So in the last three years or so — since COVID, basically — Romania and Taiwan have both joined a very special club of countries.
There are not a lot of countries in this club. If you’re very generous, you could include perhaps a dozen or so. But to my way of thinking, there are only about eight. They include:
Ireland (pretty much the type specimen)
South Korea
Singapore
All three Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
Taiwan
Romania
There are some definitional issues. Romania, in particular, s a borderline case. It only qualifies as… half a member, let’s say. Microstates are excluded; to join this club, you must have at least half a million people. In theory, you could argue for the list to include Australia, Israel, Slovenia, and even the United States, but I except them because reasons.
Okay, so: What is this club?
The answer is below the cut. But first: take a moment, look at that list, think about it. (Here’s a hint: remember what I do for a living.) Try to come up with an answer, and then put it in the comments. I’ll be curious to see what people think.
Okay, so….
It’s the list of former colonies that are now clearly richer, in terms of per capita GDP, than their former colonial masters.
Ireland — is now comfortably better off than the UK. Yes, official Irish GDP is inflated by all the multinationals that use Ireland as a base. Correcting for that cuts Ireland’s numbers by over 40%! Which leaves Ireland… still comfortably better off than the UK.
South Korea — pcGDP is now about 15% higher than Japan’s.
Singapore — much richer per capita than the UK, it’s not even close. Like, pcGDP is about 60 percent higher! (Note that while Singapore is physically small, it’s definitely not a microstate. Singapore has six million people.)
Baltic States — all much richer than Russia.
Taiwan — in just the last few years, has surpassed former colonial master Japan.
Romania — in just the last few years, has become richer than Hungary. I said Romania was “maybe half a member” because only about half of Romania was owned by Hungary. But Hungary has been richer than Romania since basically forever, so this is actually a big deal.
What were my definitions? Well, 1) Must be a fully sovereign state: no autonomous provinces or special administrative regions. Sorry, Hong Kong! 2) No microstates: must have at least half a million people. Alas, Cayman Islands! 3) No petrostates: because that’s the development equivalent of winning the lottery. Too bad, Guyana!
And finally, I’m talking about colonies that gained their independence since 1945. (Iceland is a bit richer than former colonizer Denmark, but they gained independence in 1944, and they also miss out under my “microstate” definition — Iceland has well under half a million people.) If I pushed the cutoff date back to 1918, we could add Finland and Poland to the mix: internationally recognized in 1919, both much richer than former colonial master Russia. If I pushed it back still further, we could include Australia, Greece and even the USA. But if you go far enough back, damn near everyone was someone else’s colony at some point. Restricting it to the last 80 years at least allows for clarity, and it does have the advantage that the class of candidates — countries that were someone else’s colony in 1945 — includes more than half the countries in the world.
Excluded because reasons: Slovenia and Croatia, because after 1945 they weren’t really colonies of Serbia in the way that the Baltic States were colonies of Russia. Yes, you can @ me.
May have joined already: by some measures, Israel is richer now than the UK. But I consider them as “pending” because (a) it’s very close, and (b) both countries seem likely to have weird growth patterns over the next few years.
You could argue against: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were richer than Russia long before they became independent. So they didn’t need to overtake and pass the former colonial master the way that the others did. All they needed to do was not backslide. But they /didn’t/ backslide, so they’re in.
Right, then. Before we start arguing about who should be on or off, let’s take a look at the list again. Is there anything in common?
Short answer: all of these countries have mostly had good-to-excellent policies for promoting rapid economic growth, while their former colonial masters — Japan, the UK, Hungary and Russia — have mostly not. This is why I excluded petrostates! Having oil is random geological good luck. But you can’t argue that South Korea or Ireland have any advantages in resources or location over the UK or Japan. If anything, quite the opposite. They had to get their growth the hard way.
(What I do for a living: I work in development. So I spend a certain amount of time thinking about this stuff.)
{ 49 comments… read them below or add one }
MisterMr 11.24.24 at 6:07 pm
Ireland has the advantage of being comparatively small, so even with very low taxes it can have a good welfare state if big multinationals legally relocate there.
I point this out because (1) even if you take away the 40% inflated GDP you have to count the spillover of that money on the rest of the activities (2) it is a beggar thy neighbour policy so it is optimal for them but far from optimal for others (3) it depends on being both a natively english speaking country and a small one, something that other countries cannot copy.
