Although the topic is flameprone and the title arguably baity (no narrative fits all facts), the discussion in this thread is so good—at least in its best parts—that I've turned off flags on the submission. Thanks to everyone posting in the intended spirit of HN: thoughtful, curious conversation.
I am also a Nigerian (from a different ethnicity from the author, which does influence my perspective). I've seen this discussion about "the good sides of colonialism" over and over again, and I've come to the conclusion that people keep tiptoeing around a simple truth: colonisation was wholly unnecessary, and that is what makes it unethical no matter how much good one tries to link to it.
As a less morally fraught example, consider the reaction you would have if it was exposed that your browser was secretly sending your passwords in plaintext to some third-party service to check if they were secure enough. It doesn't matter that helping users avoid weak passwords is a noble goal and genuine objective; sharing users' passwords like that is completely unnecessary and thus indefensible.
The question then becomes: was there a better way to achieve the "good" of the colonial era - technological progress, etc - without colonisation itself? And the answer is yes, absolutely 100% yes. Colonisation was a betrayal, not the start of Europe's history with Africa and Asia. To give an example close to home, the Portuguese and later the English had a fairly balanced mercantile relationship with the Benin Kingdom (part of modern-day Nigeria) for centuries before the British colonial expeditions of the very late 19th century. You can even tell from the words of earlier visitors/tourists like Olfert Dapper that there was a respect for the people, their way of life and accomplishments (the Edo people were quite good at architecture, for instance).
The Benin Kingdom could very well have continued its natural technological, economic and social progression with the support of non-violent foreign partnerships and trade while retaining its sovereignty, but for the greed of the British. In fact, colonisation has most likely hampered its development, not accelerated it. Japan for example avoided colonisation entirely and has quite clearly caught up to and surpassed its near and distant neighbours that got that dubious "help". Or consider how quickly Hawaii modernised even before it lost its sovereignty to the United States.
I think this is a very good way to frame it. I really dislike the "silver lining" narrative that seems to be common, because—as you say—it doesn't matter, the core thing is still indefensible.
I'm British, and my education (up to GCSE History as it existed in 2007, I didn't take History at AS-level or above) just completely glossed over colonialism entirely. There was no “anti-colonialist message” because there was no message on colonialism at all.
I feel that the desire is more to sweep it under the rug, and while it is better than glorifying the past, I think it encourages people to this kind of mindset, as if it was that bad, surely they'd know more? (Parallels to Americans finding out about the Tulsa race massacre recently).
I for one think that turning Tower into a British Colonialism's Crimes Museum and making the UK repent (and repay! All your City banks are belong to us) for the crimes of their distant ancestors for the next century or so is a fascinating idea, but that'd require, ah, quite a vigorous persuasion, so to speak.
i propose we start by drafting a "Comprehensive International Plan of Action" ("Comintern" for short) and invite the UNSC to join it.
It was much the same in western Canada 15 years ago for me. Learning the truth after school was genuinely difficult; it didn’t seem real at first. Even the colonization of western Canada had somehow been portrayed to me as positive all my life.
The First Nations here were subjected to overt genocide and then protracted, relentless cultural erosion in the form of systemic racism, resource/opportunity control, and the notorious residential school system. Somehow I made it into my late teens before finding out what really happened.
My kids are having a better experience, but I’ll have to wait until grade 7 or 8 to see how deep our education system is willing to dig into the atrocities that happened here. So far, at least, the school has been very positive and engaged in learning about and experiencing local First Nations culture. It’s an improvement.
The history curriculum in the UK is really all kinds of useless. It's not that it overlooks the Empire. When I was at high school it had nothing to say on anything international at all beyond World War 1 and 2. You could graduate high school having no idea whatsoever about the forces that shaped the 20th century. Stalin? Mao? JFK? The Apollo Programme? The Great Depression? None of it was mentioned.
I had history classes for years but the only stuff I remember is trivia about the industrial revolution. We were made to memorise vast quantities of detail on things like the exact dates of various Mines Acts (safety for coal miners), who invented some kinds of obsolete farming equipment, etc. There was a lot on medieval agricultural practices as well. It went far too deep on things that impart no wisdom or generalised lessons for the modern world.
There was also a lot of stuff on World War 1 and World War 2. Important, yes, but also incredibly well covered by popular culture.
I suspect the curriculum was designed to be as boring and non-controversial as possible, which is a pity. The only reason to study history is to learn lessons from it, which must inevitably mean drawing conclusions from the events of the past. Attempting to avoid that ends up reducing history to a list of kings and dates.
If I could rewrite the history curriculum, I'd give it a major renewed focus on both the British Empire and also the full history of the 20th century. It would be shallow but broad. And it would include the chaotic state of Britain between 1945 and 1990. Of course the reason it's not taught is that many teachers have very strong ideological views of their own on, in particular, Margaret Thatcher.
This is true, but my experience was they taught us barely anything (basically just the world wars), and what they did teach us was just memorising information about the past.
You being British, I do have a question for you on this, do you view the Roman occupation of Britannia as an entirely bad thing? I ask because I think we tend to add emotion to more current events and look at event further away with the lens of history. I think many times we look at closer to current events with a filter of emotion and culture. I personally think Europe as a whole gained a lot from Roman occupation, while I don't look at it in it's entirety as a good thing, some good did come of it, and it did server to advance civilization in Western Europe. I don't think people within 200 years of that occupation saw it, in the same historical framing.
As someone else from the UK, we're so far removed from anything that the Romans did that I doubt anyone has an emotional response to it (as you point out). I wouldn't even consider it correct to say that we're ethnically or culturally the same people as those who were subjugated under the Roman empire considering the subsequent Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests!
In fact, it's hard for me to name something explicitly that the Romans did in Britain other than lay the foundations for some towns and cities, and built some roads. All of this was over 1000 years ago, so I doubt (other than the exceptions that I can think of on the spot; some roads, towns and 'Roman Baths') that anyone from the UK is walking around and interpreting what they see as a result of Roman occupation.
On an objective level as someone who obviously never experienced true Roman Britain, sure, they built some things that were pretty cool at the time, but at the same time you can objectively look back and say "yeah, slavery is really bad, I wish the Romans didn't enslave people and use that slave labour to build the things that they did". I think the real layman answer is "who cares, it was over 1000 years ago, and I don't really understand how the people of the time relate to the world/culture I take part in".
Colonialism is just an extension of what was always occurring throughout History. It was no more necessary than all those conquests that shaped the world, which is another way of saying, it's no more necessary than civilization itself, the foundations for which were laid to build armies to wage war and reap the benefits.
You could no more divorce the History of technology from barbarism and inhumanity than you could Civilization. You could project a better way over human history looking through present-day lens, but that way did not happen, and more than likely it would never have occurred the way we'd idealize. Revisionism is hardly necessary.
Moralizing the past is senseless, whether you argue it was good or bad. It matters not that the colonial era is less old than others. All we can do with our newly calibrated compasses is decide what good means going forward.
> it's no more necessary than civilization itself, the foundations for which were laid to build armies to wage war and reap the benefits.
Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war. Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories.
> Moralizing the past is senseless, whether you argue it was good or bad. It matters not that the colonial era is less old than others. All we can do with our newly calibrated compasses is decide what good means going forward.
How exactly do we “calibrate our compasses” without reference to our past? It’s entirely valid to judge what in our past immoral in hopes that we can steer our present away from their reoccurrence. It’s hardly senseless, but indicative of our capacity to reflect, change, and not senselessly repeat these horrors.
> Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war. Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories.
Is this even true? I remember when I was reading "Seeing like a State" (or possibly this is from "Against the Grain"), the book would talk about how the first settled civilizations were all violent and oppressive, because nobody wanted to engage in agriculture. Why would you, when anyone could walk into nature where there was an abundance of food and life was much easier.
The original movement towards settled civilization was a violent one, where people were forced to work the land, and would try to escape. Nomadic tribes didn't violently compete with each other as much as settled societies. At least, that was the impression I was under.
This not a mainstream view today. Archaeological and anthropological research has overwhelmingly indicated that pre agricultural societies were incredibly violent, moreso than agricultural ones. Pre agricultural societies averaged between 15 and 40% of people dying violent deaths (as in, died at the hands of other humans) as compared to 3-5% in agricultural societies. It drops even further for industrial societies. To put this in perspective, about 1.7 to 1.9% of people died violently in the 20th century.
The view that pre agricultural societies were peaceful was not based in evidence, but based in wishful thinking: if civilization corrupted people then we could fix it by undoing this corruption. This was a popular belief around the 1960s and 1970s when there was little to no hard evidence on the behavior of early human societies.
> Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war.
The point of central agriculture was to produce more bodies, to wage war, if you're to believe the argument in the Origins of Political History, and I do. This necessitated bureaucracy, hence Civilization.
> Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories.
Well we have a cleaner record of the violence after that point in History, the scale for which got more brutal and concentrated over time. When your population is small, territories over the globe are vast and plentiful; I fail to see an angle where centralization was necessitated for peace, as opposed to conquest.
> How exactly do we “calibrate our compasses” without reference to our past?
To be clear: it's not a question of reference, as the past shaped and developed the morals you and I have today. Though judging it broadly in a detached sense, through our morals, renders most of our past evil, which is banal. It's not a person. Looking to the past can help identify and inform what we deem to be wrong today, which is different than saying the past is evil.
What we take for granted here is consequentialism, which is retrospective. Leading up to WW1, war was widely romanticized and considered virtuous and even the upper classmen partook (see: the War That Ended Peace), likened to skirmishes that ended fairly quickly, and of course it was a different animal by then, war was hellish once more. Colonialism in concept was not considered wrong, though perhaps consequences as a result (e.g. atrocities) would not have been considered good if you quizzed the average person. When we judge colonialism, we largely judge the consequence such that atrocities are unjustifiable no matter the other benefits. Sure. But I say to you: that's all of History, that's all of what led us here today, that led us to be "enlightened" (to be "good" as we understand it to mean today) and type on computers. We'll shift our course to avoid the bad stuff, and I'm sure in the future looking back we'll find evils.
How about the fact that the British Empire, at great cost to its own interests, ended the practice of slavery widespread among Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans?
That is not at all how that works. How do you reconcile this altruism with Britain's continued trade with and reliance on goods from the Americas and their continued use of slave labour? How is it that so many Westerners keep making these strangely naïve and surface-level readings of history and politics?
Britain as a society was no doubt for and against slavery, given that its economy had major dependencies on slave-driven commerce and production. But that does not justify a purely cynical reading.
Most societies of that time did not even bother to outlaw slavery, let alone enforce those laws. There were contradictions within British society. That was an enormous advance over the many societies and nations that simply accepted slavery in that period.
Societies in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia and elsewhere in Europe were open in their commitment to and acceptance of slavery as an institution. You could say that slavery was the norm historically. Britain was the exception. And as the exception, managing a global empire, it continued to have many interactions with slave-driven economies.
> How do you reconcile this altruism with Britain's continued trade with and reliance on goods from the Americas and their continued use of slave labour?
By simply not moving the goal posts.
> so many Westerners keep making these strangely naïve and surface-level readings of history and politics
So they are naive for noticing a good thing in an ocean of evil, and you are keeping it real by thinking that until everything is perfect no progress matters. Got it.
It's not "moving the goal posts" to point out that the "great cost to her interests" was largely nonexistent considering that Britain kept right on benefiting from and funding it under the table - it's simply knowing enough of the history involved to not reason like a small child.
Keep adding insults to your posts. Makes you right every time.
And for the "benefiting", there's nothing anybody can do that you people won't label as benefiting even if it's 2nd, 3rd or 10th party. All the while posting this on devices produced by workers free only in name with materials from the poorest countries with the most horrible work conditions in their mines.
> All the while posting this on devices produced by workers free only in name with materials from the poorest countries with the most horrible work conditions in their mines.
Sweet, so you're obviously an anti-capitalist too right?
The Empire traded with huge parts of the globe, not just America.
Are you saying that a failure to wipe out slavery everywhere simultaneously means the Navy's sacrifices of so many British lives were meaningless?
In the end, what ended mass slavery in the world? The British Empire and the American civil war, fought primarily by the descendents of the British. That's not nothing.
I'm not watching a two hour video on this, but how exactly was it against their own interests? Not only had they finally exited the slave trade, their colonization of of the area allowed them to use the manpower in their own empire.
I recently heard about Benin and the British "punitive expedition" that looted the country in a Vox video, of all things, about the world's largest open crime scene - the British Museum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoTxiRWrvp8
Did Benin not fight and conquer weaker civilizations? Did Benin not trade African people for slaves?
