Bret Devereaux

I would prefer to have lived in Kabul under the US imposed system, warts and all, to living in a religious dictatorship. But, colonial regimes, per my African history professor, tend to last only 90 years, and in Africa rarely penetrated the hinterlands.

That rule of thumb doesn't seem very useful. All it really tells us is that colonial regimes that exist longer than a century no longer seem to us to be colonial regimes, but just regimes.

You have a doctorate in African history and taught at the University of Ghana under N'Krumba as my professor had done? I just had the year. The colonial rule didn't penetrate the hinterlands. A lot of it was rule by proxy.

Africa isn't the only place where colonial rule happened. One could quite fairly argue *all* American states, North and South, are colonial states. We only don't think of them that way because of how successfully they have suppressed the original inhabitants.

The Welsh might fairly argue that England is a colonial state, for either 954 years or c. 1500 years depending on how one views the Normans as reflecting a major discontinuation or not.

There are examples like this all over the place. The people of Languedoc in France could fairly view themselves as having been colonized by the Northern French in the 1200s and as continuing to languish under a colonial rule which first suppressed their religion (Catharism)...

...and then their language (the Laguedocien dialect of Occitan). Taking a 90-year-rule as some general rule of thumb works for Africa only because European colonialism in Africa mostly happened and mostly ended around the same time brackets. It isn't a good general theory.

I've seen the 90 year rule applied to empire peak to decline. Nicaraguan stores seem right now to have better stocked shelves than Britain. Also, China and the US seem more to force assimilation than do some other countries. Russia, dunno.