Colonialism ENDED the genocide that was going on in most of Africa before the Ottoman empire was defeated. A genocide generally referred in older texts as "the islamic slave trade", because islamic economies were entirely dependent on the slave trade for more than a millenium, oh and because it's part of the religion/state that islam was at the time.
Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave trade WAS islam. As in, everything else was a rounding error. Even now, because the slave trade is still easily 95% of the entire existence of the religion.
For "some" reason people are now trying to rename it "African slave trade". Not at all to get people to focus on the 1% of slaves that went to work in western colonies in the New World (which is what Americans historically called it).
Like the one the aztecs regularly unleashed upon their neighbors? Or any pre-colonial tribe in the Americas or Africa (in this case up until this day really). What did the Romans brought us really?
An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".
The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
The implication of this statement is probably supposed to be that it's the west that did that. However, colonialism never conquered Africa. They took over Ottoman/muslim colonies. Muslims, and by that I mean the now dead state that is the religion, conquered 90% of the colonies, and inherited the remaining 10% from the Romans. The only big exception to that is the US.
In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
The primary point is that it sucked, not who did it.
> However, colonialism never conquered Africa.
As I'm a British national, and the British empire was famously the biggest, my ancestors managed to get up in basically everyone's business in the colonial era.
Even aside from all that stuff we nicked and put in museums, and the war crimes the British government has even been doing some official apologising for, it was the British empire that invented the concentration camp for use against… other colonists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...
My forebears don't get an "it's fine" badge just because the target was, in that case, a different bunch of Europeans from what is now a day-trip away.
> In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
Yes, I know. Everything being awful everywhere before the industrial age doesn't mean what the (in that case Spanish) did was fine, it makes it the equivalent of a drug-gang turf war where nobody holds any of the belligerents in high regard.
I'm not sure how that justifies war. It just means that the outcome of a war can be better than if there never was a war. Obviously both sides in any given war believe that. Ask a few Ukrainians how that works, they can explain.
Yeah. Warring people always say that if their side wins the outcome will be better, of course. Look at Israle/Hamas
I was responding to gp, maybe wrong part of the thread.
<< "Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world". If this is not justification for war, I don't know what is.
And how do they know in the absence of colonialism, but just trade, these countries couldn't/wouldn't become advanced? I can equally say colonialism is what has left many of these countries in poverty and border disputes.
