The basic answer is no. Colonial powers were never thinking about how to get the consent and agreement of the local peoples, unless it was to legitimize a land grab, how to co-rule, etc.

However, a lot of the conversation around colonialism that goes on is cartoonish in the way it portrays colonialism. It wasn't the same process from decade to decade. Over time goals changed as technologies changed and economies changed, or as political theory changed.

Another issue is often what was though as benevolent wasn't. During the 19th century when political theory had changed enough that colonial powers did feel they had responsibilities to the people they colonized, their idea of benevolence was to send in missionaries, to destroy cultures, to separate families, etc. Under the treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese thought they were being benevolent in bringing Christianity and saving pagan souls, but in reality they brought one of the largest, if not the largest, genocide in world history. The British may or may not have believed their own story about being benevolent by enslaving Africans to Christianize and civilize them, and thereby conducting the other main contender for the world's largest genocide.

Often things the colonial powers for their own benefit had actual benevolent outcomes. The British didn't build railways in India for the sake of Indians, but it turned out to reduce the impact of famines, to help the colony form a national idea, to put thinkers in touch with each other through the mail, and later through telegraphs, to build a national independence movement of a unified India. It was actually the complete opposite of what the British wanted, but achieved a huge benefit to Indian nationalists that they're loathe to admit, even today. Hong Kong is probably the best example of this. There's no question British rule was racist and discriminatory, but it helped Hong Kong build a lot of the institutions that allowed China as a whole to modernize their economy on Mao's death. That was never British intention, but that's what happened.

The other issue is the areas that were colonized may have been seen as homogenous by the colonizers, but they rarely were. Cortez didn't differentiate against the peoples of Mexico, but they sure did. And those differences allowed huge groups of peoples to fight off Mexica control of their lands. They thought it would be a benefit to them to align with Cortez against the Mexica, and it was for a short time. Cortez was a greedy, selfish, liar. He's almost cartoonishly self interested. But, to his indigenous allies he was seen as providing benevolent assistance in overthrowing the hated Mexica, until a combination of political decentralization, pandemic disease, and ruthless and blood thirsty Spanish control left them in just as poor shape as the Mexica.

The other thing probably to mention is that the military is constantly coming up with plans for reorganization. A lot of these plans are really about attempts to take some part of the military's budget from one branch to give to another. The Army and Navy do this constantly. Probably about 1% of any of these plans ever come to any kind of fruition. The army constantly is saying the Marines are redundant and should be phased out or switched over to the Army, along with their budget. This probably happens every single year during intraservice budget planning. There is probably some plan to do away with the marines by the army, or the naval airforce (world's 2nd largest airforce after the USAF) by the USAF, or something similar every year. These plans are rarely taken seriously or get farther than an op ed in some trade journal or a working paper that's circulated.

Just googling "Should the USMC be merged into the US Army" gets 3.5 million hits. It's a discussion topic that gets endlessly debated but never goes anywhere.

JFK is a good example of this. He was constantly putting his larger plans and hopes at risk for hook ups.

The Logevall biography gets at a specific instance during WWII. JFK was having an affair with a journalist, I think she was Dutch, who had had significant contacts with major Nazis before the war. The FBI was monitoring her. She doesn't seem to actually have been a spy but there were serious concerns at the time. While this was all going on JFK had an important post in naval intelligence and would have been an excellent source.

He was transferred to the PT boats partially b/c he was high profile and some serious backers wanted to highlight the boat and his stature would raise the boats profile, partially b/c it was seen as a good recruitment tool for the Navy to have Joe Kennedy's son serving in the Pacific on these boats, and partially b/c the Navy was sketched out by JFK's inability to keep it in his pants.

Have you checked out N. A. M. Rodger's stuff? I don't know a lot about the topic but he's written a lot on it, some of it pretty specialized.

I'm hesitantly excited about that. I saw the new release. There's been some good review of it going around too.

Mark Peattie's *Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 gets cited on the /r/askhistorians threads about this.

This answer has a list of sources too: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/970sif/what_was_the_relationship_between_the_ija_and_the/

It also makes the mistake of thinking of criminality as some objective thing and not a social construct. You can make loitering a crime, and then make housing extremely dense and without social spaces so that people in an area congregate in public. Which is exactly what the US did with red lining and segregation. So you have people forced to socialize in public spaces and then you criminalize hanging out in those spaces, or drinking there, etc. And now you have a record of different behavior that you can utilize in a "race blind" way, even though historically you know it's very race conscious.