JT 11.24.24 at 7:46 pm
How does one qualify to have had “former colonial masters,” exactly?
Is this merely during the 20th century? Because, if not, the list obviously expands to include Canada, Australia, the United States, and—at various points—various Latin American countries.
noone1 11.24.24 at 7:50 pm
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were parts of the USSR, exactly the same way, with the same status, as Russia was part of the USSR. Western Cold War propaganda calling them “colonies” doesn’t make it so. No more than Connecticut would be a colony of DC if the Soviets bothered to call it that.
And I wouldn’t call any pre-Trianon territories of the Kingdom of Hungary “colonies” either.
Also, google tells me that Hungary’s GDP per capita in 2023 was $22,131.63 vs Romania’s $18,419.
LFC 11.24.24 at 8:50 pm
Iirc Britain had a League of Nations mandate for Palestine starting after WW1, but that doesn’t mean Britain was its colonial master (or at least I don’t think of it that way), so the whole case is a stretch, I’d say. Iirc the mandatory status was seen as temporary by the League and (though I could be wrong here) the mandatory power was supposed to be preparing the territory for independence, though in the case of Palestine/Israel there were of course sp reecial issues. The Arab revolt of 1936-39 may complicate the picture further, but again, I don’t think having a League mandate is quite the same as being a colonial power. Not from the standpoint of int’l law at any rate.
LFC 11.24.24 at 8:52 pm
Typo: special issues
Alex SL 11.24.24 at 9:16 pm
That is an interesting list, but calling Romania a colony of Hungaria is an interesting choice. Was France a colony of Germany, and Germany around the same time a colony of Denmark, because the Alsace and the northernmost parts of Schleswig-Holstein changed hands after wars, respectively? No, if anything Romania was a colony of the Ottoman Empire, necessitating a comparison with Turkey.
But even then one may question the definition of ‘colony’ versus ‘province of an empire’. There are very different ways an area can be treated by the occupying power. If you were a province of an empire that falls apart, you generally did not experience a complete destruction of your social order, economic base, and culture as colonies tend to do.
engels 11.24.24 at 10:50 pm
Iirc Ireland had a 26% growth rate in one recent year: now that’s a development model for the world to follow!
engels 11.24.24 at 10:58 pm
The luck of the Irish: “Multinational companies have made such extensive use of Ireland to funnel royalties – a common way to shift profits and avoid tax – that these payments averaged 23 per cent of the country’s annual gross domestic product between 2010 and 2015, according to a European Commission report seen by the Financial Times.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/europe-points-finger-at-ireland-over-tax-avoidance-1.3417948
John Q 11.25.24 at 12:15 am
No one really knows when Australia became independent. In 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, the then PM (Menzies) stated that Australia was, as a consequence, also at war. Menzies tried to keep the imperial connection going in various ways.
Plausible dates include Federation (1901), Statute of Westminster (1924?) and Australia Act (1986). Somewhat similar ambiguity regarding Canada, but the Chanak crisis (1922?) made it clear that Canada was not bound by British declarations of war.
engels 11.25.24 at 12:56 am
I find this bizarre but understand there is a debate about which metropole was calling the shots:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
Matt 11.25.24 at 3:16 am
Further to John Q’s point about Australia, Australian citizenship developed quite slowly, only becoming a clearly distinct legal status in 1949, after the Australian Citizenship Act came into force, but even then, there were unclear cases of “Commonwealth” citizenship that were not exactly Australian citizenship, but not exactly not, either. (These have mostly, maybe completely, gone away as the people they applied to have died, not necessarily because of changes in the law.)
Lucas Angioni 11.25.24 at 6:09 am
So, I guess Brazil is invisible to you, right? Very interesting…
Dave O'Brien 11.25.24 at 7:34 am
Ireland left the UK in 1922. I suppose you could argue that it’s only with the declaration of the republic in 1949 that it became truly independent, but that was a recognition of the constitution it had since 1937, and it certainly wasn’t just a vassal state of the UK during the War.
otto 11.25.24 at 10:09 am
What has Romania been doing so well?
Matt 11.25.24 at 11:22 am
Engles at 10 – if you want, you can find a more recent controversey than that. It’s an incredibly stupid one of the sort that Australia seems to love, with bad free speech laws, stupid politicians, and people pretending to be much more outraged than they are, all about something that should be, at most, a small deal: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/24/lidia-thorpe-now-claims-she-misspoke-on-hairsheirs-mispronunciation-during-swearing-in-oath
Chris Bertram 11.25.24 at 1:10 pm
Ireland became independent in 1922.
lurker 11.25.24 at 2:53 pm
@noone1, 3
And Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom until 1922, exactly the same way and with the same status as England?
