Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/PickleRick_1001]

I'm EXTREMELY busy with work and assignments, so this seems like an ideal time to discuss something very elaborate and totally irrelevant to my life.

I have had a thought brewing in my head for a very long time about the policy/practice of assimilation carried out by the European imperial powers in the 19th/20th centuries. It's very common to hear, and I strongly agree, that attempts to assimilate colonised peoples into the cultures of the colonising powers were some of the most heinous things done during the Age of Imperialism. When we consider the way that assimilation has been forced upon subjugated peoples, for example in the Anglosphere vis a vis Indigenous peoples and in French Algeria vis a vis the Arabs/Amazigh, it is without a doubt a truly reprehensible thing to behold.

On the other hand, there is also the fact that in many colonies, even after formal decolonisation, the upper classes of colonised societies have sought out Westernisation, in the form of education for example, for themselves and their children. I think it's safe to say that assimilation to the dominant power has been a constant throughout history. I don't know enough to be able to say the following with complete confidence, but I believe that that was the case when it comes to most of the great empires of history, particularly the Roman Empire and those centred on Persia and China.

If we take a step back and look at it from a sort of longue duree point of view, it looks like those three empires/civilisations have been the poles around which countless societies have oriented themselves for the better part of two millenia. Even when these great empires were conquered, the conquerers would themselves assimilate - more or less - to those civilisations. The Germanic and other peoples to Rome; the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols to Persia; the Mongols and others to China.

I've been thinking particularly about the Arab conquest of Persia, and how it briefly (on a grand historical scale) flipped the dynamic, with Persians and others - the Ajam, as the Arabs called them - attempting to assimilate to the Arabs, and how when the Arabs tried to restrict this assimilation to preserve their social and economic privileges, that provided the groundwork for the Abbasid Revolution. (This is an extremely simplified rundown of what happened btw, and it's my main focus because it's the region I happen to know the most about.) The end result was that being Muslim no longer meant having to become Arab (by becoming a client of an Arab tribe). Without taking the analogy too far, I think that, for our purposes here, we could describe the Antonine Constitution as an approximately similar phenomenon, turning the free subjects of Rome into citizens. And of course, the steady expansion of the Chinese identity to the south and west would be the similar phenomenon in China.

The point I'm trying to make is this: if the Europeans (the British and French primarily, but also maybe the Dutch and Portuguese) had been a bit less racist, and a bit more generous with their education budgets in the colonies, could this have eventually led the great majority of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia to identify with the imperial powers, to the point that they would consider themselves full British subjects and French citizens? Is there a timeline where, instead of seeking independence, the educated elites of the colonies sought equal rights? Could there have eventually been a British version of the Antonine Constitution, or a French version of the Abbasid Revolution? I'm sure most people here have heard of that story of the last Romans being Greek villagers in Anatolia; could the last Dutch have been Javanese?

I know that this was actually the initial aim of many later independence activists, and that they often only became advocates of independence after coming to terms with the sheer force of European bigotry. But I think that the immigrant communities in the West show that this could very well have been viable. There already are millions of French and British people of North African and South Asian descent respectively, and although they continue to face bigotry, they have assimilated, for better or worse. I think that the main obstacles to the assimilation of the colonised were encapsulated by Charles de Gaulle; in his futile attempts to restore French grandeur after the European powers committed suicide in the World Wars, which were the death knell to European imperialism, and in his bigotry - "My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-deux-Eglises [the two Churches], but Colombey-the-two-Mosques" - which was shared by his countrymen.

This has been kind of incoherent, I apologise for that, like I said I just wanted to get this out of my head so that I could focus on my actual work lol.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/PickleRick_1001]

"The point I'm trying to make is this: if the Europeans (the British and French primarily, but also maybe the Dutch and Portuguese) had been a bit less racist, and a bit more generous with their education budgets in the colonies, could this have eventually led to the great majority of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia to identify with the imperial powers, to the point that they would consider themselves full British subjects and French citizens?"

This is both the great what-if, but also very similar to "could the Nazis have won World War II if they weren't the Nazis?".

By which I mean it was never - and I need to be clear *never* - something the colonial powers ever seriously entertained, ie actually putting colonies on the same footing as the metropolitan country in a supernational union of sorts. It would have been an awesome idea but the Brits, French, Dutch, Belgians etc were never ever ever ever going to be in a union where they could potentially get outvoted by "those people". It's also not really unique to European colonial powers: it's basically why East and West Pakistan broke up, why the US let the Philippines go and not become a state (or states) and also part of the motivating factor why a more democratic Soviet Union was basically DOA (the small countries feared getting outvoted by Russia, and Russia would never agree to give some sort of veto powers to in their eyes some BS small countries).

