Comment by Jensson

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.