I have heard people say that the French colonial holdings were useless to France...

The "all colonial empires were empty" statement is just a meme. These large swathes of land were rich in diamonds, oil, iron, coal, cotton, sugar, rice, timber and many other resources. The reason the imperial country didn't make much money is because most of the money went to private enterprises making extremely rich businessmen. The east india companies were joint stock companies that had no legal obligation to the government except in war.

I'm not stupid

>Canada
>natives almost entirely exterminated, replaced by Europeans
>Algeria
>natives alive and extremely numerous, only a few European colonists
Gee, I don't know, if only there was some kind of difference we could observe

It's about control of the major uranium mines.

Well the French didn’t quite genocide the natives whose land they’ve stolen, gee I wonder why the British colonies on previously inhabited land became almost 100% white countries. Riddle me this user.

>the French actually took there role of "bringing civilization into thoses shitholes" at heart
pahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
holy fuck

Britain has never committed genocide against anyone, dolt.

That is a lie, the biggest colony of Britain was India and it is still majority Indian. Although during the period of colonisation there was an estimated 500,000 mixed race Anglo-Indians, perhaps had the British not lost control it may have resulted in an eventual "genocide", but your use of the word genocide is inncorrect.

It wasn't a formal politics, but in the end that's what they did, by stupidity mostly.

>Unlike the Anglos or Belgium, the French actually took there role of "bringing civilization into thoses shitholes" at heart, thus the minor financial gain.

France built one university in there entire colonial empire. And that wasn't even in Africa it was in Indochina

Britain literally invented concentration camps during the Boer Wars.

A-Algeria isn't that bad, y'know...

Also accounting is very hard to track. The finance shit handled fir colony and the empire are two separate things so you need both pieces of the puzzle to connect them which is hard due to the distance in obtaining them, powers burning docs or stuff not accessible to the public for various reasons.

America did that. In NA both my country (leaflland) and America basically shat on any treaties made with Britain since those two nations are different entities

Also a fuckton of benefits aren't blatant or obvious for please.

>Captive markets
>Colonies had tiny budgets and costs so the "burden" wasn't big (and many paid their own taxes). Malawi had the budget of Glasgows street cleaning budget.
>resources under your countrols
>Control over land and geography (Tanzania has a massive amount if helium in it just discovered recent).
Military power.
>Massive labour pool
>cultural reach
>places for excess population

>Colonies where natives were brutally slaughtered and replaced by Europeans become rich and prosperous nations
>Colonies where natives brutally slaughter, drive out and replace European settlers become poor backwards shitholes only kept afloat by oilbux from Europeans
Really makes you think

Also
>Science

You are extremely distorring the entire thing just by resorting to a shitty simplification?

hmmm its almost like algerians had some form of resistance to smallpox or something

its true
only good colonies are the ones with white majority
south africa is just 10% white and its most developed country in africa by far
only 10% rhodesia was what 3-5 % white
also note that both countries where in blockade for several years

It enabled France to throw numerous nigger divisions at the Germans during the world wars, don't underestimate that

to the point that the Fr*nch allowed a genocide to happen if they could maintain it

Shut up pussy the empire was great and far better than the Dutch

>comparing North American colony to an African one

I hope you are being intentionally retarded.

Imagine actually believing this

The French colonial empire was a LARPing meme. It should have never existed. It only brought niggers and dumb arabs to France which their biggest contribution is basically dabing and commiting crime

so as ever the solution is remove kebab

They weren't trying to exterminate the boers tho. About 20,000 died which is terrible but not intentional systematic genocide.

It wasn't but the camp conditions were aggravated by the poor maintenance of the British along some some practices done by prisoners like cow dung poultices which are an issue in crowded camps.

This. I'M anti-imperial but the modern revisionist train of thought of down-playing the empire's might, benefits and history in an attempt to go "hey it was bad for me too #wewerehurt2" is just plain disingenuous. Everyone knows that if shit turned out different people would be very very happy having many far off places where they could live like kings just as a middle class citizen (to paraphrase a man "every house in South Africa had a pool, great moderate climate, and a lot of servants. Things you couldn't get with that middle class salary (said income being pretty high where as a tradesmen or a white collar) salary back home in say London."

Being white isn't why they were good you retard. The institutions used in a colony and it's policies determined how good the colony functioned post independence. If colonies were determined to actually help it's colonial subjects develop it would be way more different by an immense degree instead of finding 101 ways to screw others over fir a quick buck. Why do people have this mentality that it's all about whites.

>If colonies were determined to actually help it's colonial subjects
They were. To the extent you could say the same as modern day USA, Japan or China. The notion they weren't is nothing but a propaganda meme.

>railways that go from mines/plantations to ports directly, bypassing major pop centers are for the good of colonial subjects.

Hahahahahahahahaha
Whew you made my day. If you have to post that on an online fotsuba board the. I feel bad for you kid.

>French in India
TIP MEME

>They weren't trying to exterminate the boers tho
I wish they were

Read thisLet's not mention all the laws that fucked development over just to benefit the settlers or the colony administration/company.

Rude.

