Western Colonialism – A Different Perspective
December 2020
The description for Timothy Parsons' Rules of Empire contains the following, "a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya,"
Parsons' primary goal with this book is to show that essentially Empires do not work. It is an interesting take in that some of the examples he leans on include the Romans (Western Empire, 400 years), the Spanish in Peru (300 years), and the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain (300 years of Umayyad rule then another 400 years of Moorish rule). Over the past 250 years, France has seen some six or seven different states, including three monarchies, two empires, and countless republics. The Bolshevik state in Russia lasted about 80 years. Even the United States is younger than pretty much every example that Parsons provides.
Parsons, though provides several insights into his real goal. Like so many of his fellow academicians, the concept of colonialism runs parallel to that of racism. As Parsons states, "French and British rulers tried to make good on improving the lives of their subjects. But such imperial humanitarianism that non-western peoples needed salvation." He later talks of the proto-racism that began with India's British rule in the 1700s as if bias based on race and ethnicity has not been around since the dawn of time.
As with history going back to Herodotus and Cassius Dio, the work's nature often depends on the writer's perspective. In the case of Parsons, his descriptor reads as follows, "As a social historian of twentieth-century Africa, Professor Parsons' research to date has been focused on understanding how ordinary people experienced imperial rule." Given that for at least half of the 20th century, Africa was ruled by European imperial systems, this gives Parsons his true focus, "Parsons' books to date have explored how Africans from diverse walks of life navigated the shifting realities of repression and opportunity that emerged during the imperial and early national eras. Building on this earlier work, he is currently pursuing several research projects."
Since the end of imperial rule, it is not easy to discern a single Sub Saharan African example of success. There was a time when Mali showed promise, but recent coups have put paid to that prospect. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal noted of Ivory Coast that, "For 12 years, al Qaeda's franchise in the Sahara has focused its attacks on the continent's weakest and poorest states. Now it has turned its violence on a new kind of target: an African success story. For nearly an hour on Sunday, gunmen in bulletproof vests stalked vacationers on a beach in Ivory Coast, Africa's largest cocoa producer and its fourth-fastest-growing economy. By the time security forces arrived and killed the three attackers, at least 15 civilians—most of the locals who had been drinking beer and enjoying the surf on a sunny afternoon—and three soldiers were dead."
The African Exponent website lists seven reasons for this failure:
1. Civil Wars and Terrorism as noted by the examples of both Mali and Ivory Coast
2. Corruption
3. Poor education
4. Health and Poverty
5. Geography, establish for landlocked nations
6. International aid and its corrupting influence
7. Unfair trade policies
But this is a typical laundry list of reasons that nations are poor but not the historical root of these issues nor one of current governance. The narrative for this lack of success is that the European empires were of such an exploitive nature that these nations were rendered incapable of productive self-rule. In the Open Democracy blog, activist Daniel Macmillan Voskoboynik states, "Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory, lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as cultures, ideas, species, habitats, traditions, cosmologies, possibilities, patterns of life, and ways of understanding the world were destroyed. Countless ecological traditions – involving diverse ways of being with nature – were swept away."
Macmillan Voskoboynik adds, "During the 19th and 20th centuries, formal colonialism came to an end. Countries were liberated, new flags unfurled, and rewritten constitutions adopted. But although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation-states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes."
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, reviewer Terry Hartle, "By the 1880s, the "Scramble for Africa" had begun. At the heart of this rapacious quest was the Congo River in equatorial Africa and its enormous, almost impenetrable, rain forest." Hartle calls this period "compelling, fascinating, appalling, and tragic history."
In the early 1980s, a group of Indian historians started the Subaltern Studies program in which colonial Indian history was written from the perspective of the Indians. Because the core of this school was a disparagement of the West, it has gained purchase in America's academy. And it is not just Africa. Writing for The Conversation, author Joseph McQuade notes, " Other industries like gem and mineral mining also destroy the world’s ecological sustainability, leading to deforestation and the destruction of natural habitats. Much of this traumatic exploitation of natural resources traces its origins to early colonialism.”
So, what does all of this mean for our discussion of the developing world? With a stroke of the pen, South America, Africa, and South Asia are now released from direct responsibility for their present and futures. Two salient facts negate this theory. The first is that self-rule has been in place for more than two generations as of this writing. The second is that several of these nations, such as Zimbabwe and Nigeria, had resources available at the time of independence and that they have been squandered.
Here is an example from McQuade of historical gaslighting. "During the heyday of British rule or the British Raj, from 1872 to 1921, Indian life expectancy dropped by a stunning 20 percent. By contrast, during the 70 years since independence, Indian life expectancy has increased by approximately 66 percent or 27 years. A comparable increase of 65 percent can also be observed in Pakistan, which was once part of British India." McQuade conveniently explains away the great plague, beginning in China, killed 12 million Indians. It also does away with the global introduction of anti-biotics, a result of western-style pharmaceutical development.
