One of the remarkable things about the countries that colonised others the most in the last 400 years was how small they are. Portugal, one of the trailblazers, is two-and-a-half times smaller than Great Britain, which, given that the latter is around the size of Uganda, is very small.
Spain is about two times the size of Uganda, and slightly smaller than France, but these are largely the exceptions among the European colonial powers. You can fit five Netherlands within Uganda’s tiny boundaries and have room to spare, while Belgium is about 80 times smaller than the Democratic Republic of Congo, which it colonised.
Size, of course, is not everything. You need the ability to defend territory, which requires close collaboration among the inhabitants. The continuing instability in DR Congo, the division into two of the Sudan, and the continuing conflagration in what’s left of its northern bits are proof, if any was needed, of this point.
There were many reasons why these smaller nation-states were able to take on, defeat and colonise much bigger geographies. Technology, for instance, including shipbuilding, gunpowder and the Maxim gun was a force multiplier, for sure. We can add capitalism’s red-clawed demand for slaves to power the New World plantations, low immunity to Old World diseases, and the terrible climate in some of the colonising countries as having combined to ensure success.
But we must never forget the key decisive role of internal collaborators. Some were far-flung tribes and tribe leaders who thought that raiding their neighbours for slaves would give them upside on the trades, or weaken rivals to allow them to take over their grazing lands and women. Incidentally, this value chain only worked until the other tribes had lost their able-bodied menfolk, at which point the collaborators were often pressed into the boats themselves.
The more destructive collaborators, however, were those from within the tribe, and often within the palace itself. They lay awake in their huts at night thinking of the mirrors and trinkets that the king had received from the Arab or White visitors and wondered why they did not have their own. They, after all, were the advisors full of insights and wisdom. The king was only a violent accident of birth. The coloniser, regardless of whence they came, already understood human nature and its three driving forces of hope, greed, and fear. Once welcomed into the kingdom, all they had to do was to identify the influential individuals and constituencies and which incentives applied to them. The hardest bit was always how to couch the final betrayal as a progressive act for the tribe and the kingdom so that the new world order was more acceptable and even warmly welcomed by the masses. Here religion often provided a warm lubricant, although more extreme measures, including punitive expeditions that ended in the killing or exiling of the old monarch, sometimes had to be imposed.
Whatever the…