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Bruce Gilley’s watershed academic article “The Case for Colonialism” sparked a global furor. The book has been called, “one of the most important works of history of the last fifty years.” One thing in certain: it cannot be ignored.

The Case for Colonialism - Bruce Gilley.pdf (file not included in this release)

Highlights

As the English economist Joan Robinson famously quipped, “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited all.” Gilley, Bruce. The Case for Colonialism (p. 104).

[Public Choice vol. 98 iss. 3_4] Robin M. Grier - Colonial legacies and economic growth (1999) [10.1023_a_1018322908007] - libgen.li.pdf

Summary

Summary of The Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley

Bruce Gilley’s The Case for Colonialism presents a provocative and controversial argument that colonialism, particularly as practiced by European powers from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries, was largely beneficial, legitimate, and in some cases, preferable to post-colonial alternatives. His argument unfolds in the following key themes:

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1. Colonialism as a Net Benefit

• Gilley asserts that Western colonialism improved the lives of many in the Third World through infrastructure, governance, education, law, and public health.
• He claims many colonized peoples accepted or even welcomed European rule because it provided greater stability, justice, and modernization than local alternatives.
• Countries with long colonial tenures, especially under the British, generally show better long-term economic and political outcomes (e.g., Botswana, Singapore, Malaysia).

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2. Critique of Anti-Colonialism

• Gilley criticizes anti-colonial movements and intellectuals for romanticizing pre-colonial societies and ignoring the devastation that followed independence in many places (e.g., Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, post-apartheid South Africa).
• He argues that anti-colonialism led to civil war, economic collapse, and tyrannical regimes in many newly independent countries.
• Intellectuals like Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and others are blamed for promoting a narrative that infantilizes former colonies by blaming all their problems on colonialism.

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3. Colonialism vs. Post-Colonial Reality

• Case studies (e.g., Nigeria, Kenya, Lebanon, Zanzibar) are used to contrast the relative order and prosperity of colonial governance with the disorder and decline post-independence.
• Countries not colonized (e.g., Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran) often fared worse than their colonized neighbors.

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4. Rehabilitating Colonialism

Gilley proposes three ways to “reclaim colonialism”:

1. Imitation – Developing countries should replicate effective colonial governance models.
2. Recolonization – In certain cases, Western countries might be invited to manage key governance functions.
3. New Colonies – In extreme situations, Western powers might establish new colonies with local consent.

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5. Empirical Defense

• Gilley references numerous studies and historical data to argue colonialism:
  • Boosted literacy and health.
  • Created functioning bureaucracies and legal systems.
  • Facilitated integration into the global economy.
• He criticizes opponents of colonialism for ignoring empirical data in favor of ideological critiques.

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6. Moral and Philosophical Arguments

• He argues that colonialism was not inherently immoral and that all forms of governance involve domination.
• Many colonial rulers acted with good intentions, and abuses were exceptions rather than the rule.
• The backlash against colonialism, he suggests, is driven more by ideological fashion and guilt than by reasoned analysis.

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7. Cultural Contrasts and Civilizational Arguments

• Gilley draws stark contrasts between Western and African or Middle Eastern cultures, arguing that colonialism offered modernization and rational governance that local traditions often lacked.
• He contends that African and Middle Eastern societies were often unable to maintain modern institutions without external guidance.

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8. Suppression of Debate

• The essay recounts the intense backlash Gilley faced after publishing his article, including death threats, retractions, and accusations of racism.
• He likens the academic and public shaming to Maoist-style ideological purges, arguing that it stifles legitimate academic inquiry.

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Introduction

In 1851, after offering amnesty to the pretender and being refused, the British and their African allies stormed the town and restored the legitimate king. From this beginning, the colony of Lagos would expand into the greatest British colony in Africa, and eventually the gargantuan independent country of Nigeria, today with 225 million souls. (Location 108)

The 19th century period of Europe’s economic rise and subsequent expansion coincided with the deterioration of rival empires in the non-Western world. These empires had lorded it over subject peoples based on little more than force and spectacle. But the Industrial Revolution and the rapid spread of communications and knowledge in Europe undermined their claims to rule. (Location 111)

alternative to European colonial rule was not a merrie land of milk and honey but a toxic mix of rival European armies, feuding local chiefs, unscrupulous arms dealers, and dishonest commodity brokers. (Location 113)

In 1903, a local British commander, Frederick Lugard, marched north with a force composed mainly of Hausa Africans. He relieved the Royal Niger Company of its duties. The British “conquest” if it can be called that, was remarkably easy since local peasants were all too ready to swap the degrading rule of their emirs for the protection of the British. Journalist Shaw was so impressed that she married Lugard and wrote the first account of the amalgamation of the region under British rule.6 She called it a “new India.” (Location 127)

“There was no ill-will after the occupation. We were used to conquerors and these were different; they were polite and obviously out to help us rather than themselves,” Bello wrote. (Location 134)

we can speak of “European colonialism” in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America as a coherent whole. (Location 143)

Confining ourselves only to the post-Napoleonic empires, one half of the member states of today’s United Nations and one half of the world’s population live in countries that came under European colonial rule at some point from the 19th to the 20th centuries. (Location 145)

In the British case, the first phase began with Ireland in 1603, Jamestown in 1607, and Bermuda in 1609. The grander post-Napoleonic phase began with the Cape of Good Hope (1814), Singapore (1819), and Burma (1824). (Location 153)