The real reason for the detriment of an entire continent is that liberal values in terms of individual liberty and responsibility, the rule of law, limited government, and an economic system of open markets has yet to be attempted. Instead, these nations practice strong man rule based on proto Marxist beliefs in state-run, state-controlled practices.
Now another aspect of Africa's challenges lay in their diversity. In Quamrul Ashraf & Oded Galor. The "Out of Africa" Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development" Their work begins, "In particular, the level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in both the pre-colonial and the modern era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While the intermediate level of genetic diversity prevalent among Asian and European populations has been conducive for development, the high degree of diversity among African people and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a destructive force in the development of these regions.”
Essentially the authors argue that too little diversity, inherent in a nation such as Bolivia, locks a population into a set way of doing things and impeding progress.
Alternatively, too much diversity destroys a nation's ability to act in a unified fashion for the benefit of all. One example that fits this hypothesis is Nigeria. Home to nearly 200 million people, Nigeria has substantial resources but also, "There are an estimated 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Each inhabits a territory that it considers to be its own by right of first occupancy and inheritance. Individuals who are not members of a dominant group but who have lived and worked for several decades in the group's territory are still considered aliens. In most rural areas, such aliens may not acquire outright title to land, yet considerable numbers of people have migrated from one ethnic territory to another in search of farmland. Hundreds of languages are spoken in the country, including Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo, Ibibio, Tiv, and English." None of this has to do with a legacy of British rule as these divisions go back thousands of years.
Though the primary practitioners of colonialism were European, it does not take a leap of faith to get to the United States. In his essay Race, Class, and colonialism, Michael Burawoy, written back in 1974, writes, "As a reaction to race cycle theories, assimilation theses, and prejudice studies, it has become increasingly fashionable to view racial stratification from the perspective of intergroup conflict. In particular, two frameworks have gained popularity in the study of societies where racial divisions are prominent. The first, 'pluralism,' has emerged from the examination of colonial and post-colonial societies such as South Africa and the West Indies, and in some cases, the framework has been applied to the United States. The second framework, 'internal colonialism,' has been most widely adopted in the treatment of patterns of race relations in the United States."
And within the academy, one can get as many classes on the concept of colonialism. This is one set from one University, Tufts, which self describes as Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists seeking to open a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. This is hardly the description of the hotbed of progressivism such as Berkeley or Bryn Mayr, or Oberlin. Yet its 5,900 students, a relatively middle to a small number, have an inordinate number of choices to get their colonialism learnings. Their Colonialism Studies program for a single semester features 32 courses, including Human Rights in the United States, Colonialism and Decolonization, Religion, Race, and Nation in American History, and Settler Colonialism and the Environment.
It is not a coincidence that the colonialism issue is on the same level as racism and its primary argument of critical theory. Both involve the use of past grievances to justify public policy today. And both negate the power of individual choice and personal license to claim success. At some point, time needs to be a factor. Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960 but in Latin America, Brazil, for example, gained independence 200 years ago when James Monroe was the President of the United States. The next argument of the left is that it is the United States intervention and soft power colonialism that has inhibited progress. Even for leftist academicians, it is rich to explain how the United States has led to two consecutive Brazillian presidents serving time in prison for corruption charges. Is the power of the United States so invasive as to make Brazillian presidents take bribes?
After acquiring its first real Empire in Spanish American war in 1898, the reality is that the United States was reasonably adamant about wanting to get rid of it. Contrast this impulse with the tendencies of Empires going back to about 3,500 BCE. Spain ruled the archipelago for 350 years. The United States direct rule lasted 37. Spain colonized Puerto Rico and Cuba for 400 years. The United States directly controlled the island of Cuba for three years. Puerto Rica is still part of the United States but as a commonwealth electing its own leaders. The government in Washington appoints no viceroys. Given the current predilection for the Democrats to create PR as a blue state, a better outcome would be to grant their independence.
On the surface, this piece may appear to be a defense of empire. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one, I would abhor being a subject to any foreign rule, and this nation was built on the concept of liberty. Instead, this piece is an attack on those historians and journalists who use the legacy of empire to castigate the values upon which this nation was built and those same values that could be utilized by former colonies to create a lasting and general prosperity. These same authors often advocate leftist or far-leftist governance for these nations.
These positions would be the same governance that has brought additional ruin to once prosperous states like Venezuela. It is the same ideology that has destroyed life in Russia, China, and African nations such as Mozambique. It is time for these nations' leaders and their academic enablers to consider conservative values such as individual liberty, the rule of law, and capitalism. Colonialism may have been their past, but these conservative ideas could be their prosperous future.
