Naturally, East Africa was still somewhat different. After all, the East African mainland was unprecedentedly powerful, while most of East Africa's colonies did not directly border it. Ernst found it hard to imagine the colonies surpassing the mainland in the future—unless the East African mainland later split into many small countries.
And given East Africa's land area, even if it split into several countries, each would still be quite substantial, with every one of them obtaining millions of square kilometers of land.
"As times develop, the old colonial order will be difficult to sustain. Britain, France, and Germany's colonial empires may be at the height of their power today, but once their homelands decline, their current overseas territories will be hard to maintain."
"Not to mention anything else—if we decided to make trouble for them, the colonies of those two countries would probably already be ablaze with the flames of war."
"The Americans' approach is comparatively more clever. They use more covert methods of economic colonization to continuously expand their country's influence."
Of course, although Ernst said this, it certainly did not mean the Americans were truly wise and mighty, or more civilized than Britain and France. They simply had no choice but to do so. After all, the finest parts of the overseas colonies had already been carved up by Europe. If they could achieve their goals through traditional colonial means, no one would be willing to adopt economic colonization.
After all, without powerful military strength to support it, such economic colonial methods were difficult to sustain, and the profits came nowhere near as quickly as traditional colonization's burning, killing, plundering, and looting.
In truth, most regions of the world were progressing, which made colonization increasingly difficult.
Setting aside everything else, since the Age of Discovery, three world powers