came in.

Anyway, like the others, even though you can butterfly away both world wars, decolonisation is still going to happen. Other than education and economic dislocation through policies, the colonial immigration policies would have angered the locals. In pre-WWII Southeast Asia, the lax immigration rules imposed by the colonials meant that Chinese and Indian immigrants could come over to the colonies to set up businesses. More often than not, the competition induced by the Chinese and the Indians put the locals out of business. So, on top of being told that they were being treated unequally and there was nothing they could do about it and that their wealth was being siphoned off overseas, the locals have to put up with the fact that they were worse off than foreigners who the white men would have also treated like dirt.

Besides, there was also the memory of the Russo-Japanese War, which showed that a race the Europeans consider to be inferior can actually defeat them in a straight-up fight. As long as there were examples like this, there would exist a hope for change that would lead to decolonisation.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Decolonization was coming, but Suez was the final nail in the coffin. If you have a Tripartite victory in the Suez Crisis, decolonization in Africa will slow, the Brits probably gain another 10-15 years of being the Big Dogs in the ME, and a stronger Commonwealth is going to be the goal.

We may yet see a stable East African Federation, a successful Federation of Nigeria, and maybe even a workable Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, though that last one is going to be a lot tougher.
 
I don't think the Americans would have wanted to hold onto an empire. This was considering the fact that they tutored the Filipinos in the finer points of democracy and government administration.

Very true! We Americans are far too civilized to rule over a colonial empire!

We much prefer to exterminate the indigenous population, annihilate their civilization, drive the remaining survivors onto reservations, and give all the land to our own settlers.

That's the American way. ;)
 
Very true! We Americans are far too civilized to rule over a colonial empire!

We much prefer to exterminate the indigenous population, annihilate their civilization, drive the remaining survivors onto reservations, and give all the land to our own settlers.

That's the American way. ;)

Double standards in Manifest Destiny much?
 
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