Yeah I know remnants still exists, France still indirectly controls a lot of african nations' currency etc but why did they have to relinquish direct control?
Yeah I know remnants still exists, France still indirectly controls a lot of african nations' currency etc but why did they have to relinquish direct control?
Basically for the same reason we had to get out of afghanistan.
The only real way to defeat an insurgency is to do genocide, but then you run into labor shortage problems, which is why you then have to do settler-colonialism. That can take a very long time depending on the scope of the project; Israel has been doing it since the 50s and it still isnt a done deal and they've been trying to extract as much labor out of the apartheid second class citizens as they can in the mean time. There just isnt a political will or the time to meet capital's demands for either of these, nor is there a "morally neutral" option like smallpox to annihilate peoples like what happened in the Americas. It's much simpler to just quietly and insidiously control the populations by mystifying class and by slightly integrating these colonial bourgeoisie so resources and labor can be extracted. It's also what has been happening on a cultural level as well in America; broadly, but falsely, represent the will of oppressed people by propping up false prophets like Obama or whitewashed MLK.
Alternately -- and this is what China appears to be attempting in Xinjiang -- you can invest in the area and its people, and treat remaining insurgents relatively lightly (compare the scope and conditions of incarceration in Xinjiang, whatever they may be, to the constant, indiscriminate drone warfare/operator terrorism the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan).
The "problem" with this method is that it runs counter to the exploitative aims of colonialism.