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Colonialism
& Reality 17th
May 2002 Colonialism has gotten a bad
name in recent decades. Anti-colonialism was one of the dominant political
currents of the 20th century as dozens of European colonies in Asia and Africa
became free. Today we are still living with the aftermath of colonialism.
Apologists for terrorism, including Osama bin Laden, argue that terrorist acts
are an understandable attempt on the part of subjugated non- Western peoples to
lash out against their long-time Western oppressors. Activists at last year`s
World Conference on Racism, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, have called on
the West to pay reparations for slavery and colonialism to minorities and
natives of the Third World. These justifications of violence, and calls for
monetary compensation, rely on a large body of scholarship that has been
produced in the Western academy. That scholarship, which goes by the name of
anti-colonial studies, post-colonial studies or subaltern studies, is now an
intellectual school in itself and it exercises a powerful influence on the
humanities and social sciences. Its leading Western scholars include Edward
Said, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin. Their arguments are
supported by the ideas of Third World intellectuals like Wole Soyinka,
Chinweizu, Ashis Nandy and, perhaps most influential of all, Frantz Fanon. The assault against
colonialism and its legacy has many dimensions, but at its core it is a theory
of oppression that relies on three premises. First,colonialism and imperialism
are distinctively Western evils that were inflicted on the non-Western world.
Second, as a consequence of colonialism, the West became rich and the colonies
became impoverished; in short, the West succeeded at the expense of the
colonies. Third, the descendants of colonialism are worse off than they would be
had colonialism never occurred. In a widely used text, How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, the Marxist scholar Walter Rodney accuses European colonialism of
"draining African wealth and making it impossible to develop more rapidly
the resources of the continent". The African writer Chinweizu
strikes a similar note in his influential book The West and the Rest of Us. He
offers the following explanation for African poverty: "White hordes have
sallied forth from their Western homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule, and
exploit the world. Even now the fury of their expansionist assault on the rest
of us has not abated." In his classic work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
writes, "European opulence has been founded on slavery. The well-being and
progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of
Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races." Those notions are pervasive
and emotionally appealing. By suggesting that the West became dominant because
it is oppressive, they provide an explanation for Western global dominance
without encouraging white racial arrogance. They relieve the Third World of
blame for its wretchedness. Moreover, they imply politically egalitarian policy
solutions: the West is in possession of the "stolen goods" of other
cultures, and it has a moral and legal obligation to make some form of
repayment. I was raised to believe in
such things, and among most Third World intellectuals they are articles of
faith. The only problem is that they are not true. There is nothing uniquely
Western about colonialism. My native country of India, for example, was ruled by
the British for more than two centuries and many of my fellow Indians are still
smarting about that. What they often forget, however, is that before the British
came the Indians had been invaded and conquered by the Persians, the Afghans,
Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Arabs and the Turks. Depending on how you
count, the British were preceded by at least six colonial powers that invaded
and occupied India since ancient times. Indeed, ancient India was itself settled
by the Aryan people, who came from the north and subjugated the dark-skinned
indigenous people. Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West
either have no sense of history or have forgotten about the Egyptian empire, the
Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the Mongol empire,
the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn`t
the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and
Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn`t the Byzantine and Persian people
be paying reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And
while we`re at it, shouldn`t the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their
700-year rule? As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West
have participated in the game of conquest not only as the perpetrators, but also
as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the
Roman empire itself was destroyed by invasions of Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and
Visigoths from northern Europe. America, as we all know, was itself a colony of
England before its war of independence; England, before that, had been subdued
and ruled by Normans from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large
project if we are going to settle on a rule of social justice based on figuring
out whose ancestors did what to whom. The West did not become rich
and powerful through colonial oppression. It makes no sense to claim that the
West grew rich and strong by conquering other countries and taking their stuff.
