# Did any country on the colonizing side benefit from colonialism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 2, 2014, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620 "2014-08-02T03:03:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2014, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/21 "2014-08-02T13:54:56Z")
I suppose that colonies which were relatively sparsely populated and technologically backward provided opportunities to install a population from the mother country - USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand; to some extent Argentina, Brazil. This basically created a copy of the original society (although much changed by now). IIRC, the problem with finding a lot of gold was that Spain warped its economy. When the gold stopped, it fell into the economic doldrums. Local farmers or craftsmen often ended up competing with the best of their poorer counterparts across Europe. I read somewhere that the rest of Europe developed the economic infrastructure and activity to earn that gold from Spain, so in the long run benefited more. The model for most empires was that the colonies provided raw materials for the mother countries’ economies; so industries that did the processing locally were to some extent actively discouraged, stifling industrial development. Perhaps the best gift the empire could bestow was stability and good government that benefit the country after independence. Compare the British (or some French) ability to “know when to let go” against the sort of liberation wars that Portugal fought against Angola and Mozambique, to the relatively peaceful Commonwealth co-existence. This isn’t a fast rule though, one can point to India, USA, French Indochina and Algeria as examples where the mother country had to learn the lesson early and often. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2014, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/22 "2014-08-02T15:34:40Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > Well, ten years. Not really sure that’s “much” later. > > But the American colonies seem to have cost more then they made the British, hence all the unpopular taxes. > > And once the British lost the colonies, the people that lived there…kept selling raw materials to British merchants in return for manufactured goods. So the Brits got the same benfits as they had before, except they didn’t have to pay to send armies across an ocean to chase off the French/fight the Continentals. > > Colonialism seemed to be based on the weird premise that in order to buy and sell stuff somewhere, you had to conquer that place first. But as the US learned, and Europe eventually realized, conquering is expensive and poeple generally want to buy/sell stuff without it. If worse comes to worse, you can ally with a local faction to help them take over the gov’t. Backing a local strongman is still cheaper then conquering/defending some malarial hellhole on the other side of the globe. Massive, massive case of Americanitis here. There were two great waves of colonialism, the first in the 16th century and the second in the 19th century. In the Americas, in the first wave of immigration you had massive immigration from the mother country which completely displaced or supplanted/suppressed the locals. So when decolonisation time came, the country was handed over to descendants of the settlers, or slaves as in the case of the Carribian. In the second wave, in the 19th century conquests were for resources, strategic reasons or for pride, (Australia being the the odd one out here as being part of the second wave, but still resembling the first). This is what we talk about here. ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/23 "2014-08-03T00:52:51Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Massive, massive case of Americanitis here. There were two great waves of colonialism, the first in the 16th century and the second in the 19th century. In the Americas, in the first wave of immigration you had massive immigration from the mother country which completely displaced or supplanted/suppressed the locals. So when decolonisation time came, the country was handed over to descendants of the settlers, or slaves as in the case of the Carribian. > > In the second wave, in the 19th century conquests were for resources, strategic reasons or for pride, (Australia being the the odd one out here as being part of the second wave, but still resembling the first). This is what we talk about here. There was certainly a difference between British colonization of North America and Australia/New Zealand (though those weren’t really as far apart as 16th v 19th centuries: there were no permanent British settlements in the now-US till the 17th century, and Australian settlements started when the US was still part of Britain in the 18th century) and later British colonies. And for that matter Spanish colonization was different still (ending with a demographic of largely mixed European-native population) than English colonies in either North America or Asia/Africa. But the economic and strategic incentives in all the cases overlapped to a significant degree. But also the success in achieving the sought after goals varied widely. IMO it’s ridiculous to say Spain didn’t benefit immensely from gold in the New World, on some basis of it leading to later Spanish decline. So it can always be with easy money of any kind. But do you want tons of gold nearly for free or not? Of course you do. Most other colonial equations were more complicated than that. To a great degree the viability depended on norms of international behavior. If everyone recognized that free trade (perhaps along with aid and international organizations, IOW kind of what we have now for relations among poor and rich countries) was better than having to run other countries, that’s one situation. But if, as was mentioned earlier, rival colonizing countries would freeze you out of trade with their colonies, even on economically misguided assumptions, that was something else. It’s harder to judge the benefit of colonies in the absence of that context, except in the extremes of colonies with large amounts of valuable commodities that could just be taken from the native people; or OTOH places that required a lot of intervention and development, which the colonizing society (by then) felt the moral obligation to provide, while the colony had nothing much to offer in return but a ‘market’ the colonizer could access almost as easily without being colonial master. The latter situation, along with changes in moral views about colonization, is what faced Britain and France by ca. 1950’s, for most of their remaining colonies. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/24 "2014-08-03T01:25:56Z")
> [@grude](#): > > Jokes about gaining some decent food aside, it seems to me reading about it that the era of colonialism was a net loss for almost all countries that engaged in it. Think France nearly bankrupting itself. If you want a really good example of a disastrous colonization attempt, Scotland’s Darien scheme went so poorly that Scotland needed to join with England [Darien scheme - Wikipedia](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme#Consequences_of_failure) ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/25 "2014-08-03T04:35:43Z")
The US did pretty well with Hawaii, Alaska, and to some extent Puerto Rico. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2014, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620/26 "2014-08-03T04:43:57Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > The US did pretty well with Hawaii, Alaska, and to some extent Puerto Rico. … Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, half of California… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-any-country-on-the-colonizing-side-benefit-from-colonialism/694620.md?page=1)