None of these are unique to European colonial powers. So in that sense, the question is "why not?" rather than "why?"
Take away service-based economy, global trade and the internet, and the strong of today (or of any other time) would indeed have more use of a second TV than of world peace.
I hope that thanks to the advancement of technology, people around the world will see this instance of prisoner's dilemma for what it is, and work towards a better world together. Sadly, what I observe in reality is that people who will get the most benefit out of this seem to be its strongest opponents.
He didn't miss the point. It's standard whataboutism. You see the same arguments concerning Native Americans in the US where the proposition is that since they didn't all live in peace, their extermination shouldn't be seen as out of the ordinary.
Like with many things, it's a mixed bag. It's easy to say "well, the damage is done and all we can do now is take what we've got and look to the future", but if you look closer you can see that the damage is still ongoing and the need for decolonisation is still high.
Take architecture, for example. Traditionally pretty much every ethnic group I know of built with mud brick and thatch. During the colonial era - and afterwards, till today really - such building techniques were derided as backwards savagery. Of course the European way of using concrete was "better" and "modern", even though it's a terrible building material for a hot, humid climate. A mud house can keep quite cool in 35°C plus weather with just vents. A concrete house on the other hand traps so much heat at even lower temperatures that we end up needing fans and air conditioners to be comfortable indoors, which of course drives up individuals' carbon footprints and electricity bills.
The ghost of colonialism still lingers decades later in a whole lot of little things like that. So yes, we may be headed towards a net positive future but in my opinion the way to get there requires even further divesting from the colonial era and its ways of thinking (re: the architecture example, there are new schools of builders who explicitly aim to incorporate precolonial building wisdom in their work).
I grew up in a house built out of 'wattle and daub', with a thatch roof. I wouldn't have called it a mud hut, but it was definitely a mud cottage. That is also the typical house of rural people in England in the colonial era.
Seems to me that the typical comparison between european architecture and 'mud huts' is based on a lack of knowledge about european building processes.
Consider that maybe I am well aware of what, for example, the company Adobe's name is referring to.
So it seems to me that your comment is based on a dire lack of knowledge about how colonialism works. The British straight-up imposed town planning laws that banned using mud to build new houses so that they could build the concrete towns and cities they envisioned - I know precisely what I am talking about.
I'd genuinely like to see a reference. I don't know of any concrete-heavy building styles before the development of reinforced concrete in the late 19th century. It would have also been pretty cutting edge until maybe halfway through the 20th century.
Out of curiosity, when exactly do you think the colonial era I am talking about was? The Middle Ages?
> It would have also been pretty cutting edge until maybe halfway through the 20th century.
Nah, there have been houses built using concrete blocks since fairly early in the 19th. Using cement in house construction was hardly cutting edge in the 1920s - 1930s.
That's the thing. I don't think that's the case. I think they are a 1900's-earliest, 1930's mainstream kind of thing.
So by the time they became mainstream, the UK was already beginning the second world war, which would mark the end of the time when they were really rich or powerful enough to be an imperial state.
What you think or don't think and what is reality don't always align, sorry
For example, the first concrete built house in the US was built in 1837. Francois Coignet was making significant use of Portland cement as early as the 1850s/1860s.
Even beyond that, I'll ask you yet again - when, exactly, do you think the colonial era I am talking about was? When exactly do you think Britain let go of all its territories in Africa? Come now, this isn't exactly hidden information or difficult to look up.
Well, the question is not 'when did Britain let go of its territories'.
The question is 'when did Britain lose the kind of involvement you need to get into low-level building regulation?'
Near as I can find, they never had that kind of interest or involvement. Which is why I wanted a source for your claim that they banned traditional building materials.
So my thinking is simple: prior to 1930 is a bit early for concrete blocks to be the logical building material outside of places like New York, and even there, it would be a bit newfangled.
After 1930 is a bit late for the british to be really calling the shots about what gets built and how it gets built, since the period between 1945 and 1960 was characterized by increasing independence and english divestment. Maybe some university buildings?
Anyway, this whole conversation is a bit of a strange digression from your original rather belicose response to my observation that concrete was not by any means the 'European way'. It's my feeling that, aside from some monumental architecture (which it seems nigeria also had) most europeans were also building with brick, wood, plaster and thatch, up until the 19th century.
If you look at a modern timber frame house in the UK, the basic structure would be familiar to a roman architect. The timber structure is laid on brick piles, which are in turn laid on concrete foundations (the only modern addition - victorian houses often wouldn't have these), then a tile roof is fitted on top. It's a ridiculously ancient design.
People in America and Britain are working with mud in quite sophisticated ways, only it's called "cob" and "adobe" and "rammed earth" and isn't stigmatised as "mud huts".
They do have cutting edge variations, such as Oregon cob. They also have old fashioned variations, that still exist and are used. And some of the cutting edge is old enough to feel a bit rusty. (Superadobe was invented before people knew about the problems of microplastics, for example.)
Yes, they are. You'll find that rammed earth [1] and cob buildings are used only at the cutting edge of expensive high design ecological buildings. Industrial building materials nearly wiped traditional methods of home building off the face of the developed world.
We are in many ways rediscovering older methods and techniques of building, especially in materials.
Also Consider SuperAdobe [2], which uses nothing but dirt onsite and plastic bags.
I'd argue that cob in particular spans across the range from build-it-yourself Womble homes to fancy schmancy eco-bourgeois. And that it's mainly access to land and planning permission that's blocking the former (or causing them to be bulldozed by busybodies). It genuinely is one of the rare few building materials that can be prepared from materials on site and put up by amateurs.
Mud is porous (as long as you don't glaze it) and it has a pretty good R value. So it's the material more than the design, though anything approximating a sphere will do better than something with straight walls due to the maximum enclosed space within the minimum size skin. That also helps when you want to heat it. (Least heat transfer area to the outside.)
Why would being porous help, unless the mud is damp and there's some evaporative cooling going on?
I know in the American southwest adobe construction is popular, but that's about sheer thermal mass moderating the effects of the heat. Small windows also help.
There always is some evaporative cooling going on. At night the cooling causes condensation, and the dry clay absorbs this moisture, then during the day sun and wind dry it out again causing evaporative cooling. How big this effect is varies in different climates, but from personal experience (I've helped build some adobe houses, and have friends who live in them) I can say that it's not negligible. Another benefit is that in humid climates (like mine) the interior of an adobe house tends to be significantly less damp; enough so that we can see the difference with the salt in the salt shaker... around here in brick/cement houses it always clumps very quickly, in adobe homes it remains lose and powdery (salt starts to clump when humidity is above 75%).
Yes, it is evaporative cooling. That's why I mentioned the pores. The mud wets and then later the moisture evaporates drawing energy from the surrounding clay.
Phase change can get you below zero easily, it certainly works as a poor man's AC. It is incredible how much energy phase change requires compared to just raising the temperature of the medium.
Mud houses in traditional cob and adobe designs tend to be built thick, partly in order to be sturdy, but also because the sheer mass of the walls acts like a heat capacitor that can be used to either absorb cool night temperatures and smooth the temperature extremes, or warmed with a constant low level fire for colder climes.
I believe the thermal mass for mud and adobe is higher than cinder block or stick frame buildings so the structure gets cooled in the night and remains cool throughout the day with the added benefit of providing some additional warmth in the night.
Ground coupling is another factor. I learned a lot visiting the Eco-Village Training Center in Tennessee in 101F (39C) heat. The cob house was as comfortable as the air-conditioned cabin.
Yes I agree, it is obviously complete coincidence that the British imposed town planning laws that banned the use of the building materials that actually worked for our climate.
Are you being serious? How exactly do you read a comment mentioning fans, air conditioners, staying comfortable indoors, and individuals' electric bills and be so one-track-minded as to think I was talking about roads and not, perhaps, residential buildings?
> the colonization arguably could be a net positive for current and future generations
I think this is a misleading statement anyway, because it requires a comparison point. If it was to "no interaction at all with the colonial powers", then maybe? If it was to "free trade with the colonial powers", almost certainly not.
Even in the first case I say maybe, because who knows what their society would have looked like. It may have advanced more slowly, but maybe that would have left them with more natural resources, more culture in tact, different advancements that benefited them in different ways. The trade-off there is very unclear and just saying it would be a "net positive" is a massive leap to me.
Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars, and that the first world war produced the Bolshevik Revolution, making the Cold War possible. There are a lot of counter-factuals involved in claims like this.
Another problem is that settler colonialism exterminated the populations of the Americas and Australasia. The inter-generational comparison in those cases is primarily between two separate populations: the genocide of natives against the wealth of the ancestors of settlers.
> Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars
I'm not an historian but my impression is that WWI was primarily the result of intra-European conflicts between the great powers with any colonial issues being little more than a sideshow. WWII in Europe then seems to have been a nearly inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from the prior war. The only aspect of the two wars that does look a great deal like a war between competing colonial empires was the Pacific Theater of the Second World War.
The period from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to the First World War was the high watermark of European imperialism. British and French imperial holdings in Africa tripled, and Germany went from a handful of colonial holdings, to owning 10% of the landmass of Africa. By 1913 the European powers had colonised 96% of Africa. The dwindling of territories led to extreme competition among the colonial powers. Flash points in Fashoda (1898) and Morocco (1905 and 1911) nearly tipped over into war. Arguably, the underlying cause was the fact that gross inequality in the European powers created domestic imbalances in which capital outstripped purchasing power, forcing it to seek new investments abroad. One might draw a crude analogy between the way in which the Cold War was externalised to the global South, and the way that European tensions after 1884 played out in Africa.
As for the Second World War, I would say two things. First, that Nazi ideology was, in many ways, a product of European imperialism: its ideal of a Pan-Germanic state in Central Europe, its virulently racist and extermanist designs, and even its use of concentration camps. Second, one of the main grievances of Germany was that it was stripped of its colonial territories at Versailles, and that its territories were transformed into mandates run by the League of Nations according to principles of free trade, at the same time that France and Britain continued to run their own colonies as protectionist blocs. It was British sympathy for this colonial imbalance that, in part, stood behind the policy of appeasement. As for Japan, it was a classically imperialist power, reacting to the expansion of the US across the Pacific.
I'm pretty sure that Alsace-Lorraine was far more prominent in the consciousness of most French (certainly) and German (probably) citizens in 1914 than were any extra-European colonies.
As for the Nazis, their primary target was European Jews who had been living in Europe for millenia as well as other European peoples they viewed as inferior to the Germans, such as the Slavic peoples.
Perhaps, but the long-term axis of geopolitical competition and spiralling armament was imperial. If you accept Hobson's thesis that imperialism was a way of off-loading the surplus capital consequent from European inequality, not only was imperialism the axis of competition, but the competition was necessarily imperial in nature.
There is no possible narrative explanation of the war that does not centre on the scramble for Africa. Would there have been a great power war between Germany and the status quo powers at some point absent the scramble for Africa? It is very difficult to say. Had it occurred, it would have been radically different in shape. This goes back to my initial point about the uncertainty factored into any big counter-factual like this.
As for the Nazis, my point was that the very ideology of racism was a direct product of European imperialism. That it was primarily directed at Jews and Slavs is besides the point. Hannah Arendt - one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century - famously made the case that the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of European imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
It's worth pointing out that the one of the main rationales of Nazi imperialism was to create a living space in Europe in which to off-load Germany's surplus population. This had long been one of the main justifications for European colonialism, and the expropriation of Germany's colonies at Versailles made it look to Europe again to solve the problem. What are arguably the first two (imperial!) campaigns of the Second World War - Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - were both justified as means of creating outlets for their soaring surplus populations. Both of them faced profoundly racist immigration restrictions in the main destinations of migration, namely the United States and Australia.
In many places in the US, colonist showed up to areas that had been densely peopled a hundred years before, but were then nearly empty from disease. It wasn't settlers, but contact that did most of the killing.
No, it was simply conquest. For example, the Umayyads did not betray Hispania when they invaded, because they never had any allegiance to Hispania in the first place.
I feel as though "conquest" is a rather neutral term, despite obviously communicating that some violence took place. Whereas "betrayal" feels to me like it carries a much heavier negative connotation and emphasis on the brutality of the affair.
I would therefore term it a betrayal, and for me that is to say the colonizers betrayed Africans but also broader humanity -- their own humanity.
I’m curious if you consider “betrayal” the appropriate term for all conquests, or just Western conquests. Did the Seljuk Turks betray the Byzantines when they conquered Anatolia? Or had Romans previously betrayed the Seclucids, who had previously betrayed the various other people who occupied the area. These same patterns of repeated conquest and colonization have been repeated throughout human history from the very earliest days, including within Africa.