While the word “colonialism” initially connoted the settlement of people, in the course of the 19th century, it came to connote more the settlement of ideas and institutions—in particular liberal toleration, political representation, the rule of law, property rights, and the security of borders. It was these Enlightenment ideas and institutions, far more than soldiers and administrators, that colonized the world. Sending settlers, building a fort, or establishing a silver mine were now disparaged as “mere” imperialism. The term “colonialism” represented a more elevated vocation in which improving the lives of subject peoples through a transfer of liberal norms and impersonal governance institutions were the goals. (Location 156)

Another reason for distinguishing these two periods is that the 19th century was the final and most potent phase of what economic historians call “the great divergence” between the West and the Rest. (Location 162)

Very few major areas of the world were not touched by this colonialism because the “push” factors emanating from Europe were almost always reciprocated by even stronger “pull” factors emanating from the colonized themselves. (Location 168)

Sultan of Brunei, for instance, installed an English traveler, James Brooke, as the rajah of his chaotic province of Sarawak (in today’s Malaysia) in 1841, after which order and prosperity improved to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established there in 1888, the Sultan preferred to leave it under Brooke family control until 1946.8 (Location 170)

European rule was established with remarkable ease throughout the world because local elites believed that on balance, it would be better than the alternatives—the “preservers,” “facilitators,” and “collaborators,” as the Stanford political scientist David Abernethy called them, far outnumbered the “resisters.”9 For most colonized peoples, especially women and marginalized groups, European rule was an opportunity more than a threat. (Location 175)

Countries that were not subject to colonial rule in this second era—like China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti, and Guatemala—provide a measure of comparison to help identify what, if anything, were the distinctive effects of colonialism. The famous paired comparisons of colonized versus non-colonized countries like Belize-Guatemala, Jamaica-Haiti, Malaysia-Thailand, Kenya-Ethiopia, Liberia-Ghana, or Pakistan-Iran provide one approach. These comparisons suggest that the only thing worse than being colonized was not being colonized. The main countries that were never European colonies—especially China, Ethiopia, Iran, Thailand, and Nepal—or whose colonial experiences ended before the modern colonial era—Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti—are hardly compelling as evidence that not being colonized was a boon. (Location 179)

vacuum of governance in the face of modern pressures that Western colonialism could fill. (Location 187)

India, which looms large in the “might have been” debates, the Muslim Mughul empire had collapsed just as European trading interests arrived. The Persian king Nader Shah issued a common Persian-Indian currency at the end of 1739 after defeating the Mughul army, indicative of his plan to incorporate the area into his Iranian empire. Some Indian nationalists opine that Persian rule would have been preferable.10 But as the British historian Michael Axworthy noted, “the massacre of perhaps 30,000 people perpetrated by Nader while he was in Delhi would hardly have been an auspicious curtain-raiser for permanent Persian rule there.”11 When Nader returned home, he gouged out his son’s eyes, castrated his military commander, and had eight merchants who had purchased a royal carpet chained together by the neck, thrown into a pit, and burned alive. Thousands more perished in his various pogroms. To the Hindu on the street, the arrival of the British East India Company must have seemed a godsend. (Location 187)

In short, it is the case for a humble submission to the facts of life rather than the worked up intellectual fantasies of the scholar class. (Location 207)

The disasters of “free” states like Haiti (which threw off its French colonial rulers in 1803 and promptly descended into two centuries of chaos), Hobson noted, showed that ordered and coordinated European colonial rule was better in most cases than a mad scramble. (Location 217)

Gandhi later donned native garb and claimed to be a spiritualist challenging the empire. But his whole life and mental make-up was a testament to the benefits of colonialism. (Location 228)

Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Ferhat Abbas in Algeria both hoped for a continued French condominium, while Patrice Lumumba praised Belgian rule in the Congo. The challenge, as they saw it, was how to enjoy the stabilizing role of an external governing power while unlocking the benefits of empire. That is why the former colonies of the defeated Ottoman empire were put under the control of European countries as League of Nations “mandates” after World War I. (Location 232)

The Second World War changed everything. The Anglo-American Atlantic Charter of 1941 promised “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Western powers were exhausted from a second sapping world war centered in Europe. They were ready to throw in the towel. (Location 236)

“It can’t hurt to ask!” became the motto for disgruntled native politicians everywhere. To their surprise, the colonial rulers usually said, “Yes.” The reason was not noble anti-colonial “resistance” but ignoble European resignation. A by-product of the two world wars was a deep turn inwards for Europe. Material deprivation and national confidence were at a low point. Among the many targets of the emotional response to the devastations of war were overseas colonies, often seen as a conceit for nations that could no longer keep their own houses in order. (Location 246)

Leninist anti-colonialism of revolutionary Russia. The radical anti-colonialists of the Left were soon joined by radical anti-colonialists on the Right. (Location 252)

Nazis had seen themselves as freeing Germany from the “colonial” rule of the Treaty of Versailles. Like so many anti-colonial fanatics, Hitler wanted to purify his culture of the depredations of liberal civilization. (Location 253)

After the war, this illiberal ideology of anti-colonialism was exported with a missionary zeal to the colonies by European intellectuals of both Left and Right. Egypt’s leader Gamal Nasser employed ex-Nazis in Cairo to fan the flames of anti-colonialism throughout the Middle East. This new anti-colonialism offered natives a magical explanation of everything they disliked about modern life and a utopian promise of paradise if only the yoke of colonialism could be lifted. (Location 259)

The BBC’s Listener magazine noted in 1957 that colonialism had become “the commonest term of abuse nowadays throughout more than half the world.” (Location 265)