Russia had a quite special status, it was not allowed its own leadership or party, Yeltsin was the first president of Russia.
You can’t have two rival leaderships at the core.
Andrew 11.25.24 at 3:17 pm
Norway became independent of Sweden in 7 June 1905 and is a petro-state, but it does have a higher GDP/capita then Sweden.
Doug Muir 11.25.24 at 6:00 pm
“Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were parts of the USSR, exactly the same way, with the same status, as Russia was part of the USSR. Western Cold War propaganda calling them “colonies” doesn’t make it so.”
— dude. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years living in the former Soviet Union. Yes, they were totally colonies. That’s not “western propaganda”; it’s the lived experience of those countries.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 11.25.24 at 6:05 pm
“Iirc Britain had a League of Nations mandate for Palestine starting after WW1, but that doesn’t mean Britain was its colonial master (or at least I don’t think of it that way)”
— you might not think of it that way, but Britain occupied Palestine, put British administrators (mostly drawn from Egypt) in place, wrote laws, imposed taxes, and ran the place in exactly the same manner they’d been running their other colonies for decades. The Arabs and Jews on the ground absolutely saw them as colonial masters.
“I don’t think having a League mandate is quite the same as being a colonial power.”
In theory, it wasn’t — “Class A” mandates were supposed to be in a sort of waiting room for sovereignty and independence. In practice, it absolutely was — the mandatory power acted exactly like a colonial power.
Doug M.
MisterMr 11.25.24 at 6:17 pm
@Doug Muir
For example, Italy had some colonies in the interwar period. The locals were not considered italian citizens, and were definitely seen as on a lower level than Italian citizens.
In the meanwhile, Italy also conquered the Alto Adige/Südtirol region, that is between Italy and Austria, but is mostly german speaking. The locals certainly were not happy of this, and the government applied forced italianisation programs to them. However, that is not a colony, the people there were italian citizens with full rights; even the forced italianisation made sense because these people were supposed to be italian citizens.
It seems to me that the situation in the various USSR republics is closer to that of Alto Adige/Südtirol than that of colonies in the strict sense.
Michael Keary 11.25.24 at 6:46 pm
This is quite arguable. The former governor of Ireland’s central bank, for example, has published a paper advocating a new indicator to properly capture the effect of multinationals on the Irish economy. By this measure, the UK is significantly more prosperous.
https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/economic-letters/vol-2021-no-1-is-ireland-really-the-most-prosperous-country-in-europe.pdf
Alex SL 11.25.24 at 8:58 pm
Doug Muir,
As others are also pointing out, folding every ‘being occupied or part of an empire’ into one large category ‘colony’ loses important distinctions that may have an enormous effect on the ability to subsequently become prosperous. Consider the following gradient:
The occupying power commits genocide to replace the local population with its own people.
The occupying power commits cultural genocide and settles its own people between the local population to assimilate that population into its own culture.
The occupying power appropriates all the land and resources, destroys local economic structures, and works the local population as slaves or serfs to feed all the wealth generation of the area to itself.
The occupying power leaves local culture and social structures alone as long as the occupied area pays exploitative taxes and/or reparations.
The occupying power leaves local culture and social structures alone and treats the local population as normal citizens as long as they do not rebel against the occupation.
The occupying power isn’t really an occupying power because the area we are talking about could legitimately be considered part of its nation, based on complicated history and many of the people who have been living in the area for centuries preferring to be part of that nation. It just so happened that until the last war, the area belonged to another nation who makes the same claim.
I find it difficult to file the last two under ‘colony’, because that empties the concept of ‘colony’ from most of its moral content. Under that logic, you can now call Saxony a colony of Germany. But for present purposes, the main problem is that in filing all of this under ‘colony’, you imply there is no difference between how the third and fourth harm the economic prospects of the area after independence compared to how the last two leave the economy entirely intact, for example. That coarse an analytical lens is unlikely to produce a good understanding of why and how things happen.
Tm 11.25.24 at 9:04 pm
How does Belgium compare to Spain and Austria?
Finland was a colony first of Sweden and then Russia. Poland was of course part of the Russian empire until the 20th century.