NYPD's Compstat did exactly that and they tried to use it as evidence that the NYPD wasn't enforcing the law in a race biased method.

In the US the big problem is that b/c of the legacy of redlining and segregation, a lot of these algorithms use zip codes which has turned out to just be a proxy for race. So the pre trial release were basically making the decision based on race and age, but b/c no one in the court system actually knew how they worked, no one challenged it.

Cathy O'Neil's got a bunch of good work on it. She had a book a few years ago called Weapons of Math Destruction.

The language is old and it wasn't standardized in spelling, as all the "shews" demonstrate. I think the first attempts at dictionaries trying to standardize it were only about 100 years old, but the most successful attempt by Samuel Johnson was contemporary with Hume.

I like Hume a lot, but I wouldn't say it was easy reading and you have to be pretty familiar with Descartes and Berkeley to understand what he's talking about and neither of those are that easy. Descartes has the benefit that it gets translated into English about once a generation, which makes it easier to read.

As far as his English history goes, it's supposed to be very good for the time, but at this point we have such better methods and so much more research to rely upon, and greater access to archives that have been better maintained that I think the only people who really read it anymore are academics studying Hume or the historiography of English history.

I would definitely make an effort to read Hume's Dissertation "Of the Passions" and his two Enquiries. It's better if you can read them as part of a class with an instructor who's taught them before b/c there's lots of context. Reading Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments helps too. But it's a lot to read and none of them are easy going. But it's very rewarding.

What do you think the likelihood of getting a black ink that stays black? Or at least more black than current inks?

When we get tattoos should be getting the tradenames of the ink to see if unlisted ingredients pop up in the fortune?

Maybe Anna Funder's book, Stasiland? I haven't read it but it looked interesting and I thought I'd pick it up if I ever saw it on the remainder table.

Julia Lovell's eponymous book on the Opium War is a good one to approach the subject. It's reasonable length, covers the whole topic, and has a nice epilogue on the importance of the story in current Chinese politics. She also did a thing for Fivebooks.com about the five best books on the Opium Wars. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/opium-war-julia-lovell/

Stephen Platt's book on the Taiping Civil War, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, is interesting. It's mostly about the US and British response so it would fit in well with your interest in the colonial aspects.

I read a book a few months ago by Helen Zhi called The Last Boat Out of Shanghai about the diaspora community in Shanghai and it had info about the colonization of Shanghai by the western powers and the Japanese. It's a good book but only about half of it deals with the topic your interested in. James Carter has a book called Champion's Day about the Japanese occupation. And Paul French has a kind of a lurid but fun one called City of Devils about the underworld in Shanghai.

Through a fluke of the universe I kind of ended up with too many things to read at one time but I ended up with the new Meacham Lincoln biography, And There Was Light. I'm only about 1/4 of the way through it and am going to have to put it down for a few weeks to catch up on some of my other reading responsibilities.

I will say that so far as a biography goes it seems like it would be a good first or 2nd Lincoln biography. I'm only a quarter of the way through like I said, but so far it's pretty similar to the the outline laid down by the Herndon biography and hits a lot of the same points about Lincoln seeing the slave market in New Orleans, his dislike of working for his dad, his mom's early loss. It doesn't make as big a point about his father's neglect when he was young as some other books do.

If you wanted a Lincoln biography to kind of get a start on the topic I think it would be a good one. If you needed a gift for a "history dad" or uncle it'd be a good choice. There are better ones out there, but you don't need much knowledge of Lincoln's life or the political situation of the times to read this one.

This is a little flippant, but actually does have some historical truth to it. Korea got divided up b/c National Geographic had published a map that folded in half along the 38th parallel.https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-2-colonels-national-geographic-map-divided-korea-24734

There's a book that came out last year called Devil Land. The author has some other books on Charles II and the English civil too. This book made a few best of lists I saw and I kind of filed it away in my "Maybe check it out if you see it on the remainder table or at the library" list. But it might be something you'd find interesting.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56567211-devil-land

I saw this essay today and thought you might find it interesting: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/world-war-i-jonathan-boff/

It was about 100 schillings for a 48 hour work week. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41831403

There were about 10 schillings to the US dollar according to the article.