Once the United States and Soviet Union began vying for the affections of anti-colonial agitators, there was no will power in European capitals to remain. (Location 273)

In the span of three decades—roughly 1945 to 1975—the world system oversaw the mass production of 100-odd countries with little more than a flag and a Government House to their names. (Location 276)

The new United Nations became what the American scholar Jeffrey Herbst called a “decolonization machine” as it stamp-pressed nation after nation into being.21 The Oxford philosopher John Plamenatz warned in 1960 that “foreign rulers ought to see to it that, when they withdraw, the passive and inarticulate do not fall victims to a ruthless minority of exuberant patriots.”22 Yet, this is precisely what happened in most places. Civil war, political tyranny, and economic collapse spread from one major country to another, including to 11 of the Big 17 mentioned above: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Morocco, Algeria, and the Sudan. (Location 277)

many former colonies like Singapore, Malaysia, Botswana, and Belize got along just fine with “the legacies of colonialism” because their leaders made better choices. This pat phrase —“the legacies of colonialism”—would have enduring appeal to anti-colonial intellectuals. It had no statute of limitations because to deny oneself this intellectual cop-out was to force oneself into mature thinking. (Location 289)

Agog at the devastation throughout the Third World, and unwilling, as the African novelist Chinua Achebe put it, to examine “the chaotic jumble of tragic and tragi-comical problems we have unleashed on ourselves,” Western intellectuals and their Third World imitators invented a make-believe world called “post-colonialism” that was entirely insulated from reality. In this cuddly world of post-colonial thought, they would preen and posture with dense jargon about obscure topics and theories of cause and effect. (Location 296)

Successive genocides in Zanzibar, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka left little impression on the bright minds of post-colonial theory. Nor did Zimbabwe’s downward spiral after decolonization in 1980, South Africa’s after 1994, or Hong Kong’s after 1997. Calling these human tragedies “the cost of progress” became untenable. So did explanations of them in terms of “the legacies of colonialism.” But a persistent and trained blindness afflicted the intellectual classes. (Location 301)

The island of Zanzibar (off the east coast of Africa) became independent from Britain in 1963. (Location 305)

One of the two black rebel leaders, both of whom had moved to the island from the mainland in colonial times because of its opportunities, (Location 309)

Over just two days, between 5,000 and 10,000 people were murdered. A further 20,000 “stooges” were imprisoned, while 100,000 mostly middle class and wealthy people fled the island—so 43% of the population was either killed, imprisoned, or exiled. (Location 317)

Communist friends arrived in this new “people’s republic” offering state repression and poverty. (Location 325)

For the next forty years, a human disaster unfolded on the island that would leave it shattered and destitute. In the words of an American historian, the revolution led to “confiscations, shortages, surveillance, and fear.” (Location 330)

Seminal books that would become bibles to generations of university students—Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)—were published even as the premises of their arguments were collapsing in the real world. (Location 361)

If colonialism had been such a terrible thing, as these books claimed, then formerly colonized places should have sprung to vigorous life the moment the colonizers were sent packing. Even allowing for a seemly pause to recover from the alleged traumas of colonialism, it should not have taken more than a decade or so for the fruits of decolonization to be harvested. Germany and Japan, after all, had been laid waste by the war and were quickly becoming democratic and wealthy by the late 1950s. (Location 364)

A much later book by the Swiss economic historian Bouda Etemad neatly began with the question: “How did they do that?”37 In his study of how European colonization happened, Etemad documented the extraordinary extent to which very few Europeans were actually involved. Most of the colonizing was done by natives. A whole new vocabulary arose to explain how and why the colonized seemed so darned content with colonialism: “instrumentalism,” “strategic engagement,” “exchange relations,” and sometimes even that poisoned term “collaboration.” (Location 384)

Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka’s (Location 389)

The anti-colonialists had outdone their colonial tormentors in terms of racism, exoticization, and degradation. Those post-colonial thinkers who espied a “Christian-colonialist conspiracy” behind every aspect of modern society were engaged in a fantasy. Such allegations were “facile cover-up expressions for the lack of a painstaking concern for truth,” he charged. (Location 396)

A sharp repudiation of the anti-colonial mindset came in 1979 when Singapore’s foreign minister, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, told the UN general assembly that Third World leaders had developed a tendency “to adopt the vices of their former imperial masters while carefully eschewing some of their virtues.” (Location 399)

As the delegates gathered for their ritual denunciations of colonialism, the Nellie Massacre outside the conference windows told a story of the problems of anti-colonialism. (Location 423)

The 1980s was the decade when the former colonies showed the first signs of reclaiming the colonial structures their leaders had destroyed: market economies, political democracy, the rule of law, property rights, freedoms, and foreign investment and trade. In a now-classic paper on economic development, the Burmese economist Hla Myint had advocated export-led policies that “in their technical properties, may not be very different from those of the colonial governments in the past.” (Location 426)

Those lessons were hitting home by the 1980s. At the time that Myint wrote, in 1958, South Korea’s economy was the same size as Peru’s, while Taiwan’s was the same size as Egypt’s. In the following decades, South Korea and Taiwan pursued colonial-style policies of export-development and financial and economic integration with the West, while Egypt and Peru pursued anti-colonial protest. By 1982, South Korea’s economy was more than twice as large as Peru’s, while Taiwan’s was 70% larger than Egypt’s. Today, Taiwan and South Korea have per capita levels of GDP that are four times higher than their anti-colonial counterparts. Throughout the Third World, other countries like Kenya and Chile that also rejected the prescriptions of the dependistas became richer than their neighbors. (Location 430)

