Imperialism. y/n?

So 2 crazy tribes are at war constantly, then one empire bashes their armies, unites the lands and brings them better technology. The efforts of the empire to unite everything results in the basis of a strong future nation state when they finally leave.

Compare India to Africa, India's only major political troubles were border disputes with China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

All of these countries maintained a semblance of democracy despite being as poor as Africa for many years, while China went through Totalitarianism and Africa suffered from a patchwork of military dictatorships (except in South Africa).

Empires have problems though when they have to compete with other empires, as we have seen in Africa, or when they cannot maintain security.

I'm going with "yes". Where empires failed, if the empire never interfered I do not believe countries would always end up like Thailand or Japan, I believe the same factors that led to the fail of empire would also lead to their failure as traditional societies trying to advance to modernity. They would end up like Ethiopia during the 70s and 80s or China after ww2.

>>7
There is not much difference between the prevailing view of imperialism and a more objective view of imperialism, both would judge it to be immoral. The difference is in how they compare imperialism to the alternatives, the emotionally charged conformist view is that imperialism is evil so the natives must be good, the objective view is that both the imperialists and natives are under tyrannical regimes and we have to look at them both in more detail to find answers, so this is the only disagreement here.

The cost of waiting will always be less than that of intervening because any conquered nation cannot be a free society.

Becoming a free society is a gradual change, it can be argued that a society is never "truly free" until it is independent but certainly Hong Kong was more free than its neighbors in China for much of its history. India underwent rapid economic and technological development during the 20s, 30s and 40s, a significant middle class had been around since the 1860s and expanded even further during this time and exercised political power long before India was officially independent and democratic.

Thus, India did not need to become independent through outright civil war and when India became independent it could secure itself and maintain democratic institutions. Which is more than could be said for many African countries which became independent prematurely and were open to attack by marxist rebels, resulting in decades of civil war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambique#Conflict_and_civil_war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopia#Mengistu_era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angola#Independence_and_civil_war

>>8
When I say "compare india to Africa" you might want to look up the history of colonialism in those regions on wikipedia for some background info.