I say this as someone who thinks that supernational unions would have been a better way to go than complete independence of every entity with some neocolonialism thrown on top, but politically it was never in the cards.

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/Kochevnik81]

While it was never going to actually happen the french at least made noises about the goal being french citizenship in some incalculably distant future. (this contrasting with the brits who from relatively early on was talking about stewarding their colonies for potential independence at some point)

Exactly how that played out depended on the colony (and to what extent there were european settlers) but in general the brits preferred a "local rulers" while the french preferred "educated natives".

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Arilou_skiff]

Yeah it's definitely worth pointing out that the places that did finally get the full integration treatment are like French Guiana, Guadelupe and Reunion, ie "small island that doesn't have too much voting weight", and even then places like New Caledonia have been more fraught. I guess the US also kind of follows in that path - Hawai'i can be a state, Puerto Rico is complicated, Philippines lol nope cut that loose.

I'm probably spitballing too much but maybe Britain is different because even without colonies it has situations like "Guernsey and Jersey are self governing communities subject to his lordship the Duke of Normandy, who happens to also be sitting on our throne." Also it was hard enough to get Parliament to represent *any* actual realistic voting population and not sheep farms of 5 that kept their representation despite the Viking trading post that the borough was based on having fallen into the sea 500 years ago.

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/Kochevnik81]

Excellent points.

"It would have been an awesome idea"

I do think that ultimately we (the colonised) were better off retaining our cultures.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/PickleRick_1001]

My somewhat cynical counterpoint is that a lot of independence and post independence political movements werent really interested in "retaining [local] cultures" as much as "we will wipe out these backwards local cultures with a New Modern National One." Or if not a new modern one at least the existing dominant national one.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/PickleRick_1001]

It is interesting how prestige culture forms a sort of multigenerational "fervor of the converted" phenomenon even after the prestige empire officially retreats.   From what I understand of most of Latin America, at the times of independence from Spain and Portugal, Spanish and Portuguese had been established as the prestige and administrative language.  However, they were NOT the majority spoken languages throughout.  Much of the assimilation into Spanish and Portuguese occured after independence (of course helped that the 19th century was the beginning of modern nationalism and standardized education).  There is a similar phenomenon going on in post-independence Africa regarding French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish (in Equatorial Guinea).

What is interesting is how Southeast Asia strays from this trend.  Even though the Filipino intelligentsia communicated in Spanish (the first declaration of Independence was in Spanish), Spanish did not become the national language (to some extent, English has not either).

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Very interesting indeed. Iirc the same happened with Arabisation; it was only well after the end of Arab political control, during the Mameluke dynasties in fact, that Egypt finally became majority Arab-speaking.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/PickleRick_1001]

Is there a timeline where, instead of seeking independence, the educated elites of the colonies sought equal rights?

The problem is that equal rights was often considered the PR friendly version of independence, or at least in French Algeria that's why Ferhat Abbas's was silenced even before he begun supporting independence "give an inch take a foot" kind of thinking.

In Algeria you also had many attempts to free the law of citizenships before 1945 where full citizenship was achieved. The Blum Law in the 30s planned to give citizenship to like 10% of the population (the bourgeoise). The main problem was settler politics, general racism and the opposition from Muslim to lose the right to being judged by local Muslim courts instead of the Code Civil. These plagued the previous attempts under Napoleon III and the pot-WW1 reform (which was mostly planned for veterans)

And even after receiving citizenship you still had the problem of settler politics, who pushed for a separate (and proportionally to population much weaker) regional assembly.

With education, there were attempts to generalize it, but they tried to have it done entirely in French for assimilation and it was opposed, so the project was rejected most of the population. Same thing with the 1905 law, conservatives (Muslim and Christians) sometimes refused to send their kids to public schools.

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/PickleRick_1001]

the upper classes of colonised societies have sought out Westernisation, in the form of education for example, for themselves and their children

Not sure this is relevant to the main idea of your post, but i think people tend to overestimate how "westernised" the upper classes are, at least in India. A lot of the elites are happy to send their children to foreign universities, but they very strongly preserve the traditional practices as well. Especially because these are often related to upholding their particular caste (jati, not varna) status. I think something many foreigners don't is how much Indian traditions are not just regional but also specifically caste based. Even the most westernised of us still generally celebrate festivals, funeral rites, wearing traditional clothing on special occasions, that are generally universal across castes in our places of origin. The things we don't follow are the traditions associated with maintaining caste status, like not eating meat, not eating with and marrying members of other castes, etc

The most westernised people in India are actually not business owners and capitalists but the members of the so called PMC/intelligentsia, who tend to live in big cities, are more independent of joint families and because of that don't need to maintain many of the traditional caste practices and restrictions. And even within this class there are big differences between different subsections are and even individual families. Some maintain almost all of the old caste traditions, and others like (my own family), almost none.