[A Tribute to Colonialism] in 1987, (Location 439)

Carlos Rangel’s 1986 book, Third World Ideology and Western Reality, (Location 443)

scholar Pascal Bruckner in his book of the same year, The Tears of the White Man, (Location 445)

did not take a Ph.D. to realize that the countries which had preserved their colonial legal orders, economic systems, bureaucracies, and political pluralism were the ones that were doing better. In Southeast Asia, Singapore and Malaysia carried on the colonial system with great success while anti-colonialists laid waste to Burma and former French Indo-China. Across the Middle East, anti-colonial movements destroyed millions of lives from Algeria to Lebanon while a few beacons of stability like the United Arab Emirates and Israel took over colonial mandates to create decent societies. Africa was no different: grotesque human suffering at the hands of anti-colonial movements from Ghana to Mozambique leavened by adherence to colonial systems of law and market economies in places like Botswana and South Africa. Apartheid South Africa served as a model of a modernized African state, and over 100,000 black Africans a year applied to migrate there during the 1980s.45 Countries like India that had spent forty years trying to build socialism and Marxist secular societies finally did a U-turn, liberalizing both economy and society after running into a brick wall (in India’s case with a currency crisis in 1991). (Location 450)

main gift of colonialism was to have conjoined backward areas to the world capitalist system. Post-colonial leaders had a choice: either embrace or spurn that legacy. Incorporation into the world economy as exporters of raw materials had provided the first step in domestic industrialization, to be followed, if leaders adhered to good governance and investment, to export-based economic success. The economic benefit of colonialism was simple, Fieldhouse argued: for the first time in world history, “wealth” was something that accumulated and could be sold, which translated into social benefits. (Location 465)

The American economist Robin Grier found that British colonies, mainly because of their educational systems, generated sustained growth for their colonies. Across all colonies, those that were held for longer did better. (Location 470)

study of the effects of colonialism on the income levels of people on 81 islands, they found “a robust positive relationship between colonial tenure and modern outcomes.” Bermuda and Guam were better off than Papua New Guinea and Fiji because they were colonized for longer. The costs of anti-colonialism in Cuba were shocking: comparable islands had income levels roughly ten times that pitiful island. (Location 480)

British historian Niall Ferguson published Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Like Fieldhouse, he argued that economic and political modernization could not have happened without colonialism. The British empire brought the English language, property rights, banking, the rule of law, Christian ethics, a limited state, representative government, civil society, and the idea of liberty to places that would have at best concocted some debased local interpretation of these things in the absence of direct colonial rule. (Location 487)

Just as Marx had failed to realize that the parliamentary reports into factory conditions that he devoured in order to stand up his criticism of capitalism were themselves the reason that capitalism would survive, critics of colonialism who spent many delightful hours parsing the lurid details of colonial crimes found in the public records, failed to understand that it was precisely the liberal civilization that so diligently investigated and corrected such crimes that was why it was of such benefit to the colonized. Post-colonial tyrants tended to just dump the bodies in the river and deny anything had happened. (Location 492)

The American philosopher Christopher Morris wondered in a 2006 essay why critics of colonialism never paid attention to the evidence of illegitimacy, repression, exploitation, racism, and violence in independent states. “All systems of governance involve some kind of ‘domination’,” he noted. One could not deny that in principle, good colonies could be more ethical forms of domination than bad states. In practice, it did not take a trained statistician to see that many were. “Nice empires are ‘not so bad’,” Morris wrote, “and empires are not harder to justify or to legitimate than states.”50 (Location 503)

Ibn Warraq published Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (Location 518)

Warraq pointed out the many logical contradictions in Said’s theory. His insistence that all Orientalist knowledge was false and distorted sat uneasily with his simultaneous claim that this knowledge was so excellent that it helped Europeans to dominate foreign cultures. In addition, Said argued that all claims of “true” knowledge are narratives, which begs the question of how something can be false. The main empirical problem for Said’s theory was that it could not account for Germany. It was like a theory of war that could not account for peace. (Location 519)

To be colonized in this 19th to 20th century era, was to have much better democratic prospects, according to a statistical study of 143 colonial episodes by the Swedish economist Ola Olsson. (Location 538)

Danish political scientist Jacob Hariri in a statistical study of 111 countries, also found the obvious counterpart conclusion: to not be colonized because of the existence of militarily or politically strong pre-modern state, or to be only symbolically ruled by Europeans piggy-backing on traditional institutions rather than replacing them, was to be more likely to be saddled with a dysfunctional state and political system later on. (Location 540)

PART I   The Article and Its Aftermath (Location 744)

1   The Case for Colonialism (Location 747)

The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities—the civilizing mission without scare quotes—that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. (Location 757)

three ways to reclaim colonialism. (Location 761)

One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. (Location 762)

A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. (Location 764)

Thirdly, in some instances it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch. (Location 767)

Colonialism can return (either as a governance style or as an extension of Western authority) only with the consent of the colonized. (Location 768)

Sèbe has documented how the founding figures of Western colonialism in Africa (such as Livingstone in Zambia, Lugard in Nigeria, and de Brazza in Congo) are enjoying a resurgence of official and social respect in those countries now that romanticized pre-colonial and disappointing post-colonial approaches to governance have lost their sheen. (Location 770)

Three Failures of Anti-Colonial Critique (Location 777)

objectively harmful (rather than beneficial); and that it was subjectively illegitimate (rather than legitimate). There is, in addition, a third line of criticism that merits revision: that it offends the sensibilities of contemporary society. (Location 780)

