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 Quarterlysaid 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]
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 Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” was withdrawn from the Third World Quarterly after 18,000 petitioners sought to have it removed, and 15 members of the editorial board resigned.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] Continue reading “Is There a Case for Colonialism?”
Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..
The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.
When economist Harold Demsetz looked into the history of the fur trade in the Labrador Peninsula in 1967, he was not studying environmental protection. He was exploring the origins of property rights. Yet his findings contributed to a major rethinking of environmental issues. Here’s what he found.
Before 1700, Indians hunted beaver in forests around Quebec, using them for food and fur. Because the demand for beaver was limited, says Demsetz, “hunting could be practiced freely.”[1]
Some years ago in my search for causes of the West’s prosperity I came across Deepak Lal’s 1999 book Unintended Consequences. The book planted the seed of an idea that has recently borne some exotic fruit.[1]
According to Lal, in 597 AD Catholic missionaries were trying to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England. Augustine, a monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Pope Gregory I asking him whether several of the converts’ marriage habits were allowed.
In his reply, the pope was strict. He did the following: 1) he rejected marriage to close relatives or to close in-laws (called affines by anthropologists), 2) he banned the adoption of children, and 3) he prohibited concubines. (Divorce was already prohibited, based on scripture). Why? Continue reading “The Medieval Church and Its Consequences”
