Greater land and resources? What made the Romans interested in expanding around and across the Mediterranean? If they manage to assimilate other people, they would have a much larger pool of soldiers to draw from. There would also be the matter of prestige I imagine. The idea of being able to say that your country is this big, is something that I imagine many people would want to be able to do. It would feed into one's own sense of superiority, and on a national level, I imagine that the same effect would occur.
What would incentivise colonial empires to integrate colonies?
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That's not taking into account Italian plans for Somalia, including the establishment of the largest overseas naval base, in Libya, which alone would require tens of thousands just to directly work onthe area, support it, etc. Settlement was basically nonexistant a decadebefore and growing fast - a few thousand in 1926, there were over 50,000 by 1935. If the total population grew at the same rate as Mogadishu, there are likely 75000 by 1940, perhaps more. Many of them did work in the agriculture, but in the various mills in the Mogadishu triangle, along with light industry that was also arising.
Libya does have the benefit of being closer, but both have a large population and, absent Italian presence in WW2, Somalia will continue receiving settlement, especially as it offers a strategic benefit that Libya, in and of itself, does not possess.
Maybe? I imagine if one is able to justify in the lens of "its our duty to spread our cultures and ideas" then I think it would probably already have a precedent for many of the colonizing cultures. If a nation of people thinks of itself as being so great, as many did at the time, then they probably wouldn't have any problem with "spreading that greatness" if only to reinforce or reaffirm their own sense of superiority.
Portugal did after world war 2 until 1974 under Estado Novo. when Estado Novo fall the new government quickly drop all the colonies with no opposition.
Aphrodite
Banned
The Russian/Soviets were the last colonial power standing. The lack of rights probably had a lot to do with it
Amusingly, the Finns always had greater rights than the Russians under the Romanovs
But that’s the thing. Nehru definitely wasn’t content with the existing order. He sought Indian independence, and then after he succeeded in that goal, he sought to break the power of the feudal elites.
The thing is, much of the elite was nationalist and pro-independence. While the established, landed elite was generally coopted, the newer elite created through trade generally sought for independence and the reduction of the power of the landed elite. So really, establishing a colonial legislature with property requirements would backfire - in India, for instance, despite only about fifty of two hundred or so seats being up for election, it resulted in nationalists totally and utterly obstructing parliamentary agenda to advocate for dominion. So, really, devolved legislatures would backfire, giving nationalists a voice but not nearly enough of their demands.
That's what the locals are for. The naval base will bring some settlers, but by far the majority of the construction personnel will go home, and from then on the majority of Europeans on site will be military personnel who normally reside in Europe.
And I'm not sure how much more it would have gotten after that, it's competing with the rest of Ethiopia after 1936.
Libya had a smaller native population than Italian Somaliland, and a far far smaller native population than the Somalia Governorate.
Which is why the population increased by 40k in ~ 10 years, and didn't really show much in a way of slowing growth until WW2? Somalia and Eritrea were safer and had a much larger Italian population than further in Ethiopia, even if the climate is better in the highlands.
And, once Ethiopia eventually is lost (they'll not be keeping that), the population that settled in Ethiopia will flow to
And the Italians didn't have to settle and could have used natives to run the burgeoning mills and factories that were being set up in Mogadishu and elsewhere, but settlement was encouraged and the Italians worked in those mills as well - it wasn't purely native population. Italian settlement wasn't widespread and such outside of the central triangle OTL, so you have a possible Oran situation, long term.
To construct a naval base, I'm not talking about the labor to build it. The labor to build it doesn't matter. It's the engineers and trades that actually work in the shipyard, which was to become the biggest naval base in East Africa (like Eritrea was designated the industrial center). To run a fully functional naval base, you need thousands of personnel trained, and almost all of those are going to be imports. If it's a small naval base, you're looking at about 10 thousand people, very roughly - and this was not to be a small naval base. That's not counting military personnel, of course, that's just what would be necessary to run the base. Let's not even include those personnel that would bring families along (or those that would marry native Somali or others), or otherwise.