Countries that did not have a significant colonial history—China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti, and Guatemala, for instance—provide a measure of comparison to help identify what if anything were the distinctive effects of colonialism. So too does research into pre-colonial histories that, almost by definition, reveal comparatively weak institutions, divided societies, and subsistence economies, for instance in Biber’s study of pre-colonial Namibia. (Location 794)

Daniels argues that “[h]ad the British left Kenya to the Mau Mau, there would have been anarchy and further civil war, perhaps even genocide.”8 Just as many Kenyans joined the Kikuyu Home Guard and the special prison service for the rebels as joined the insurgency, and the independent Kenyan government has long applauded the historic contribution of the British in suppressing the movement. (Location 810)

Perhaps the most egregious violation of epistemic virtues is internal coherence (or non-contradiction). Eminent scholars repeatedly make the logically contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough, whether with regard to boundaries, governing institutions, economic systems, or social structures, as evidenced in the short space of just two pages by Young. (Location 818)

Research that is careful in conceptualizing and measuring controls, that establishes a feasible counterfactual, that includes multiple dimensions of costs and benefits weighted in some justified way, and that adheres to basic epistemic virtues often finds that at least some, if not many or most, episodes of Western colonialism were a net benefit, as the literature review by Juan and Pierskalla shows.15 Such works have found evidence for significant social, economic, and political gains under colonialism: expanded education; improved public health; the abolition of slavery; widened employment opportunities; improved administration; the creation of basic infrastructure; female rights; enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities; fair taxation; access to capital; the generation of historical and cultural knowledge; and national identity formation, to mention just a few dimensions.16 (Location 835)

Until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes—all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives. The “preservers,” “facilitators,” and “collaborators” of colonialism, as Abernethy shows, far outnumbered the “resisters,” at least until very late: “Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.” (Location 850)

The Costs of Anti-Colonialism (Location 891)

In our “age of apology” for atrocities, one of the many conspicuous silences has been an apology for the many atrocities visited upon Third World peoples by anti-colonial advocates. (Location 895)

Guinea-Bissau and its anti-colonial “hero” Amilcar Cabral. In launching a guerrilla war against Portuguese rule in 1963, Cabral insisted that it was “necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people.” (Location 898)

The resulting war killed 15,000 people (out of a population of 600,000) and at least as many civilians, and displaced another 150,000 (a quarter of the population). (Location 905)

Once “liberation” was achieved in 1974, a second human tragedy unfolded, costing at least 10,000 further lives as a direct result of conflict. By 1980, rice production had fallen by more than 50 percent to 80,000 tonnes (from a peak of 182,000 tonnes under the Portuguese). (Location 907)

Guinea-Bissau has a more or less permanent UN peacekeeping force and continues to suck up millions in aid as the “continuadores de Cabral” squabble under what the World Bank calls “continuing political disarray.”36 Today, in per capita terms, rice production is still only one-third of what it was under the Portuguese despite forty years of international aid and technological advances. (Location 917)

the eighty countries that threw off the colonial “yoke” after World War II, at least half experienced similar trauma while most of the rest limped on. For sixty years, Third World despots have raised the specter of recolonization to discredit democratic opposition and ruin their economies. (Location 927)

A sobering World Bank report of 1996 noted: “Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.” (Location 939)

Resurrecting Colonial Governance (Location 962)

In many cases, colonial bureaucrats and police were rehired by the newly independent governments. (Location 971)

No less an anti-colonial “hero” than Chinua Achebe ended his days with a memoir that explicitly affirmed the positive contributions of colonialism to governance in his native Nigeria: “[I]t is important to face the fact that British colonies were, more or less, expertly run,” he wrote.45 What was important about Achebe’s “articulation of the unsayable,” as Msiska called it, was his rediscovery of “the colonial national formation as a habitable community.” (Location 973)

The Case for Recolonization (Location 1003)

The widespread support in Sierra Leone for the 1999 to 2005 British overhaul and rebuilding of the police force (Location 1039)

Liberia’s energetic president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf championed the post-2005 Government and Economic Assistance Management Program (GEMAP) that gave extensive powers over spending and budgeting to external actors. (Location 1045)

Despite cries of “exploitation,” colonialism was probably a money loser for imperial powers. The Stanford economist Richard Hammond coined the term “uneconomic imperialism” to describe the ways that European powers embarked on ruinously costly and ultimately money-losing colonialism for largely non-economic reasons.63 That is why they gave up their colonies so easily, as Wu also showed with regard to the Dutch surrender of Taiwan.64 The benefits of empire were widely diffused while the costs were narrowly borne by the colonial power. (Location 1058)

2   How the Hate Mob Tried to Cancel Me (Location 1381)

like it or not, the question facing most peoples was which rulers were less likely to commit atrocities. (Location 1458)

after Belgian colonial rule began in the Congo in 1908, after the private fiefdom of King Léopold II, natives streamed into the colonial centers. (Location 1460)

In today’s coded language, a white supremacist is someone who believes that what Naipaul called the “universal civilization currently led by the West” is the cornerstone of global human flourishing. (Location 1497)

The Great Chief of Luanda told the governor of the Belgian Congo in 1959 to resist the “loud-mouthed minorities” who would “again plunge our country into the poverty and misery of the past” with their demands for sudden independence. (Location 1500)

The University of Edinburgh’s Neil Thin wrote that anti-colonial ideologues have lost the ability to actually learn from history—“appreciative history” as he calls it—so intent they are on whipping it into submission. (Location 1507)