Elliott Green 11.25.24 at 9:35 pm
This is an interesting topic but the post messes up by completely misunderstanding the meaning of a ‘colony,’ which is a territory conquered by another country and governed under different rules than the metropole. There is really no way to fit Romania or the Baltics into this rubric and I imagine if anyone who lives there calls their former a former colony that is a question of mistranslation/misunderstanding of the English concepts of ‘conquered state’ vs ‘colonial state.’ As I’m sure you know the UN maintains a list of ‘non self-governing territories,’ which is the classic definition of a colony, and countries like the Baltics were never on this list.
Sorry to go on about this but I see this mistake among my students and posts like this and others on X (like https://x.com/aziz0nomics/status/1849121641365709243) only help to confuse people.
EWI 11.25.24 at 11:49 pm
Chris@16
Ireland became independent in 1922.
Not quite. 26 counties with nationalist majorities were incorporated by force into the new, British-backed client in the Free State, while Northern Ireland… well, we know what happened there.
In 1937 de Valera pulled an FDR in radically re-imagining what his country could be, and successfully bluffed the British into not doing any re-invading over in given the imminence of European war (Churchill, the old enemy from the Irish WoI, per Robert Fisk had to be regularly talked down from war on Éire during WWII).
EWi 11.26.24 at 12:56 am
Doug@19
but Britain occupied Palestine, put British administrators (mostly drawn from Egypt) in place, wrote laws, imposed taxes, and ran the place in exactly the same manner they’d been running their other colonies for decades.
And imported many of the same RIC paramilitaries who had prior experience in Ireland of trying to control a suspect and often hostile ‘native’ population
Doug Muir 11.26.24 at 9:17 am
“It seems to me that the situation in the various USSR republics is closer to that of Alto Adige/Südtirol than that of colonies in the strict sense.”
— forced Russification, including imposition of the Russian language and explicit plans to reduce local languages to “kitchen” status and set them on the road to extinction. Mass movement of millions of Russian settlers in a deliberate effort to change the colony’s demographic balance. Russians given preference in hiring, especially into key political and economic positions. All important decisions taken in Moscow, by bodies entirely dominated by Russians. Extraction of local resources for the benefit of Moscow; large-scale investment decisions, from timber planting to naval bases, made by and for the benefit of Moscow, with no meaningful local input.
A bit more intangibly — but very real and important — there was an ethnic pecking order in the old USSR. Russians were of course at the top. Baltics were half a step down; Ukrainians were a full step below that. It’s a topic that is sadly underdiscussed in the academic literature, but Russian contempt for the other national groups, and their resentment of Russians, was one of the great unspoken drivers of the very abrupt breakup of the USSR. (And of course, the current Ukrainian conflict makes a lot more sense when you realize that most Russians believe, deep down, that Ukrainians are just an inferior and rather stupid sort of Russian.)
Estonians and Latvians were able to vote in Soviet elections, yes. I… don’t see this as dispositive, or even particularly relevant? Note that lots of colonial powers allowed colonies to have votes; for instance, Algerians could vote in French elections right into the 1950s.
There are all sorts of finer points. Like, the Chairman of the local Party would almost always be a local — a Latvian in Latvia, an Armenian in Armenia. But that guy (always a guy) would (1) be a heavily Russified local, speaking fluent Russian, having lived for years in Russia, often a graduate of Moscow University; and (2) looking closer, the people around him would all be ethnic Russians. In particular, the top posts — managers of state owned enterprises, ministers in the local government — would be reserved mostly for ethnic Russians, with a sprinkling of heavily Russified locals.
(In Moldova, they used to have a proverb: “To be a Minister, one must cross the Dnistr”. It rhymes in Moldovan… point being, the region across the Dnistr was the ethnic Russian colony, and somehow all the ministers and bosses seemed to come from there.)
Another fun detail: one sharp generational marker across the fUSSR is that guys over 35 years old, born before 1990, are much more likely to have Russian first names. Moldova and Georgia are full of 40 year old Ivans and Dimitris. Why? Because being able to “pass” as Russian in casual encounters — “Hi, I’m Ivan” — was a nontrivial social advantage, and parents wanted that for their sons. That evaporated after 1991, which is why younger guys are far more likely to have distinctly national names: lots of 30 year old Florins and Cristians in Moldova, Iraklis and Levans in Georgia.