The British were themselves the product of multiple waves of conquest and colonization from the Paleolithic through the Iberian migrations, the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans up until 1066 and beyond.
It’s a constant of human behavior and historical development, so I’m not sure betrayal is really the right way to the think about it.
> I’m curious if you consider “betrayal” the appropriate term for all conquests, or just Western conquests.
I would consider any conquest that involved the breaking of a centuries-long cordial relationship to be a betrayal, yes. What exactly is your point?
> Did the Seljuk Turks betray the Byzantines when they conquered Anatolia? Or had Romans previously betrayed the Seclucids, who had previously betrayed the various other people who occupied the area
> The British were themselves the product of multiple waves of conquest and colonization from the Paleolithic through the Iberian migrations, the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans up until 1066 and beyond.
No offence to you personally, but this particular brand of intellectual dishonesty - discussing the British empire as though it is far-flung history and not very recent indeed - is quite annoying. The conquests you bring up were a thousand years ago, two thousand in the case of the Roman-Seleucid war. On the other hand the expedition that subjugated the Benin Kingdom was in 1897, and it (as part of the country now called Nigeria) did not gain its independence from Britain until 1960. My father was born under colonial rule, for crying out loud, and I'm not even thirty yet. People don't make a habit of jumping into discussions of the German invasion of France in WW2 with anecdotes on Charlemagne's conquest of Bavaria - why on earth do they think it's okay to do when talking about the colonial era?
Eastern European here who wonders how the Ottoman rule was a thousand years ago. The Ottoman colonization lasted some 500 years for us and ended in late 19th and early 20th centuries, depending. Btw, I agree with your general point that colonization is pretty much always a net negative.
If you perhaps look at my comment again you will notice that I said the conquests, not the period of colonisation. The point, which might have been easy to miss, was that getting up and invading another nation in the Middle Ages is a rather different proposition from getting up and invading one close to the turn of the 20th.
I can't help but think you rely on Whiggish assumptions about history. Invasions in the Middle Ages and today seem different if you think we have progressed beyond our ancestors, that to act against that supposed progress is to betray it.
In fact, we're cognitively identical to the Medieval and Roman people. We have different ethical frameworks in the 21st century, but human nature doesn't change so fast. The British in the 19th Century were driven by the same underlying factors as the Romans 2000 years ago and Russia, China, and (arguably) the US today. We can certainly condemn it and trumpet our moral outrage, but that doesn't help us to understand or avoid it.
I agree that recent colonizations are more relevant politically and morally to the present day. But I do think we have to see Western colonialism as part of a universal behavior exhibited by human societies. We should make an effort to understand the history in its full complexity.
My motivation is not to minimize the abhorrent behavior of the British during that period, but to ensure that we don't make it out to be something uniquely evil that cannot be repeated in the future.
(And I do think it is important to see WWII in its historical context: the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, the rise of Prussian dominance, the Treaty of Versailles, etc. To do so doesn't minimize the responsibility of Germany in the 30s and 40s, but it does help us to understand the complexities behind the simplifying narratives of all sides.)
We do see World War 2 in its historical context, and we manage to discuss them all the time without making absolutely sure to work in "well we should all be grateful to the Nazis for the advances in science and technology that they drove, let us consider Both Sides" at every opportunity.
We are simply asking you to extend the same intellectual grace when discussing and teaching about colonialism, which by-the-by was going on at the same time as the world wars.
The "let's consider both sides" approach is part of the problem. I don't want to consider the partisan or ideologically motivated narratives of both sides — at least not in isolation — because they are equally likely to be false. Instead I want to understand what actually happened, its causes and consequences, and how it relates to other historical events.
It is an unfortunate reality that the victims of colonialism have no more of a monopoly on the truth than the perpetrators.
Thank you - the point I was trying to convey was that it was not simply venturing into uncharted lands in the name of a monarch, the way many Westerners seem to picture it (perhaps with the colonisation of the Americas in mind, which is more of what I would just call a conquest). These were known lands, with known sovereignty, and known established relationships, trade agreements and shared history - the imperialist subjugation was out of greed and a desire for profit maximisation, not out of unfamiliarity.
And as to the point you made about betraying humanity: it's funny how people generally understand that the First and Third Reichs were out of line, understand the ethical reasons for the Allies opposing their takeover of Europe, but make excuses upon excuses upon excuses for European nations executing the very same imperialist agenda in Africa at the very same time.
That was the whole linchpin behind Japanese expansionism.
Japanese government realized that they are behind in development both technological and economical.
Those were the colonized countries. So to avoid being colonized, they did all in their power to become colonizers themselves.
The irony is that out of all colonized countries the Japanese colonies were the one that net benefited from colonization. At the cost of brutal oppression and atrocities, but Japanese considered those their 'land' and instead focusing purely on extraction of wealth (europen model) they were developing infrastructure.
All in all, the whole 'colonization was not so bad' is whitewashing of history. And we should stop putting positive light on it. Just because one slave owner was 'good' it doesn't make slavery justified.
> The irony is that out of all colonized countries the Japanese colonies were the one that net benefited from colonization.
This is a completely inaccurate representation of the various Japanese colonial projects. While some historians might refer to what became Taiwan in these terms, very few would say the same of Korea or the territories in China the Japanese occupied.
In fact, the viciousness and extractive nature of the Japanese colonial projects are what justified to many the corollary anti-colonial violence that eventually escalated into civil war in the Korean peninsula. For example,An Jung-geun, who assassinated the Japanese colonial administrator Ito Hirobumi, is still considered a national hero in both the north and the south.
> All in all, the whole 'colonization was not so bad' is whitewashing of history. And we should stop putting positive light on it. Just because one slave owner was 'good' it doesn't make slavery justified
Eh, you're whitewashing history right there.
Projecting today's morals,values & information on to a past people who did not have those who were raised when the norm was the norm.
Savagery existed throughout mankind and to think otherwise is silly.
Every land had tribes who may have formed an alliance but also would have just as likely killed & enslaved others outside their tribe. _Every_ land.
> Projecting today's morals,values & information on to a past people who did not have those who were raised when the norm was the norm.
Of course we can and we do that, that is the only way we progress as a species.
Killing and enslaving is objectively wrong, no matter if you are 15th century peasant or 20 cent soldier.
What next? Ethnic cleansing are/were not so bad as they result in strengthening of national coherence? Eugenics is simply caring for the future generations?
Its a slippery slope argument giving a pass to past actions as they 'didn't know' its bad what they had done.
> Savagery existed throughout mankind and to think otherwise is silly.
I have not said that you are building a straw-man here. I advocate not to call the savagery act anything but savagery.
>Every land had tribes who may have formed an alliance but also would have just as likely killed & enslaved others outside their tribe. _Every_ land.
So that gives me a right to kill you and enslave your family?
I don't disagree that colonization was not a good thing. Yet in all of human history we have struggled against one another for dominion of land and resources. How is colonization really any different then all the other wars/conquests done before? Or is simply that it was done on such a scale that sets it apart or is it the relative nearness of it historically that brings it more to relevance for people?
True! Even the Benin Kingdom itself was, after all, an empire that sought to (and did) expand its borders within the region. What I am saying is that you cannot justify imperialist expansionism with "but they did good for the people they subjugated", because that good could have been accomplished without the looting and destruction of other nations.
In other words, some things simply don't need to be defended. We can acknowledge that they happened and discuss them levelly without trying to put bad actors in a better light. To invoke Godwin's Law a bit, we do manage to discuss Nazi Germany without constantly saying "Well actually we are all better off because they did lead to some advances in science and technology". (As an aside, colonialism is arguably more recent than Hitler - Nigeria for one did not gain independence from Britain until 1960. Yet one is considered "too soon" but the other is treated as though it happened in some distant past that we should all have gotten over by now.)
> simple truth: colonisation was wholly unnecessary, and that is what makes it unethical no matter how much good one tries to link to it
1. Unnecessary. Unnecessary for what? Anything? Cause in that case I do not agree. The rise, expansion and collapse of empires is very necessary for the development and testing of human organizational models. The price for change (not necessarily good) is human life. That's the reality of the entire history of the human race, you can't simply wish it otherwise.
2. Unethical. Morals are highly subjective and debatable, but I do want to mention one thing. Magna Carta originated in evil white Europe and the whole world benefits from it's forceful spread.
It's evolution of human societies really. And like all evolution it's not moral, nor has any higher purpose. Different models compete with each other, the capacity to survive, expand and evolve is what is being tested.
Preying is part of life. People forget we are animals. Sure, we try to impose some rules on the preying, but who can enforce them but the strongest?
I am not trying to deny our need for liberty and safety. But you have to think about those in the real context of constant conflict. At any time you should look around and chose to support one predator over another, because there are real differences that will impact your needs. And many people from that time and place in the original article chose the white wolves.
Edit to address you question more directly: empires need to provide some things to the ones who are being ruled, otherwise you can't keep order. Lack of order means lack of efficiency, which affects army, which affects their ability to control and expand the empire. So there is a constant quest for balance between taking resources and giving back things. New empires pop up that do it better and they kill everything around until they fall themselves. Evolution.
I think this debate is very interesting and must be carried on among people coming from former African colonies.
It gives us European more perspectives to look at and improves the level of the discussion that, in my opinion, has no particular value or chances of persisting new ideas if it takes place exclusively on social networks in the form of slogans and memes.
I'm Italian, I ideally descend from the African born emperor Septimius Severus, who was born in Leptis Magna the modern Al-Khums in Lybia.
I've always been fascinated by the strong bond that the early Roman empire had with northern Africa and Middle East, where all the modern western civilizations were born.
They looked at them in respect, when Septimius Severus became emperor the Egyptians were already older to the Romans than Romans are to us today.
Septimium Severus became emperor defeating his opponent, an usurper of the empire, Gaius Pescennius Niger.
Niger in Latin means black, dark, but also evil and ill-omened, the latter being the ones that described him better.
Niger is also the name of the river that gave name to Nigeria, but the meaning is completely different, yet it sounds exactly the same. When I was a kid studying ancient history at school I was always looking for coincidence like this one, I believed they were magic.
Africa at the time of Septimius Severus was a very advanced country, in every aspect of life: they had some of the largest cities in the World, they were good sailors, they had prosperous markets, they had the largest library in the entire World and let's not forget the monumental buildings - still unarrived today.
Romans were great engineers, they built roads, infrastructures such as bridges and aqueducts, but also thermal baths ran by geothermal energy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquae_Sulis)
But Gaius Pescennius Niger usurped the empire and Septimius Severus had to fight him until Gaius was defeated and then killed.
I'm fascinated by Roman history and I read a lot about it, but I cannot look the other way when I think at it on a human level: they were constantly killing each other no matter how many advancement they brought to society, engineering, politics, rule of the law, they killed each other, a lot!
What I get from this essay is not that there was a good colonialism but that pre colonialism wasn't that good as well.
My father used to read me "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" when I was a little kid and I will never condone what happened and the devastation it caused and that's why I ultimately believe that "debate should always serve the ultimate purpose of helping build ... rather than tearing things apart"
Colonisation was wholly inevitable. Japan, as per your example, had a big freak out when Perry forced them open - realised that "dutch studies" were a matter of national security - and modernised at absolute breakneck pace as they happened to have had all the social structures already in place to accomplish this.
And no sooner had they closed the gap that they turned around and became ruthless colonisers themselves. Such was the game for all of human history until the 20th century.
> Such was the game for all of human history until the 20th century
It hasn't stopped, it just stopped being blatant.
See Confessions of an Economic Hitman for the US approach, or the Belt & Road Initiative (and all if it's hidden enforcement measures and implications) for a Chinese implementation.
Oh absolutely. And there's no shortage of pretty blatant examples to boot, people just conveniently avoid thinking about it. See East Timor for example.
We have yet to fully step out of barbarism and into modernity as a species.
The European colonialism would not have happened had there not been resources - human and mineral - to exploit. They would not have brought their technology over in exchange for a smile and a hug. Without something to exploit their would have been no reason for the Europeans to have anything to do with Africa or the New World.
Your comparison with passwords is apt. In fact, it was less than a decade ago that I would sniff wifi and collect all kinds of passwords. In fact, it was so easy that a browser extension was created specifically to sniff other wifi users' Facebook passwords. That browser extension was the straw that broke the camel: since then there has been a huge push towards HTTPS.
