Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

THE MORALITY OF ANGLO COLONIALISM?
Review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar. Written by TJ Grant (7/23) via Amazon.

First: The alternative to colonialism was European adventurers armed with guns, ships and capital conquering the natives and setting up their own pirate/warlord kingdoms. Which happened in many places. Many of the colonies became colonies because they petitioned the British government to take formal control, as a way of staving off something worse. The Maori petitioned the crown 3 times to take formal legal control of what became New Zealand. Britain was reluctant to do so, which is why they had to petition multiple times.

Some think the alternative might have been for the Europeans to just stay home and leave far off lands alone. The British, at the height of their power, tried something like this when they attempted to keep European settlers from crossing the Appalachian Mountains, in accordance with its treaties with the Native Americans. They deployed 10,000 troops and worked closely with native allies, and completely failed to stop the flood of Europeans. The truth is, with the technology and wealth of Europeans at the time, no one could stop adventurers from going anywhere. The world was too vast, and the technology put the whole world within reach. Prof. Biggar shows over and over how the main function of colonial governments was to regulate, oversee and bring order to a process they couldn’t stop–which was the spread of European institutions and production methods around the world. If you step out of the black and white thinking of conquerors and conquered, and think of it as the process of the diffusion of certain ideas, institutions, production methods and technologies, you can see how some process like this was inevitable. No one was keeping European ideas secret. Once it was a possibility, almost everyone wanted whatever cheap useful thing they weren’t producing locally, whether that was mass produced sewing needles, metal pots, tea, tobacco, sugar, guns, horses, literacy, etc. The period of European colonialism is how that process played out in practice.

One final point, the countries that weren’t colonized in this period, Guatemala, Haiti, Ethiopia, China, still went through the process of integrating these ideas and institutions from Europe, but at the end of the colonial period, the 1950’s, these were the poorest, most backwards places on earth. There really was no avoiding the spread of trade and industrialization.

Second, people often confuse the period of European imperialism with European colonialism. And there is some overlap. The imperial period is, for example, when Spain conquered the Incas and Aztecs and just took all their gold and silver. The colonial period, some say the 1820’s to the 1960’s, was one where European nations were drawn in to establishing local government as a means of facilitating and regulating trade. Why? Because as every entrepreneur of the day discovered, you couldn’t set up a business on the coast of Africa or India, and be profitable for very long, without a substantial security force protecting you from the local warlords. States got drawn in by their merchant class petitioning the government for protection. Spain wasn’t interested in establishing a political/legal/economic system for the natives they gained power over. They just wanted to extract the precious metals. Contrast that with how Britain came to power over all of India. First, they sought and found trading partners on the coast. Then as neighboring powers saw how beneficial it was to trade with them, the native kingdoms ceded more and more territory to the British so that the British could establish themselves and set up shop. Soon the British were the greatest power on the subcontinent. If a prince of a kingdom died without a clear heir, the British would annex that kingdom. Eventually, through one deal or another accommodation, the whole of India was under British control. When was the great battle that saw the British military defeat the Indian military? It never happened. The British slid into power because they could and because the Indians of the time were more or less amenable to it.

Third, often times when the British Empire decided to conquer a place, it was because they were fighting to end the slave trade, and certain places wouldn’t stop being a market unless the local elite were deposed and replaced. For example, the British kept between 10 and 36 warships patrolling off the coast of West Africa from 1833 to 1861 to bring an end to the slave trade in the region. Lagos and Benin were recalcitrant, unrepentant slave kingdoms. In 1851 the British attacked Lagos to destroy their slave facilities, but local elites rebuilt them and continued their practices. In 1861 Britain made an incursion, deposed the rulers, and set up a colonial government, one of whose primary tasks was to bring an end to the practice of slavery in the area. The British did this again in 1891, for similar reasons, in Benin. They did this at great expense. One estimate holds that Britain only finished paying off all its debt from fighting international slavery on the high seas in 2016.