Doug M.
noone1 11.26.24 at 9:28 am
“Finland was a colony first of Sweden and then Russia.” – 24
Finland was a province of Sweden, and then a province, autonomous, self-governing province, of Russia. And, after a few more reincarnations, by joining NATO it now entered a long list of the client states of the US of A.
@28,
sorry, but this is all nonsense.
lurker 11.26.24 at 10:26 am
“be a heavily Russified local, speaking fluent Russian, having lived for years in Russia” Doug Muir, 28
Typically:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yestonians
TM 11.26.24 at 1:01 pm
noone1: Calling a conquered territory “province” (following imperial Roman terminology) doesn’t really change the fact that it’s occupied by a foreign power. But yes, there are definitely different shades of colonialism and imperialism and in general, white colonial subjects of European colonial powers were better treated than dark-skinned subjects so there’s that.
It’s funny that you suggest NATO membership as a form of colonialism despite the fact that nobody was ever forced to become a member and no member state was ever forced to do anything against the will of its own government.
MisterMr 11.26.24 at 1:33 pm
@Doug Muir
“— forced Russification, including imposition of the Russian language and explicit plans to reduce local languages to “kitchen” status and set them on the road to extinction.”
Yes, that is literally what Italy did to Alto Adige/Sudtirol. Furthermore, if you consider that italian “strict dialects” are actually parallel languages to standard italian, it is more or less what the italian government did to everyone in Italy apart people from Tuscany (for historical reasons) and people of some degree of literacy (who already spoke standard italian as a koiné language).
This was a common event in state formation, it is not that strange. It is how nation states were born up to recently. Similarly Ukraine just before the war forbid the use of Russian as a legal language IIRC.
The whole point is that they wanted to subsume the other ethnicities in one single national ethnicity, which is not what colonies do.
This is certainly bad in many ways, but it is not the same of a “colony”.
Ancient colonies (e.g. ancient Greece or ancient Rome) were “daughter cities” of the original metrople where former citiziens of the metrople went and started farming the land (important in a time of agriculture). In some sense the USA was something like this from the point of view of the european settlers, at least at the beginning.
But “colonies” in the sense the term is used currently refer to the situation that happened starting in the early modern period of european going abroad, ensalving or submitting other populations, and using that enslavement to extract surplus (mostly raw materials to be worked in the metropolis).
It seems to me that the various USSR republics were neither the first kind of colony, nor the second: they were more like provinces of an empire, as Ukraine was already a province before the russian revolution, or say Lombardo-Veneto was a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. These are situations where there is a central population that is more equal than the others (this includes the Austrian empire), however the local population there weren’t really exploited as bad as (extreme case) Belgian Congo, neither believed to be of an inferior race as in Italian Ethiopia or Abyssinia, etc.
The linguistic oppression actually existed because the metropolis wanted to subsume the province, not because it wanted to keep them separated.
Other examples that you give fall in the logic of a situation where some ethnicities are perceived better than others: even in european countries today, a degree/PHD in a fancy USA university will carry you further than a local one, or academics have to speak and write in english to be published in important journals etc. (that would have been russian in the USSR). An italian politician who wants to be influent in the EU has to learn english etc.
Now I’m not saying that the USSR was paradise and everyone was treated equally, that clearly wasn’t the case, but it seems to me that we are speaking of the usual metrople VS periphery stuff, plus an attemt at linguistic unifcation (that failed with the end of the USSR), not the same thing of the “colonies” as were conceived in european policy up to WW2.
Similarly, if Putin won the war in Ukraine and overran the whole country, I would expect him to turn Ukraine into a satellite state of Russia and a de facto province, which is very bad, but not int a colony in the sense above (that is the most common sense used when we speak of colonialism).
In this sense, it is also arguable whether Ireland was a “colony” or a “province”.
LurkeriousMaximus 11.26.24 at 2:09 pm
It’s funny that you suggest NATO membership as a form of colonialism despite the fact that nobody was ever forced to become a member and no member state was ever forced to do anything against the will of its own government.
It’s Time to Reconsider Turkey’s NATO Membership
In nearly every theater of vital security interests, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems devoted to undermining the trans-Atlantic alliance.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/06/turkey-nato-membership-alliance-russia-erdogan-sweden-syria/
EWI 11.26.24 at 2:52 pm
MisterMr@32
But “colonies” in the sense the term is used currently refer to the situation that happened starting in the early modern period of european going abroad, ensalving or submitting other populations, and using that enslavement to extract surplus (mostly raw materials to be worked in the metropolis).
