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I want to start a discussion here on a historical subject I've never been able to get a decent answer on anywhere else. The question is:
What is going on with how colonialism worked in its heyday versus how difficult it seems to be to conquer and control other countries nowadays?
Back in the heyday, tiny little England controlled something like a quarter of the world, off and on during various periods, including such areas as all of India, most of the Middle East, the original American 13 colonies, Canada, Australia, sometimes hunks of China, various large hunks of Africa, etc. The somewhat larger France controlled other hunks of North America, a bunch of Caribbean islands, large chunks of Africa, and the Middle East, etc. Even tinier Belgium, with a modern-day population of only 11 million, had some pretty big colonies in Africa that they controlled. At the time, they (mostly) seemed to have little trouble controlling these colonies for centuries, sometimes with mostly peaceful means and sometimes with quite brutal violence.
Meanwhile nowadays, mighty continent-striding America can barely keep Iraq and Afghanistan under control for a decade or two. Russia had little better luck in Afghanistan and mostly hasn't done too well in controlling areas other than tiny regions on their borders already at least partially populated with Russians. China doesn't seem to be doing much better. All of the former colonial superpowers can now barely dream of controlling a single hostile city overseas. The British stretched themselves to the limit trying to take the Falklands back, and managed to hold I think it was a city or a small region in Iraq with a lot of help from America. I think France intervened briefly in Mali a decade or so ago, with only limited success.
So ahem, what the hell happened? How did it go from super-easy to super-hard to control a foreign country on the other side of an ocean? Questions about this in Reddit history subs seem to generate mostly uhhs and grunts and vague excuses. I wonder if anyone in here, with mostly more open discussion on tougher topics has any interesting thoughts on the subject?
Epistemological status - Straight brainstorm.
To what degree has the role of colonizer been taken over by the multinational corporation?
I've seen Steve Sailer repeat a theory (fairly certain he doesn't claim it's original to him, but I would have to do some internet searching to determine who he credits it to) that we may be past an era of conquest due to changes in what makes up the economic value of a place.
Ie, in 1850, most of the value of a place was the natural resources of a place, the farmland, the mines underneath it, that sort of thing. So you could fight a war on top of it, and if you won it, the economic value of what you won would remain largely intact.
In contrast, most of the economic value of a place these days is the human capital contained in a place. So if China decided they wanted to invade California (to pick an absurd example) they might militarily conquer it, but in doing so, all the engineers would flee, the urban centers would be destroyed, you could do it, but you couldn't do it and keep the economic value of what you won intact.
Instead, it makes more sense to try and extract what you can out of economic trade, that sort of thing.
Extending the analogy a bit, maybe political control over a place isn't particularly important as long as you have other levers to get what you want out of a place.
As long as Apple or Nike can set up a sweatshop (slightly tongue in cheek, but hopefully the point stands) in your country, and expect their property rights relatively respected [1], who cares if the local official has to write reports that need to be sent to Parliament or the State Department or not. The powers that be are able to get what they want out of a place, if anything, they're saving money having to pay for fewer bayonets.
[1] I guess at some point in the past there was real risk that multinational companies would have their investments expropriated by local governments, I guess maybe that was a larger risk when the USSR was giving support to various Marxist revolutionaries? That seems like something that's less of a risk than it used to be. Possibly due to levers like the IMF and World Bank and that sort of thing. Idk, I might be out in front of my skates in terms of knowing what I'm talking about.
I see where you're going with this, and it does seem different than imperialism circa 1900, but it might be worth considering that some of the first major joint-stock companies were the (British) East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, well known for governing areas that are now independent nations (India, Pakistan, and Indonesia). Although I don't think modern corporations are engaging in quite that level of governance.
Yeah, the parallel occurred to me as well,
Maybe where I'm trying to go is that original colonization was driven by economic adventurism,
Maybe that economic adventurism hasn't really gone away,
But these days involves more getting the right signatures to lock Foxconn into producing iPhones at a favorable rate, and less getting people do things at gunpoint.
Or maybe you'll miss out on the economic value of getting Foxconn to produce iPhones at favorable rates if you start by waving around guns?
Idk, I don't have a theory fully fleshed out in my mind.
I think to get into the economic and corporatist aspects of modernity and value extraction from third world countries, you want to get into leftist critiques of the IMF/WTO/proposed TPP and the Bretton Woods system more generally. If you're interested in fleshing out your theory more. To use your outline:
starts with
inasmuch as a prerequisite to Foxconn producing iPhones is membership in the overall global economic system, dominated by dollar exchange, rule of law, respect for private/corporate property, etc.
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