life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on.

America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals.

Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them.

But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.

We have more trinkets yes, but in exchange we've been reduced to a deracinated blob with no hope or future, now in a state of terminal decline

More chattel does not necessarily mean a better life. Dictators that look more like you are not necessarily more beneficent.

> Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard

"Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century."

in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud.

India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_Indi...