Russian Colonization Of Ukraine a Failure

History recognizes two models for building empires: the garrison and the family. The former is better in the short term, but disastrous in the long; the latter is the opposite. When Spain and Portugal colonized North, Central, and South America, they utilized the garrison model. Their settlers were almost all men of military age whose purpose was to establish military garrisons that would supervise the extraction of natural resources, their processing, and their shipment back home. Women and children, if they came at all, were a “perk” available only to higher ranking functionaries. More often than not, they saw their stint in the colonies as a necessary evil, a hardship assignment, breathlessly waiting to make their colonial fortunes and use them to buy nobility titles and mansions in Lisbon and Madrid. For the absolute monarchies of Catholic Europe, Spain and Portugal, colonialism was a Big Government project, funded and directed by their central governments, which with the avarice and waste that only such governments can have, focused only on the quick buck, never looking at the big picture. France, with its better developed middle class and private sector, adopted a hybrid model of military exploration followed by the settlement of the newly explored territories by lower and middle class French families, well suited for homesteading in the cold climates of New France, a vast territory stretching from the sources of the Mississippi river in the west to the Atlantic Ocean in the east and as far south as the northern border of Massachusetts.