Guest Article: In Defence of Colonialism

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Martin van Creveld

R. Hallpike*

One of the certainties, not to say dogmas, of modern culture is that colonialism was very, very wicked. As a result, it requires grovelling apologies from all the nations that were guilty of it. Having observed it at first hand in Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia fifty years ago, this moralistic certainty strikes me as naive and ignorant. Why? I will now explain.

The situation of Man over the last five thousand years or so has increasingly been one of advanced civilisations, large, complex societies organized into centralized states at one extreme, and small, illiterate tribal societies with very primitive technologies at the other. In this ancient confrontation a frequent course of events was the domination or conquest of the tribal societies by the empires. Nineteenth- and twentieth century European colonialism was a special episode in this history because the contrasts between their scientific, technological, cultural and political development and that of the tribal societies they dominated was the most extreme of all time, The consequences were global.

Tribal societies are small-scale and inward-looking. Based largely on kinship and without political centralization, in them people mix mainly with those they know and strangers are rare. Technology is primitive, economies barely rise beyond the subsistence level, and violence endemic. Each tribe had its own religious rituals and speaks its own particular language which may only have a few hundreds or thousands users. Early states, however, in some cases developed into large, wealthy civilisations and empires, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and the Graeco-Roman world, with much more advanced technology, arts, crafts, and architecture, writing, and professional armies. They were also the major centres of inventions that, especially through trade and navigation, spread widely throughout the world. At the other extreme sub-Saharan Africa, despite its size and diversity of cultures, contributed virtually nothing to world civilisation. No writing; no technological inventions; no significant architecture; a generally low level of craftsmanship; and no systems of political or religious thought.

This inequality between what I shall call imperial and tribal cultures became ever greater through developments in Europe. Meaning, the Renaissance and the development of navigation; the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century; the Enlightenment; and the growth of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout these centuries large areas of the world, such as Oceania and Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and large parts of the Americas remained populated by small tribal societies. Often with high levels of internal and external violence (violence against women specifically included), low levels of technology, and subsistence economies. To be sure, here and there some particularly powerful tribe succeeded in developing into what, for lack of a better term, I shall call a proto-state. However, they too remained at an illiterate and primitive level of culture.

A number of European nations had been trading with Africa and other areas such as the East Indies for centuries: the Portuguese, for example, had reached the coast of West Africa by 1485. But as the nineteenth century proceeded they began colonising these backward areas of the world and, as they did so, imposing a series of revolutionary changes on them. If only because power is always abused, the process involved considerable brutality, oppression and exploitation; but that was part of the price indigenous societies had to pay. The Romans too were brutal, but their rule in Britain resulted in the longest period of peace that country would enjoy until the Tudors.

Come the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colonisers, having taken over, amalgamated numbers of tribes into larger national units. Complete with centralised government, administrative systems, codes of laws, judicial systems to settle disputes, police and armed forces to maintain order and put down communal violence, and schools to teach literacy and one of the world languages such as English or French. They also introduced currency to facilitate trade and payment of taxes; developed the economy and cash crops; abolished inhuman practices such as slavery, cannibalism, infanticide, and human sacrifice; introduced hospitals and medical services; and built roads, railways, and telecommunications, water projects, irrigation, and sanitation. Not least, missionaries spread one of the world religions, usually Christianity which, like English or French, allowed people to begin sharing a common culture above and beyond that of their limited tribal world.

These revolutionary developments could never have been produced from within the indigenous tribal societies. Instead, they had to be forcibly imposed by outsiders. The motives of the colonisers varied. Some no doubt loved power; others went out to the colonies to become rich; and still others did what they did because they thought they were doing good. But the motivations of the colonisers were irrelevant. Historically speaking, all that counted was the effect in pushing civilisation and causing it to spread.
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Starting at least as far back as Rousseau, there has long been a tradition that idolises “the noble savage,” If only he had been left alone, so the thinking goes, he would have been much happier. Having lived in tribal societies I know that this a fantasy of the intelligentsia. People who would not survive a week if they had to live in these societies as they used to be in pre-colonial days; surrounded by violence, sickness, famine and starvation, the fear of witches and evil spirits, and grinding physical hardship which their primitive technology could not mitigate.

Modern propaganda also sugests that the propensity to enslave defenceless peoples is engrained in the psyche of Westerners. In fact slavery is one of the oldest and most widespread of human institutions. It was normal in much of the Islamic world. Also, and especially, in Africa, where powerful kingdoms such as Dahomey, Ashanti, Benin and Ghana of West Africa earned huge profits by rounding up and selling the European slave-traders what they needed. In East Africa the Arabs and the Ethiopians had been enslaving black Africans since before the time of Christ. In Saudi Arabia, slavery was only abolished in 1962. Especially in the Americas and the Caribbean during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, slavery and colonialism went together. Not so in the 19^th when the movement for the abolition of slavery meant that Britain, and eventually other Western nations, used colonial rule as a means of abolishing it.

But there is a further consequence of colonialism which is seldom appreciated. It was only when tribal societies were combined into modern nation states, with law and order, literacy and schooling, and the ability to speak one of the world languages with access to modern communications and technology, that they could finally take their place in the global community of nations and make themselves known to the rest of the world. International aid schemes and health projects in particular would have been quite impossible in societies still at the tribal level of development.

To sum up,it was colonialism which laid the essential foundations of the modern world of independent nations. The latter could never have come into existence without that prior stage of colonial nation-building. That this revolutionary process involved considerable hardship and cruelty no one doubts. However, that is in the nature of revolutions; in the end, colonialism vastly improved the lives of its subjects. Its demise which started in 1945, was also the first time in history when powerful colonial empires voluntarily gave freedom and independence to their imperial subjects. Often. As it turned out, before they were ready to enjoy it and, as a result, relapsed into anarchy or despotism.

