The colonials modernise their empires more

I was wondering what if more of the colonial powers spend more time and money building more roads, railways, port facilities, industrialising their colonies, exploiting their mineral wealth and general stuff like hospitals?
 
I've often thought about this, but the entire colonial model kind of disallows something like it. Colonies in a traditional sense (i.e., non white-settler colonies), existed for the sole purpose of sending raw materials to the motherland to be processed. Building factories to do this in the colony itself makes this model of governance irrelevant.
 

yourworstnightmare

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Labour would be a problem. The typical European holding in Africa during the 1800s relied purely on Forced Labour (due to 2 facts: 1. The natives distrusted wage labour, 2. The Colonies had not enough funds to pay good wages anyway), which of course was very unpopular, and couldn't be overexploited ,would turn the native communities into revolts (well, of course Portugal kind of never cared and fully exploited their natives, and don't get me started on Leopold's Kongo).
 
An industrial labour force can be 'produced' pretty quickly. The rural population might distrust them, but once it turns out that you can actually live reasonably well on these wages, they'll come (they did OTL). BUt industrialisation is unlikely to be the first priority of colonial powers simply because it's against their interest.

Infrastructrure development is more likely. The problem, I think, would be funding it. Colonies were supposed to pay for themselves, so it wouldn't be until the second half of the twentieth century that this becomes affordable. It might be possible to put more money into an (exploitation-oriented) infrastructure if colonial products came to bemore expensive.
 
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