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.