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Joseph Masters's avatar

Good piece but I think you could argue France was similar to Portugal in the way it fought for its empire at least in Algeria

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Brad Pearce's avatar

You could, I thought about that a lot when writing this and if I needed to bring it up or specify it in some way and decided not to.

It is different for many reasons, including that France put a lot into culturally assimilating Africans with a fair amount of success, and that De Gaulle put his political future on the line for withdrawing from Algeria when France could have fought on for years.

This is a much more complex topic than is reasonable to argue in the comments, but I agree that France is an interesting comparison here.

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