Where does this fit into your analogy? Weakness invites exploitation, exploitation catalyses the push towards improvement. We see it everywhere: car safety, environmental regulations, Arab spring, gay rights. Yes, the colonialism _was_ necessary to get to the standard of living now seen in major African cities. As a Jew, I'll tell you that the Holocaust was a necessary step towards a modern, independent Jewish state.
That does _not_ excuse colonialism, the Holocaust, password sniffing, toxic chemical dumping, or any of the other atrocities that had to occur for the dice to fall where they are today.
> They would not have brought their technology over in exchange for a smile and a hug.
Somehow you seem to have missed the entire point of my comment, which is that there were already existing relationships based on trade and exchange that were betrayed because military subjugation was cheaper in the long run.
Curious indeed that other nations were able to progress and modernise through trade and exchange without compromising their sovereignty, but that wouldn't be enough for African nations for some reason. What exactly would those reasons be?
> Curious indeed that other nations were able to progress and modernise through trade and exchange without compromising their sovereignty
Where, exactly, did this occur? I suppose one could point to the United States as an example but that's an edge case: a new nation splitting off from an already industrialized nation. Japan might be cited as another example, but they notion that they didn't compromise their sovereignty is not entirely accurately. Japan had contact with Europeans since the 16th century. They didn't industrialize until Western powers used gunboat diplomacy to force favorable trade deals. Furthermore, this was in the 19th century, decades after Europe had fought the first Opium War and colonial conquests in Asia had already begun.
> but that wouldn't be enough for African nations for some reason. What exactly would those reasons be?
Africa isn't being singled out here. The rest of the world didn't industrialize just through commercial contact either.
Europe had been trading with Asia for centuries before colonization occurred, and despite that Asia did not industrialize. These regions had greater centralization, urbanization, and rates of literacy that most other regions of the world. I could flip the question around back to you: what makes you think that trade and exchange would be enough for Africa to industrialize through commercial contact when other regions of the world did not?
To say that British colonialism was better in Nigeria than in Kenya, or than Belgian colonialism doesn't _really_ seem to support the thesis that "there were good things about British colonialism", does it?
The fact is people showed up with guns one day and said "you work for me now" and "all these separate tribe lands are now one administrative unit so I can manage it better". No matter how nice they were by building roads (to ports), or schools (so the workers can understand basic math and thus follow orders, and how great their lives are under colonial rule) doesn't change the highly likely correct statement that an independent Nigeria free from influence stirring internal conflicts would have been much better off.
"Being colonized was better than living through our internal struggles" is kinda moot. Europe had plenty of war, disease and more war and still came out through it. A colonizer imposing stability by the sword/rifle wouldn't have been better in the long term.
I don't think you can make some of the claims you are making without more evidence. State formation is often a violent process and often involves someone showing up with weapons demanding you pay them taxes. Does it matter if it is a European or a neighbor?
You often have what we would call colonialism in this process, just a more local version of it. Think about the Huns sweeping into central Europe, conquering those people's and adding them to their coalition. Or the Aztec demanding tribute from their neighboring cities. Or China conquering central Asian states and Korea. Or the Zulu building a confederation through conquest of Southern Africa. All of these were coercive relationships, built on a state or proto state dominating the "less advanced" people around them.
I'm not saying that this makes colonialism good, but the idea that there was some sort of peaceful prior existence for the people before colonization or without colonization there wouldn't be just as difficult violent struggles is not obvious from history.
There is certainly a huge difference between setting up extractive institutions designed for the benefit of people living half a world away, compared to extractive institutions set up for the benefit of people living a few hundred kilometers away. In the latter case, you have a much greater chance of seeing some of that wealth again, and of being able to influence the decisions of your rulers.
Logic dictates that any wealth or resource that staysin the community is more likely to benefit that community as opposed to if it is shipped to a different continent and never seen again.
Yes, the Germans invaded Poland, Russia, and most of Europe and extracted lots of resources at a significant disadvantage to the Poles. Japan invaded Korea, China, and much of Southeast Asia and killed hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of colonialism. I don't think the locals were happy about that. The United States relationship to the Native Americans. Mongol conquest of central Asia. The Zulu conquest of their empire. The Italian and French occupation of North Africa. The Ottoman relationship with the Armenians. The relationship between South Sudan and Sudan. Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Kurds. Israel and the Palestines. All of Europe and the Jews. I can name historical examples of neighbors exploiting neighbors all day.
You can't just say "logic dictates" when logic dictates no such thing. I'm not saying your wrong, or there is not correlation, but there is no clear pattern between how far off an occupier is and the treatment of the occupied from what I can see.
We don't call what the Huns, Aztec, Chinese or Zulu did "colonialism" because it doesn't help the narrative. Notice how, in particular, there are plenty of people willing to call what happened to Ireland colonialism even though it involved solely neighbours and even though every single faction arrived there via England originally.
Yes, but the Iberian migration was just an earlier example of a long history of migrations and colonizations going back millennia. There was a time when the British Isles weren't populated by Homo Sapiens, and migrating people's found the lands empty (except for the occasional band of Neanderthals), but it's deep in pre-history and since then migration has almost always involved some level of population replacement and/or subjugation by new elites.
Ireland is probably better framed as (mostly) entrenched religious discrimination and subjugation on that basis (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws)
We also don't call, say, the Spanish conquest of the Netherlands "colonialism", yet we still celebrate our independence from Spain (indeed, our entire royal house is based on this).
I think it's mostly just a bit of a bikeshed over terminology to be honest; we could also call it "European conquest of Africa", or whatnot, but that's just the same as "colonialism" with a different name.
Colonialism is a specific institution, it distinct and separate. It does not mean that mongoles were better, but they dealt with subjugated countries differently. They did not redraw borders of countries, or forbid people from mining their own salt.
"After his morning bhajan, Gandhi waded in to the sea shore and picked up a handful of salt, proclaiming that with the handful of salt he was proclaiming the end of the British Empire. The police arrived and arrested thousands of national leaders including Gandhi. Gandhi's bold defiance of the salt law encouraged other Indians to break the law as well"
The Mongols most certainly changed the borders of the countries they occupied. If that is the only criteria, then every conqueror is also a colonial power.
There also were plenty of examples of conquerors applying specific economic laws to the conquered. For example, Muslim conquerors would impose a tax on Christians and Jews in their empires (the Jizya). Does that make them colonial powers? So how is colonialism a specific institution?
The Mongoles have not redrawn borders along a line on a map the way British and French have, creating the mess we now have in the Middle East.
I can't make a complete list of criteria that defines colonialism, but to claim that it was no different than other conquests is to betray complete historical illiteracy.
> The Mongoles have not redrawn borders along a line on a map the way British and French have, creating the mess we now have in the Middle East.
Back then there was not really the same concept of boarders. But you can be 100% sure that the Mongols picked sides in many local conflicts and simply layed down the law on things like grazing rights and many others things.
> I can't make a complete list of criteria that defines colonialism, but to claim that it was no different than other conquests is to betray complete historical illiteracy.
It really isn't. Sure colonialism from 1800 is not the same as 1200 century mongol conquest. But to draw a line between colonialism and all other types of conquest in human history is actually historically questionable.
Comparing colonialism to other conquests at the same time is very apt. Empires impose institutions and take sides in local conflicts, enforcing new laws making deals with neighbours not to the advantage of locals and so on.
Unless you can lay out a set of clear differences between colonialism and all other froms of one society taking over another, I see no reason to treat collonialism as seperate.
> The entire country India was ruled by a private company
And in other cases, for exmaple the mongol one specific branch of the family was put in command of a region and those families often engadged in trade of the resources from their part of the empire. There are lots and lots of ways empires manage their 'colonies', a quasi private 'company' is certaintly not typical but its also not ahistorical as far as I can see.
I don't see the point of this discussion if can't even accept that the East India situation is unique, something that's unanimously agreed upon amongst historians and economists.
Either you posses some unique knowledge that historians do not, or you are dead set on 'proving' colonialism was 'no different than what came before' regardless of any arguments brought forward.
> something that's unanimously agreed upon amongst historians and economists
Can you actually show this to be true?
Lots of things in history is are pretty unique. At the time East India company was clearly not special, other institutions of that type that existed. And we can find clear precedents in history.
Any attempted to really define colonialism will either be incredibly convoluted or equally aligns many other historical situations.
Lots of what we call colonization is also not threw quasi-private space sponsored monopolies.
I don't know why we don't call it colonialism considering we often call them empires and the process of empire is in some ways very linked to colonialism. All of these terms come from the Roman empire which created a multiethnic state dominated by two ethnic groups, the Romans and the Greek, with colonies of each around the Mediterranean.
Perhaps its baggage from the 18 and 19 centuries when only Europeans, Americans, and Japanese had territories spanning continents in a form we would call colonies. The only reason the Japanese had those territories was because they thought an empire would stop them from being colonized themselves. ( This does not excuse the terrible abuses of the Japanese government.)
Europeans were the first to gain the ability to project power on a global scale and thus became the colonisers. There is a borderline racist trend in some parts of academia to frame colonialism as being a consequence of the inherent value system of white Europeans - but while it is true that racist and chauvinistic attitudes were used to defend colonialism, I think it is fairly certain that had Africans been the first to develop the ability to administrate a state across oceans then we could be living in a world now where England, Italy, and Denmark are struggling to reclaim their respective identities and sovereignty after only recently gaining freedom from their Yoruba and Kongo oppressors.
It was founded by people from Tyre which is indeed in Lebanon.
After gaining independence in the seventh century BC, Carthage gradually expanded its economic and political hegemony across northwest Africa, Iberia, and the major islands of the western Mediterranean.
In 146 BC, after the third and final Punic War, the Romans destroyed Carthage and established a new city in its place. All remaining Carthaginian dependencies, as well as other Phoenician city-states, came under Roman rule by the first century AD.
European colonialism was certainly novel in its sheer scale, and its effects are felt to this day in pretty much every non European country barring a small handful.
Nope, because only the brits surpassed the previous biggest empire, the mongols.
And mongols did come with some advancements in tech as well, but also plenty of destruction.
The Mongolian Empire was very different in operation from the British or other colonial empires. It was not set up with the aim of wealth extraction and economic dominance of subjugated territories back to the parent country. You could not call it "colonial" by any widely accepted definition of the word.
Because it collapse still in the part of expanse.
Other empires like roman was just like the british. In fact the definition of empire is the dominion of "second class" territories in virtue of the "first class".
I thought Mongolians were more on wealth extraction and less on economic dominance - essentially demanding tribute and after setting up an administrative class after a wholesale purge of the previous military elite the only demand being to keep the tribute flowing.
Less economic dominance because they were nomadic raiders not traders or industrialists.
Their complete cultural apathy is largely what makes them "not colonalism" technically. In the same way that samuari aren't technically feudalism because they aren't landowners but servants of a lord. Although they work by analogy pretty well.
There are many angles to this story, but some should not remain ignored: the story of centuries long slave trade -- note, the slave trade was fully established much before the Western nations used "the fruits" of it:
From a book by Gene W Heck "Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism":
"For the medieval Muslim world was, to a large extent, a civilization
powered by involuntary servitude. Its manual labor force and, even at
times, significant parts of its military, consisted predominantly of slaves.
Nonetheless, there were, by doctrinal definition, no slaves indigenous within the Dar al-Islam ~ as after the initial Arab conquests, its empire became comprised of Muslims and tax-paying non-Muslims (dhimmis), classes of citizens who could not legally be reduced to slavery.
‘Therefore, an vibrant external slave traffic was vital to provide the energy required for the successful functioning of Islamic industry.”"
(Gene W Heck PhD: residing in Middle East, a senior business development economist operating in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East and adjunct professor of government and history with the University of Maryland.)
"Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million had arrived in the Americas."
Many people who try to "explain" what happened before bend over backwards to avoid considering some of such facts which were some of the main drivers of what was happening in the world for centuries (and I include there the author of the original article -- the "censored" history is simply not something worth analyzing).
They didn't really "join" as much as they went from being victims to being perpetrators, from being countries where Barbary Pirates (Ottoman Empire) would regularly go on slave raids to conquering the attacker's homelands and then expanding like crazy.
> doesn't change the fact that an independent Nigeria free from influence stirring internal conflicts would have been much better off
Maybe we have different definitions of the word fact but I'd suggest what you are saying is actually a hypothetical and not a fact at all.
Ethiopia was never colonised and look how they turned out compared to the rest of Africa. It's very tempting to try simplify these highly complex realities, the relative comparison you've made doesn't hold water though.
This was just for 5 years (1936-1941); although you could perhaps also add on 3 years of British rule to that. I wouldn't really describe that as "colonialism" in the same way that e.g. Nigeria was ruled by the British for 160 years.
