My last post, “Land Grants or Land Grabs,” revealed that most federal land that started land-grant universities had been taken from Indians. I received some constructive pushback. (See the comments.) But that feedback reminded me of a question, Why did the Europeans invade the New World in the first place and conquer Native Americans, rather than Native Americans invading Europe and conquering Europeans?
The phrasing of this question will alert some readers to the subject of this post, the powerful 1997 book by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.[1]
Diamond’s book travels through time (back to the origins of humans) and space (all continents except Antarctica) to answer that question—to determine why some societies became so powerful, with such technology, that they could cross an ocean and conquer millions of people. The European/Native American conflict is the most obvious example, but history has many examples of more powerful groups overcoming less powerful groups.
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?”
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?”
