Like with many things, it's a mixed bag. It's easy to say "well, the damage is done and all we can do now is take what we've got and look to the future", but if you look closer you can see that the damage is still ongoing and the need for decolonisation is still high.

Take architecture, for example. Traditionally pretty much every ethnic group I know of built with mud brick and thatch. During the colonial era - and afterwards, till today really - such building techniques were derided as backwards savagery. Of course the European way of using concrete was "better" and "modern", even though it's a terrible building material for a hot, humid climate. A mud house can keep quite cool in 35°C plus weather with just vents. A concrete house on the other hand traps so much heat at even lower temperatures that we end up needing fans and air conditioners to be comfortable indoors, which of course drives up individuals' carbon footprints and electricity bills.

The ghost of colonialism still lingers decades later in a whole lot of little things like that. So yes, we may be headed towards a net positive future but in my opinion the way to get there requires even further divesting from the colonial era and its ways of thinking (re: the architecture example, there are new schools of builders who explicitly aim to incorporate precolonial building wisdom in their work).

I grew up in a house built out of 'wattle and daub', with a thatch roof. I wouldn't have called it a mud hut, but it was definitely a mud cottage. That is also the typical house of rural people in England in the colonial era.

Seems to me that the typical comparison between european architecture and 'mud huts' is based on a lack of knowledge about european building processes.

Consider that maybe I am well aware of what, for example, the company Adobe's name is referring to.

So it seems to me that your comment is based on a dire lack of knowledge about how colonialism works. The British straight-up imposed town planning laws that banned using mud to build new houses so that they could build the concrete towns and cities they envisioned - I know precisely what I am talking about.

I'd genuinely like to see a reference. I don't know of any concrete-heavy building styles before the development of reinforced concrete in the late 19th century. It would have also been pretty cutting edge until maybe halfway through the 20th century.

Out of curiosity, when exactly do you think the colonial era I am talking about was? The Middle Ages?

> It would have also been pretty cutting edge until maybe halfway through the 20th century.

Nah, there have been houses built using concrete blocks since fairly early in the 19th. Using cement in house construction was hardly cutting edge in the 1920s - 1930s.

>concrete blocks since fairly early in the 19th

That's the thing. I don't think that's the case. I think they are a 1900's-earliest, 1930's mainstream kind of thing.

So by the time they became mainstream, the UK was already beginning the second world war, which would mark the end of the time when they were really rich or powerful enough to be an imperial state.

What you think or don't think and what is reality don't always align, sorry

For example, the first concrete built house in the US was built in 1837. Francois Coignet was making significant use of Portland cement as early as the 1850s/1860s.

Even beyond that, I'll ask you yet again - when, exactly, do you think the colonial era I am talking about was? When exactly do you think Britain let go of all its territories in Africa? Come now, this isn't exactly hidden information or difficult to look up.

Well, the question is not 'when did Britain let go of its territories'.

The question is 'when did Britain lose the kind of involvement you need to get into low-level building regulation?'

Near as I can find, they never had that kind of interest or involvement. Which is why I wanted a source for your claim that they banned traditional building materials.

So my thinking is simple: prior to 1930 is a bit early for concrete blocks to be the logical building material outside of places like New York, and even there, it would be a bit newfangled.

After 1930 is a bit late for the british to be really calling the shots about what gets built and how it gets built, since the period between 1945 and 1960 was characterized by increasing independence and english divestment. Maybe some university buildings?

Anyway, this whole conversation is a bit of a strange digression from your original rather belicose response to my observation that concrete was not by any means the 'European way'. It's my feeling that, aside from some monumental architecture (which it seems nigeria also had) most europeans were also building with brick, wood, plaster and thatch, up until the 19th century.

If you look at a modern timber frame house in the UK, the basic structure would be familiar to a roman architect. The timber structure is laid on brick piles, which are in turn laid on concrete foundations (the only modern addition - victorian houses often wouldn't have these), then a tile roof is fitted on top. It's a ridiculously ancient design.

