Isn't that true of pretty much every country, even the few that were never colonized by European powers?
I mean, Afghanistan developed since its independence in 1919, but that's hardly attributable to some sort of intrinsic Britishness.
Same for Egypt, with its 1922 independence, or Libya in 1951.
Just like how Vietnam developed after independence from France.
While we've seen how Japan developed without being part of any colonial system. ("it was probably better in the end to be conquered by the Romans than many others" rejects the idea that it might have been better to not be conquered at all.)
> A "country" is just a lot of bits that someone conquered.
The modern definition of a "country" also requires a permanent population and a government, along with recognition by other countries. Note that this definition is of fundamentally European origin.
Further note the difficulty of using your definition for "Northern Cyprus" and "Sealand", much less the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta".
I was commenting on 'spawned a bunch of successful countries .. and all have developed' by pointing out the meaningless of "developed". Every country has developed over the last 100 years - those which were British colonies, those which were French colonies, and those which were not colonized.
That Japan and Ethiopia carried out atrocities to expand their respective empires during that time is completely besides the point.
I don't claim to "really know" but being born in a "formerly pink" bit of Africa has always seemed a lot better to me than the alternatives. I wouldn't want to have been born in Mozambique or Angola (Portugese) or the DRC (Belgium) and even the Francophone bits of Africa seem a bit doubtful to me.
This may just be for reasons that nobody can control of course. Perhaps anyone taking on those places would have had the same results.
My complaint is that "developed" is meaningless, given that all of those countries have developed. Even something like "developed better" needs a comparison.
For example, do you include Egypt, Sudan, and Libya as "formerly pink" parts of Africa? Would you prefer living in one of those three countries or in Madagascar (ex-French)?
For that matter, do you count Cameroon as under being under German, French, or English control when you consider that country's modern development?
As for "the alternatives", how do you evaluate the alternative of "not being colonized"? Do you look to Liberia and Ethiopia and assume that's indicative of how the other countries would have developed?
It's like Britain or any part of Europe being colonised by the Romans. They left and things fell apart. Who in Europe developed by being left alone?
Nevertheless wherever the Romans stayed longer, so did bits of their way of doing things. We're typing in their alphabet, using many of their words. Our legal systems embed many ideas from the Roman one (I read this but cannot say how true it is). I do know that in my pink bit of Africa our legal system is based on Roman-Dutch law.
We basically believe in educating, building public infrastructure, accountancy, paying tax, a degree of organisation as the Romans seem to have done and we've tried and failed, just as they did, to have democratic government of a sort.
And all of this happened via a 2nd party - the British (and some Dutch).
The problem is that a change in culture and attitudes takes generations and a few generations ago people in my part of the world were wearing animal skins (an exaggeration obviously) but for many the rural life really is only a generation ago.
Now significant numbers of people read and write, work in offices or industry. There's no way that would have happened this fast without modern medicine and agriculture and to a lesser degree the ability to build cities with clean water and sewage. That's because the population would not have been able to grow like it has. Droughts would have wiped people out - without the dams, grain stores and imports-by rail that happened as a result of the creation of these things by people from an alternate culture.
Whats happening now is that because the values of that alternate are only embedded in a small part of the host culture, it's difficult maintain them and therefore things fall apart.
There's a core knowledge/culture about civilisation that didn't come ultimately from the British but really from the Romans and through them from the Greeks and maybe through them from others. It's a multilayered fruit with each previous civilisation adding something. To develop it has probably taken 1000s of years. Nobody has done it totally on their own.
Isn't that true of pretty much every country, even the few that were never colonized by European powers?
I mean, Afghanistan developed since its independence in 1919, but that's hardly attributable to some sort of intrinsic Britishness.
Same for Egypt, with its 1922 independence, or Libya in 1951.
Just like how Vietnam developed after independence from France.
While we've seen how Japan developed without being part of any colonial system. ("it was probably better in the end to be conquered by the Romans than many others" rejects the idea that it might have been better to not be conquered at all.)
> A "country" is just a lot of bits that someone conquered.
The modern definition of a "country" also requires a permanent population and a government, along with recognition by other countries. Note that this definition is of fundamentally European origin.
Further note the difficulty of using your definition for "Northern Cyprus" and "Sealand", much less the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta".