European colonialism that happened about two to five hundred years ago, done by countries like England, France and Portugal, is most often painted in an extremely negative light: "White supremacist" nations invading, taking over and colonizing foreign lands of people they considered inferior, thinking that they have the God-given right to those lands and those resources, who exploited the lands and the people, stole their land and property, and took them as slaves, leaving only devastation and desolation behind.
Then, during the past one to two hundred years ago all these European countries withdrew from their colonies and allowed them to become independent.
What a horrendous episode in human history! Such a travesty! Such crimes against humanity! Lands ravaged, resources stolen, people abused and taken as slaves.
Yet, when you actually start looking about the actual situation that happened before, during and after European imperialism, shoving the politics and moralizing aside, it paints a rather different picture.
For starters, before European colonialism the vast, vast majority of the peoples and nations that were later colonized lived literally and without exaggeration in the Stone Age. That's not some kind of racist exaggeration and distortion: It's literally true. While Europeans were building cathedrals, had the printing press and sailed across vast oceans, the vast majority of those people in Africa and elsewhere lived literally in the Stone Age, most of them not even having tools or weapons made of metal, living in mud or straw huts. Some of those peoples had advanced barely to the equivalent of the Bronze Age, but just a few of them, and just barely.
When the Europeans came, they didn't just ravage the lands, steal all the resources and either massacred the native people or take them as slaves. In some cases, sure, but that was actually not all that prevalent. Instead, the Europeans brought advanced technology and advanced knowledge eg. about architecture and agriculture, they built infrastructure, buildings, roads, factories. They literally brought the native people from a literal Stone Age to the post-medieval renaissance age in mere decades. The Europeans did not merely take advantage and abuse the locals: They built them huge buildings, they built them roads and railways, they taught them agriculture.
This didn't happen only in Africa, as it also happened in most of southern Asia. India and the other surrounding cultures lived, as mentioned, in a state of very early Bronze Age, give or take, and the British brought them straight to the Victorian era in a span of just a few decades. In fact, thanks to British colonialism India became one of the richest, most modern (by the standards of the time) and most prosperous countries of all of Asia.
Then look at what happened when the Europeans left, and effectively gave the land back to the native people.
Some countries succeeded in maintaining a semblance of modernity (quite often thanks to not severing completely ties to Europe), but in the vast, vast majority of cases these countries started regressing more and more back towards the Stone Age. All the infrastructure, the roads, the railways, the buildings, the factories started to be more and more in a state of ever accelerating disrepair due to lack of proper maintenance and work. Road after road started crumbling, railway after railway started becoming unusable, building after building started decaying because of lack of maintenance.
Many of the richest and most African and Asian countries became extremely impoverished after the Europeans left.
And all that in the span of a mere 50 or so years.
Ironically, about the only countries that remained rich and prosperous were the ones where the Europeans didn't completely leave but continued to work to maintain (South Africa being the most notable but not the only example.)
If Europeans had never colonized these places and had just remained in Europe, without any contact with all those countries, what do you think would be state of all these countries today? I think it's relatively safe to say that the vast majority of them would still be living in the Stone Age to this day (just like the so-called "uncontacted peoples", of which there are some remaining in the world.)
So one has to ask: Would that have been the better outcome?
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