Comment by triceratops
3 hours ago
> 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.
Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors
I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.
They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.