When allegiance to Power was demanded,
Those who said 'yes' and those who said 'no',
Were both considered offenders.
—Faiz Ahmad Faiz
To build and hold their empire, Romans built roads. Portuguese spice-traders and Spanish speculators became emperors by exploring shorter and safer sea lanes. The defeat of the Spanish Armada might have helped the rise of Pax Britannia, but to hold itself together, it had to extend its shipping inland, which it did by river navigation and later by girding the globe with railways. Along with swords and sermons, empires of yore needed effective transportation network to entrench itself in distant lands. But the dominance of these emperors of the Old World came to be challenged with the laying of submarine cables. The need of a volunteer colonialist to rough it out in the sweltering heat throughout the year suddenly disappeared.
In Einstein's analogy, wireless communication was something similar to a cat with its long tail: you twisted the tail in New York and its face distorted in pain in the Philippines, except that you could not see the cat. Communication network thus became the new tool of control over the 'colonies'. Emperors of the New World could sit in the climate-controlled offices of Langley and Foggy Bottom and direct the course of events in distant lands. Thus arose a string of puppet dictators through out Asia, Africa, and South America in the decades after the Second World War.
The so-called de-colonisation process worked well in very few countries; for most other states on the periphery, all that happened was that the centre shifted from London and Paris to Washington and New York. Satellite television began to rock the Russian Bear and kept shaking it until it fell from its pedestal in the wake of a showdown with the Jehadis in the wilderness of Afghanistan. Instead of real warriors, Americans sent in the Rambo video to neutralise the ensuing chaos; and in place of shipment of manufactured goods for basic commodities, New Colonies had to make do with loans to pay for the services of 'consultants', and the branded soda. More than anything, it were the 'consultants' that bred corrupt regimes every where in the developing world while branded colas helped create depoliticised zombies mortally afraid of questioning the conventional wisdom.