Financial studies of the French Empire have shown that generally the cost to take it weren't very large, expansion mostly paid for itself. French colonies were expected to not take any metropolitan budget support. They might still have been in the red, but not by much.
During the Great Depression around 1/3 of French foreign trade went to their colonial empire, as did a lot of investment, and they acquired a lot of resources in their colonies. It also had important military elements, because it provided conscripts for the Metropole, while the French never really spent that much on military defenses in their colonies (purposefully so in Vietnam for example, since they knew that it was a lost cause to try to defend it so they didn't really intend to try).
Personally I think that the French colonial empire benefitted them a lot, up until maybe the 1940s and 50s. When they had to fight and bleed so much in Algeria and Vietnam, the cost benefit ratio might have changed. But before that, it was beneficial for France.

imagine being this much of a brainlet

india was and is the 2nd most populated region in history

Basically this, the French colonial empire was honestly beneficial especially with them owning the entirety of the west african coast and the rubber in vietnam. France was also naturally rich in resources and their colonies were too.

France owned actual territory in one part and then ports or buildings in others.

Says the guy with the canned and completely ruined meme word as his only point.

I've always wanted to ask this but I haven't seen a proper thread for it until now.Why didn't the French just combine all their colonial territories in Africa into one francophone nation?

(1) To start with, those were different territories. Broadly, you can divide them into three different regions : North Africa, West Africa, and Equatorial Africa. But things get even more complex than that, since Togo and Cameroon weren't technically part of French West and French Equatorial Africa, and were in fact League of Nation mandates. It was ILLEGAL to attempt to combine them with the French administration of those regions, and the League of Nations Mandates Commission critiqued the French over that, even when the French weren't doing anything. Morocco and Tunisia meanwhile, were separate from Algeria, and were officially protectorates - they were administrated not by the colonial ministry (which ran Sub-Saharan Africa), but instead by the Foreign Ministry. Algeria was formally an integral part of France.
So you have at least 4 different forms of government (plus there are the 4 communes in Senegal, which had their own administrative quirks, even if they were part of the French West Africa), and 7 different separate territories, some of which the French were legally unable to combine, and some of which were officially part of Metropolitan France and so combing them with the other territories would be giving them up as part of France proper.
Things don't end there, because North Africa and West/Equatorial Africa are separated by the Saharan Desert, which makes linking them extremely hard, not to mention they have different political economies, histories, cultures, etc. etc. Not the first time that the French had ridden roughshod over that sort of stuff, but it gets to the most important point : there isn't any reason to combine them all into one territory.
Why should they be all combined into one territory? There is an excellent book about decolonization in West Africa (I wrote a short review of it hubpages.com/literature/An-Incisive-Book-on-a-Little-Covered-Subject-The-End-of-Empire-in-French-West-Africa-by-Tony-Chafer ).

(2) The only people who supported really, as opposed to rhetorically, unification in West Africa were the radicals and the bureaucrats. The radicals were opposed to French control, so the French outflanked them in preferring a balkanized region of states which are mostly friendly to the French, as opposed to a unified state hostile to them. The bureaucrats (civil servants) are more special, because they wanted to have the region kept on the same standard as France - by claiming that it was part of France and had the same standards as France, the French were constitutionally obligated to pay them the same standards as civil servants in France. Nobody else had an interest in this. The vast majority of the population didn't care about pan-Africanism, it wasn't important to their interests, it was hazy and ill-defined. And the bureaucrats were isolated from the rest of the population because they were perceived as being a privileged minority, who were well paid and with lots of benefits, compared to the average worker or peasant. The French didn't want to keep paying them so much, they had hoped to have the region as a net profit to them. So they de-linked the bureaucrats from the metropolitan pay grades by empowering territories in the region, and then territorial governments, now faced with the task of actually paying these civil servants, instead of being able to stand in a coalition alongside them, mostly promptly proceeded to cut their pay. These regional politicians didn't have their political power base on a federal level, instead it was in their territories - the modern day nations in the region. They didn't support west-African unification, because that would cost them their own power : the Senegalese did, but the Senegalese were at the heart of West Africa anyway.

(3)This is all after WW2 of course, but that's when these became serious political questions. This is, mind you, just on the West Africa level, not on the entire French African level. Things get even more difficult once the question becomes one of combining together regions which weren't previously united. I don't know if you've read Benedict Anderson, who wrote the premier book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, but administrative districts create a feeling of shared collective consciousness. Bureaucrats rise to the top of the ladder in their district, they rub shoulders with other bureaucrats, and they see the borders and boundaries of their world. Give it some time, eventually you have a nation. It has happened in pretty much all of the previously colonial nations, where the borders stuck to being what it was during colonial times. What's the difference between somebody from Ecuador and Peru really? The big one is that they were different territorial denominations under the Spanish, and it stuck that way, and now they're full fledged nations.
West Africa used to be a federal denomination, but the territories (the modern nations in the region) were empowered over it as the eventual nation. There was some feeling of shared West African sentiment among the elites due to having shared the same confines of political horizons, education, and destiny, (but not among the people really), but it was overcome by territorial boundaries - the French also concentrated everything on Paris, instead of having the horizon of political territory be West Africa proper (the territorial delegates could sit in Paris, representing their territories, not West Africa, so the territory was more important than the federation).There's no such feeling of a shared political nationalism between North Africa (already split out into different states), West Africa, and Equatorial Africa. The French had no interest in joining them together, nor could they do so at independence.