I know there's been several timelines on this board dealing with the Portuguese retaining their colonies, but have any of them been about them actually living up to their ideals about treating their colonies as equals to the metropole?
would it be possible for a nation to actually treat their subjects with dignity and try to build a self-governing nation state tied to the "mother country"
I don't know how you can blame the US on the fall of the Filipino economy. If anything, it would have done better to get a free trade agreement with the US back before gaining independence (which would have been hard, I grant).
And if you look at the Meiji, even when a people tries to uplift themselves by their own bootstraps, things still get horribly traumatized.
Maybe modernization and industrialization comes inherently at a great cost.
Stanley Karnow's In Our Image (1990 Pulitzer, IIRC) is an interesting examination of just these sort of questions - and from a post-WW II and post-Vietnam perspective (meaning, largely, a realistic one, to my way of thinking...)
The Philippines is an interesting and even atypical example, however; widely varied indigenous societies (kind of a given, being an archipelago) that are (essentially) unified by a European power, given an overlay of common culture (largely religion) that in turn leads to a "nationalist" point of view against the Europeans; rebellion and then empire-building by (essentially) a former settler society (the US) turned nation state in its own right, with its own set of (real or imagined) pieties and perspectives.
The "saving grace" - such as it is - of the US-Philippine relationship is that despite the horrors of the P-A war and occupation, something reasonably close to a civil society resulted, and both Filipino emigration to the US and the shared horror of the Pacific War (1941-45 version) cemented the relationship.
The PI was, essentially, the first non-settler colony to gain independence from the imperial power in the modern era; as brutal as the PA War/occupation was, the US elite - pretty early on; certainly by 1920, if not before - saw that a movement to independence was the only way forward.
Independence in 1936, rather than 1946, would have had some interesting ramifcations; absent any US garrison, would Japan have invaded? They invaded Thailand, of course.
Best,
Same reason the other Dominions would/did. Sentiment, material benefit and a bit of inertia.Why would India want to?
Same way the British benefit from sending people to die in India's wars. Two way street and all that.How do they benefit from sending people to die for Britain's wars?
A) You misspelled 'In addition to'.Why would it want to have a lot of economic ties with some country on the other side of the planet instead of its natural partners in Asia and the Middle East?
This is the core PoD. At worse, the people who spent a generation or two drinking the proverbial 'Civilizing Mission' Kool Aid takes a look at the British-educated, English speaking, and to a very large degree acculturated Indians stating that a move to Dominion Status is wanted they think "Why not let these chaps run the place? Saves a fair number of headaches."Understood... when the Indian elites sought Dominion status out, the British wouldn't offer it, and when the British offered it because of their need for Indian manpower, the Indians said thanks, but no thanks.
Same reason the other Dominions would/did. Sentiment, material benefit and a bit of inertia.
Same way the British benefit from sending people to die in India's wars. Two way street and all that.
A) You misspelled 'In addition to'.
B) The same reasons Britain would benefit in maintaining ties to India atop the natural partners in the North Atlantic.
This is the core PoD. At worse, the people who spent a generation or two drinking the proverbial 'Civilizing Mission' Kool Aid takes a look at the British-educated, English speaking, and to a very large degree acculturated Indians stating that a move to Dominion Status is wanted they think "Why not let these chaps run the place? Saves a fair number of headaches."
I am taking the spirit on the threat title to heart and presuming that some folks decide that keeping the captive market to the degree they have would be more trouble than it is worth in the long term.The trouble is that letting local interests run the place completely undermines the captive market and British profits. What happens when the acculturated Indians decide to promote industry in Bengal instead of obediently focusing on cash crop production for the mills of Birmingham? You're undermining the entire basis of colonialism- economics.