The colonies were, for men like Burnham, playgrounds, places to carry out ideas without worrying about the counterforces that encumbered action at home. Mainlanders could confiscate land, redirect taxes, and waste workers’ lives to build paradises in the mountains. Filipinos, for their part, were relegated to the sidelines. The segregated spaces at

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But though the ‘sea states’ coped most successfully with the economic conditions of the period, their strength and importance should not be exaggerated by hindsight. Much of their overseas commercial activity was risky and unprofitable,27 as the misfortunes of the Royal Africa Company, the South Seas Company and the Dutch West India and East India

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The indigenous governments that replaced colonial rule in the countries that were not settled by Europeans drew their leaders and administrators from populations who had little experience or skill at running any type of large-scale enterprise. In many cases, especially in Africa, infrastructure inherited from the departing colonial powers was rapid

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The world’s newly discovered lands were thus to be divided between two Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain. Yet other newcomers had quite different ideas. From the early sixteenth century onward, two other rising Atlantic powers, Britain and Holland, both part of the Reformation that rejected papal authority, aggressively contested the papal treat

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