Last week I wrote about Bruce Gilley’s 2017 article “The Case for Colonialism.” Gilley’s article caused an uproar because it argued that European nineteenth-century colonialism was, overall, a good thing. It had “objective benefits and subjective legitimacy.” In this post I want to share two cogent criticisms. I’ll also briefly share my strange odyssey that opened a window on the United States’ half-century of colonialism.
Needless to say, some of the criticism of Gilley’s essay was emotional, not substantive. The petitioners who brought about its withdrawal from the journal Third World Quarterly said that it “fails to meet academic standards of rigour and balance” by leaving out the “violence, exploitation and harm” of colonialism, which “causes offence and hurt and thereby clearly violates that very principle of free speech.”
This (abridged) statement entangles claims of poor scholarship, hurtfulness, and free speech without being very analytical. And, as Tom Young, an associate professor at SOAS University of London, wrote drily, “If every article in an academic journal exhibiting poor scholarship prompted thousands of protests academic life would surely grind to a halt.”[1]
But there was substantive criticism, too.
The International Review of Social History released a special online issue on labor history and colonialism. The introduction lumped Gilley in with other “empire revivalists” such as Nigel Biggar and Peter Emmer.[2]
In essence, Pepijn Brandon and Aditya Sarkar said that these “revivalists” turn the anti-colonialist argument upside down. They claim broad achievements from colonialism and then they ward off criticism “by admitting—and simultaneously qualifying and rhetorically rendering diminutive—various discrete crimes and excesses committed under the aegis of colonial rule.”[3] In other words, these neo-colonialists concede colonialism’s errors and failings, but treat them as unimportant.
(Anti-colonialists do the opposite. For example, the evils of colonialism—forced labor, horrid massacres of natives, failure to bring natives into the government—take priority over successes such as increases in life expectancy and creation of law courts.)
The observation by Brandon and Sarkar reflects an ideological gulf that may be impossible to cross. How can one objectively measure the important actions against the unimportant ones, especially since colonialism was a heterogeneous mass? Different European countries applied different goals and different management styles to many different people—and peoples. (In a future post I hope to discuss the differences between British and other colonialists).
A second major argument, expressed by Horman Chitonge of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, is that colonialism is still thriving.[4] Colonialism was more than governance, says Chitonge, and decolonization is incomplete. True, colonialists are no longer in charge, but they left a morass of destructive attitudes.
Says Chitonge:
“Completing the decolonisation project would require a critical engagement with the subtle trails of coloniality of power which continue to dictate not only the activities of most Africans, but also their modes of thought and being.”
Colonialism still dictates the activities and “modes of thought and being” of most Africans? That’s a big claim. He continues:
“[T]he colonisation was not merely a physical process of occupying certain territories; it was much deeper than that, involving the reclassification of the human race into us and them, the civilised and uncivilised, the developed and the underdeveloped, the industrial and pre-capitalist, etc.”
Chitonge’s argument has merit, at least for me. I recently wrote favorably about a book arguing that the Catholic Church wiped out kinship relations in Europe 500 years ago. Doing so changed the culture from one that was stagnant to one favoring the growth of prosperity and power, and its impact continues even today. (The Church’s process started in 500 AD and ended in 1500 AD.)
If the Catholic Church could have that effect, it’s not implausible to argue that colonialism had a negative effect that prevails today, 60–70 years after independence.
This possibility—that maybe today’s massive problems have a connection with colonialism—led me to search more broadly into today’s views about former colonies. I started looking at Postcolonial Studies and Foreign Affairs. Along the way, I learned something troubling about Foreign Affairs, the highly respected publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.
When you view a journal in the online JSTOR database of journals, you see a “title history.” I was surprised to see that the first title for Foreign Affairs was The Journal of Race Development, which (according to the JSTOR chronology) started in 1910. It was retitled in 1919 as the Journal of International Relations. Then, in 1922, it became Foreign Affairs. Wikipedia says it a little differently: the Journal of International Relations was “merged into” Foreign Affairs in 1922.
Foreign Affairs apparently doesn’t see it this way, or see it at all. The website of the modern magazine says that Foreign Affairs began in 1922, under the tutelage of editors Archibald Cary Coolidge and Edwin F. Gay. Perhaps today’s Foreign Affairs editors are ashamed of the connection to its predecessors?
The Journal of Race Development will be the subject of my next post.
Image: Members of the Indian Army who fought for the British in World War I. Taken by H. D. Girdwood and housed in the British Library Collection on Flickr.
Notes
[1] Tom Young, “The Gilley ‘Debate,’” Journal of Modern African Studies 27, no. 2 (2019): 325-337, at 326.
[2] Pepijn Brandon and Aditya Sarkar, Introduction to “Labour History and the Case against Colonialism,” International Review of Social History 64 (2019): 73-109, at 78.
[3] Brandon and Sarkar, 82.
[4] Horman Chitonge, African Study Monographs. Supplementary issue (2018), 57: 21-43. Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University, June 1, 2018/ https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/233007/1/ASM_S_57_21.pdf
One thing that concerns me about the anti-colonialist or postcolonial position is that they treat the actions of Europeans as somehow exceptional and particularly egregious. Yet, European conquests and actions are in fact merely part of a continuum of conquest and the subsequent mistreatment of conquered peoples that is as old as history. India, for example, was repeatedly invaded by both Mongols and Muslims throughout the Middle Ages. The amount of blood spilled then was far greater than during the period of British colonization. And Africa was a place of constant tribal warfare, with tribes almost continually wiping out, subjugating, or displacing other tribes. The Western slave trade depended almost entirely on such warfare for captives.
This clarification of context does not exonerate European colonizers of any abuses they committed. But it does say that, in the whole run of history, that they were not exceptional.
Secondly, the treatment of native populations even by their own ruling elites in many colonies was notoriously brutal. In many cases, the lives of the colonized improved.
Third, Chitonge’s accusation that the colonists changed Africa is specious. Yes, it’s true, just as it’s true that the Roman conquest of Germany changed Germany and the Islamic conquest of Spain changed Spain and the Moghul conquest of India changed India. The postcolonial project is an attempt to demonize Europeans instead of addressing true history.
And, once again, is it better to be an average Indian or African today than before the Europeans arrived? Despite the ongoing turmoil in Africa, the answer has to be an unequivocal “yes.”