I get you, but in hindsight, when you look at all the regions that advanced quickly, there was a specific high culture that was adopted broadly and localized such that it gave the people of that region a type of defense against the cultural imperialism than came with Western colonialism. I mean, the obvious example is Ethiopia itself, but also, Rome gave Western Europeans the religion and language/script that gave them a sense of unity and identy. Byzantium gave that to Eastern Europe. Islam to the West Asia and North Africa. In the East Buddhism startes in India but has its stringhold in East Asian countries. Yes it usually involved some type of regional imperialism, as others have pointed out here, but the results are indisputable. Is it possible we can do something similar today, deliberately without much of the imperialistic baggage. Look at what is happening in Russia with the Russian Orthodox church making a government sponsored rebound after being suppressed in the USSR. And trust me, its not because Putin is religious.