Colonialism Was Pretty Awful, Actually

Or Why Do We Keep Letting Journalists Write About History, Seriously.

In an interview, the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala stated how “the world really doesn’t acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don’t really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles.”  Worse, in our current era where reactionary contrarianism has become (if possible) even more fashionable among the professional literati, it seems like there’s an entire sub-genre that can be called “colonialism wasn’t that bad, actually.” Recently, journalist Sherelle Jacobs caused a stir on social media with a piece for the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph chiding people for focusing on the sins of the architects of the British Empire. But she’s hardly a pioneer of the genre. A prominent economist, Deepak Lal, wrote a book titled In Praise of Empire with the thesis that, whatever damage empires do to human lives and cultures, at least they usually promote prosperity (like most economists, of course, Deepak ducks the question of whose prosperity). And then there’s historian Niall Ferguson, a tireless apologist for both British and United States imperialism, who once stated that Senegal was better off experiencing imperial rule.

All that said, I'm not going to dwell on the argument, that colonialism was overall good for regions like India, China, and West Africa. Colonial history is not really in my sphere of expertise outside a broad familiarity with the history of the French and British colonial empires, and anyway such arguments have been tackled brilliantly elsewhere. However,  as someone who does specialize in the history of the  Enlightenment, I can speak to how what makes this kind of politicized interpretation of history obnoxious at best and dangerous at worst is that it is actually "right", at least in the coldest, most technical sense. Colonialism was good at least for Europe, both for the obvious reasons (it created a complex luxury economy that improved the standard of living in most of Europe across classes, albeit highly unevenly) and less direct causes (colonialism generated a massive amount of travelogues and geographical writings, which fueled a sense of cultural relativism and undermined the concept of a universal, natural law, which in turn gradually gave rise to the Enlightenment and everything from religious pluralism to sexual freedom).

Of course, as any honest historian who doesn't have some kind of reactionary ax to grind will tell you (meaning not Niall Ferguson), saying a historical event is “good" is often subjective to the point of meaninglessness. The Black Death brought an end to serfdom in western Europe and enabled some workers across medieval Europe to claim a better life for themselves, but saying it was for the best despite the death toll has something of a psychotic ring to it. We can call the World Wars “good” from a modern liberal perspective because they brought about the fall of authoritarian monarchies like the German and Ottoman Empires, undermined colonialism and naked expansion as a justified reason for war, and eventually gave rise to the United Nations and a new, stronger framework for human rights. But that would be shoddy history not least because we can only speculate what an alternate present, one with neither World War in its past, would look like. Perhaps these or even better developments would have occurred without the apocalyptic struggles and massive loss of life. More to the point, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to express such a view without being dismissive and callous toward the loss of life, the destruction of communities and historic landmarks, and the incalculable trauma. To be fair, writers like Niall Ferguson do often include some passages about the horrors of colonialism, but it hardly erases the rather obvious fact that they are clearly working from a thesis that is basically “colonialism was worth it.” Such claims fly in the face of the nuance and humility that should be at the heart of a historian’s work, especially when a historian deals with events that ended hundreds of thousands of lives and scarred entire societies.

Even when talking about what colonialism brought to the European metropole, one should not and cannot speak of unalloyed positives. It is true that colonialism brought about prosperity Europe arguably hadn't seen since the golden age of the Roman Empire, if even then, but the same forces it unleashed also caused an inflation and land-rent crisis that literally lasted centuries and fueled inequality and poverty on such a scale that it broke down age-old systems of community organization and social support. The enclosure of farming and hunting land once held in common, the increased physical isolation of many European elites from the communities they ruled over, and the driving of workers and the petty bourgeois away from their homes and shops and to factories and relatively distant offices were all at least in part encouraged by economies and governing mindsets all fundamentally shaped by colonialism.

I know I wrote earlier about the impossibility of historical counterfactuals, but indulge me for just a minute and let me say with some confidence that without colonialism the Enlightenment and the benefits it brought about probably wouldn't have happened or at least would have happened very differently. At the same time, clearly colonialism cannot be separated from the poison fruits of the Enlightenment and what followed in the metropole: scientific racism, the exploitation of the industrial working class, the dehumanization of the urban poor, and, I would also argue, the pervasive view that economies should be managed simply to generate wealth and not for the public good.

It is telling how, at least in prestige newspapers and among the circles of public intellectuals and well-paid pundits, this discourse is treated as a more than acceptable take on both history and present-day world politics. I can just imagine the outcry if the New York Times printed an opinion piece on how we need to stop dwelling on the dark side of 20th century genocides because at least we gained a better, more sophisticated understanding of human rights in the end (although, given the state of the English-speaking world’s punditocracy these days, who knows?). Instead, what we do get are constant musings on the misunderstood positives of the most brutal, longest, and far-reaching sustained campaign of conquest and exploitation the world had ever seen. It’s no accident these interpretations of history still exist in a world where, as commentators like Uzodinma Iweala keep pointing out, Western politicians and opinion-makers still talk about places like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa as if they have not yet proven themselves worthy of independence.