If there are, they're kind of going to be fringe historians or popular historians, probably older. The big reason why this doesn't really exist in the field anymore is that historians, through their work, have shown that the world is just too complex for any one person to control history in the sort of way that used to be attributed to people like Barbarossa or Charlemagne. Marxist theories of history have done a lot to show how the vagaries of things like geology can lead to bread riots in France right as the king's finances get exposed that are beyond the control of any individual. And for any individual's actions there are countless other's doing their own actions, sometimes in support, sometimes in opposition, sometimes in totally different spaces or overlapping spaces without concern of other's actions. History is just too complex.

Besides the great man type history, you also don't really see works like Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The kind of history where you develop a grand theory to explain everything is just out fashion and recognized as too unrealistic of a pursuit. Now an academic might try and write a book that covered a topic over a length of time, like maybe US history for some period, or German colonialism in Africa, but it usually won't get more general than that b/c they have enough knowledge to realize the flaws and errors that get introduced when you have generalize more than that.

Some popular historians still write these books, but they're usually used to justify some kind of political goal or worldview and aren't really taken seriously b/c they reason backwards from a conclusion rather than forming a theory from evidence and arguing in support of a theory. They're the kind of books pundits might "write" and promote. They go through a print run and are pretty much never referred to again.

The FDR thing is fairly well known. The recent Ken Burns doc on US policy and the Holocaust is worth watching on this. But during the war FDR faced a choice of putting resources to ending the war or hoping that bombing would have some impact on the holocaust. But there wasn't really any evidence that bombing camps would make a difference. There were thousands of camps and they could just moved populations around and repurpose other camps, or they could go back to the strategies of earlier in the war and just machine gun them down. FDR realized the only realistic option was to defeat the Nazis.

Southern Dems did a lot of stuff to restrict the vote, not just to Black voters. They opposed the 19th Amendment pretty universally, even though Dems in western states were some of its strongest supporters. They also had really restrictive voter laws. The Virginia constitution of 1902 probably restricted the vote to about 20% of Virginia's population.

B/c of the senate and house districting, sometimes it makes sense not to grow your voting base in the US, but to concentrate on restricting votes that you can't control. You can modern equivalents of it now in some states.

This stuff is complicated, but you can already see a rehabilitation of Stalin's image. The economic hardship in post Soviet Russia, the incompetence of the government, propaganda about the predations of the west all have contributed to his image among people who are dissatisfied with Russia's current condition. I imagine as Russian society breaks down more we'll see a stronger move to beautify Stalin.

For Hitler it probably won't happen b/c his legacy is such a failure. Stalin died on his own terms, not cowering in a bunker as his society was utterly destroyed by his own bad advice. There were no forced migrations of millions of Stalin supporters into Georgia or some kind of equivalent like post war Germany had. The benefits of Hitler's corruption weren't widespread enough or long lasting enough to create any kind of constituency to try and call back "the good old days." Most of the people who would make that up are obvious misfits and usually pretty embarrassing. Hitler's rule was just too closely tied to devastation to really have any other legacy. He didn't industrialize Germany. He bankrupted the economy in about 6 years and then on top of all his other atrocities basically destroyed Germany.

I like the US from about 1850 to 1940. There was just a huge sea change in the understanding of the Constitution, economic institutions, and development in the country. It's a fascinating period to learn about. A lot of the conflicts from that time are still driving politics to this day. Right now we're basically in a reversal of Constitutional understanding back to a Lochner era reading where civil rights aren't important but economic rights of the elites are paramount. This is basically con law from 1939 to 1870 in reverse.

This happened over a long period of time that really started after 1915. You had the big boll weevil infestation in the south and Black sharecroppers, people tired of the constant violence and intimidation, economic refugees, etc strated to immigrate to northern cities. The GOP in the northern cities was a lot like the financial wing of the GOP today, with a concentration on small business owners, big corps, low tax policy. B/c of that they didn't really have any institutional infrastructure to integrate Black voters into their political machinery. But the Dems, even though being still racist, did know how to organize the laboring class. So you start to get this uncomfortable alliance of both groups saying, we don't really trust each other, but if you help us, we'll help you. A famous example of the uneasiness of the relationship is Chicago, where the Black voters supported Daley even knowing he had participated in the race riot of 1919 during the Red Summer.

There were set backs to this relationship, Wilson's presidency was an example. The party leadership had to balance the conservative racism of the southern wing of the party, the labor jealousy and racism of the northern party, and the needs of big city political machines in the north.