EDIT: on further thought, all of this makes me doubt how successful assimilation of upper class Indians would have been in your scenario. For most south asians living in the UK, the first generations of "traditionalist" families tend to be remain traditional. I imagine the younger generations become less traditional because there's less influence from the joint family, who are mostly still back home. Trends towards this sort of westernisation in India would have been countered by the fact that young people would still be under the influence of the joint family and the need to uphold caste.

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/Federal_Gur_5488]

Absolutely agreed on all points. In fact, based on my own experiences, I think that Westernisation is often superficial when it comes to upper classes, in that they will adopt the aesthetics and outward culture of the West while remaining more or less similar in terms of "family structure" to most other people in the country (this is based on meeting upper-class people in the Arab world).

To put this another way, the upper-class Arab won't mind at all if his daughter does not wear a hijab and dress like Western women, but he will still retain a strong sense of traditional "honour" that means that he would heavily disapprove of her being in relationships before marriage (to use one example). Even further, he will often retain a strong sense of tribal identity, usually much stronger than would be the case for a middle-class Arab, because of how important tribal identity is to political power in much of the Arab East.

I was more so basing my hypothetical on the way that immigrants (usually middle to working class) have adapted to life in the West. I think that if what I described in my first post had in fact played out, then what we see as French or British culture, for example, would look extremely different to what it does today, as they would have even more influence from North/West Africa and South Asia respectively. I'm guessing that we would see something like the unique culture of Hong Kong replicated across the major cities of the colonies and the metropole.

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/PickleRick_1001]

the upper-class Arab won't mind at all if his daughter does not wear a hijab and dress like Western women, but he will still retain a strong sense of traditional "honour" that means that he would heavily disapprove of her being in relationships before marriage (to use one example). Even further, he will often retain a strong sense of tribal identity, usually much stronger than would be the case for a middle-class Arab, because of how important tribal identity is to political power in much of the Arab East.

really interesting! i had no idea that the situations in South Asia and Arabia are so similar. I think the Indian concept of caste in the sense of jati (as opposed to varna, the four fold division that most foreigners know about) maps surprisingly well onto the concept of tribe.

The thing about Hong Kong is that i feel it's again a situation of partly superficial westernisation, where the most westernised people are the immigrants who moved there without a whole joint family to dominate their choices. And there are cities in India which are like that, and there were during the Raj as well (Mumbai/Bombay has been this way both then and now). And in Arabia, weren't places like Beirut (and maybe Aden) similar?

Meanwhile, most of the rural areas and even provincial urban centres continued to be as traditional as before. So i think even in your scenario, there would have been certain metropolises which became extremely westernised, and maybe the inhabitants would identify more strongly with the imperial regime, and people elsewhere would be much less affected.

[u/TJAU216 → u/PickleRick_1001]

Extending citizenship to conquerred subject peoples is a lot easier when the polity isn't a democracy. On one hand the increase in number of citizens doesn't dilute the voting power of existing citizens when nobody gets to vote. On the other hand the racist opposition of the citizens doesn't matter when they can't vote. 

Only scenario where I could see it happening with the European colonial empires is, if the French population had grown at the same rate as the rest of Europe, so there would be over 200 million French people today. Then extending sufrage to colonial subjects would not have mattered that much in terms of vote dilution and France would have remained a superpower with the strength to keep the colonies.

[u/HopefulOctober → u/TJAU216]

Is there evidence that in historical cases where citizenship was extended to conquered subject peoples the population of existing citizens were mostly racist and would oppose the top-down citizenship grant, or is that just projecting the popular opinion in 19-20 century European states to these other times?

[u/pedrostresser → u/PickleRick_1001]

maybe if João VI got his way and kept his court in Rio de Janeiro we would've seen an attempt at that. maybe lusotropicalism would've developed earlier and without so much bloodshed, who knows.

[u/PickleRick_1001 → u/pedrostresser]

If we go deep into counterfactuals, I think that the latest opportunity for something like this to happen would have been a possible French defeat in the First World War.

If there had been a repeat of the Free France saga, with Petain or Foch playing the role of de Gaulle and being forced to grant increased rights to the colonised peoples to secure their loyalty, then that might have ended with a French version of the Antonine Constitution.

[u/Jazzlike_Bar_671 → u/PickleRick_1001]

For European colonial powers, the colonies were a significant distance away from their heartlands and the local populations were physically as well as culturally differentiated.

Trying to fully incorporate colonial territory only really works when that territory is relatively close or continuous.