December 2020
The description for Timothy Parsons' Rules of Empire contains the following, "a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya,"
Parsons' primary goal with this book is to show that essentially Empires do not work. It is an interesting take in that some of the examples he leans on include the Romans (Western Empire, 400 years), the Spanish in Peru (300 years), and the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain (300 years of Umayyad rule then another 400 years of Moorish rule). Over the past 250 years, France has seen some six or seven different states, including three monarchies, two empires, and countless republics. The Bolshevik state in Russia lasted about 80 years. Even the United States is younger than pretty much every example that Parsons provides.
Parsons, though provides several insights into his real goal. Like so many of his fellow academicians, the concept of colonialism runs parallel to that of racism. As Parsons states, "French and British rulers tried to make good on improving the lives of their subjects. But such imperial humanitarianism that non-western peoples needed salvation." He later talks of the proto-racism that began with India's British rule in the 1700s as if bias based on race and ethnicity has not been around since the dawn of time.
As with history going back to Herodotus and Cassius Dio, the work's nature often depends on the writer's perspective. In the case of Parsons, his descriptor reads as follows, "As a social historian of twentieth-century Africa, Professor Parsons' research to date has been focused on understanding how ordinary people experienced imperial rule." Given that for at least half of the 20th century, Africa was ruled by European imperial systems, this gives Parsons his true focus, "Parsons' books to date have explored how Africans from diverse walks of life navigated the shifting realities of repression and opportunity that emerged during the imperial and early national eras. Building on this earlier work, he is currently pursuing several research projects."
Since the end of imperial rule, it is not easy to discern a single Sub Saharan African example of success. There was a time when Mali showed promise, but recent coups have put paid to that prospect. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal noted of Ivory Coast that, "For 12 years, al Qaeda's franchise in the Sahara has focused its attacks on the continent's weakest and poorest states. Now it has turned its violence on a new kind of target: an African success story. For nearly an hour on Sunday, gunmen in bulletproof vests stalked vacationers on a beach in Ivory Coast, Africa's largest cocoa producer and its fourth-fastest-growing economy. By the time security forces arrived and killed the three attackers, at least 15 civilians—most of the locals who had been drinking beer and enjoying the surf on a sunny afternoon—and three soldiers were dead."
The African Exponent website lists seven reasons for this failure:
1. Civil Wars and Terrorism as noted by the examples of both Mali and Ivory Coast
2. Corruption
3. Poor education
4. Health and Poverty
5. Geography, establish for landlocked nations
6. International aid and its corrupting influence
7. Unfair trade policies
But this is a typical laundry list of reasons that nations are poor but not the historical root of these issues nor one of current governance. The narrative for this lack of success is that the European empires were of such an exploitive nature that these nations were rendered incapable of productive self-rule. In the Open Democracy blog, activist Daniel Macmillan Voskoboynik states, "Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory, lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as cultures, ideas, species, habitats, traditions, cosmologies, possibilities, patterns of life, and ways of understanding the world were destroyed. Countless ecological traditions – involving diverse ways of being with nature – were swept away."
Macmillan Voskoboynik adds, "During the 19th and 20th centuries, formal colonialism came to an end. Countries were liberated, new flags unfurled, and rewritten constitutions adopted. But although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation-states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes."
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, reviewer Terry Hartle, "By the 1880s, the "Scramble for Africa" had begun. At the heart of this rapacious quest was the Congo River in equatorial Africa and its enormous, almost impenetrable, rain forest." Hartle calls this period "compelling, fascinating, appalling, and tragic history."
In the early 1980s, a group of Indian historians started the Subaltern Studies program in which colonial Indian history was written from the perspective of the Indians. Because the core of this school was a disparagement of the West, it has gained purchase in America's academy. And it is not just Africa. Writing for The Conversation, author Joseph McQuade notes, " Other industries like gem and mineral mining also destroy the world’s ecological sustainability, leading to deforestation and the destruction of natural habitats. Much of this traumatic exploitation of natural resources traces its origins to early colonialism.”
So, what does all of this mean for our discussion of the developing world? With a stroke of the pen, South America, Africa, and South Asia are now released from direct responsibility for their present and futures. Two salient facts negate this theory. The first is that self-rule has been in place for more than two generations as of this writing. The second is that several of these nations, such as Zimbabwe and Nigeria, had resources available at the time of independence and that they have been squandered.
Here is an example from McQuade of historical gaslighting. "During the heyday of British rule or the British Raj, from 1872 to 1921, Indian life expectancy dropped by a stunning 20 percent. By contrast, during the 70 years since independence, Indian life expectancy has increased by approximately 66 percent or 27 years. A comparable increase of 65 percent can also be observed in Pakistan, which was once part of British India." McQuade conveniently explains away the great plague, beginning in China, killed 12 million Indians. It also does away with the global introduction of anti-biotics, a result of western-style pharmaceutical development.