Most resource-oriented economies (oil states, Brazil, Australia, Norway etc) are extraction-oriented and this doesn't seem related to colonialism. "Dutch disease" is named after the over reliance the Dutch developed on their extraction-oriented economic sector - it's a very hard thing to avoid.
In this context "extraction-oriented" means extraction to a foreign power, ie building roads to ports and disregarding all other infrastructure needs that do not further the exportation of raw materials and goods to imperial ports.
Of course Brazil, Australia and Norway export their goods, but they also build other infra needed by their citizens. Colonizers, not so much.
Doesn't by definition doesn't an extraction oriented economy need a foreign customer to use the end input? If they used it themselves it wouldn't be extraction oriented.
And for it to be sustainable the end user needs to be able to get a gain from it (even if given some fantastic hypothetical world like being robots who depend upon crude oil to survive instead of food).
Essentially the combination of the two may be technically peripheral in that competive advantage results in a dutch diseased country and corruption leads to lack of investment in infastructure beyond what is needed. Thus colonial extractive economy is one cause but it may occur without any colonalism per se - just as a result of internal actions. Lets call this manifestation "pseudocolonial". The only involvement of the foreign in the pseudocolonial is a willingness to trade. One may assign guilt or morality in another nation for choosing to accept trade or boycott or embargo but either is just as much intervention.
To be pedantic I suspect the framework may be conflating aspects - this isn't apologetics towards actual horrific extractive colonies which short sightedly squander human potential and cause needless suffering.
Why wouldn't it? Assuming that Nigera was never colonized, there is no reason to assume they wouldn't extract the resources on their soil for their own economical development.
That much is obvious, every country extracts their resources. In this context "extraction-oriented" means extraction to a foreign power, ie building roads to ports and disregarding all other infrastructure needs that do not further the exportation of raw materials and goods to imperial ports.
So in other words the problem with "extraction oriented" is by definition it stops with the extraction as opposed to bootstrapping to other infastructure both humanitarian and foundational for more advanced economy?
Ethiopia was very successful - especially compared to other African countries - until the Marxist revolution in the 1970s - well after the colonial period.
The famine in the 1980s was disastrous, and then there were periods of civil war and war with Eritrea which lasted until the early 2000s. Ethiopia is landlocked, and the wars as well as civil wars in both Somalia and Sudan made trade very difficult.
But the economy has been growing well since then, and it is far from a failed state like neighbouring Somalia or Sudan.
I'm not really sure a single example like that can be projected to a pattern.
But a lot of countries were doing economically well under colonialism. Rhodesia was the 'breadbasket of Africa', a very rich state. When the British left they arranged elections, the first and the last. Mugabe took control and look at Zimbabwe today. A different kind of basket case.
The state of Ethiopia isn't so far different to other places, but that's mostly because after colonialism ended too many countries slipped backwards into the sort of tribal warfare, Marxism, corruption, economic mismanagement etc that typified the non-colonialist states. Do you think the British would have tolerated a Marxist insurrection in a colony, if they'd still been in charge?
The article alludes to this when it talks about how the illiterate man would prefer being ruled by a white man, because he thinks he'd be treated more fairly. Colonialism created many problems, but the state of these countries after it ended puts it in perspective.
If you set up a bunch of people on the Northpole and support them, that's a colony. If you take someone else's land, murder them, enslave them or exploit them that is conquest. The 'colonies' of yesteryear were simply brutal exploitation strategies executed with zero consideration for anybody's rights except for those of the conquerors.
Since those countries - without exception very wealthy, and mostly European though there are some exceptions - tend to be all very civilized now we no longer want to be faced with this uncomfortable truth: that we went from famines and plagues to riches within a few hundred years over the backs of untold people's lives destroyed.
In school we don't teach it other than with some strange form of national pride. We only tell the story from some glorified explorer's point of view. But when viewed from the side of the indigenous people the sight of a Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish or some other seafaring nation was that your days were numbered.
Any accidental positive happenstances do not negate that conquest is war and war is a net negative, no matter how much you twist it and even if it benefits the aggressor financially.
That's an interesting perspective. I think it misses the true meaning of the word colony. Taken your initial explanation, that's exactly what happened. Took a bunch of people and set them up with resources with the intention of setting up shop in the new uncharted land. The reality is, a colony doesn't ever value the native population of the location it's setting up as it would the population of the colonizers. So in essence, colonies are just another form of conquest, but rather than immediately engage in war the tactic is to survey the the land, suss out the local populations, and once you have enough courage/strength dominate them. That was more or less the colonization playbook. The best example was India. The East India company eventually became the British Colony of India. What this ultimately does is it views the local inhabitants of the land not as equal valued humans, but either as a resource to be exploited or a nuisance to be removed from the ultimate goal of resource extraction for the Colonizing entity.
When viewed from the side of the indigenous however, it wasn't just the sight of a European that meant your days were numbered. Sighting an Aztec for example was almost as bad.
It is possible that going from famines and plagues to riches within a few hundred years with European influence ultimately results in less suffering than if that transition took significantly longer without European influence.
I think the "going from famines and plagues to riches within a few hundred years" was referring to what happened in Europe. As far as I know, those were not issues in most of the former colonies (before colonization).
Do you recognize any intermediate state? I think there is a big difference in long-term outcome between colonization/conquest of a very sparsely populated region, such as Canada, the US, and Australia, versus places that were already heavily populated like India, Africa, and the Far East.
In the former case, yes, natives are displaced and horrible things happen to them, but the key difference is that the colonizer really has to supply all the human labor. It means colonists of the colonizer's own culture come in and build a society similar to that of the colonizer. This probably also results in that kind of colony being treated better by the colonizer because they were "white" or "British". That's why basically only white countries are part of the British Commonwealth, whereas the nonwhite colonies have severed ties with the UK. Also, colonists in this scenario would largely be citizens of the colonizing country, and would demand commensurate rights and legal protections.
What seems to me a very strong pattern is that colonies in sparsely-populated regions turned out generally well and are first-world countries today, whereas countries that were heavily populated at the time of colonization/conquest are largely still basket cases.
I think the most likely explanation of this, besides cultural affinity with the colonizer, is that if you are colonizing a sparsely populated region, labor will be scarce. It won't be economical to have vast numbers of colonists extracting any but very high-value raw materials; or, more likely, processed raw materials and low-level industrial goods. So there would be much more pressure for such colonies to industrialize faster. And in turn, a colony with higher per-capita productivity will be able to develop a middle class and therefore a functioning domestic market much faster.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your characterisation of different outcomes based on size / density and sophistication of pre-colonial populations, but you are factually wrong on commonwealth membership:
Africa
Botswana
Cameroon
Gambia, The
Ghana
Kenya
Kingdom of eSwatini
Lesotho
Malawi
Mauritius
Mozambique
Namibia
Nigeria
Rwanda
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
South Africa
Uganda
United Republic of Tanzania
Zambia
Asia
Bangladesh
Brunei Darussalam
India
Malaysia
Maldives
Pakistan
Singapore
Sri Lanka
Caribbean and Americas
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas, The
Barbados
Belize
Canada
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Jamaica
Saint Lucia
St Kitts and Nevis
St Vincent and The Grenadines
Trinidad and Tobago
Europe
Cyprus
Malta
United Kingdom
Pacific
Australia
Fiji
Kiribati
Nauru
New Zealand
Papua New Guinea
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tonga
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
That is bickering over word choice, though. Everyone agrees that what happened was violent and by any modern criteria illegal and immoral. What is more interesting is that if you look carefully you do find gems in the turd pile. The situation varies not only by country but by city and area. Invaders, no matter what name for them is currently considered an appropriate best fit, brought ideas, language, trade, rules, and systems that have value and got propagated. Most African cities did not originally have street grids, sewers, sanitation, railways, courts of law. For all the damage that clearly was done there was also value in the introduction of so many modern ideas and systems. Whether or not the result was a net negative is not relevant when it comes to recognizing value. The way really basic innovations like street grids, English for traders, and sanitation endure in post colonial urban centers speaks to the reality that cultural exchange had many aspects and factors and was not all murder and theft.
> In school we don't teach it other than with some strange form of national pride.
You seem to be Dutch from your profile; I don't know how old you are, but in high school around 1998-2001 my history lessons were most certainly not positive about the Dutch Indies. It was very frank and direct, and went out of its way to tell anecdotes of the Indonesian side about Dutch oppression. I don't know if this experience extends to all schools; but things are certainly not as bad as "in school we don't teach any of this".
So that's exactly 20 years older than I am; it seems things have gotten a lot better since then, see also e.g. [1] – looking through some of the specific lessons [2] it doesn't shy away from telling students that the Dutch were "the baddies", so to speak, pretty much from the get-go at groep 5 (aged ~9/10).
There are perhaps still some things that could be improved – I don't know the "facts on the ground" beyond my personal experience 20 years ago – but it certainly doesn't seem like an "ignored topic", and I'm quite surprised that in Britain the education system seems to mostly ignore this. Then again, I lived in England for a few years and the number of times complete strangers went off on some unprompted overtly racist tangent to me is quite shocking, so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised...
One thing that can really help with the study of colonialism is the proper sourcing of (and translating if needs be) of first hand accounts. This should be the starting point of any discussion. Dr Remi does this well.
There are two objections I have to this piece. The academic points are sound and very good, however There is a throw away at the end "opening the door for white people to shed any guilt".
This feels very catholic original sin. Barbarism underscores colonialism, as does greed, this is undeniable. But we cannot tar an entire race with the sins of their ruling elite forebears. (just as its inexcusable to discriminate on the basis of race)
The second is the underplaying of the level of colonialism in europe it's self. It suggests (wrongly) that the europe was the land of milk and honey. At the time that the newly formed united kingdom was sniffing around india (pre nationalisation of the EIC) napoleon had invaded most of europe. The ramifications we still feel today. At the time of the british empire was collapsing, russia was brutalising the eastern bloc.
Amazon has a research group it unironically calls the "1492 project".
It turns out that the colonial frame is actually useful for predicting behavior, and should be kept for precisely that reason.
Tech companies invade spaces with long-established established norms around property rights (e.g. wiretapping is a crime, I own my communications), then operate entirely outside those norms, and once they are powerful enough they assert that their norms have been law all along.
This is akin to "buying land" with beads from people who have a completely different understanding of what "buying land" means. There is no informed consent.
Informed consent is the difference between a voluntary market transaction and colonization.
I think what bothers me about many instances of colonialism is the misleading historical representations that we are left with, as history is often written by (if not the victors) those who had the upper hand at the end of the conflict.
There is still an ongoing narrative that the British brought some kind of civilization and industrialization to the region of British India that was unachievable before, somehow advancing it into a new age. In truth, the start of colonization was centered around the deindustrialization and enslavement of workers in Bengal into forced labor and sometimes starvation, destroying factories that produced advanced ships and textiles in the wealthiest region that alone accounted for 10-12% of the world's GDP if I recall correctly. These products were typically for export, generating wealth in the region, and the production was destroyed in favor of tea plantations that proved to be relatively underutilized and unproductive.
Granted, the kingdom was also under external stressors at the time such as conflicts with neighboring regions, so maybe this specific relatively industrialized economy may not have survived until today, but the British certainly hastened the poverty-stricken development of India and other subcontinental countries that the region is still suffering from today.
Do aspects such as the exposure to the English language, now relatively widespread as a second language, make up for this in the long term? Maybe this argument can be made, but it seems like an uphill battle in my opinion.
Soviet apoligists day the same about Baltic regions: “we came to basically a forest and built schools for them”.
What they forget is that in parallel to that they were systematically eradicating their language and everyone who had any political stance (educated, etc) up to the point that a lot of political movements in these regions originated from overseas, as that is where most of these (lucky) people could move instead of being forcibly removed to Syberia.
But the contributions are radically different as the current remains reveal. Worldwide English is the language of commerce and throughout the remains of the former British Empire English for traders continues to be extremely common and global in scope and impact. In almost every city colonized by the British there remain enduring street grids with broad rights of way and predictable block sizes that are in many cases still the most lively and economically active areas.
In contrast modern Baltic people speak English for international commerce and Russians when they need to talk to their neighbors. Also most of the construction the Russians were responsible for were military or industrial installations that have mostly been replaced or fallen out of use.
It is these artifacts of colonial force that remain that bring into question the idea that the whole business had zero positive impact.
The point the gentleman makes is well-reasoned, but I find it strange that he doesn't cite any of the 'facts that don't fit the anti-colonialist mindset', instead settling for general observations that are hard to concretely dispute because of their general nature.
