Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't? I suppose you can't really quantify the value of people that were destroyed by colonization, but you can look at the current population.
Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't exist, and everyone used the OPs language. How would they have handled advancing computers? I've seen photos of Japanese typewriters and they look... unwieldy to say the least. And graphics tech took a while to get advanced enough to handle such languages, let alone input. (MS Japanese IME uses some light AI to pick the desired kanji, right?)
Disclaimer: I don't mean this in an offensive way, just a dispassionate curiosity.
>"Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't?"
It's both a positive, and a negative. But if you want to calculate whether it was a "net" positive or "net" negative, then I'm afraid you're going to have to quantify very difficult-to-quantify concepts. And you'll have to do it on behalf of a lot of people, some of which don't exist anymore to answer your question. In essence, next to impossible.
However, particularly in the case of colonialism. I will add that because it's such a difficult concept, it is being exploited by manipulative scholars and politicians for personal/political agendas. So you have politicians in these countries claiming that it was a net negative, without any way to quantify it, and without acknowledging any good that came along with it. Now, of course, colonialism was bad, period. It can never be justified to enslave people, and it should never have happened.
Well that's why I said without taking into account people that were destroyed by it. That is, if we look purely at modern-day circumstances, are they better?
A comparison might be a country with overpopulation. If you kill x% of the population and enact some birth control plan, then 100 years later you might end up with a "net positive" discounting the people that were killed and the emotional effects of their loved ones.
Are there countries in Africa that weren't colonized, or some islands that weren't, that we could compare to ones that were and make some inferences?
Alternatively, you could compare countries that had "more" or "less" colonialist control/influence, and see if there is any correlation to their current performance. Though, as with all social-sciency it's very difficult to isolate the variables to get deep insight into possible causal links.
It is really hard to quantify something like that. While British siphoned off large amounts of natural resources and often caused widespread famines in India. They also gave us western democracy, education in western science,access to all the western knowledge.
You speak as though, these things wouldn't have come without the British; I'm sure Japan today is a poor backwards country, for they weren't blessed with the act of "civilizing" by the cross.
All this is out of context and has nothing to do with what OP talks about.
About what you are talking about, it is a fact that India was the richest countries in the world before British colonised it, and after British left it was one of poorest.
> suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't exist, and everyone used the OPs language. How would they have handled advancing computers?
Bengali isn't all that complicated; more so than English, yes, but definitely surmountable. Printing presses, typewriters, etc. have been used without incident for Bengali (and for other Indian languages) for a long time.
P.S.: It's not really a great idea to open a post with "Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect?" I understand you did not intend to offend, but at the very least it's a touchy subject, and a contentious and complicated history.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, I perceive the last part, your post-scriptum, to be a little bit distorted. The Renaissance had many sources. One of them was the massive intellectual immigration from the crumbling Byzantine Empire, thus serving for much of intellectual works as a bridge over the time (from antiquity to enlightened medieval period) and space (near east to all over the Europe). And it was mostly Greek in its cultural background.
Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't exist, and everyone used the OPs language. How would they have handled advancing computers? I've seen photos of Japanese typewriters and they look... unwieldy to say the least. And graphics tech took a while to get advanced enough to handle such languages, let alone input. (MS Japanese IME uses some light AI to pick the desired kanji, right?)
Disclaimer: I don't mean this in an offensive way, just a dispassionate curiosity.