So, that population wouldn't be a transient one that lives overseas - it'd have to be at least semi-permanent, which means settlement. And the only point that is that it'd be another core of settlement for Italians to migrate to. At first it's just the base, and then the base workers, and then the base continues to expand with immigration from Italy, natural growth, and sailors and similar deciding to remain (not many, likely, but they'd add in). So you have a second population center outside of the Mogadishu triangle for the Italians.
Also, Libya's population was ~860k in 1940, and Italian Somalia ~1150k in 1939, which is the closest comparison I have at this point in time. Libya is smaller, but not necessarily drastically smaller. (Eritrea seems to have been even smaller, too, than Libya).
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The key point is that Somalia is, until oil is discovered in Libya, more valuable in a strategic sense. It's the farthest flung colony, with a relatively quiet native population, with good agricultural potential, and allows the Italians to project power. Libya isn't nearly as valuable. So, the fascist government certainly would have continued to encourage Italians to settle in Somalia, which it had been quite successful in doing at that point in time. Natural growth, continued immigration due to strategic importance in securing the region and projecting power, and other efforts would continue until the fall of the regime (not out of the question, of course), or the discovery of Libyan oil, at which point Libya becomes a much more important colony and the immigration from Italy will dry to a trickle, at least for a while.
Well, if the colonial empire is genuinely trying to raise living standards amongst the populace in the colonies, for reasons that I am trying to look for here, I'd imagine that there wouldn't be many insurgencies considering how China doesn't have any(noteworthy) cries for democracy within the mainland. Like a bread and circuses type event I imagine would be applied throughout these empires that wish to sustain themselves.
IMO there are at least 6, possibly more, factors that would be needed for a European colonial empire to integrate its colonies:
1) A universalist ideology, which has strong, if not perfect, commitment from the ruling group of the metropole and a decent portion of the metropole's population (for example, French revolutionary liberalism, Soviet revolutionary socialism, perhaps some sort of "we are all equal under the king/queen/emperor/Caliph" ideology could work, though many countries made a stab at doing so in the modern era but ended up forced back to narrow nationalism)
2) A relatively large metropolitan population compared to the colonies - if the core group is less than 1/5th of the total population of a state, things tend not to go too well
3) The metropole needs a large economy so it can afford to develop and defend its colonies
4) Most of the key resources required for the empire available within the empire - for example, if we assume the key resources are iron ore, coal and oil, an empire would really want to access 2 out of the 3 key resources within their own territory
5) Either the empire should have resources that are cheaper to exploit than the resources available outside, OR the empire should have for some reason restricted access to the world market so that investment is preferentially drawn to developing colonial territories, not independent minor states
6) The colonies should ideally have some geopolitical relevance to the goals of the metropole.
The only European empire to tick all 6 of these boxes throughout its existence was the Soviet Union (and of course, when it stopped ticking all these boxes, it evaporated in an instant). However, Britain and France could both conceivably end up in a position where they both ticked all the boxes and still had large colonial domains - though IMO Britain either needs a PoD in the 19th Century or it will be a considerably reduced British empire that emerges from the geopolitical and ideological changes required to stabilize the empire.
Italy, Japan and a Germany that didn't lose all of its colonies in WW1 could potentially do it. So long as any of these 3 don't over-extend as Italy and Japan would do in the 30s and WW2, they may well have better odds to hold their empires together than the Brits and the French.
As could a USA that decided to be more colonial, or a China that recovered earlier in the 20th Century and then opted to join the colonial race.
I also tend to think the Ottomans had fairly good odds if they caught a couple breaks (like not joining in on WW1).
fasquardon
Can I have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers beyond 1935. I'm not doubting you, I'd just like a source for my own future reference.
Yes, but it's sentiment and ease of access that attracts migrants, and the Fourth Shore has both in spades.