The real reason for the detriment of an entire continent is that liberal values in terms of individual liberty and responsibility, the rule of law, limited government, and an economic system of open markets has yet to be attempted. Instead, these nations practice strong man rule based on proto Marxist beliefs in state-run, state-controlled practices.
Now another aspect of Africa's challenges lay in their diversity. In Quamrul Ashraf & Oded Galor. The "Out of Africa" Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development" Their work begins, "In particular, the level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in both the pre-colonial and the modern era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While the intermediate level of genetic diversity prevalent among Asian and European populations has been conducive for development, the high degree of diversity among African people and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a destructive force in the development of these regions.”
Essentially the authors argue that too little diversity, inherent in a nation such as Bolivia, locks a population into a set way of doing things and impeding progress.
Alternatively, too much diversity destroys a nation's ability to act in a unified fashion for the benefit of all. One example that fits this hypothesis is Nigeria. Home to nearly 200 million people, Nigeria has substantial resources but also, "There are an estimated 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Each inhabits a territory that it considers to be its own by right of first occupancy and inheritance. Individuals who are not members of a dominant group but who have lived and worked for several decades in the group's territory are still considered aliens. In most rural areas, such aliens may not acquire outright title to land, yet considerable numbers of people have migrated from one ethnic territory to another in search of farmland. Hundreds of languages are spoken in the country, including Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo, Ibibio, Tiv, and English." None of this has to do with a legacy of British rule as these divisions go back thousands of years.
Though the primary practitioners of colonialism were European, it does not take a leap of faith to get to the United States. In his essay Race, Class, and colonialism, Michael Burawoy, written back in 1974, writes, "As a reaction to race cycle theories, assimilation theses, and prejudice studies, it has become increasingly fashionable to view racial stratification from the perspective of intergroup conflict. In particular, two frameworks have gained popularity in the study of societies where racial divisions are prominent. The first, 'pluralism,' has emerged from the examination of colonial and post-colonial societies such as South Africa and the West Indies, and in some cases, the framework has been applied to the United States. The second framework, 'internal colonialism,' has been most widely adopted in the treatment of patterns of race relations in the United States."
And within the academy, one can get as many classes on the concept of colonialism. This is one set from one University, Tufts, which self describes as Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists seeking to open a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. This is hardly the description of the hotbed of progressivism such as Berkeley or Bryn Mayr, or Oberlin. Yet its 5,900 students, a relatively middle to a small number, have an inordinate number of choices to get their colonialism learnings. Their Colonialism Studies program for a single semester features 32 courses, including Human Rights in the United States, Colonialism and Decolonization, Religion, Race, and Nation in American History, and Settler Colonialism and the Environment.
It is not a coincidence that the colonialism issue is on the same level as racism and its primary argument of critical theory. Both involve the use of past grievances to justify public policy today. And both negate the power of individual choice and personal license to claim success. At some point, time needs to be a factor. Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960 but in Latin America, Brazil, for example, gained independence 200 years ago when James Monroe was the President of the United States. The next argument of the left is that it is the United States intervention and soft power colonialism that has inhibited progress. Even for leftist academicians, it is rich to explain how the United States has led to two consecutive Brazillian presidents serving time in prison for corruption charges. Is the power of the United States so invasive as to make Brazillian presidents take bribes?
After acquiring its first real Empire in Spanish American war in 1898, the reality is that the United States was reasonably adamant about wanting to get rid of it. Contrast this impulse with the tendencies of Empires going back to about 3,500 BCE. Spain ruled the archipelago for 350 years. The United States direct rule lasted 37. Spain colonized Puerto Rico and Cuba for 400 years. The United States directly controlled the island of Cuba for three years. Puerto Rica is still part of the United States but as a commonwealth electing its own leaders. The government in Washington appoints no viceroys. Given the current predilection for the Democrats to create PR as a blue state, a better outcome would be to grant their independence.
On the surface, this piece may appear to be a defense of empire. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one, I would abhor being a subject to any foreign rule, and this nation was built on the concept of liberty. Instead, this piece is an attack on those historians and journalists who use the legacy of empire to castigate the values upon which this nation was built and those same values that could be utilized by former colonies to create a lasting and general prosperity. These same authors often advocate leftist or far-leftist governance for these nations.
These positions would be the same governance that has brought additional ruin to once prosperous states like Venezuela. It is the same ideology that has destroyed life in Russia, China, and African nations such as Mozambique. It is time for these nations' leaders and their academic enablers to consider conservative values such as individual liberty, the rule of law, and capitalism. Colonialism may have been their past, but these conservative ideas could be their prosperous future.