[snip]
In this sense, it is also arguable whether Ireland was a “colony” or a “province”.
Not sure where you got that one from. Ireland was specifically subjected to ‘plantation’ (settlement by British colonists) all throughout and immediately after the period of conquest, especially in Ulster which had resisted the longest and therefore was scoured hardest. Incidentally this process gave rise to considerable UK advancements in the gathering of statistics (census), surveying (the Ordnance Survey) in measuring and dividing the country up for settlers, as well as population surveillance and control (the armed paramilitary RIC in their barracks occupying every town and village, all reporting back to the colonial administration in Dublin Castle).
The pre-plantation Irish Catholic population were deliberately denied human and civil rights over several hundred years, though in more modern times with mass media and suffrage a veil of secrecy and misdirection needed to be drawn over this reality. There were also, as happens with colonial entities, a local hierarchy established by the coloniser of their non-English subjects to enact the maxim of divide and rule.
lurker 11.26.24 at 4:51 pm
@MisterMr, 32
“however the local population there weren’t really exploited as bad as (extreme case) Belgian Congo”
A very colonial-ish administration managed to kill more than a third of the Kazakhs in a couple of years. Actually a bit faster than Leopold II in the Congo Free State. And like him, they claimed to act with the best intentions.
MisterMr 11.26.24 at 7:36 pm
@lurker
I assume that you refer to this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933
that is similar to the Ukraine famine. However, AFAIK in both cases some historians believe these were politically motivated, and therefore genocides, others that these were an unfortunate consequence of A bad economic planning and B Stalin killing everyone who seemed vaguely disloyal, so that nobody dared to tell him that his policies weren’t working, so that he assumed that the Ukrainians were hiding food from the tax collector, whereas in reality they were starvating.
My opinion is that there is more truth in the second explanation, even though probably ethnic prejudice also played a role (as happened e.g. during the Irish famine).
So I suspect that the same happened in Kazakistan, and therefore I don’t count it as a colonial behaviour, although certainly it was a very bad thing that should be blamed on soviet communism.
There is a similarity with colonialism however (and this is true also for Ireland) in that part of the problem was that these regions were supposed to pop out food to keep industrial workers in the metropolis fed.
Matt 11.26.24 at 9:54 pm
All important decisions taken in Moscow, by bodies entirely dominated by Russians. Extraction of local resources for the benefit of Moscow; large-scale investment decisions, from timber planting to naval bases, made by and for the benefit of Moscow, with no meaningful local input.
For what it’s worth, that was the “lived experience” of lots of people I know/knew from parts of Russia proper, too, that are a bit away from Moscow (Ryazan, Kaluga, Tula, etc.) – that their economic activity was seen primarily as a supplier to Moscow, and that they had little choice or control over it. (And, that if you wanted to be successful, you had to go to Moscow, ideally having studied there.) My recollection is that the Baltics were, in general, better off economically than many, perhaps most, “2nd tier” Russian cities during the Soviet Union as well. I’m not sure what moral to draw from this. I mostly think the term “colony” and “colonialism” are over-used, often mostly rhetorical in use, and not super helpful. But this general phenomena was certainly wide spread, or felt to be, in the Soviet Union, beyond the “non-Russian” parts of the country.
lurker 11.27.24 at 7:52 am
@MisterMr, 36
“some historians believe these were politically motivated, and therefore genocides, others that these were an unfortunate consequence of A bad economic planning”
So Leopold II did not do a genocide in the Congo because he did not intend to kill millions, he just did not care they died, as a result of economic policies?
I’m OK with arguments over different uses/definitions of the word colonialism, but I do think you understate somewhat the reality of what the USSR was, make it more normal and ordinary than it was.
Take France. France made peasants into Frenchmen as a matter of policy, but did it systematically kill Occitan writers or hunt down folk musicians? The Ukrainian literary renaissance ended in a pit in Sandarmokh and Bandurists were killed for singing in Ukrainian.
Some Breton nationalists collaborated with Germany, this did not lead to a mass deportation of Bretons to Algerian Sahara.
