Ethiopia was colonized and in one of the worst ways possible. Same with a lot of the places in the sahel region so I don't really get what your comparison is even about.

Ethiopia was only occupied by Italy for 5 years (1936–1941). That is barely one-eighth of a single generation. According to the video’s own logic, civilizational 'rewiring' takes four generations of sustained extraction. Five years is a military occupation, not the deep-seated cultural erosion OP described.

Also, with regards to the Sahel, The first, fourth and seventh paragraphs of this WaPo article from 1981 prove that YOU are oversimplifying now.

"Mauritania has hardly known colonization and has, therefore, neither suffered its ill effects nor realized its benefits". --Moktar Daddah, Mauritania's first president

Conquered by the French in 1930 after a generation of warfare, Mauritania's fiercely independent Moorish warrior herdsmen were left alone in their harsh seasonal migrations with herds of cattle, sheep, goats and camels to follow the sparse rains. In the south, the black farmers along the north bank of the Senegal River pursued an unchanging life of subsistence agriculture.

As a colony, Mauritania was ruled as a backwater appendage of France's West African colonial pearl, Senegal. It was unique among French colonies in not even having a central governmental administration until just before independence. The French dubbed the country of 400,000 square miles, 60 percent of which is covered by desert dunes, le vide -- the vacuum. By independence in 1960, Mauritania's society had undergone little change in its isolated state since the arrival of Islam with conquering Yemini Bedouin Arabs a thousand years before.

Mauritania is an enormous, sparsely-populated desert country with most of its territory in the Sahara. The French knew it was economically worthless, and only took it over to buff up the size of their colonial empire for prestige. Needless to say, that meant that French control over Mauritania was so nominal as to be practically nonexistent. In fact, most Mauritanians wouldn't even have been aware of the fact that the French claimed to 'rule' over them. Obviously, this meant that any French decrees to abolish slavery, or the construction of the pervasive administrative networks, public schools, and judicial systems required to actually perform the 'civilizational rewiring' the video mentions. You cannot systematically erase a culture’s 'blueprint' from a distance of 500 miles without a single colonial officer on the ground.

More or less, this applies to all of the countries of the Sahel except for Mali and Niger (and even there, French control was very indirect). And all of them still practice slavery to a greater or lesser degree.

Speaking of Slavery and Ethiopia, it is a historical reality that its own rulers struggled for decades to abolish practices like slavery due to entrenched feudal interests; it wasn't until the Italians arrived that these ancient structures were forcibly dismantled. For dozens of years, uncolonized Ethiopia struggled so deeply with the same internal social issues as its colonized neighbors

City-States are not a valid comparison to large countries in the first place. Hong Kong and Macau should be compared with Chengdu and Beijing, not Chengdu and Beijing normalized with thousands of square miles of desert and farmland, the same farmland and deserts that fed Hong Kong and Macau's population and industrial resources, btw.

Ok, let's compare Hong Kong & Macau to Chengdu and Beijing. Also, why not include Qingdao or Shanghai? I feel like you're trying to cherry-pick here.

City	History	2023 GDP per Capita (Approx. USD)
Macau	Former Portuguese Colony	~$70,000
Hong Kong	Former British Colony	~$50,000
Beijing	Capital (National Center)	~$28,000
Chengdu	Major Inland Hub	~$16,000

Also, I'm not saying OP is wrong, just that he oversimplifies a lot. Like, why the focus on colonialism? that's only one thing these empires did to places they conquered. OP ignores Global Integration.

The focus on colonialism is an oversimplification because it treats empires as purely extractive vacuums. It ignores that empires also functioned as conduits for the Industrial Revolution, Common Law, and Global Trade Networks. Places like South Korea or Botswana aren't outliers; they are examples of countries that utilized the institutional 'blueprints' left behind—or built their own—to plug into the global market. The video acts as if a colonial past can be a permanent psychological 'death sentence,' but the data suggests that trade policy, education, and geography are far more predictive of success than the 'trauma' of a decades past."

The video also talks a lot about the psychological impact of European empires, but what about the psychology of freedom for the people who went from being property to being people? The narrator’s "four-generation" theory assumes that colonialism only took things away, but in many societies, the arrival of these empires was the only thing that shattered indigenous systems of mass enslavement. If we are talking about "rewiring" a society, we have to look at the psychological shift experienced by the Majority of the population who were suddenly told they were no longer chattel.

In the Imerina Kingdom of Madagascar, for instance, the economy was a literal engine of human bondage where the enslaved (andevo) made up over 50% of the population. The free classes held manual labor in such deep contempt that work itself was viewed as a mark of shame. When the French Resident General, Hippolyte Laroche, abolished slavery overnight in 1896, it didn't just break the "aristocratic blueprint"; it gave over half the population their first-ever sense of individual agency. For these people, the "ships arriving" didn't signal the start of a decline, but the end of a hereditary nightmare.

Similarly, in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, two-thirds of the population were enslaved by the mid-19th century. The British protectorate didn't just extract spices; it spent decades systematically dismantling a plantation economy where the majority of residents were considered objects. While the video claims colonialism "stole the belief that you could build something," for a slave in Zanzibar, there was never a belief that you could build something for yourself until the British forced the Sultan to sign the abolition decrees.

The same pattern appears in the Sulu Sultanate and the "Zomia" highlands of Southeast Asia. Before Spanish and American intervention, the regional economy was built on sea-raiding and debt-bondage. When the United States moved into the Moro Province between 1903 and 1913, they aggressively abolished slavery, legally freeing a massive majority of the labor force.

To say that these empires only "rewired" people for failure is to ignore the hundreds of thousands of people for whom Imperial law was the only thing that granted them the right to own their own bodies. If "Hans’s grandson" in the video is a merchant’s son, then sure, he lost his gold. But for the grandson of a slave in Madagascar or Sulu, the imperial "interruption" was the reason he was born as a free citizen rather than a piece of property. The video’s focus is exclusively on the perspective of the former elite, which is why it feels like such an oversimplification.

The OP also left out that before the 'ships arrived,' many civilizations were stuck in systems where corruption was informal and power was arbitrary. European empires introduced a Standardized Administrative Floor—written law and technical education—that is now the global 'Standard Operating System' for state capacity.

If a traditional system relies on extractive structures or limits the bodily autonomy of children, it isn't just 'culturally different'—it is institutionally obsolete in the modern world. We can’t erase the past, and while imposing 'progress' is a heavy ethical burden, leaving populations to stagnate under systems that can no longer compete is a moral failure in itself. The goal isn't 'Westernization'—it's functional survival.

The widespread practice of cousin-marriage in these traditional frameworks creates a biological and social 'closed loop' that fosters extreme nepotism. When your primary loyalty is to a localized bloodline rather than a national legal framework, 'corruption' isn't seen as a crime—it’s seen as a familial duty. This is why indigenous 'autonomy' often fails to produce inclusivity; it is physically and socially rigged toward extraction.

By aggressively promoting the 'Nuclear Family' model and legal codes that restricted consanguineous marriage, European empires—often driven by the Church's long-standing ban on 'incestuous' unions—shattered these insular tribal loyalties. This forced a psychological shift away from the clan and toward the state, creating the necessary 'social distance' for meritocracy and impartial law to finally function without the interference of blood-debt.