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Where Did the Workers Come From?

England before the Industrial Revolution

When I was in high school, I “knew” why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Great Britain.  Tenant farmers were forced off landlords’ estates by the British enclosure laws;  they moved into the cities and fueled the new factories. This seemed rather obvious (otherwise, where would the workers have come from?) and it was the conventional wisdom.

In 1928, for example, the celebrated historian Paul Mantoux had said, “Industry was in fact the only refuge for thousands of men who found themselves cut off from their traditional occupations. The manufactures were to offer them the living they could no longer earn on the land.” [1]

This conventional wisdom, however, was wrong. Continue reading “Where Did the Workers Come From?”

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What Was the Journal of Race Development?

G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall. Photogravure by Synnberg Photo-gravure Co., 1898. Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0.

I was somewhat shocked to come across an American publication called the Journal of Race Development, published from 1910 to 1919.[1] I was especially surprised that a journal with such a name was a predecessor to Foreign Affairs, the respected journal of the Council of Foreign Relations. As I noted before, Foreign Affairs does not acknowledge this on its website.[2]

My post is about this Journal of Race Development. Here’s what I’ve learned.

First, the journal started publication soon after the United States began experimenting with colonialism. Having “freed” Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards in 1898, Americans kept the countries for themselves, more or less, along with islands such as Puerto Rico and Guam. The nation’s new role may have generated the journal—Americans suddenly realized the rest of the world might be relevant. Continue reading “What Was the Journal of Race Development?”

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The Case against Colonialism

Indian army during World War I

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. Continue reading “The Case against Colonialism”

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Is There a Case for Colonialism?

Map of Africa

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?”

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The Sad History of Homesteading

McCarthy Homestead

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.

Yet homesteading created heartache. Continue reading “The Sad History of Homesteading”