In the end, my essay was withdrawn because Indian anti-colonial fanatics made death threats against Qadir and his staff. This “suppression of research findings on blatantly political grounds” wrote the University of Buckingham historian and academic ethics specialist Geoffrey Alderman suggests “we have indeed stumbled into a very dark place.” (Location 1545)

3   A Lecture* (Location 1557)

You may have heard of the case of Helen Zille, the former premier of the Western Cape province in South Africa, who in 2018 was found guilty by the country’s ethics board of improper conduct for tweeting, after a visit to Singapore, that South Africa should similarly build on the valuable inheritance of colonialism rather than trash it. (Location 1584)

In 1993, the average Singaporean was 4.5 times wealthier than the average South African. Today, they are 7 times wealthier. (Location 1588)

In her defense, Zille quoted no less an authority than Nelson Mandela citing the benefits of British colonialism. (Location 1593)

One obvious response to such charges is, to borrow John Stuart Mill’s defense of liberty, that you will never really know whose arguments are factually correct and normatively defensible unless they are exposed to the strong gale of counter-argument. (Location 1750)

Lands of Hope (Location 1810)

In 2016, a Danish aid worker in Nigeria rescued a boy who had been left to starve to death by the local community because they believed he was a witch. UNICEF estimates that in this one southwestern state of Nigeria, there are 15,000 children similarly abandoned by their parents as witches and 10,000 a year added to the streets nationwide.11 The Danish aid worker got together with her local Nigerian colleagues and established the Land of Hope Children’s Center in Nigeria for rescued children. The Nigerian government is unable and unwilling to act against this cultural practice. Exxon-Mobil has funded the Center along with a lot of international donors, and it is essentially playing the “colonial” role of filling in a governance deficit. (Location 1812)

anti-colonialism has become so entrenched, not just in the Western academy, but in the politics of many failed states that nothing short of a Enlightenment that ushers in a productive encounter with the modern world will do. (Location 1830)

4   A Response to My Critics (Location 1869)

I make clear in the article that I define “colonialism” as referring to “British, French, German, Belgian, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies from the early 19th to mid-20th centuries.” This temporal separation of European expansion from the earlier fifteenth to early nineteenth century phase follows Abernethy who, along with others, argued that only in this second phase—which he dates to the 1824 Anglo-Burmese war—was formal “political control” the dominant mode of European empire while the industrial revolution made the modes and scope of empire qualitatively different from those in the first phase. (Location 1924)

Part of the perennial debate here is simply the misunderstanding of economic growth by scholars whose worldviews are shaped by zero-sum Marxist approaches. Without “exploitation” and “profits,” there can be no employment, wages, markets, and improvements in organization and technology. As the English economist Joan Robinson famously quipped, “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited all.” (Location 1991)

the only semi-successful African economy ever was South Africa, until its system of white minority rule was hastily “decolonized” in the early 1990s and the country went into a tailspin. (Location 2009)

statistical model really just shows that African countries were six times more likely to be ruled indirectly than others,33 and that such rule was associated with worse outcomes. Lange’s work tells us nothing about colonialism. It does tell us about the challenges of development in Africa. (Location 2036)

colonial rulers engaged in historically unique forms of brutal treatment of labor, we must distinguish two issues. The use of mandatory (“forced”) labor in many colonies was intended as a replacement for taxation and was, of course, historically common in places where taxation was impractical. It may rub our modern sensitivities the wrong way, but this was the most fair and liberal means of providing for public services and infrastructure. Secondly, the “labour question” is whether under colonialism wages were generally rising and conditions of employment were generally improving. The work on wages in British Africa and India, and on employment law and unions shows the answer is “yes,” most notably in the careful econometric work done on West Africa.40 (Location 2070)

284 country-decades 1730 to 1970, Cappelli and Baten showed that British colonialism had a significant and positive effect on human capital as a result of their approach to education, while non-British colonies, taken together, did not (but also did not make it worse). (Location 2166)

According to the theoretical model developed by Grossman and Iyigun, the gains in population size and health in the late colonial period created more “leisure” time for anti-colonial activism in Africa and Southeast Asia that may explain decolonization. (Location 2185)

A counterpart study by the Danish political scientist Jacob Hariri in a study of 111 countries showed that not to be colonized was to be saddled with an autocratic political system later on.65 In other words, merely being a colony resulted in a diffusion of democratic norms, laws, and institutions, quite aside from whether the personal efforts of colonial officials in pursuit of self-government met the exacting standards of later scholarly critics. (Location 2213)

colonial violence because, in most cases, I believe it was justified and in cases where it was not, it never rose to a level that rendered colonial rule, as such, illegitimate. In the oft-cited case of the Herero war against German colonial rule in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1906, for instance, the initial German response was justified and restrained.76 Only later, with a shift in battle strategy on the ground under Lothar von Trotha, did the German campaign become unintentionally brutal. (Location 2272)

British legal abolition of the slave trade came in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1834, so anti-slavery activism is one of the fundamental shifts that defined post-1824 colonialism that my paper defends. (Location 2356)

The general point is this: absent any minimally empirically robust general measurement of subjective legitimacy in the colonial era, we are left with the default assumption that given the ease of its spread and the minimal degree of coercion and coercive forces relative to time, population, and geography, the standing assumption must remain that colonial rule was highly legitimate, a fact reinforced by the tumult that followed colonial rule, especially in Africa. The only way to upset that conclusion, absent empirical evidence, is to rule out legitimacy by definition, and not surprisingly, this is precisely the strategy that scholars have adopted. Having definitionally ruled out the legitimacy of colonialism, scholars have to sweep under the carpet any unauthorized emanations of legitimacy from the colonized. This was my finding in a 2016 paper on the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, whose naughty pro-colonial utterances have been studiously airbrushed from scholarly memory. (Location 2504)

