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What were the long term effects of Western colonialism on the technological development and social stability of the societies they ruled over? Are there any sources discussing this in a non-ideological manner? Counterfactuals are generally pretty hard to discuss or explore, but my intuition is that the long term effects of colonisation would have been on the balance positive.
In many of the colonised areas the technological disparity seems obvious - the Aztec and Inca for example completely lacked beasts of burden and did not put the wheel to use in any significant way, they did not have knowledge of advanced metallurgy (the Aztec made limited use of copper and bronze, but never learned how to use iron), nor were there technologies like the printing press etc all of which the Spanish already had when they made contact at the time. In the case of the Inca they simply did not even have a written language to print - and quipu doesn't count as a writing system, the current consensus seems to be that it was simply an accounting system and not a written representation of Quechua. There was a translation of a quipu in the village of Collata that apparently represented information phonetically, but that quipu was made after the Spanish conquest and was likely influenced by contact with them.
An analogous situation is Mughal India, which as far as I know could be described as "proto-industrialised" at best and significantly fell behind Britain in the face of the massive manufacturing boom that the Industrial Revolution brought to Europe (additionally, the Mughal Empire had already begun to disintegrate pretty rapidly from the eighteenth century onwards). And British contribution is pretty visible today even to your average Indian, the Indian railway system being a big example. I'd wager it's pretty plausible that colonisation by a more technologically advanced society generally confers long run material benefits.
I suppose a potential counterargument that could be offered up would be to posit that perhaps their situation would've been better had Western powers not occupied them and traded with them instead, but that argument encounters the obvious issue of the natives perhaps not being able to access these resources - a huge amount of the resource extraction and manufacturing was after all organised and sponsored by Westerners. I highly doubt that, say, South American natives had the wherewithal to build massive gold and silver mines like the Spanish and Portuguese did - production on that scale was probably outside of the ability of even the societies that did do basic mining, like the Inca.
It is obvious colonization ironically massively sped up those countries IDH/economic growth over long term however that should not occlude the probable fact that most colonizers don't wanted to significantly invest in the growth of their colonies, especially education.
Had them significantly tried to have an utilitarian impact on those countries their economic development gradient would have been far different and with difficult to quantify but not necessarily unknowable ramifications such as e.g. say, make the third world reach occident economic and IDH parity before the 21st century.
It is interesting in that regard, to follow the increasingly war-like economic agressions the hegemonic U.S are making towards China.
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