The ghost in the box

[shkrobius]

If liberty is inalienable natural right, as we hold it, how can the convicts be deprived of liberty as just punishment? The Bible does not consider imprisonment (as opposed to jailing before a trial) as the lawful mode of punishment. There is no "tradition" justifying this barabarian practice except for the perverted sadism of Germanic pagans,

Comments

[i_eron]

Russia has colonized the _empty_ part of Eurasia. There were exceptions, right, but the bits with significant population were conquered one by one, by a much bigger country.

The whole of Latin America and Caribbean (and Spain has colonized about two thirds of it) had a population of 39 million which has quickly fallen to 10 million according to wiki. And the rich Spanish monarchy could draw soldiers from its Italian and other European possessions. Spain was bigger than its American colonies. People typically look at the world in its current proportions (actually, in the proportions that were when they were at school). The proportions were very different once.

The Dutch have colonized Indonesia via trade domination, it was not a "typical" military conquest.

I am too lazy to find a good estimate of the population of French African colonies at the moment of their conquest, but the whole of Africa was just above 100 million and France certainly took the lesser part of it, especially if you remember that not many people live in Sahara.

The British just replaced the Ottomans in Egypt and Sudan. And they too had quite a hiccup in Sudan, due to the rise there of nationalism, that new Western idea.

The British conquest of India was the most obvious exception to the trend - a very big place was conquered.

They say Alexander the Great has stopped in India "because his troops were tired and homesick". Nonsense. There were just too many people to conquer in India.

This aside, all these conquests were significant achievements. I think anything like that is just not possible today. The reason is not only the change of sentiment in the Western countries or the lack of true incentive. Also the local populations are very different from what they were. They are nationalistic, technologically advanced (not compared to us now, but compared to them back then) and more numerous.

Your example of a possibility of a Chinese colony in Africa today just supports my point. There are far more Chinese than Africans (amazingly, this is about to change). Chinese could overwhelm, say, Madagascar. Then Chinese could send all their prisoners (either 1.5 or 10 million, depends on who do you believe) to live in this tropical paradise, hunting lemurs and mining sapphires. I believe it would be very difficult for Chinese to achieve. They can theoretically conquer Taiwan which is just slightly bigger than Madagascar and much closer. I mean theoretically, because it would require the Americans to withdraw but Taiwanese still deciding to fight. Taiwan is much more technologically advanced than Madagascar, but it does not really matter. Everybody understands that mainland China would win (either in Taiwan or in Madagascar) - in the end because of the population difference. The only question is how many people would die in the process.