* C. R. Hallpike is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. He studied anthropology at Oxford and conducted extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea. He has published many books, including The Foundations of Primitive Thought and Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains, and regards political correctness as the greatest danger in our time to academic research and freedom of thought generally.

Pussycats III, or the Rise and Fall of Empires

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

“What is time?” asked Saint Augustine. And, answering his own question, wrote: “I know what it is, but I cannot easily explain it.” Thirteen hundred years or so later Isaac Newton described some of time’s outstanding characteristics as he saw them. In his scheme of things time had an objective existence, i.e. it was not something that existed merely in our feelings or thought. It moved from the past to the future, never the other way around. Flowing along, so to speak, it could never repeat itself. The speed of the flow was fixed, and nothing could interfere with it.

The Einsteinian Revolution challenged these ideas. Nevertheless, to this day many, perhaps most, people see time in Newtonian terms. Some scholars believe that the idea had something to do with the invention of mechanical clocks around 1300. But that is a subject we cannot explore here. Suffice it to say that, around 1760, it was joined by the idea of progress. Not only did time move from the past to the future, but as it did so things became better, or at any rate were capable of becoming better, than they had been. All men will become brothers” wrote Friedrich Schiller in his Ode to Joy (1785).

Shifting the emphasis from the individual to the polity, the father of modern history, Friedrich Hegel, led his strong support to this idea. So did all three of the most important modern ideologies that drew on his work, i.e. liberalism, socialism/communism, and fascism. As Steve Pinker‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) shows, not even the experience of two world wars, Auschwitz and Hiroshima have put an end to the idea that man, and by implication society, is capable of moral improvement and has actually been improving.

Strictly speaking, neither the idea of progress nor that of the kind of time in which it takes place can be proved. That explains why the latter has always coexisted, and to some extent continues to coexist, with several others. Particularly interesting in this respect is time as moving in cycles. The idea was prevalent during classical antiquity. Such key figures as the statesmen Lycurgus, the philosophers Plato and Seneca, and the historians Polybius and Livy (who wrote that Rome “was struggling with its own greatness”) all advocated it. The great fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldoun based his history on it. So did Machiavelli and the eighteenth-century philosophs Montesquieu and Gibbons. During the first half of the twentieth century it enjoyed a strong revival at the hands of historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.

Some of these men sought ways to delay the process or, if possible, bring it to a halt. Thus Isocrates, the fourth-century BC Athenian statesman, hoped that Athens, by not ruling its subject city-states too harshly, could avoid the kind of rebellion that had brought previous empires (including its own as it had existed in the previous century) to an end. Arguing that trade generated gaps between riches (plutos) and poverty (penia) and that such gaps necessarily led to civil war and collapse, Plato in The Republic sought to ban it. In Sparta, private property as well as gold and silver were prohibited. Yet as was clear even as such measures were being proposed and implemented, in the long run the cycle of rise and fall could not be halted.

As one would expect from a line of thinkers stretching over two and a half millennia, there was no agreement as to just how the process works. Still, looking back, the gist of the argument can be summarized as follows. The earliest humans lived in rustic tribes. They fought each other over land, domestic animals, and women who, as the book of Exodus makes clear, were seen as little different from cattle. One tribe having conquered the rest, it took on its richer settled neighbors. As, for example, the Persians did in respect to Babylon; the Goths in respect to Rome; the Aztecs in respect to the Toltecs; and the Mongols in respect to China.

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Having triumphed, conquered and subjugated, the former tribesmen grew rich and soft. Allowing themselves to be governed by women, they indulged in every kind of luxury. Pushing the process along, rich societies are almost always urban. Making a living in such an environment requires a long education. This causes childhood to become extended and makes raising children very expensive. Hence, as some Roman statesmen began arguing even before the Emperor Augustus passed legislation to increase the birth rate, people who live in cities tend to have few children.

Relative to their size, such societies end up by having fewer men of military age. The small number of men of military age turns them into a precious resource and makes societies reluctant to have them shed their blood even for the best of causes. If, on top of all this, the young are prohibited from experiencing and expressing the joys of war, let alone enjoying the rewards it can bring, the remaining ones are unlikely to be good at waging it.

Some such societies have tried to solve the problem by enlisting mercenaries, foreigners included, thus separating thinkers from fighters. The outcome, says Thucydides, is that decisions are made by cowards—excellent sheep, to quote one recent writer—while the fighting is done by idiots. Others put their trust in technology as the mid-fourth century anonymous author of De Rebus Bellicis (About Things Military) and quite some Chinese officials of various ages suggested. To no avail. Less than a century after De Rebus was written the barbarians brought the Roman Empire to an end. Far from defeating the northern barbarians once and for all, China was conquered by them not once but twice.

Finally, here and there attempts have been made to alleviate the problem by enlisting women. They are, however, unlikely to succeed. For obvious biological reasons, women are vital for the future of any society. As a result their blood is invariably perceived as more precious than that of men and very few of them actually fight or are killed in battle.

All this caused the societies in question to abandon the military virtues that had once led them to greatness or even start looking down on them. Attacked in turn by their poorer but more virile and aggressive neighbors, who were often joined by subject peoples, they ended by collapsing in ignominy. Often the conquerors were backward peoples whose only advantage over the conquered was their fighting spirit. The cycle, Plato and the rest believed, repeated itself, forming the stuff of which history was made.

Is there any reason to think it has ceased doing so?