How did the West manage to do that? In the late Middle Ages, say 1500, the West
was by no means the world`s most affluent or most powerful civilisation. Indeed,
those of China and of the Arab-Islamic world exceeded the West in wealth, in
knowledge, in exploration, in learning and in military power. So how did the
West gain so rapidly in economic, political and military power that, by the 19th
century, it was able to conquer virtually all of the other civilisations? That
question demands to be answered and the oppression theorists have never provided
an adequate explanation. Moreover, the West could not have reached its current
stage of wealth and influence by stealing from other cultures for the simple
reason that there wasn`t very much to take. "Oh yes there was," the
retort often comes. "The Europeans stole the raw material to build their
civilisation. They took rubber from Malaya, cocoa from West Africa, and tea from
India." But, as the economic historian PT Bauer points out, before British
rule there were no rubber trees in Malaya, no cocoa trees in West Africa, no tea
in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They
brought tea to India from China. And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa, a
crop the native people had never heard of. None of this is to deny that when the
colonialists could exploit native resources, they did. But that larceny cannot
possibly account for the enormous gap in economic, political and military power
that opened up between the West and the rest of the world. What, then, is the source of
that power? The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern
era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy and capitalism.
All those institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but
those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilisation. Consider science. It is based
on a shared human trait: the desire to know. People in every culture have tried
to learn about the world. Thus the Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Mayans
developed a calendar, the Hindus discovered the number zero, and so on. But
science - which requires experiments, laboratories, induction, verification and
what one scholar has called "the invention of invention," the
scientific method - that is a Western institution. Similarly, tribal
participation is universal, but democracy - which involves free elections,
peaceful transitions of power and separation of powers - is a Western idea.
Finally, the impulse to trade is universal, and there is nothing Western about
the use of money, but capitalism - which requires property rights, contracts,
courts to enforce them, limited-liability corporations, stock exchanges,
patents, insurance, double-entry bookkeeping - this ensemble of practices was
developed in the West. It is the dynamic interaction among these three Western
institutions - science, democracy and capitalism - that has produced the great
wealth, strength and success of Western civilisation. An example of this
interaction is technology, which arises out of the marriage between science and
capitalism. Science provides the knowledge that leads to invention, and
capitalism supplies the mechanism by which the invention is transmitted to the
larger society, as well as the economic incentive for inventors to continue to
make new things. Now we can understand better why the West was able, between the
16th and 19th centuries, to subdue the rest of the world and bend it to its
will. Indian elephants and Zulu spears were no match for British rifles and
cannonballs. Colonialism and imperialism are not the cause of the West`s
success; they are the result of that success. The wealth and power of European
nations made them arrogant and stimulated their appetite for global conquest.
Colonial possessions added to the prestige, and to a much lesser degree the
wealth, of Europe. But the primary cause of Western affluence and power is
internal - the institutions of science, democracy and capitalism acting
together. Consequently, it is simply wrong to maintain that the rest of the
world is poor because the West is rich, or that the West grew rich off stolen
goods from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The West created its own wealth, and
still does. The descendants of
colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism had never happened.
I would like to illustrate this point through a personal example. While I was a
young boy growing up in India I noticed that my grandfather, who had lived under
British colonialism, was instinctively and habitually anti-white. He wasn`t just
against the English; he was generally against white people. I realised that I
did not share his anti-white animus. That puzzled me: why did he and I feel so
differently? Only years later, after a great deal of reflection and a fair
amount of study, did the answer finally hit me. The reason for our difference of
perception was that colonialism had been pretty bad for him, but pretty good for
me. Another way to put it was that colonialism had injured those who lived under
it, but paradoxically it proved beneficial to their descendants. Much as it
chagrins me to admit it - and much as it will outrage many Third World
intellectuals for me to say it - my life would have been much worse had the
British never ruled India. How is that possible? Virtually everything that I am,
what I do and my deepest beliefs, all are the product of a world view that was
brought to India by colonialism. I am a writer, and I write in English. My
ability to do this, and to reach a broad market, is entirely thanks to the
British. My understanding of technology, which allows me, like so many Indians,
to function successfully in the modern world, was largely the product of a
Western education that came to India as a result of the British. So also my
beliefs in freedom of expression, in self-government, in equality of rights
under the law and in the universal principle of human dignity - they are all the
products of Western civilisation. I am not suggesting that it was the intention
of the colonialists to give all those wonderful gifts to the Indians.