5   Is It Shameful to Defend Colonialism?* (Location 3023)

Like coercion, shame usually operates in the background via what social theorists call “virtual causation.” The mere expectation that one’s behavior will trigger coercion or shaming has the intended effect of modifying one’s behavior without the censors ever lifting a finger. Since there are no visible acts of censorship—whether coercive or normative—the censors claim it is much ado about nothing. This tends to entrench the censorship because of the lack of a sensory experience for society in seeing someone being silenced via coercion or shaming, what is known as an “availability heuristic.” Without an availability heuristic that the brain can summon, the motivations in society to do anything about it are reduced. (Location 3084)

Most memorable in Mao’s China was the Cultural Revolution, a purification movement intended to crush political opponents through recourse to ideological struggle. The identification of right-deviationists would purge the Party of incorrect thinking and invigorate the ranks. Ambitious cadres were given a way to signal their virtue and loyalty to the cause. Not surprisingly, the most aggressive agents were the Red Guards, teenagers and university-aged youth for whom participation in the purges was both fun and a quick route to the top. They ran the “shaming festivals” where deviationists were shamed by having their hair cut, their heads bowed, and their thought crimes read aloud for all to hear. But the real agents of the Cultural Revolution were the higher ups in the Party who, rather than standing up, sat silent or mouthed support. (Location 3113)

Mao guided the movements with “work teams” and “central leading groups” sent from the top, no different from the Diversity Office or Institutional Review Board investigations of today. The error-prone were invited to correct their ways through struggle sessions, self-criticism, hysterical declarations of loyalty to Mao, and rustication to learn from the peasants—parallels found in today’s remedial cultural competency training, “awareness of whiteness” seminars, mandatory diversity statements, and service-based learning. (Location 3126)

PART II    Episodes of Colonialism (Location 3205)

6   African Civilization and The Premature Termination of Colonialism* (Location 3209)

define Africa as sub-Saharan Africa because of the civilizational fault line between the Islamic North African region and the sub-Saharan region. (Location 3217)

First, African civilization represents the starkest contrast with Western civilization compared to any other. Second, the difference lies not just in fundamental social and ethical assumptions but also in the developmental gap, which means that we do not really know what a modernized African civilization would look like and how it would compare to the West. Third, the colonial encounter was the most significant and important opportunity for Africa to modernize its civilization and development, and thus, its premature termination was a tragedy for Africa. Fourth, the world badly needs Africa to develop a modernized African civilization but at present the prospects for that remain bleak. (Location 3224)

In a well-known essay of 1992, the Cameroonian economist Daniel Etounga-Manguelle argued2 that the main features of the common culture that defined African civilization were: (1) a high degree of fatalism, irrationalism and belief in magic; (2) a communitarianism that suffocates individual initiative; (3) a focus on the past and present, not on the future; (4) a disregard for economic realities and planning; and (5) an excessive concentration of authority and power in one individual—the so-called “big man ruler”—who will often claim to have magical powers. (Location 3229)

These five features represent an almost perfect contrast to the five dimensions that the French philosopher Philippe Nemo argued were the key aspects of Western civilization,3 namely: (a) Greek ideals of individual liberty, reason, and science; (b) Roman ideals of law and humanism; (c) Judeo-Christian biblical notions of ethics, empathy, and progress against evil (echoed in Rachel Fulton Brown’s argument4 that the reading of Psalms is what led to empathy for others); (d) the Papal call to action and responsibility in human affairs, which created the idea of a universal and secular civic space (echoed in Larry Siedentop’s view in Inventing the Individual5 of the central role of medieval canon law); and (e) the Enlightenment discovery of the attractions of pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and political equality. (Location 3234)

African irrationalism contrasts with Greek reason. African communitarianism contrasts with Roman humanism. The African focus on the past and present contrasts with the Biblical belief in progress. The African disregard for economic realities contrasts with the Papal call to action and responsibility. The African concentration of authority contrasts with Enlightenment pluralism. (Location 3244)

Yet the post-colonial record in Africa, which represented a reversion to African ideals, has discredited the notion that African civilization was ever desirable, either inherently or in terms of its functional contribution to human development. (Location 3252)

The difference in Africa, Ekeh argued, was that it was in the private realm where morality existed and in the public realm where it was absent. The expectations of public life in Africa were to rob, loot, break rules, and abandon any ethical commitments formed in private life. The striking deterioration of South Africa under president Jacob Zuma from 2009 to 2018, where the corruption was in full view and yet he remained president with much support, is the most obvious recent example of this. (Location 3270)

the reason that Africa’s private morality remained primitive was developmental, or material. African societies never went through a developmental period in which people started to conceive of themselves as belonging to a “disembedded” public where one could depend on the impersonal market and the rational and predictable rules of an impersonal legal system to survive. There was no equivalent of Ming Dynasty commercialism in China or the municipal life of medieval Europe. This is simply an unavoidable tragedy of Africa’s late development. (Location 3287)

leaders came to power who still thought like tribal chiefs. They saw their main duty as staying in power and gathering adherents, not delivering on public promises—what (Location 3292)

thus had a choice of two types of political regime, both rotten. After independence, and with the inducements of the Cold War, Africa was ruled by amoral despotisms that reflected the lack of morality in the public sphere. They lacked a firm basis in African culture and were more akin to Ekeh’s notion of the lawless and short-term criminals who loot quickly before being ousted by the next “national movement.” After the Cold War, came the rise of electoral regimes. These reflected moral populisms, the entry of private African morality into the public sphere. This private morality was wholly unsuited to the modern world, and no less lawless and destructive. The irruption of premodern African morality into the public sphere simply made things worse, (Location 3301)

