>>215723952
That's the point, they were doing the white man's burden and trying to make the shit there up to white standards. They're not exactly going to build shoddy shit.
In the 1950s the French looked at how much maintaining roads and functioning institutions for the colonies would be and were like "fuck that".
>>215723953
Many European nations with little or no colonies were doing comparatively as well, and Spain was a poor Eurofag country even with some residual colonies. Most trade was between developed nations, the actual empires were a moneysink. I think it was Kaiser WIlhelm's Cabinet that complained about being forced into getting colonies because the German Public wanted it. They tried organizing african colonies into trading companies, but private enterprise just didn't want anything to do with it.
Colonialism was also embraced by african blacks at the time because it was like getting sci-fi technology for them. It'd be like if aliens came down and dropped amazing technology thousands of years ahead, made life instantly better, gave you laser weapons to kill off a neighboring country you hated easily.