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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?
Once one colonizes a region the colonized learn from the colonizers.
In addition most areas colonized by europeans did not have strong national identities. Thus groups could be played off each other. After colonization national identities arose.
More over most European colonization was motivated by securing trade at the expense of other european powers....not motivated by actual colonization. So many colonies were not managed by direct rule.
The point is that after "colonization" the colonized were empowered to assert thier own autonomy based on the colonizers own nationalistic logic.
Greatest example U.S.A.
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