Tm 11.27.24 at 8:32 am
MisterMr: Let me suggest that both can be true: a regime can be colonialist in the sense of an imperial center ruling ruthlessly over provinces, and also be an oppressive dictatorship towards (most of) the people in the metropolitan center. Perhaps in the case of Stalinism it’s not so easy to disentangle these two. But remember that Stalin had whole ethicities (e. g. the Krim Tatars) deported. Ethnic non-Russians were far over-represented among the victims of his regime. These empirical facts cannot be ignored.
Whether colonialism is an adequate framework for the historical understanding of Russian imperialism may be debatable. I would simply call it imperialism. Russia has for centuries and to this day been understood as an empire (just ask Putin). A land empire in contrast to the British sea empire. Differences and commonalities. No two empires are alike but that doesn’t mean the concept is useless.
lurker 11.27.24 at 9:04 am
@Matt, 37
Imperial Russia did not treat Poles much worse than provincial Russians, either, and Poland was one of the most literate and industrialized parts of the empire, but the ingrates still kept rebelling.
Soviet-era Estonians compared their life not to Russian provinces but what they had before and glimpses of what they saw of life in Finland. Better things existed and could be had, out of the USSR.
Matt 11.27.24 at 10:53 am
Lurker (40) – you’ve misunderstood the rather smaller point I was trying to make, I think.
Doug Muir 11.27.24 at 12:43 pm
It’s interesting that everyone is focusing on definitional issues. Other than “well it’s because Ireland welcomed big corporations”, nobody is talking about just why these places have done so well.
In particular, how the heck did South Korea overtake and pass Japan? As recently as the early 2000s, that would have been unthinkable.
Doug M.
Maxlex 11.27.24 at 1:23 pm
I dunno that South Korea had to do anything special. All it took was Japan stagnating for 30 years
SamChevre 11.27.24 at 2:26 pm
My first guess on “why did S Korea pass Japan” would be the timing of the fertility collapse in each country. Japan’s went below replacement in the 1970’s, S Korea in the 1980s – so Japan’s population is older than S Korea’s, and S Korea is probably near it’s peak for average earnings (which tends to be around age 50 for individuals.)
It does seem that the colony/province distinction is tricky; I am not sure that thinking of Mississippi as a colony of Massachusetts is helpful, although the same dynamic as you note between Russia and the other parts of the USSR definitely existed for a century (during which period Mississippi went from one of the wealthiest states to one of the poorest.)
Zamfir 11.27.24 at 5:31 pm
Distance seems an important factor, related to the definition question. These are nearly all countries that got conquered by a neighbour, but then not fully absorbed in that nation. With the Scots or Basques as closely related situations.
While the stereotypical ‘former colony’ was a long distance away from the colonising country, with fairly small armies doing the work.
That large distance implies a serious ‘per capita’ power difference already sta the start. And the new rulers had a strange interest in a distant coloby. Sometimes just a handful of people, caring only about the export of a single product thay could be profitably shipped, and the entire social structure of the colony got overhauled around those limited interest. As people mentioned above, the interest of a metropolis in a neighbouring conquest is closer to its interest in parts of the home country itself. Much wider in range, and requiring a much more functional local order.
Both reasons make it much less surprising that a ‘nearby’ colony becomes properous than a ‘distant’ one. The extended list in the OP has Australia and the USA as distant colonies – reflecting the colonizers more than the colonized.
Alex SL 11.27.24 at 10:35 pm
While it is worthwhile to discuss how bad exactly Stalin was, the main point here is still whether the categorisation of the original post makes any sense in supporting the insights it seems to be working towards. And the problem is, even if the USSR tried to Russianise Estonia, that is not the case. The way the original post uses ‘colony’ as a unifying category is analytically unhelpful even if this one specific nation here or there was a colony, because the occupation experiences the various nations on the list had nothing whatsoever in common that is relevant for their subsequent prosperity.
qwerty 11.28.24 at 12:11 pm
Zamfir 45,
Tellurocracy and thalassocracy. One Aleksandr Dugin has developed a whole big theory on this subject.
Laban 11.28.24 at 4:11 pm
Alex SL 11.25.24 at 8:58 pm
You forgot another type – when the colonial power finds that the locals don’t want to work a ten-hour day for damn-all, and import a working population from elsewhere. Which is why the population of Fiji is around 50% Indian.
The copra was rotting on the trees before they arrived!
Macroduck 12.05.24 at 11:12 pm
By the way, didn’t our last batch of Nobel laureates do some work in the same area of thought? Perhaps their insights would be useful here.