Colonialism was not based on philanthropy; it was a form of conquest and rule. The British came to India to
govern and they were not primarily interested in the development of the natives,
whom they viewed as picturesque savages. It is impossible to measure, or
overlook, the pain and humiliation that the British inflicted during their long
period of occupation. Understandably, the Indians chafed under that yoke. Toward
the end of the British reign in India, Mahatma Gandhi was asked, "What do
you think of Western civilisation?" He replied, "I think it would be a
good idea." Despite their suspect motives and bad behaviour, however, the
British needed a certain amount of infrastructure to effectively govern India.
So they built roads, shipping docks, railway tracks, irrigation systems and
government buildings. Then they realised that they needed courts of law to
adjudicate disputes that went beyond local systems of dispensing justice. And so
the British legal system was introduced, with all its procedural novelties, like
"innocent until proven guilty". The British also had to educate the
Indians in order to communicate with them and to train them to be civil servants
in the empire. Thus Indian children were exposed to Shakespeare, Dickens, Hobbes
and Locke. In that way the Indians began to encounter words and ideas that were
unmentioned in their ancestral culture: "liberty",
"sovereignty", "rights" and so on. That brings me to the
greatest benefit that the British provided to the Indians: they taught them the
language of freedom. Once again, it was not the
objective of the colonial rulers to encourage rebellion. But by exposing Indians
to the ideas of the West, they did. The Indian leaders were the product of
Western civilisation. Gandhi studied in England and South Africa; Jawaharlal
Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge. That exposure was not entirely to
the good; Nehru, for example, who became India`s first prime minister after
independence, was highly influenced by Fabian socialism through the teachings of
Harold Laski. The result was that India had a mismanaged socialist economy for a
generation. But my broader point is that the champions of Indian independence
acquired the principles, the language and even the strategies of liberation from
the civilisation of their oppressors. This was true not just of India but also
of other Asian and African countries that broke free of the European yoke. My
conclusion is that against their intentions the colonialists brought things to
India that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the descendants of
colonialism. It is doubtful that non-Western countries would have acquired those
good things by themselves. It was the British who,
applying a universal notion of human rights, in the early 19th century abolished
the ancient Indian institution of suttee - the custom of tossing widows on their
husbands` funeral pyres. There is no reason to believe that the Indians, who had
practiced suttee for centuries, would have reached such a conclusion on their
own. Imagine an African or Indian king encountering the works of Locke or
Madison and saying, "You know, I think those fellows have a good point. I
should relinquish my power and let my people decide whether they want me or
someone else to rule." Somehow, I don`t see that as likely. Colonialism was
the transmission belt that brought to Asia, Africa and South America the
blessings of Western civilisation. Many of those cultures continue to have
serious problems of tyranny, tribal and religious conflict, poverty and
underdevelopment, but that is not due to an excess of Western influence; rather,
it is due to the fact that those countries are insufficiently Westernised.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which is probably in the worst position, has been described
by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as "a cocktail of
disasters". That is not because colonialism in Africa lasted so long, but
because it lasted a mere half-century. It was too short a time to permit Western
institutions to take firm root. Consequently, after their independence, most
African nations have retreated into a kind of tribal barbarism that can be
remedied only with more Western influence, not less. Africa needs more Western
capital, more technology, more rule of law and more individual freedom. The
academy needs to shed its irrational prejudice against colonialism. By providing
a more balanced perspective scholars can help to show the foolishness of
policies like reparations as well as justifications of terrorism that are based
on anti-colonial myths. None of this is to say that colonialism by itself was a
good thing, only that bad institutions sometimes produce good results. Colonialism, I freely
acknowledge, was a harsh regime for those who lived under it. My grandfather
would have a hard time giving even one cheer for colonialism. As for me, I
cannot manage three, but I am quite willing to grant two. So here they are: two
cheers for colonialism! Maybe you will now see why I am not going to be sending
an invoice for reparations to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Dinesh
D`Souza |