Agreed, this seems like a bit of a clickbait title. I'm sure you'll find people that say they want colonialism to be taught in school as an exclusively bad thing, but you'll also find people wanting intelligent design to be taught alongside evolution.
I'm starting to wonder if titles such as these are actually "clickbait". Maybe we could call them sharebait - they don't encourage reading and speculation as much as social media outrage for or against the overly simplified, purposefully controversial headline. I don't doubt that a lot of people will see this and think "See? We weren't so bad!" or "See? They don't care how bad we were!", whichever matches their preconceptions.
I still wonder why people don't get tired of reducing every discussion to "is x good or bad?" Why should everything need to be categorized in such a way, and why would this be the most important aspect of any analysis? It seems more likely that referring to a massive and complicated process in such a simple way will never be correct, and so these arguments can never be resolved, only recapitulated.
The core argument in this article seems to be that multiple perspectives are necessary to understand colonialism and that many lower class people preferred colonial oppression to the oppression by their local elites. This is not related to whether or not colonialism was a net benefit to people.
"But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. 'Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,' Awolowo wrote."
> when I asked my British university class what they had learned at school about colonisation, “Nothing really!” was the chorused reply.
I am not surprised.
For what it is worth, during my UK education I never really got taught any "general" history. There was no high-level history of the country, no general sequence of world events, no lists of kings and queens or which prime minister was in power when and so on.
History classes would instead pick some arbitrary time and location and then "deep dive" into that single subject for the entire school year - e.g. we covered the Russian revolution and only the Russian revolution for one entire school year. Other years it was The Normans, another it was the Great Depression.
History class seemed to be less about the actual history (i.e. facts), and more about the approach taken to scrutinise the sources for reliability/credibility and come up with your own judgement based on what you have available.
If I had to choose between memorizing a sequence of facts curated by some randos in the government, or being taught how to scrutinize sources for reliability/credibility and come up with my own judgements, then you won as that is far better.
In general, the approach you mentioned misses the forest for the trees. It is a terrible way to teach history. Most students will not later learn much history on their own. Sure, critical thinking is good, but I would argue that knowing the broader strokes of history would enable better critical thinking among the descendants of colonial beneficiaries.
This article is all well and good but realistically, in 2020, if you were a teacher at any grade level who taught about slavery or colonialism with any nuance whatsoever your career would be promptly executed by internet firing squad.
I found that the moral ambiguity only ratcheted up over time. In 3rd grade it was peaceful pilgrims co-existing with the natives. In 9th grade it was the trail of tears and Vietnam. In college it was "the sons of liberty were terrorists and the noble savage trope is a myth".
Sure, let's have some more nuance during our education. But let's also not let the UK off the hook; off the top of my head, during the same century, the UK starved their own people at home in Ireland [0], propped up the Raj while Indians starved [1], and waged a series of wars against the Dutch Boers to the detriment of native South Africans [2].
It can both be true that the British Empire was a great boon in terms of education, health, and trade; and also that the Empire was a great plague upon its subjects, bringing indoctrination, sickness, and slavery.
I think this kind of attitude is what the author of the article is struggling with: assigning blame, tallying up the sins of each side to see who is the winner, this kind of debate is not useful - even if you don't intend it, framing things in this light will cause it.
There is value for everyone in discussing the nuances of dark events in our histories. But unfortunately we have a natural tendency to over simplify things into these highly polarized dichotomies, a vs b, in an attempt to make complex events easy to understand. Nobody alive today had a hand in these events, and while it's natural to feel things for our ancestors whether it's shame, pride or anguish, we would do well to distance ourselves like an alien observer when analyzing these events... the sins of our fathers should remain that way if we are to make progress as a species - I'm not religious, that was an accident.
It's not history though. The same attitudes prevail today. Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. France are bombing most of N Africa and involved in all sorts of shady deals in Africa in general. The list is long and current.
Which people? If you want to undo colonialism you need to include all Irish people in this measure and I can tell you not many Irish nationals if even that want it to be like it is. I'm probably the most outlier opinion in that I think they should be their own country outside of both the UK and Ireland.
From politico:
Overall, the results showed 65 percent "yes" versus 19 percent "no." Excluding undecided voters and those who refused to answer — 15 percent — nearly four in five respondents who had made up their minds said they would vote in favor. https://www.politico.eu/article/election-two-thirds-of-irish...
Full disclosure: I am from the South of Ireland (i.e. the Republic).
I actually have always agreed with your outlier opinion, but you need both countries to be in the EU to make it work (shrug).
You are not counting the appropriate people in your study. A pretty large majority of people in the Republic would like to see the North become part of their country.
However, our opinion is less important than the opinions of the people living in Northern Ireland, and in that part of the island, there is not a strong majority for re-unification.
Like my original point is what the Good Friday/Belfast agreement states, so I'm not sure why you're disagreeing with me.
I’m talking more about decolonisation. If you steal something it was and is never yours to begin with. GFA was only necessary because of colonial history and continuing attitudes and the power games that come with them.
There is one school of thought (which the GFA falls under) which is what’s happened in the past is legitimate and we have to work from where we are and there is another which is that the colonial past is illegitimate and therefore any gains are also illegitimate and most be returned to their rightful owner.
I don’t subscribe to either necessarily but seeing as continuing prevailing attitudes among the colonial elite haven’t changed one bit I think we have no choice but to confront them gloves off style. It’s literally stealing our collective global future.
How far back do you want to unwind? Should all non-aboriginals be disenfranchised or removed from Australia? At some point you have to work with things as they are and move forward.
People are alive today who experienced apartheid, who cannot visit their family because of the India–Pakistan border, or who remember when the Ireland–Northern Ireland border was "troubled". (What an amazing euphemism for a horrific memory.) The events I talked about, and so many more, are not just etched upon the history of the British Empire, but have repercussions which echo to the current day.
And yeah, either an action was a crime against humanity or it wasn't; either it was a war crime or it wasn't. We have an international system for this, but the British and American Empires refuse to submit to it, partially because they can't guarantee that the Russian and Chinese will also submit to the rule of international law, and partially because they know that it will be the end of the imperial era.
I'm not sure what you are arguing. That remnants of the British empire still exists? that present is derived from past? or that there are current events as well as these historic ones?
Whichever, is it then more constructive to focus on who is the most guilty? or try to prevent bad shit from happening again and look at the finer points rather than invoke vengeful attitudes?
My point was that when we are so focused on who is worst, who is the evil one by framing things in terms of blame, the entire scenario is coloured that way. This doesn't seem useful, it's just a fairy tale, the evil vilain in a Disney film that does not exist in reality. I think this can apply to present day events as much as past - I think I was foolish to hang that extra argument of "past" on this more fundamental one since all the replies are focusing on that.
I'm arguing that colonialism has lasting negative pragmatic effects in the world. Further, I'm arguing that we should not practice colonialism, and that we should actively work to decolonize; this makes me one of the anti-colonialists whose narrative is being questioned by the original article's author.
What are you arguing? I recognize the tactic as one of the most ancient: You're scooping up handfuls of sand and throwing it in the air to try to make everything harder to see. From my perspective, it's almost as if you're anti-anti-colonialist, but that's a rude accusation to make without hard evidence. Either way, I can't tell where you're headed and it feels like you just wanted to make sure that the thread was derailed.
> What are you arguing? I recognize the tactic as one of the most ancient: You're scooping up handfuls of sand and throwing it in the air to try to make everything harder to see.
Reality _is_ harder to see, this is my entire point, to not quantize massive complex events into 0 and 1.
I guess it matters to people who want to bring colonialism back to Africa, Lebanon or Hong Kong. I think HN is pretty down with the last one so I don't know what you're talking about.
It's worth pointing out that when my Dad went to London for work in the 50's, there were signs all over the place saying, "No dogs; No blacks; No Irish"
I'm not sure why you'd call him a partisan. At worst he has an opinion, which doesn't think that the colonialism was morally neutral, and he is sharing it with us.
Even the name, colonialism, is chosen to paint a very one sided contemporary political view. Colonial EMPIRES are just how imperialism manifested in a certain time and place. Human history is a never ending story of empires that didn't care about race, continent, culture, etc. Just the strong conquering the weak (military strength) for resources. With the weak very often being disorganized in every aspect, not just the army, so the conquest also brings benefits to them.
> Even the name, colonialism, is chosen to paint a very one sided contemporary political view.
You're projecting. The word "colony" doesn't by nature have any negative connotations; the reason "colonialism" sounds negative is because it is associated with the enslavement and extermination of native populations.
Here is another way of raising a question about colonialism:
"What is unethical about a project[colonialism] that, among other things, industrialized the colonies, established courts of Law, laid railroads, and introduced scientific education, modern medicine and parliamentary democracy there? As long as we do not address this issue properly, there are no obvious reasons to assume that the earlier generations of thinkers were wrong. Today, it is not clear how or why colonialism is an evil or from where it draws its evil strength. In other words, we lack an adequate understanding of colonialism."
>> I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus
towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.
I find this a little unfair, given that many white people do not have a
colonial past and some have themselves been subject to colonisation and
imperalism. This includes most of the peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe,
i.e. the Slavs and also my people, Greeks. While Russia had an Empire and
colonies in Asia, it never really colonised Africa [1]. Other Slavic countries
never had colonies [2] and neither did us Greeks who were ourselves enslaved
by the Ottomans for much of our pre-modern history and were a protectorate of
the Great Powers saddled by them with a foreign kingly dynasty [3] during the
time that the Western Europeans where having their little moment in Africa, in
the 1880's.
So it's no point feeling "animus" towards all white people- certainly not
towards one's Polish mother. It's no use lumping all "Europeans" together,
either. I would go as far as to say that even the majority of people in
countries that were colonial powers, like Britain or France, did not really
partake in the riches pillaged from Africa and its people, because it all
stayed in the hands of monarchs and aristocrats who often didn't treat their
domestic population any better than the people of faraway lands and certainly
didn't hold them in much greater esteem. If you hail from a long line of pig
farmers and washerwomen that lived in poverty and squalor while their "betters"
partied in India - how can you be held responsible for the latters' behaviour?
And then there were the white people colonised by other white people, as in
the colonisation of Ireland by the English during the 1550's, by settling it
with Protestants and establishing... plantations [4]. Has anyone asked the
Irish how they feel about the great British Empire? [5]
If we're going to have a historically nuanced debate about colonialism (and
not just race and racism, which are somewhat independent, in my view) then we
should have a nuanced debate and discuss the fact that colonialism didn't
really care about the colour of your skin, only about the degree to which you
were inhabiting land with useful resources that could be taken from you and
exploited for the glory of Empire (and the enrichment of its elites).
Re: Slavs and colonialism, most of the money that built the Italian city of Genoa in the 1100s to the 1300s came from selling and facilitating the selling of Slav war prisoners (i.e. slaves) captured and transported from the Northern shores of the Black Sea to the Constantinople area (i.e. on the Southern shore).
It's still kind of disputed, that's why I left that out of the conversation.
Forgetting for a moment about the English term "slave", it's interesting that in Italian slaves are called "schiavi", with the singular "schiavo", while in old Romanian we used to called Slav people (who were different from us, Romance-speaking people) as "șchei", with the singular "șchiau/schiau", the second form at singular pretty similar to the independently formed "schiavo" from Italian (which means "slave", like I said).
And in Greek, we say "Σλάβος" (Slav) which is only one word away from "σκλάβος" (sclave) so I've always thought that the two were connected, until very recently, when I checked wikipedia just to be sure and found out that I was probably wrong.
There's no identity to "whiteness" except racism against "non-white" people. There's no more reason a Polish person should relate to British or French colonialism than a Tunisian or a Libyan, other than the belief that they are united by whiteness. Slavic people weren't even considered white until very recently; intelligence tests in America were moved from the context of childhood development to mass testing with the primary purpose of excluding the Eastern European immigration that was thought to be a subhuman threat to the US gene pool.
> colonialism didn't really care about the colour of your skin
This is a step too far; if there's any home of white identity it's in the colonies that largely eradicated the natives, such as the US and Australia. Worldwide, people are racist against black people like Americans are. It's American tropes about black people that have traveled all over the world. Even the British, who had their own brutal African colonies, are racist towards black people through borrowed American language and imagery. Native British racism largely revolves around South Asia, just as native French (and Italian) racism is largely obsessed with Arabic-speaking North Africa.
> There's no identity to "whiteness" except racism against "non-white" people.
