Is There a Case for Colonialism?

A few weeks ago, Bruce Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State University, was hit with an online petition opposing his forthcoming book about Sir Alan Burns, a colonial British governor. In response to the petition, the publisher withdrew the book and canceled the series it was supposed to inaugurate.

Although the publisher minimized its aggressive action (“we put the book on hold and removed it from our website while we reviewed the matter”), the petitioners were elated: “Rowman and Littlefield paid attention to the academic community and Gilley’s shameful series has been rejected.”

Something similar happened in 2017. Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” was withdrawn from the Third World Quarterly after 18,000 petitioners sought to have it removed, and 15 members of the editorial board resigned. The journal’s publisher withdrew the article due to death threats to the editor who had approved its publication.

Don’t feel too bad for Gilley, however. He wrote Oct. 8 in the Wall Street Journal that “this sort of publicity is hard to buy” and he expects another publisher to pick up his latest book.

What, exactly, is he saying about colonialism? In this post I will share the argument outlined in “The Case for Colonialism.” (His article was published in Academic Questions after the Third World Quarterly withdrew it.)[1]

On its face, it is difficult to praise a system in which soldiers with ships and guns took  control of large, already-inhabited areas,  often violently. Yet, writing primarily about nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism,  especially in Africa, Gilley argues that colonialists brought both “objective benefits and subjective legitimacy” to underdeveloped nations.[2]

The “objective benefits” were: “expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national iden[t]ity formation, to mention just a few dimensions.”[3]

As for subjective legitimacy: “Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonised to colonised areas, fought for colonial armies and participated in colonial political processes—all relatively voluntary acts.”[4] In other words, colonialists by and large provided good governance and were respected by most indigenous people.

But Gilley doesn’t stop with this defense. He wants to bring colonialism back! (More about that in a moment.)

What gives his argument some potency today is that the period after colonialism—that is, independence—has been a terrible disappointment. As time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult to claim that the severe economic stagnation and violent conflict we see in the Third World were caused by colonialism. (Such claims continue to be made, however.)

Independence for African countries began after World War II. In 1996, more than 50 years later, the World Bank wrote, “Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of [governing] capacity in the last 30 years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.”[5]

Gilley illustrates this regression with Guinea-Bissau, a West African country that obtained its independence from Portugal in 1963. Its revolutionary leader, Amilcar Cabral, himself admitted that he couldn’t obtain support from his people; he got training, weapons, and economic help from Cuba, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden.[6] The war killed at least 30,000 people, says Gilley, and led to a one-party state and further violence. By 1980, “rice production had fallen by more than 50 percent.”[7] He quotes the World Bank in 2007 saying that the country is in “continuing political disarray.”[8] Yet Cabral is a world revolutionary hero.

So, given such views of colonialism, Gilley would like to see it return. Indeed, it already is, in small ways. For example, in Sierra Leone, the British were invited in for “overhauling and rebuilding” the police force. Liberia has entered a program with the World Bank, the IMF, and the U. S. to embed outside advisors in the administration to reduce corruption. Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer has proposed that rich nations copy the success of Hong Kong by setting up “charter cities” in poor nations—with permission, of course. They would provide governance models that would likely attract people and set an example for other cities. In that vein, Gilley suggests that small island governments be created on the coast of Africa, open to people from the mainland.

Gilley says explicitly that colonialism was not an “unalloyed good,” but that it is time to end the anti-colonial agitation that has been “haunting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Third World.” In his view, anti-colonialism is harmful and colonialism should be viewed objectively.

[1] Bruce Gilley, “The Case for Colonialism,” Third World Quarterly, September 8, 2017. Retracted but published by Academic Questions (Summer 2018), online at: http://www.web.pdx.edu/~gilleyb/2_The%20case%20for%20colonialism_at2Oct2017.pdf.

[2] Gilley, 5.

[3] Gilley, 4.

[4] Gilley, 4.

[5] Gilley, 6, quoting a World Bank study.

[6] Gilley, 5, quoting Carbal, as reported in J. P Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 24. In the second edition of Cann’s book, this quotation of Carbal is on page 41.

[7] Gilley, 5.

[8] Gilley, 6, quoting the World Bank.