Fourth, there are a host of colonial academics who had overwhelming praise for the colonial project. Chinua Achebe from the deposed slave kingdom that later became Nigeria, praised the British colonial government, as “very highly competent…expertly run.” Sun Yat-sen praised the British presence in Hong Kong, where he and millions of his country men fled to escape the Chinese government. And many more.

Fifth, Prof. Biggar devotes a whole chapter to supposed atrocities and crimes. He concedes some failings, like the British gunboats forcing the opium trade on the Chinese. He found Britain at fault for that episode. He sometimes concedes historical events where he judges the British responsible but not culpable. For example, in Tasmania. The natives had already been decimated by a series of epidemics before any white settlement began, probably from trading with other Europeans. The upper estimate for aboriginal people when whites started to settle is only 6000. The natives engaged in brutal conflicts among themselves with a high mortality rate. The colonial authorities arrived too late at the policy of separating the native people onto reserve land apart from white settlers, because the more they mixed with European settlers the more disease and death they contracted. In the end, only 47 natives survived this period. This outcome was absolutely Britain’s fault, so they are responsible for it. But the consistent aim of colonial policy through this period was directed at protecting and preserving the native people. They failed in their aim. Sometimes tragedy was the outcome of contact, even when no malevolent government policy or action was taken. Of course, it’s easy to call such a history a genocide. But genocide requires intent. What do you call a government policy that aims to save the native people but fails due to a complete ignorance of germ theory? Germ theory was only published and popularized between 1850 and 1920. The British arrived in Tasmania in 1803, and the natives were reduced to 47 survivors by 1847.

Prof. Biggar is willing to find fault with British policy and choices at various points. And that inclines me to think he’s doing actual history as opposed to simply taking a side. But it is surprising how many ridiculous accusations against British action he has to contend with. For example, that Cecil Rhodes was the Hitler of South Africa, that Britain discriminated against colonial regiments in Africa when it came to commemorative gravestones, that the British destroyed the Indian textile industry (they didn’t), that Britain didn’t care about the starvation of the Irish or the Indians across various famines (when they did their utmost to alleviate them), etc.

Sixth, legitimacy. The thing that makes our elected governments legitimate is not just that they are elected democratically. It’s by “… enabling, defending and promoting public goods, and by distributing them fairly…” If you elect a government and it hoards public resources to distribute to one segment of society while abusing another, that government loses legitimacy, despite the democratic election. Likewise, if an unelected government governs fairly, successfully promotes the public welfare and markedly improves things for its citizens, then even if not democratically elected, such a government begins to gain its own legitimacy. So even in the instance where the British invaded and deposed the ruling class of Nigeria, because they imposed something more just, ended a great evil, there exists the possibility that military force was justified and legitimate. Just as we believe it was legitimate for the Allied forces in WW2 to invade and depose Hitler, Mussolini, and Toji. The same principle that justified fighting the Nazis, justifies the fight against slave kingdoms across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This is the thinking behind “Just War theory.”

Once warlords and slavers were deposed, to the celebration and excitement of the rest of the population, the colonial powers required very little force to stay in power. In Kenya the ratio of white administrative officials to natives was 1:19,000, in Nigeria 1:54,000, etc. It was overwhelmingly native people who staffed the police and armed forces the colonial governments directed. This is a much lower ratio than the number of police to citizens in 1st world countries today. These countries had colonial governments because they agreed to have them, if not always formally and directly, then in practice. These governments could not have stayed in power without the consent of the governed. And no colonial government stayed very long after a majority of the population started calling for its departure.

So, what is the legacy of colonialism? By 1950, uncolonized countries were the most behind. Among colonized countries, the longer they were colonized and the better relationship they maintained with their colonial country after colonialism, the more successful the country was. The standout examples are Singapore, Hong Kong, Botswana, Namibia, India, and South Africa. Colonialism wasn’t a cruel thing evil Europeans did against tribal people. Some colonial governments were by some measures more legitimate than our own 1st world governments are. They regulated and moderated the process of tribal people joining the international system of trade, by helping them build the foundation for their economic and industrial sectors.

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