Historically, this is quite wrong. By the late 19th to early 20th c., "white" identity in the U.S. had essentially become a way of providing all European immigrants with one common, shared identity thus obviating prejudice towards some European nationalities especially wrt. Central Europe (hence Germans, but also Slavs). To a significant extent, this is comparable to how self-identification as "white" is understood today, as well. There's nothing in such self-identification that implies prejudice against people of color.
The implication is ingroup vs outgroup as immutables. Aparthiad South Africa had some darkly hillariously arbitrary (no pun intended) definitions of black and white such that Japanese were white and Chinese were once black.
Roman identity also fits within the ingroup-outgroup frameworm but not quite immutable. It involved such odd priorities by modern standards like retiring a "gaulic stereotype" class of gladiators after the conquest of Gaul because they were Roman now, even if many were slaves it became "politically incorrect".
The AskHistorians answers are quite consistent with what I pointed out above. Of course one can always find plenty of historical anecdotes to quibble about wrt. what exactly happened in specific times and places, but that's neither here nor there.
> I find this a little unfair, given that many white people do not have a colonial past and some have themselves been subject to colonisation and imperalism. This includes most of the peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe, i.e. the Slavs and also my people, Greeks
Similarly, while it is true that in recent centuries Greeks have been more often the victims of imperialism than the beneficiaries of it, Greece did produce one of the greatest imperialists of all time, Alexander the Great; and the Eastern Roman Empire was for centuries one of the Mediterranean's great empires, and despite its name was for most of its history far more Greek than Roman
The article you link to is on Greek colonisation, not Greek colonialism- and there are at least three very good reasons for it.
One reason is that if you want to go back 2500 years, that certainly covers e.g. the Zulu empire and its own conquering of of neighouring tribes, the Aztec or the Inca empires, various Indian empires and kingdoms and so on - in which case the whole conversation loses its meaning because everyone has been a colonialist at some point. Of course, it's clear that the conversation is carried out in the context of European colonialism and in particular of the colonisation of Africa by European powers.
Another reason is that when we speak of the Greek colonies around the Mediterrannean we speak of new, often independent, cities founded by people originally from cities in the Greek mainland, rather than an invading, occupying force who came to subjugate an indigenous population, pillage the natural riches of its land and send it back home, as in European colonies.
Finally, we don't know of any big deportation or mass slaughter or enslavement of indigenous populations in the case of Greek Mediterrannean colonies and there is every reason to assume that many new cities were founded without a drop of blood being shed. There is generally no historical record of big invasions or military campaigns etc. leading to colonisation. The story is very different than what we call "colonialism" today.
>> Similarly, while it is true that in recent centuries Greeks have been more often the victims of imperialism than the beneficiaries of it, Greece did produce one of the greatest imperialists of all time, Alexander the Great; and the Eastern Roman Empire was for centuries one of the Mediterranean's great empires, and despite its name was for most of its history far more Greek than Roman
I have to say that I find this line of reasoning very unfair, as a Greek, given that in a different context I've been very often told that I'm not really Greek because real Greeks lived two thousand years ago, that I can't really draw a direct line of descent to Pericles, or Socrates, or Aristotle (I'm not really trying), that Alexander the Great was not really Greek but Macedonian (and incidentally my country should shut up and let North Macedonia have its name because it totally owns it) and that I look too blond and fair-skinned and pale-eyed to be Greek anyway.
In short, it seems to me that too many people have tried to tell me things about Greek history but not necessarily because they care about history, more because they want to score some points in some silly debate that I'm not interested in. I hope you recognise the danger and avoid this line of thinking yourself.
Also, your statment that Byzantium was "far more Greek than Roman" deserves a thorough debunking but this comment has grown too large already, for which I apologise. Suffice it to say that the Byzantines -and the people living in the Greek peninsula at the time- considered themselves Roman not Greek. Even today we say we are "Ρωμιοί", Romans.
Finally, regarding Alexander- Alexander's empire wasn't an empire of the Greeks, it wasn't an empire of the Macedonians, even, it was Alexander's empire and nobody else's. And when he died, it died with him because his superpower stopped working. Alexander wasn't Greek. He wasn't Macedonian. He wasn't even human. Alexander was a superhero- and like a superhero he stood above all men and did things only superheroes and demigods can do. We can learn nothing from him about the lives of ordinary people.
> One reason is that if you want to go back 2500 years, that certainly covers e.g. the Zulu empire and its own conquering of of neighouring tribes, the Aztec or the Inca empires, various Indian empires and kingdoms and so on - in which case the whole conversation loses its meaning because everyone has been a colonialist at some point.
But if it is true that everyone has been a colonialist at some point, how thereby is it that the "whole conversation loses its meaning"? One might instead say that's an important fact that needs to be considered in the conversation, but often isn't.
> Of course, it's clear that the conversation is carried out in the context of European colonialism and in particular of the colonisation of Africa by European powers.
But is that too narrow a context? And part of the debate is about whether what those European powers did was somehow historically novel, or whether it was fundamentally a continuation of what everyone else had been doing for all of history? If one views what they did as historically novel, then what Greeks did 2500 years ago is irrelevant; if one views it as just a continuation and intensification of the historical norm, then it has more relevance.
> Another reason is that when we speak of the Greek colonies around the Mediterrannean we speak of new, often independent, cities founded by people originally from cities in the Greek mainland, rather than an invading, occupying force who came to subjugate an indigenous population, pillage the natural riches of its land and send it back home, as in European colonies.
Were these lands colonised by the ancient Greeks uninhabited terra nullius? Or did they already have an indigenous population, which the Greek settlers may have displaced? Also consider that there were two types of European colonialism – extractive colonialism in Africa, Asia (and certain parts/periods of the Americas), and settler colonialism in the Americas (other parts/periods), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. The former involves removal of resources, the later involves insertion of a new population. Ancient Greek colonies were settler colonialism not extractive colonialism.
> There is generally no historical record of big invasions or military campaigns etc. leading to colonisation
Back then, far fewer written records were produced than were in more recent centuries, and what written records were produced have been mostly lost. I wouldn't assume that just because we don't have records of something happening, that therefore it didn't happen.
Also, the British colonisation of Australia didn't involve any significant military campaigns, at best a few skirmishes, and some massacres too. (In military terms, the colonists and the indigenous were very unevenly matched, much more so than in North America for example.) If there was a pre-existing indigenous population displaced by ancient Greek colonies, it could easily have been hunter-gatherer tribes.
> given that in a different context I've been very often told that I'm not really Greek because real Greeks lived two thousand years ago
Anyone who tells you that is an idiot. Of course you are a real Greek.
> more because they want to score some points in some silly debate that I'm not interested in
What silly debate do I want to engage in? It sounds like maybe you've been burnt by debates with North Macedonian nationalists whereas my sympathies have always been with Greece in that dispute.
> considered themselves Roman not Greek. Even today we say we are "Ρωμιοί", Romans.
Yes. But even though Ρωμιοί derives etymologically from the city of Rome, the Latin influence on Constantinople's culture was relatively small (strongest in the legal system). I think the term really referred to Constantinople's claim to be the Second Rome, the political (and even theological) successor of the First Rome, not to a claim that its people were of the same culture and ethnicity as First Rome's. Greek Ρωμιοί are not a Latin or Italic people, Latin Romani are.
And that's why, I suspect, we talk about it so little and why there's so little "nuance" when we do. I can't in any way relate to getting angry at somebody who's currently living about something that somebody who's been dead for a long time did to somebody else who's been dead for a long time, but I'm painfully aware that there are a lot of people who do. It seems like there's just nowhere to go with that: "you're being unreasonable?" "I'm sorry that you feel that way even thought I don't?" "let's move on as a society?"
It's very rare for anyone to talk about the efforts made by some institutions to give power and wealth away in restorative colonialist experiments, for example the American Colonization Society.
We have decades of socio-economic data about Liberia covering all aspects of development since its creation as a colony for freed slaves.
I have never heard anyone debate the terrible experiment of Liberia which is today one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world, despite it being founded and governed by its own free people and independent from any other nation for over 170 years.
It is one of the purest split tests in human civilisation but few know it exists and even fewer want to learn anything from it.
Well I think one thing and which the article describes well, is that colonialism gave external pressure for those nations moving forward. Like being bullied and abused in school before graduating, colonialism gave an identity mixed in with the culture and language the oppressors brought. Tribes that would probably never have formed a country together otherwise, were piled in with arbitrary borders with no regard did it split the tribes or not. And given a name and a flag and told they were now Kenyan or whoever from here on out.
Now of course bullying and abusing is wrong and the bullied have eternal trauma of being subjected to it, but I think there are two perspectives to it. You can either look at it as the worst thing that happened "I would have become rich and famous had I not been bullied" or as something that made you stronger "I've been through worse".
Granted, the analogy between bullying and colonialism might not be completely accurate. But like everything in life things are mostly grey instead of black and white. Can you quantify which color is stronger and equal it as being one or the other? Maybe, but there should be a lengthy rationale how you came up with the conclusion to reflect the best how world truly is (and yes yes, there are exceptions to this rule also). Which the article actually does well, and I wish this type of rationality to difficult issues would be more popular.
Being Dutch, I think this can be attributed more to the feeling of 'having been really big in the past' than what actually happened during that period. The Dutch, I mean, suffering from a Calimero complex as we are.
Oh I'm sorry, it basically means:
"They are big and we are small and that's not fair"
It originates from an italian cartoon tv-series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimero
I don't know that the living get to speak for the dead. If someone comes to your town, kills your parents and burns down your house, but then kidnaps you and raises you as a servant, it's a bit silly to compare the comforts of your servants' quarters to the hypothetical situation you would have been in if the invaders had never come. Your parents' story is still important, and your guess about how unhappy you would have been in a world that never happened is a rationalized comfort in your current situation. Especially if you are a member of one of the local Christian elites used around the world as a buffer between the colonial power and the land and workers it needed to exploit.
Stories by the colonized about how colonization helped their people are like slate dot com headlines about "Why Getting Cancer Saved My Life."
At the same time, though, a world where everyone's going around trying to avenge their ancestors is a world full of conflict and strife. There are obvious reasons it's problematic to tell people they have to forgive and forget, but I think it's a quite similar problem to tell people they shouldn't.
99.99% of our 300,000+ years of history is people going around avenging their ancestors through pillage, enslavement, rape and murder. We're for the most part in a brief moment of respite from the norm, but I'm sure we'll be back to genocide and slavery before long.
I'm American, but I'm surprised I've never heard any arguments about reparations for their former colonies, as I've heard plenty about reparations for the practice of slavery in the US. I mean de-colonialization happened much later than the end of slavery in the US, and it would arguably be easier to implement. Has the idea been brought up in public thought in Europe at all? Some cursory googling revealed it has been brought up, but I'm curious what public discussion and sentiment is on the issue
The part about finding an "African identity" that isn't merely "western" gave me pause because I come from a country that was colonized considerably earlier and, like the rest of the Americas, had its native population decimated so completely and its identity so completely replaced, practically nothing is left but "western"... And I find myself completely alright with that, so it's harder to me to see the importance of such an identity.
There's always someone coming to help you out for your own good which just coincidentally enriches them. Listen, if you want to come cut my lawn and install pretty little lights but enslave me, don't expect me to thank you for the lawn. I can cut the lawn myself. Thanks.
I'm just a single generation away from poverty to the point of - on one side of my family - actual infant malnutrition. Why am I supposed to feel responsible for the actions of people that were geographically and ethnically distinct from my ancestors, simply because they happened to share the same skin colour and kingdom? Not many people in industrial Wales seemed to share in the benefits of colonialism. Many of the British elite were/are Norman: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2479271/1-000-years...
An analogy: Suppose that at work, some critical system belonging to another team blows up, and everyone is asked to help fix it. It's not useful to complain that it's that other team's fault. The mess is there, and it needs to be fixed. Even though you don't share in the guilt for it blowing up, you're still responsible for fixing it.
I've heard/read that many times, but I've never heard/read anyone saying that people should feel responsible for the sins of their forefathers, let alone for the actions of people with whom they share skin color.
I would love to be pointed to a conversation or an article that frames things that way.
Thanks. At least this article (partially) answers "Why am I supposed to feel responsible for the actions of people that were geographically and ethnically distinct from my ancestors, simply because they happened to share the same skin colour and kingdom?", but one first need to (as said in the article) "fully grasp the full benefit and privileges they have received" as a group, not a matter of rich vs poor, otherwise the point of the article is probably moot, especially if you've never heard of red lining or gerrymandering.
The article was referring to the USA situation. The difference between their situation and the Romans is that some of the people who played a part to the present situation (policies, laws, housing, blocking access to education...) are very much alive.
