Comment by triceratops

> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies

Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.

They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.

You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.