Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission.
A widely accepted contemporary belief, prevalent throughout American secondary and higher education, is that post-1800 Western colonialism was an unmitigated evil. Notably, this does not hold true for non-Western oppressors. One textbook says Man of Color Genghis Khan’s rape-and-pillage empire “sponsored interaction among peoples of different societies and linked Eurasian lands more directly than ever before.” The same text says of Europeans: “By the 19th century, however, European observers recognized that empires of their day were different from those of earlier times.” How? Who knows.
One lefty source points out that Genghis killed so many people—up to 10 percent of the population of Earth at the time—that he removed 700,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and cooled the climate. Hero!
When we talk about historical colonialism, we cannot simply assume people groups have generally confronted choices between American-style democracy and life under colonial control. Often, freedom isn’t even on the menu. In many cases, the alternative to colonialism was not democracy but equivalent or even worse “Native” oppression. In every transition, there are trade-offs.
Even when freedom is an option, no one seems to ask the question: what price is too high to pay for freedom? An idealistic activist would likely say there is no price too high, but this is to ignore the reality of pragmatic political and human considerations.
The reality that no one wants to talk about is that colonialism often had benefits for the colonized. We often give the Romans credit for their roads. Why can’t we do the same for 19th-century Caesars?
A professor of political science at Portland State University, Bruce Gilley, makes an obvious point in reply to such arguments in The Case for Colonialism. Moral arguments about the objective or unique evil of the colonial era assume the existence and general acceptance—in pre-colonial Black and Arab and Native states—of an essentially modern ethics, where acts like aggressive war or the harsh domination of once-conquered territory were seen as not merely unfortunate in practical terms but evil.
Such arguments also assume indigenous governments did not themselves often engage in these actions. In reality, there is essentially no evidence that truly modern, post–right-of- conquest moral or legal standards existed anywhere on earth before the modern era—Iroquois or Hawaiian or Ashanti nobles were probably no more or less ruthless than their white opponents—but there is considerable evidence of the hard material benefits of colonialism.
Furthermore, in a revelation that would shock leftist activists, according to Gilley, Western colonial regimes were measurably seen as legitimate by the majority of their nonwhite subjects until very nearly the end of the colonial era. Such behavior, among the highly sophisticated “native” residents of, say, West Africa or Southeast Asia, was emphatically not due to “Uncle Tom”–style subservience or awe at Western technological prowess. Almost certainly, no Indonesian or Ashanti trader who saw the muskets or rifles available to outnumbered European outpost troops in the 1800s was amazed by them—although he would doubtless have started scrambling immediately to get his hands on as many as possible. Rather, the non-Western peoples of the world were as capable of pragmatically weighing their options as their European friends, foes, and rivals.
Why has all of this, much of which seems obvious, become taboo to say? A big chunk of the answer is the extraordinary ideological bias of modern academia. The publication of Gilley’s bland scholarly article, astonishingly, resulted in multiple death threats, two separate petitions signed by roughly 2,000 academics, and the resignation of more than half the editorial board of host journal Third World Quarterly.
The prevalence of activist thinking in scholarship is evident through examples of highly controversial, trivial ideas being introduced as fact. As we have seen during recent controversies surrounding Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, academic activists not infrequently link traits like being on time to the office or engaging in friendly competition at work to “whiteness” or “the colonial period”—making it a sort of revolutionary act to refuse to engage in them.
A great deal of the corpus of anti-colonial scholarship consists of this sort of thing, including a sub-genre that Gilley describes as “inquiry into the glories of sadomasochism among Third World women.”
For all of their frequent follies and occasional brutalities, there exists very little evidence that most Western colonial regimes were led by more bloodthirsty or incompetent leaders than the indigenous governments that preceded—and followed—them—or that they overall did a worse job of governing. This point was made recently in a fascinating piece titled “The Other Side of Colonialism, Part I,” which appeared on the consistently entertaining website How Africans Underdeveloped Africa, a resource of Black heterodox thought run by a Nigerian-Canadian writer, and which argues that any real understanding of colonialism’s effects has to involve a true understanding of what Africa was like before the colonial period. Like North America, per all data, it was no earthly paradise.
Prior to colonialism, Africa could perhaps best be described as diverse and dangerous. Focusing on West Africa, the Black How Africans Underdeveloped Africa author describes the region as “a highly heterogeneous place” containing several impressive state-level societies ruled by stable hereditary kings, some intermediate societies including chiefdoms and large tribes, and “numerous small un-stratified tribal entities.” Peace was an extreme rarity: the entire area, to no more or less an extent than Polynesia or inland eastern Europe, suffered “the usual problems of fractured and fractious tribal regions around the world.” In the least developed tropical forest zones, warfare and raiding between tribal groups were constant, “endemic.”
However, even in larger societies like the Islamic and highly “civilized” Sokoto Caliphate, slavery was a key component of the local economy and thus “wars and slave raiding”—the latter often at expedition scale—took place constantly.
Historians’ blinkered obsession with Western colonialism therefore makes the lessons of history less clear. It obscures the fact that trade-offs are inevitable when swapping any system of government and that colonialism isn’t necessarily going to be worse than any alternative. But also it makes it harder for us to see how common the same dynamics are today, outside the West. Once again, ideology makes us poorer historians and poorer observers of the world around us.
Photo by Stefan Magdalinksi — Slum in Kibera, Kenya (2010) — Flickr
I would like to think that British colonialism was a positive force, on the whole. But reflecting upon Irish history, it’s hard for me to see much good in it. I can’t really say that it was great for the American Indians, to put it mildly, though I doubt that many American Indians would really like to go back to living as stone age tribes. The real Indians? Maybe. The whole picture is a hard sale though.