> Not many people in industrial Wales seemed to share in the benefits of colonialism.
I guess Welsh economy also profited (to a lesser extant) from slavery [1][2]. But if Normans purposefully enact systems that benefits them at the expanse of Welsh, solely (or even in part) because of their welshness, then of course you are legitimate to fight against it (if I understood you correctly).
It's remarkable how well this thread managed to avoid going that way overall. The distinction in comment quality is striking. Compare this comment to, say, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24107624 or many others in the thread.
The article itself presents an ideological position. So, this was ideological from the start.
I am presenting an alternative ideological position that better frames the original one. It is a better framing, because the original is backed on racial grounds, whereas I am making a point based on taking personal responsibility or not (being governed).
That's an interesting viewpoint. Given that I dropped out of college (twice!) and generally arsed around unproductively for 10 years while my school mates were buying houses, I'm going to gently suggest that you have little to no idea of what I actually think (except for my views on taxation).
Given that I personally believe that schools, roads and hospitals are necessities for modern society and you appear to believe that these are some kind of false consciousness, I'm not sure how we can carry on this discussion.
I didn't say that schools, roads and hospitals are not necessities. I would say schools, roads and hospitals are necessities for the government to run a modern society. They decided and they did it. You and I paid for it.
Just on the roads point, without a government, we might all be flying personal helicopters, no roads required.
And without a penis, I'd be a woman :) Seriously, I don't think that you have a strong argument here, and if you really feel this way, then you should try and articulate the issues you see with government in a way that might convince others.
And it's not they (unless you're stateless or an immigrant), it's we. We pay taxes so that our delegates (government) can provide us services. It's a worthy trade, in my belief at least.
Of course we don't know what might or might not occur, if the situation were different. But the fact is that neither you nor I decided on roads. The government decided. I don't see what's weak about that.
The government is 'they', its not 'we' (though you may identify with its actions). I want no part of it, but despite my lack of agreement with anything that it does, it is inflicted on me anyway. I am coerced to pay taxes. You are in agreement with a system where a big gang can use their superior numbers to force another person to do what they say, despite that other person having done them no wrong.
So, seriously, if you have a counter argument, please go ahead and make it. Please explain what number or percentage of people makes it ok to force another person to part with 40% of their income against their will. I'd like to hear your argument. Be sure to explain the difference between government tax and mafia protection money too.
Taxes are the cost of civilization - of being able to deal with other people without resorting to violence every time. Perhaps one day we'll be able to do that without a monopolistic entity enforcing the rules, but it's very clear that time is not now.
I personally don't have any problems paying taxes. I can get fussy about some of the details, but I can recognize the necessity of some organization performing these duties.
Obviously you think this is a clever reply, but it isn't. Between this and your parent post, all you're really doing is demonstrating that you have no idea how civilization works. Perhaps you have some idea of how you think things ought to work instead, but that's true of basically everyone.
Clearly you perceive no value from taxes and deeply resent that you have to pay them in the first place. And hell, you might even do well for yourself out in the wilderness alone, independent from everyone else. But since you're posting here, that is obviously not your current situation. So if you want to be a part of civilization, you need to pay your dues just like everyone else. And if you don't like it, at least you have the possibility of going something about it yourself, if you can convince enough other people that you're right.
You don't have a choice about being a part of civilisation and whether you pay taxes or not. No choice. But congratulations, you have made yourself feel as if you did and you're happy to go with it. I guess you walk out the door, satisfied at the way your money is spent, the roads, armies, education, etc, etc - just as you would have chosen for yourself!
Just because I'm happy to pay taxes doesn't mean that I'm happy with the ways that money is spent. But I can recognize the inherent need for _some_ entity to serve in this function, and I'm glad that I have one that I can participant in.
There is literally no citizen in the world that is completely happy with their country. That is part of being human. Because our views are so diverse, it's impossible to form large groups of people without those types of disagreements.
I didn't get a choice about being born, either, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do what I can with what I have instead of pining for a reality that will never exist.
You participate once every 5 years in voting for one of 2 meaningful options on a list of ~5-15 issues. No one is happy with that choice.
Then, say 50% of the populace vote, 25% get the person who they voted for in. So the 25% (who do not feel fully represented) get to rule over the other 75% who know they are not represented. Basically we all pay taxes into a system that no one feels happy about. And when you think about it, it isn't about what's right - it comes down to who has the force. Its a mafioso monetary extraction system, that indoctrinates its victims. 'Stockholm Syndrome' is the psychological term for when you love your captor; most people who support the government system suffer with this.
As a group of people our views are diverse. That's good, right? Large groups of people are hard to manage. So don't manage them. I don't seek to manage other people's affairs. Government is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist - managing lots of people. People should be self-managing.
PS There's a difference between jumping to the defence of a system that no one is happy with, and finding a way to survive in a system that is collectivising and dehumanising. In supporting the system as you do, you are literally a turkey voting for Christmas. Sorry if that's harsh, but that's really how I see it.
If you think "participation" is only about voting once every 5 years, then you are part of the problem. Although since you say five years instead of 4, perhaps I shouldn't assume you're american.
Participation in democracy is about more than voting, especially if you're only voting in a fraction of the elections.
I have an argument, a hypothesis. I have tested it and I don't find it wanting. You have an opinion. You don't have an argument.
4 or 5 years, I won't quibble.
And oh, how else do you participate in democracy, except for voting? Does one stand for election?
And for me, if I am settled in my thinking that no one represents me and I don't want a part of the extortion system that is in place, do I have to do whatever some group of people say is right to do because they can force me, even though I am doing no harm to another?
Voting is the starting point for participating in democracy.
Then you need to make sure you're informed the best you can - this can demand that you move beyond your comfort zone to understand things that you do not.
You need to interact with your representatives and hole them accountable.
There are many more ways to participate in governance.
Your hypothesis fails horribly to manage problems that can be classified under "The problem of the commons."
You talk about how people should be able to manage themselves, as though that's all government is doing: managing people. But that's not right at all. Like I said, you're really demonstrating that you don't have an understanding of what government actually does. And even you think that humans should be self-managing, that doesn't magically make them so. Reality quite obviously and repeatedly contradicts this.
HN gets just as many left-leaning articles. When Jacobin stories appear here (or similar), we get comments exactly like yours complaining about how HN is overrun by $left-label.
People who actually lived in that time prefered the colonization administration as per article but progressive intelectuals from today know better. What more could be said...
"In his 1947 book [...]Obafemi Awolowo, [wrote] “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” [...]
"According to this, [...] many regular Nigerians seemed to sense a fairness in the British exercise of power that they were not so sure of in their own leaders."
So one author says that SOME people thought that the British were fairer. We don't know how many. And we don't know if they were right or wrong.
> SOME people thought that the British were fairer. We don't know how many
It's right there in the quote: "many"
> And we don't know if they were right or wrong.
That's your other quote "He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man" - the author's opinion, who was not an illiterate obviously: "has good reasons".
Being right or wrong has nothing to do with it. Their lives, their country, their right to decide. You think you know better what's good for them, don't you?
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. There's obviously a lot of substance in a topic like this—an overwhelming amount really—and the idea of this place is to try not to collapse into the one or two pre-existing fixed points.
Nobody mentioning what the original article said: people of the time affected by what was going on chose the colonization administration as the lesser evil.
Mentioning this is flaming? And completely dismissing the content of the article and pushing current trending political stances is not? Not to mention down voting anything that does not agree with "Europe bad, Africa good"?
I think somebody needs to say these things, no matter how unpopular they are at the current moment. If you think otherwise though - your site your rules. Just say so and I am out.
Empires are made up of people - both good and bad. Empires have both good and bad impacts as they expand. Its the people (colonizers, colonized) who make the difference in many cases.
Prior to the British Empire, slavery was ubiquitous, as was piracy. It was widespread in Africa, the Middle East, and other areas. After the British Empire, these scourges were pretty much gone, primarily through the efforts of the British Empire.
That is not to say that slavery and piracy were not actively encouraged, and used as instruments of the British state. In fact, slavery and piracy greatly expanded for a time due to British policies. The British state, and powerful companies and people achieve great wealth and power because of slavery and piracy.
Nonetheless, they were eventually ended decisively through the efforts of the British Empire, which banned slavery in 1807.
What happened? People changed, and fought for change. Their efforts changed the machinery of the British Empire for the better.
Consider John Newton. He was a slave trader, who eventually became an abolitionist (a person who fought against slavery).
Or William Wilberforce, who spent a large part of his life facing ridicule for opposing slavery, and fighting the powerful slave interests, finally winning that fight in 1807.
So, yes, a large government apparatus such as the British Empire can have an enormous impact on people, both good and bad.
Simplifying the complexity to "without colonization, we would be fine" or "colonization provided all of these great benefits" - both of those gloss over the reality, and make it likely we'll repeat the mistakes of the past.
Without Hacker News I would never even know that such insane authors exist:
"This expectation underestimates the human desire to feel strong, the powerful psychological appeal for many, not just in Britain, in taking pride in the conquests of their ancestors. It offers a sense of collective strength they can tap into as individuals. If they, of whom I am one, could be so triumphant in the past, surely I too possess triumph in me?
The morality of taking pride in ancestral conquests involving the killing and subjugation of other human beings is questionable, but its psychological appeal is undeniable."
why yes, it sure is a RUSH to conquer other people and take all their stuff, especially for the huge number of masses that never had to actually, you know, kill anyone, they just get to have all this awesome land and stuff and kind of a curious way that all the streets seem to be named after native americans even though I've never met any here at all, shrugs.... conquest is awesome! teach the controversy, people!
It's disappointing to me to see such a knee-jerk misinterpretation of an apparently sincere article. The author merely pointed out an almost obvious aspect of human nature, and you attack him as though he holds this belief.
My father was actually colonized. He actually went to Nigeria, expecting to find a unified black Africa just waiting to throw off the shackles of colonialism. As the civil war erupted he actually watched tribalism consume the country and saw Igbos having their heads caved in with crankshafts wielded by other black Africans.
He would understand the nuance and ultimately truth of the author's argument.
It's weird and sad to see people in North America who have never been colonized, who have never picked up a weapon just completely lose their minds about stuff that doesn't bother the actual people who were actually colonized. Stop being outraged on others' behalf and talk to those with experience, or listen to people like this author. There's a lot you're missing.
the US is a colonized nation. The relatively low population (because up to 95% were killed) of Native Americans in this country live with profound social problems and in horrid conditions (there's Native American reservations right here I have seen) and they are not happy about it. I'm outraged on their behalf. As kids we grew up playing things like "cowboys and indians" and naming our sports teams things like "the redskins". We as kids were fully ignorant of what any of this meant decades ago. Once we learned, if you decided to feel "pride" that we wiped out a whole culture, or revulsion, basically says a lot about what kind of person you probably are.
Sure, obviously. We seem to be straying a long way from this article about Nigeria written by a Nigerian. Maybe we should listen to and value the Nigerian's perspective about Nigeria instead of zooming in on an uncharitable interpretation of one sentence from his article, is all I'm saying.
A friend's mother was put into a residential school in Canada. When she says "it wasn't all bad" is that a defense of the practice and institution? Of course not, but maybe we should listen to her, you know, lived experience and add it to all the other experiences.
EDIT> Think of it this way: why are you telling a Nigerian how to Nigeria, in the spirit of anti-oppression?
EDIT2> People and life are complicated. We live in a world where people beat the crap out of each other based on which sport ball jersey their team wears. Nuance and anti-knee-jerk are required if we're going to find our way out of this chimpanmess.
I think he was being charitable. Not wanting to offend anyone. He ended like this
So for British teachers wondering how to teach the subject, it is important to cite various perspectives, including, crucially, the perspectives of the colonised; not in a wholly arbitrary manner seeking to buttress this or that grand narrative, but in a way revealing the complexities and contradictions of Britain’s colonial encounter with Africa.
which suggests he doesn't agree with their views. I think he is pretty neutral.
he failed! suggesting the psychological appeal of knowing that I grew up in a town that was violently ripped from native americans makes me feel AWFUL, what kind of psychotic asshole do you need to be to actually know about the genocide you live on top of and then to feel pride in that? People are generally not bothered by their own colonialist history because they're shockingly ignorant of what it actually means to go somewhere and eradicate an entire culture. But to suggest that these people are actually intimitely aware of such conquest and that it there is "undeniable appeal" to feeling "proud" of that is revolting.
But I don't think he's suggesting he's reporting his experience with Britons. I'm pretty sure they evade the bad parts of empire in their education. Just like the Civil Rights Movement is sanitized in US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html