Bruno noticed in the papers over breakfast only a few weeks later. The Netherlands had announced a period of decolonization across its empire. Troop movements were immediate, primarily in the East Indies, which was the immediate priority for such measures.
The British Empire was gone. The French colonial empire was buried. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Belgians had long since abandoned their stakes overseas. And Germany had washed its hands of the world beyond the fatherland.
The Great European colonial empires were gone and dead. And the Netherlands was the last in line to follow in the footsteps of its betters.
Colonialism had failed. The cost of building, maintaining, extracting, and refining raw materials to ship them back home for production had been a fool's endeavor from the start.
It was not a question of morality, but of cost-benefit ratios. And Europe had emerged both in this life and the previous one he had come from as the ultimate losers of such grand ambitions.
