WI: Genuine Colonial "Upliftment"?

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"

Part of the problem is that in order to build such a nation-state, it's necessary to destroy the self-governing polities that existed before colonization. No colonized area, even those at a pre-state level of development, was a terra nullius. The process of replacing one system of government with another is unlikely to happen peacefully or generate much goodwill among the subject population, no matter how sincere the colonial powers' paternalistic aims may be.

I'm not saying there aren't ways - as Falecius pointed out, I've sketched out some better outcomes to colonialism in my timeline - but those ways generally depend on the colonized people having more say in how the relationship with the metropole develops, or in other words, on colonialism being less colonial.
 
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).

this isn't PolChat, and i'd not like to argue too much.

i agree that we should have gotten free trade agreements on our own terms.

but suffice to say, most of those 'free trade agreements' were anything but bilateral. they benefited America first and foremost, and ended up shafting the only just rising Philippine industries. cheaper everything in those days, and a manufactured perception of 'foreign is higher quality' keeping people here hooked on American goods long after the prices went way up... we used to be a net exporter of goods.

as i understand it, the folding of the Philippine economy into the American one was what made the whole expedition worth it.

i'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's how i understand it.

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.

That's true, and the whole point of the Romantic movement.

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,

hm. interesting. i read the essays by Nick Joaquin which i think argued the same thing about our culture.

on Japan: they definitely would.
 
Why would India want to?
Same reason the other Dominions would/did. Sentiment, material benefit and a bit of inertia.
How do they benefit from sending people to die for Britain's wars?
Same way the British benefit from sending people to die in India's wars. Two way street and all that.
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?
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.

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.
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."
 
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."

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.
 
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.
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.

(Keeping tariff barriers down would, of course, be at least a secondary goal of the dominion negotiations. May not work, but a better and less costly strategy than the military one.)
 
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