People in America and Britain are working with mud in quite sophisticated ways, only it's called "cob" and "adobe" and "rammed earth" and isn't stigmatised as "mud huts".

You're talking about the cutting edge of experimental building techniques, not the common building techniques used in the US and UK.

They do have cutting edge variations, such as Oregon cob. They also have old fashioned variations, that still exist and are used. And some of the cutting edge is old enough to feel a bit rusty. (Superadobe was invented before people knew about the problems of microplastics, for example.)

Hahahaha, centuries old techniques are now "cutting edge".

Yes, they are. You'll find that rammed earth [1] and cob buildings are used only at the cutting edge of expensive high design ecological buildings. Industrial building materials nearly wiped traditional methods of home building off the face of the developed world.

We are in many ways rediscovering older methods and techniques of building, especially in materials.

Also Consider SuperAdobe [2], which uses nothing but dirt onsite and plastic bags.

1. https://www.dwell.com/article/modern-rammed-earth-homes-723d...

2. https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe

I'd argue that cob in particular spans across the range from build-it-yourself Womble homes to fancy schmancy eco-bourgeois. And that it's mainly access to land and planning permission that's blocking the former (or causing them to be bulldozed by busybodies). It genuinely is one of the rare few building materials that can be prepared from materials on site and put up by amateurs.

You've piqued my curiosity. Technically, why does a mud house keep the interior cooler? Is it the material, or the design?

Mud is porous (as long as you don't glaze it) and it has a pretty good R value. So it's the material more than the design, though anything approximating a sphere will do better than something with straight walls due to the maximum enclosed space within the minimum size skin. That also helps when you want to heat it. (Least heat transfer area to the outside.)

Why would being porous help, unless the mud is damp and there's some evaporative cooling going on?

I know in the American southwest adobe construction is popular, but that's about sheer thermal mass moderating the effects of the heat. Small windows also help.

There always is some evaporative cooling going on. At night the cooling causes condensation, and the dry clay absorbs this moisture, then during the day sun and wind dry it out again causing evaporative cooling. How big this effect is varies in different climates, but from personal experience (I've helped build some adobe houses, and have friends who live in them) I can say that it's not negligible. Another benefit is that in humid climates (like mine) the interior of an adobe house tends to be significantly less damp; enough so that we can see the difference with the salt in the salt shaker... around here in brick/cement houses it always clumps very quickly, in adobe homes it remains lose and powdery (salt starts to clump when humidity is above 75%).

Yes, it is evaporative cooling. That's why I mentioned the pores. The mud wets and then later the moisture evaporates drawing energy from the surrounding clay.

Phase change can get you below zero easily, it certainly works as a poor man's AC. It is incredible how much energy phase change requires compared to just raising the temperature of the medium.

Mud houses in traditional cob and adobe designs tend to be built thick, partly in order to be sturdy, but also because the sheer mass of the walls acts like a heat capacitor that can be used to either absorb cool night temperatures and smooth the temperature extremes, or warmed with a constant low level fire for colder climes.

I believe the thermal mass for mud and adobe is higher than cinder block or stick frame buildings so the structure gets cooled in the night and remains cool throughout the day with the added benefit of providing some additional warmth in the night.

Ground coupling is another factor. I learned a lot visiting the Eco-Village Training Center in Tennessee in 101F (39C) heat. The cob house was as comfortable as the air-conditioned cabin.

I believe there may be reasons for use of concrete in Africa that aren't related to colonialism.

Yes I agree, it is obviously complete coincidence that the British imposed town planning laws that banned the use of the building materials that actually worked for our climate.

Are you being serious? How exactly do you build modern roads, skyscrapers, dams or really anything large scale and industrial out of mud bricks?

Are you being serious? How exactly do you read a comment mentioning fans, air conditioners, staying comfortable indoors, and individuals' electric bills and be so one-track-minded as to think I was talking about roads and not, perhaps, residential buildings?

> the colonization arguably could be a net positive for current and future generations

I think this is a misleading statement anyway, because it requires a comparison point. If it was to "no interaction at all with the colonial powers", then maybe? If it was to "free trade with the colonial powers", almost certainly not.