But during FDR's presidency the Black voting community became more important and FDR was forced to grant more benefits, like guarantees of jobs for Black people in war department jobs. But he still maintained segregation in the military and federal government, and imposed segregation on federal military contractors in housing, to placate southern democrats.

As Black Americans in the south saw the help their northern kind were getting, they started to align the alternative political structures they had with the national Dem party. And they got more results, like Truman's integration of the military.

By the end of Truman's term a combination of the contradiction of fighting the Nazis for freedom while maintaining Jim Crow, the political use Communists made of Jim Crow, and the valor of Black servicemen in Korea made it pretty clear that Jim Crow was immoral. If the north was forced to face the issue they would usually do the right thing. So, the Supreme Court, even the Eisenhower justices, started to swing towards the new norm.

JFK had campaigned with civil rights as part of his platform. As civil rights activists started their bussing campaign, violence broke out across the south. This was all captured on Television and broadcast the south's brutal and savage racism to televisions across the north. This forced Kennedy to move closer and closer to the civil rights movement. He was not particularly good at it and it was awkward with lots of missteps, but that's the direction he was pulled in (Tom Ricks has a new book, Waging The Good War, out that should be easy to find that gets into how the Kennedy brothers were used to leading and very uncomfortable not being in control of the movement. JFK didn't have time to learn and adjust but RFK did. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/08/thomas-e-ricks-civil-rights-january-6-waging-a-good-war-book-military-history)

During LBJ's term, the need for the civil rights act was pretty obvious. The civil rights activists used a couple new strategies. One was having white college volunteers come down to the south to work with them and the other was to involve children (high school aged) in their activism. While a lot of Americans could look away as Black people were brutalized, it was impossible for them to ignore attacks on children and young white Americans. LBJ was able to get several civil rights bills passed.

And that's when the break gets dramatic. There were still prominent Black republicans like Jackie Robinson who wanted to work with the party. But Barry Goldwater sensed an opportunity. He started claiming that segregation was a "states' rights" issue. He refused to condemn groups like the Ku Klux Klan that showed up at his rallies. He moved GOP primaries (illegally) into segregated venues to keep out Black Republicans, and opposed the civil rights laws and court decisions ending segregation. He turned the GOP convention into a near race riot that drove out even the most dedicated Black Republicans.

Goldwater failed, the violence and barbarism was too much for people. The Alabama murder of 4 little girls at church was too much for people who considered themselves civilized and Christian to tolerate and Goldwater failed to respond. The parties really changed at that point. Southern Dems switched, they had already started leaving the party with the Dixiecrats, but now went over to the GOP. Nixon formalized it into the Southern Strategy and the election of Reagan and his dog whistles made it clear to Black voters where the GOP stood. The GOP was able to gain influence among white working classes in the North and the west by playing into this racism too. A lot of Nixon's support and the organizing for the future GOP came from California housewives in places like Orange county that were worried about integrating schools in S. California which had seen a big increase of Black people who moved to California for the war industry jobs. The best book on covering the whole topic I know of is Joshua Farrington's Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. You can hear an interview with him on The New Books Network.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/joshua-d-farrington-black-republicans-and-the-transformation-of-the-gop-u-pennsylvania-press-2016

A couple good books on how the GOP picked up northern working class White people by playing to racial anxieties is Nick Buccola's The Fire Is Upon Us about William F. Buckley and James Baldwin. Buckley's campaign for mayor of NYC. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/books/review/the-fire-is-upon-us-nicholas-buccola.html

and Ralph James's Northern Protest about MLK's failed Chicago campaign. It's out of print but still relatively easy to get from a library or through ILL. Rick's book touches a little on it and ties it together with the failed campaign in XX.

Michelle Nickerson's book, The Mothers of Conservatism, is a good book on the political organizing women did for the GOP in places like Orange County. You can hear an interview with her on The New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/michelle-nickerson-mothers-of-conservatism-women-and-the-postwar-right-princeton-up-2012

I love his biographies. I've got this one sitting in my TBR pile, but the one on Stanton and Seward were great.

I'm reading The Company right now by Stephen Brown. Someone on one of these threads recommended it a while ago. It's about the Hudson Bay Company and it's really interesting to see how exploration of the interior of the continent took place, how trade networks operated and changed, and how indigenous culture adapted to the changing economic situation. I think if you're at all curious about Canadian or Western US history then this is a great read.

I think Brown is a pretty good writer and the book is very engaging. He raises some good comparisons with modern society and asks some interesting questions about how cultures interact.