I’m cooning myself because there aren’t any other blackcels to discuss it with ATM but
While slavery was objectively destructive and based around pure exploitation and trafficking of innocents, colonialism was more complex.
India got raped brutally and turned from a proto industrial powerhouse with better quality of life than the West (Bengali Subah) into a resource farm for brits leading to many famines where EIC would redirect food from the populace and give zero fucks.
But if you look at the Zulus, they were a despotic genocidal backwards shithole where kings would massacre your whole family if you made slight mistakes. They also practiced a worse form of colonialism on the indigenous Khoisan and wiped most of them out during their conquest.
Boers came in and developed an actual livable nation despite it coming at the cost of a brutal extractive apartheid. The difference is however this was a settler colonies rather than an extraction based metropole so they focused on building self sufficient economy to supply the secessionist Boers kind of like the US.
As we all know, most African colonialism took place a couple hundred years ago. By then slavery was taboo/outlawed in the West while a lot of Sub-Saharan polities still practiced it and didn’t care. So you could also argue that white people helped abolish exploitative practices.
But again Sub-Sahara is massive and was split up into many different territories. Congo Free State didn’t exactly play out the same way as Bechaunaland (Botswana).
While slavery was objectively destructive and based around pure exploitation and trafficking of innocents, colonialism was more complex.
India got raped brutally and turned from a proto industrial powerhouse with better quality of life than the West (Bengali Subah) into a resource farm for brits leading to many famines where EIC would redirect food from the populace and give zero fucks.
But if you look at the Zulus, they were a despotic genocidal backwards shithole where kings would massacre your whole family if you made slight mistakes. They also practiced a worse form of colonialism on the indigenous Khoisan and wiped most of them out during their conquest.
Boers came in and developed an actual livable nation despite it coming at the cost of a brutal extractive apartheid. The difference is however this was a settler colonies rather than an extraction based metropole so they focused on building self sufficient economy to supply the secessionist Boers kind of like the US.
As we all know, most African colonialism took place a couple hundred years ago. By then slavery was taboo/outlawed in the West while a lot of Sub-Saharan polities still practiced it and didn’t care. So you could also argue that white people helped abolish exploitative practices.
But again Sub-Sahara is massive and was split up into many different territories. Congo Free State didn’t exactly play out the same way as Bechaunaland (Botswana).