Even in the first case I say maybe, because who knows what their society would have looked like. It may have advanced more slowly, but maybe that would have left them with more natural resources, more culture in tact, different advancements that benefited them in different ways. The trade-off there is very unclear and just saying it would be a "net positive" is a massive leap to me.

Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars, and that the first world war produced the Bolshevik Revolution, making the Cold War possible. There are a lot of counter-factuals involved in claims like this.

Another problem is that settler colonialism exterminated the populations of the Americas and Australasia. The inter-generational comparison in those cases is primarily between two separate populations: the genocide of natives against the wealth of the ancestors of settlers.

> Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars

I'm not an historian but my impression is that WWI was primarily the result of intra-European conflicts between the great powers with any colonial issues being little more than a sideshow. WWII in Europe then seems to have been a nearly inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from the prior war. The only aspect of the two wars that does look a great deal like a war between competing colonial empires was the Pacific Theater of the Second World War.

The period from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to the First World War was the high watermark of European imperialism. British and French imperial holdings in Africa tripled, and Germany went from a handful of colonial holdings, to owning 10% of the landmass of Africa. By 1913 the European powers had colonised 96% of Africa. The dwindling of territories led to extreme competition among the colonial powers. Flash points in Fashoda (1898) and Morocco (1905 and 1911) nearly tipped over into war. Arguably, the underlying cause was the fact that gross inequality in the European powers created domestic imbalances in which capital outstripped purchasing power, forcing it to seek new investments abroad. One might draw a crude analogy between the way in which the Cold War was externalised to the global South, and the way that European tensions after 1884 played out in Africa.

As for the Second World War, I would say two things. First, that Nazi ideology was, in many ways, a product of European imperialism: its ideal of a Pan-Germanic state in Central Europe, its virulently racist and extermanist designs, and even its use of concentration camps. Second, one of the main grievances of Germany was that it was stripped of its colonial territories at Versailles, and that its territories were transformed into mandates run by the League of Nations according to principles of free trade, at the same time that France and Britain continued to run their own colonies as protectionist blocs. It was British sympathy for this colonial imbalance that, in part, stood behind the policy of appeasement. As for Japan, it was a classically imperialist power, reacting to the expansion of the US across the Pacific.

I'm pretty sure that Alsace-Lorraine was far more prominent in the consciousness of most French (certainly) and German (probably) citizens in 1914 than were any extra-European colonies.

As for the Nazis, their primary target was European Jews who had been living in Europe for millenia as well as other European peoples they viewed as inferior to the Germans, such as the Slavic peoples.

Perhaps, but the long-term axis of geopolitical competition and spiralling armament was imperial. If you accept Hobson's thesis that imperialism was a way of off-loading the surplus capital consequent from European inequality, not only was imperialism the axis of competition, but the competition was necessarily imperial in nature.

There is no possible narrative explanation of the war that does not centre on the scramble for Africa. Would there have been a great power war between Germany and the status quo powers at some point absent the scramble for Africa? It is very difficult to say. Had it occurred, it would have been radically different in shape. This goes back to my initial point about the uncertainty factored into any big counter-factual like this.

As for the Nazis, my point was that the very ideology of racism was a direct product of European imperialism. That it was primarily directed at Jews and Slavs is besides the point. Hannah Arendt - one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century - famously made the case that the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of European imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

It's worth pointing out that the one of the main rationales of Nazi imperialism was to create a living space in Europe in which to off-load Germany's surplus population. This had long been one of the main justifications for European colonialism, and the expropriation of Germany's colonies at Versailles made it look to Europe again to solve the problem. What are arguably the first two (imperial!) campaigns of the Second World War - Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - were both justified as means of creating outlets for their soaring surplus populations. Both of them faced profoundly racist immigration restrictions in the main destinations of migration, namely the United States and Australia.

In many places in the US, colonist showed up to areas that had been densely peopled a hundred years before, but were then nearly empty from disease. It wasn't settlers, but contact that did most of the killing.