The Brits were the best colonizers. The Indians were the worse (i.e. The Brits allowed India to administer Burma, which is how it got so screwed up).

The British. Their “settler” colonies are the top of the heap: USA, Australia, New Zealand, Anglo-Canada, even South Africa in its region. The colonies which were ruled by Britain but had indigenous populations are a more mixed bag, but in general have done better than their neighbors, e.g. Malaysia v. Indonesia. India has good institutions, though it has lots of awful problems, e.g. rampant corruption. One objective assessment is the LLSV economists’ analysis, which has admittedly been tweaked around the edges by criticism.

Overall, the Brits win hands down on this question.

I’d be interested to see any serious counter-argument.

I think the worst was the Belgians. At least, they were the worst in de-colonization.

Curzon: But in the case of Taiwan, most of that Japan-created civil society was wiped out by Chiang Kai Shek and his goons after they took over. The entire government bureacracy was replaced by Chinese mainlanders, all of the wealth of the former elite was seized by the Nationalist Party (KMT), and many thousands of Taiwanese who had “cooperated” with the Japanese simply by being successful in civil society were massacred.

I’m not trying to say that Japanese colonization didn’t have any positive effect on the development of Taiwan, because it clearly did, but you oddly focusing on Japanese colonization. Don’t forget that from 1945 to 1987 Taiwan was run by an alien occupying regime, and could almost be said to have been a “colony” of the Republic Of China government.

Don’t forget that Taiwan was also a “replacement” colony of the Chinese, with Chinese settlers displacing the natives, much like the British did in North America, Australia and New Zealand. And it had also been colonized briefly by the Spanish and the Dutch, although naturally their influence is pretty miniscule in the long term.

And Imperial Chinese society was more merit based than most people give it credit for today, with civil service jobs being awarded based on the examination system. Yes, it was a self perpetuating merit system because people who grew up poor rarely had the resourced to become educated enough to pass the examinations, but that is only a more extreme version of the situation that exists today in, say, Japan and South Korea-where access to the best universities is far more difficult for families that cannot afford expensive private grade schools, cram schools, and tutors.

Hi, Long time reader, first time commenter.

Although I personally agree with Moorethanthis’ idea that a fare comparison of colonial empires is impossible (and I also subscribe to the idea that the question “which brand of colonialism was best” itself is flawed), just by looking at the results themselves, I would have to say that the Italians (the Belgians come a close second) were the worst colonizers of all time. As for the best, I would have to say the United States.

Ditto on what froggie mentioned. Michael Turton had a post that had a summary of an analysis done by a researcher at a university in Singapore which compared socio-economic indicators in colonial Asia prior to WW2. It turns out that economic and social development levels in Asia were fairly uniform in both British Malaya, French IndoChina, and Japanese Taiwan & Korea. As others noted, the Phillipines under America was the exemplar in the pack and was then the most successful. The Dutch I recall had the most difficulties in Indonesia. The main thrust of the research article was that Japan’s colonization experience in Taiwan and Korea was, economically and socially speaking, not particularly unique when compared to the achievements of other imperialists at the time. I’d like to find the entire article at the View from Taiwan, but unfortunately it is blogspot and I don’t recall how long ago it was posted.

I have to agree, the Belgians were pretty bad. Congo was run as a vast charnal-hell while it was their colony. Many of their colonial administrators bragged about how nasty they were. They did not consider Africans to be human.

I’m surprised noone has mentioned the Spanish yet. They probably did more colonizing than anyone else, and yet this whole argument seems to have forgotten about them. Any thoughts?

As for the Philippines, the US did a very excellent job of building the education system (particularly in contrast to the Spanish, who seemed hell-bent on keeping anyone aside from the priests and elite class from learning how to read), but unfortunately the democratic institutions were not strong enough to prevent the Marcos dictatorship. On other hand, this was probably more a result of cold war thinking, which led the US to back Marcos over the Communist New People’s Army despite the consequences, and not really a failure of colonial era policy per se.

Also, the subordination of the southern Muslim provinces under the Manila-based government really only occurred during the American period. The Spanish had more or less ignored them, only nominally incuding the far south in the Philippines territory and the “Moros” cause very little trouble at that time.

People who claim that the Brits were the best are spectacularly wrong. The reality is that the Brits inherited the pick of the crop when it came to colonies. The most outstanding and productive British colonies, as opposed to settler societies, had a lot more by way of movement into modernity than the colonies of other European powers. On whichever continent you look where British bureaucracy was imposed on a local substructure; that local substructure was almost always possessed of a native state system. The Brits really didnt do much. The folks who actually embarked on a civilizing mission complete with infrastructural establishment etc were the Japanese. All one has to do is look at how much influence the Brits had on educational structures in Africa, vis-a-vis Japan in Korea etc; consider that in many British colonies, educating the natives was in many respects illegal – ditto for many continental colonies. On every count; infrastructure (Britain’s many railroads-to-nowhere), political structure (Britain handing over to big men, after stratifying local politics along ethnic and racial lines) and sheer racism (we have yet to see a colonial system that matches the horrors of apartheid) etc – the British dominions consistently underperformed their contemporaries: The total body count coming out of Africa in the postcolonial period is made up mainly of casualties from ex-British colonies (add Biafra to Sudan and much of Eastern Africa and South Central Africa etc), by contrast with Congo, Angola etc. The peculiar racism of British colonialism is mostly to blame for the horrid situation in Zimbabwe today: I simply cannot find another colonial power with this dismal a record.

As William Dalrymple points out, when British colonialism in India was run as a commercial operation under the East India Company, cultural adaptation and assimiliation was widespread. However, when Britain began to inhabit and believe its role as the pre-eminent global power, and Christian missionaries spread though the colonies, attitudes of racism and superiority grew to define the Empire. So, in regard to MF’s question on preserving native culture: private enterprise good, civilising mission bad.