I mean of course it's possible that Italian Somalia could get far more settlers, but I still don't see it being integrated prior to Libya, which was already being hailed as an extension of Italy proper in propaganda.
Hrm. The numbers I've been double checking aren't quite as conclusive as I had remembered. My apologies. The only hard cite I have for you is Mogadishu's Italian population, which was 30k in 1940 according to the 1942 Yearbook of the Encyclopedia Americana. The record of growth is mostly my interpolation, as there is no population listed for 1940, so the recorded rough 5% of Somali population in 1940 is hard to gauge. - I've seen the 1940 population as high as 1.3 million (WW2DB), but I doubt that, as it was 1.15 million in 1939 (populstat), so it's likely the influx there would be of soldiers.
Combined, if I estimate ~ 1.2 million, that puts ~ 60,000 Italians in Somali while using the 5% estimate, which means growth has slowed some. But I think I found the reason for that while digging - Ethiopia. In 1938, Massawa in Eritrea had grown to 15,000 people, expressly for the purpose of becoming the port of entry into Ethiopia. So, while not necessarily stopping growth, growth wasslowed by the acquisition of Ethiopia, like you had implied.
I guess that, for the duration of the war, Civilians couldn't be settled in the region nearly as well, and as WW2 soon followed the end of the 2nd Italo-Ethiopian War, there was never a chance for that settlement to rebound. This is echoed in the only recorded Italian growth being in Mogadishu, their major city, rather than in the countryside/outlying territories/similar.
So, absent Italian participation in WW2 (or absent Axis participation, rather), the immigration should pick up once Italy has successfully built up its territory in Eritrea and can turn further south to expand in Somalia along similar lines. But to keep prewar growth levels in Somalia, it would be necessary to avoid Ethiopia as such a war, instead.
Thanks for making me double check my numbers on that - they weren't quite as strong as I remembered.
Fair enough. You definitely could have Libya be integrated into Italy properly sooner than the others, certainly. Government sponsored settlement would be targeted towards East Africa, but you'd have much more natural immigration to Libya due to its vicinity.
Well for Portugal their African holdings of Kabinda, Angola, and Mozambique were sitting on quite a few natural resources; Guinea however was a dead loss IIRC. Goa, Macau, and East Timor if handled properly could have potentially been self-supporting financially which would have allowed them to maintain sovereign territory in handy locations, albeit at the cost of possibly complicating local relations.
Not only that, it was also the only colony where they faced a unified and well lead rebellion and were not able to recruit a significant number of soldiers from the local populous. They should have dumped it right off the bat, would have freed up a lot of soldiers for Angola or Mozambique (and IIRC Guinea-Bissau also produced the most Portugese casualties).
That's the hard-headed approach but if would have created problems - it gives encouragement to separatists in Angola and Mozambique that it can be achieved, and goes completely against the regimes own policies of making the colonies integral parts of Portugal. I do wonder if the Estado Novo had been able to know earlier what sort of resources the colonies were sitting on whether they might have been able to hold on more successfully.
In Mozambique that would indeed be a risk, but given how weak and divided the Angolan rebels were I don't think a moral buff would tilt the conflict in their favour in any appreciable way.
Not as Crazy as you think there was a serious push to Install Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte (AKA Napoleon V)as Emperor following the death of Félix Faure and the Drefus Affair it didn't get too far since supporters of a Bourbon Restoration had the same idea and voilà French Republicanism won out... Although if World War One went poorly for the French it is possible there could have been another Monarchist Push then
French republicanism had won out long before the Dreyfus Affair. It had won out after the Sixteenth of May crisis and attempted constitutional coup in 1877, and it had secured itself after Boulanger was defeated in 1889. That push would have been defeated, and Bonapartism would end up even more discredited.
If France was defeated in WWI, it would have discredited monarchism, with revanchism, an ideology connected to monarchism (among other ideologies), having totally and utterly failed.