In a way I can’t decide if the resource colony is a more benign form of colonialism or a more offensive one. European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America was horrible. It was full of atrocity and cultural belittlement. But in the French’s attempts to turn Africans into Frenchmen, there was still an implicit understanding that those people mattered, or at least they could. With the resource colony the message is simpler; the water has value, the people do not.
