Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
(Heh, heh, heh. I see you've all fallen for my cleverly conceived plan to get everybody talking about Rome.)

KingJaja: Do you think that if the Brits had been able to offer full citizenship to the people of Nigeria, that would have made a difference? I realize that Rome was a contiguous empire, but just for arguments sake, would the prospect of British citizenship have made a difference to your father and grandfather?
I think the French actually offered full citizenship to some Senegalese (Leopold Senghor was a member of the French national assembly) and generally did the whole "assimilation" thing better than the British.

(Also compare Muslim North Africa - Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia with Pakistan and Muslim India, you'll realize that the French did some things better than the British).

On the other hand, the British Empire was a slightly more exclusionary thing (both in theory and in practice) than the French Empire. The British had a deep mistrust of educated Africans and preferred to deal with uneducated traditional rulers than with the educated elite. This could be one of the reasons why predominantly Muslim Senegal, Mali and even Niger practice a more moderate form of Islam than Northern Nigeria (but that is a topic for another day).

The level of affection Francophone West Africans have for France (with a few notable exceptions) is much greater than the level of affection Anglophone West Africans have for England (in many cases it is non-existent).

If the British were more serious about assimilation, the relationship between the British and Nigerians today would have been deeper and more meaningful.

So the answer is yes.

I am not so sure a comfortable life can't compete in the long run with spiritually thrilling ideologies. Those 3 things you cited are wonderfully exciting, but after a man has been married for a few years and a few children he may begin to see the advantages of wealth. One side won't ever wipe out the other of course, but I think wealth or the promise of it can compete fairly effectively.
A large part of the appeal of those three things is the support networks they provide - and help that was offered in times of need is never forgotten, no matter how many children you have and how much money is in your bank account.

The only thing that can beat the appeal of those three things is a robust economy and a fully functioning welfare state. There is absolutely no religious organisation in Africa / Latin America / Asia that is serious about increasing its market share that doesn't invest heavily in its benevolence arm (and that includes the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood).

We all know that a fully functioning welfare state is not going to happen anytime soon in those parts and somebody has to handle social services. You are smart enough to know what happens next.

Assimilation keeps coming up. I wonder if that is what the Romans actually did. When the Mongolians conquered China, they eventually became Chinese. They were assimilated. When the Romans conquered places, those places became Roman. They were not. That is not an absolute of course, each group influenced the other, but I think a case can be made that the Romans transformed those they conquered more than they were transformed by them.
Are you suggesting that the World is becoming more American / Western? Probably, but watching MTV, drinking Coca-Cola and speaking English does not make one an American. We may superficially resemble Americans, but I can assure you that we don't think in English and that is what really counts.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the global media and entertainment scene is increasingly more competitive and more regional. As recently as 1991, CNN was the only player in 24 hour news TV. Today, that space has been taken up by several players such as Al Jazeera (nothing the West has can compete against Al Jazeera in the Arab World).

You might not know this, but tens of millions of Africans who have never sat through a Hollywood movie have devoured hundreds of Nollywood movies. The same applies to the Indian Sub-continent and Bollywood (also very popular in the Arab World).

In my mind, the greatest agents for assimilation into a common global culture today are (a) fundamentalist Islam and (b) evangelical Christianity. Think about it, the most visible fashion trend in the World today is not the proliferation of blue jeans but the popularity of the hijab. Look at the impact evangelical Christianity has had on the work ethic in many parts of Latin America and Africa.