> not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it.
Generally speaking the colonisers established their colonies to access natural resources, being new agricultural techniques to undeveloped lands, and engage in trade. The culture of the coloniser naturally came along with them.
Even if there were no specific goal of bringing freedom that may still have been a side effect.
> such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.
Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.
Edit: And my point is that making a hard separation between colonial and post colonial circumstances is a mistake, as many of the post colonial issues trace their reasons to colonial decisions.
>They declined Europe's "offer" (though realistically Europe really didn't have anything to offer its colonies after being devastated by WWII), but where they that much better off under Soviet influence
Well, at least they got their freedom from European colonialism.
> only countries that flourished and had tremendous economic growth, are those who had a period of more personal freedom and an almost non-existent government
I forgot about the famously non-existent ancient Egyptian and modern Chinese governments.
> Africa was a heavy source of anti-colonial radicalism during the cold war.
However, the political problems and impoverishment that accompanied the most drastic efforts to throw off colonial ties, did scare some other countries into not going that far. For example, after other West African countries saw Guinea become the first nation to completely end French ties, but then fall into poverty and have no one to turn to but Maoist China, they reflected that perhaps France’s role in the region was not so bad after all. At present, it is not at all unusual to hear a Senegalese person expressly point to Guinea-Bissau as an example of anti-colonialism gone wrong.
The abolition of slavery occurred at different times in different countries. It frequently occurred sequentially in more than one stage – for example, as abolition of the trade in slaves in a specific country, and then as abolition of slavery throughout empires. Each step was usually the result of a separate law or action. This timeline shows abolition laws or actions listed chronologically. It also covers the abolition of serfdom.
Although slavery is technically illegal in all countries today, the practice continues in many locations around the world, often with government support.
That would be ironic considering that they had not completely freed many of their colonies yet.
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