Let’s not forget that Robert Mugabe was seen as uniquely suited to lead Africa into the future when he came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 because he had never been tainted by involvement in colonial (or anti-colonial) politics. (Location 3319)

Colonialism offered to Africa an intensive, accelerated course in a cultural modernization, economic development, and public sector articulation—the social, economic, and political requirements for a modern civilization. When we look at colonial experiences in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, it is a time of amazing optimism and flourishing. The triple challenge is being met against all expectations. As the Nigeria novelist Chinua Achebe, born in 1930, recalled of that period: “The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.” (Location 3326)

Etounga-Manguelle argued, like Hyden, that the problem with colonialism was not that it disrupted Africa’s cultures (and thus its civilization) too much but that it disrupted them too little. Or, colonialism was not given the time it needed to bring about the triple transformation: sustained economic growth, cultural modernization (the private sphere), and civic construction (the public sphere). The countries fortunate enough to have post-independence leaders who clung tenaciously to that colonial vision after independence—Botswana, Kenya, and Senegal, for instance—managed to survive the onslaught of Afrocentrism much better than those that venerated “authentic” anti-colonial leaders—Congo, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, pretty much everywhere else. (Location 3336)

Colonialism ended not because of local “resistance” but because of Western “resignation”—the rapidity and simultaneity of decolonization gives lie to the romantic ideal that local resistance movements had anything to do with it. (Location 3348)

apartheid South Africa. It served as one model of a modernized African state. Over 100,000 black Africans a year applied to migrate to apartheid South Africa during the 1980s. (Tell that to today’s college students and black studies dons and you get a blank stare.)13 But black nationalists paid attention only to the white rulers, not to the black middle class—Africa’s first—that was emerging there. The slide backwards in South Africa since the end of apartheid is a reminder of how deeply entrenched Africa’s pre-modern, embedded institutions are because they outlasted the nearly century-long experiment of Boer colonialism. (Location 3351)

Within weeks or months after colonial rule ended, African societies unraveled into primordial structures, and the state collapsed along with civic life. (Location 3357)

firewood, dung, paraffin) for cooking and heating. The health costs of using these without proper methods are steep—2,500 lives lost per year. (Location 3359)

In 1998, the bureaucracy proposed a new policy to make solid fuels safe. But the policy was ignored by politicians because they saw solid fuels as symbolic of the apartheid era when only whites had access to electricity. Politicians refused to fund programs for this “symbol of oppression,” wrote Njirambo Matinga and colleagues.14 Imagine if apartheid police mowed down 2,500 black protestors per year. Anti-colonial politicians have been doing this for over a decade with impunity, and this is only in the very obscure realm of solid fuels use. (Location 3360)

7   The Case for Colonialism in the Middle East (Location 3435)

In 2020, after a warehouse explosion destroyed the Port of Beirut in Lebanon, an online petition began circulating in the country requesting a return to French rule. “We believe Lebanon should go back under the French mandate in order to establish a clean and durable governance,” the petition stated.1 Within the first day, it attracted sixty thousand signatures. (Location 3440)

Colonial History in the Middle East (Location 3474)

The twenty-three countries of the Middle East region, defined broadly as an area stretching from Mauritania to Pakistan, experienced on average fifty years of European colonial rule during the high tide of classical colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (64 years if we count only those 18 countries that were actually colonized). Of these 23, eleven came under British rule (11.5 if we count the southern part of contemporary Yemen), six under French rule, and one (Libya) under Italian rule—each for different periods. The region also has a diverse cross section of five noncolonized contemporary countries: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and most of what became Yemen. These five provide useful counterfactuals to colonial rule. (Location 3475)

Making general statements about Western colonialism in the Middle East is also confounded by the different circumstances under which it appeared: of the eighteen colonized cases, six (Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon) resulted from the collapse of Ottoman rule during World War I, while at the other end of the spectrum, three (Oman, Algeria, and Bahrain) predated the era of modern colonialism in the early 1800s. There is, in addition, the unavoidable question of how to treat contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, which experienced eight and twenty years, respectively, of US-led occupation in the early twenty-first century. (Location 3501)

Blame Colonialism (Location 3519)

Mark Fathi Massoud argues that the rise of Islamic extremism in the region is a result of the sidelining of sharia law under colonial rule.5 While the decision to continue with secular legal systems was made by postcolonial rulers, he argues, the ineluctable structural tendencies for this were laid by colonialists. The result: “Muslim-majority countries stunted the democratic potential of sharia by rejecting it as a mainstream legal concept in the 1950s and 1960s, leaving sharia in the hands of extremists.”6 That his article contains the phrase “blame colonialism” reflects a remarkable lack of intellectual maturation in the Islamic world for over half a century, transporting us back to the days of soap-box revolutionaries in the casbah. By definition, his theory could not account for Islamic extremism in non-colonized Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, or Yemen. (Location 3526)

large canvas approach of “blame colonialism” was given academic respectability by Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, a study of the European cultural encounter with the Middle East and South Asia that has been used as a template by students of Middle East politics as well. Said had very little to say about the actual practices of colonial governance. Since colonialism was obviously evil, his interest was more in the causes of that evil. His answer was Orientalist thinking that “embodies a systematic discipline” that “fatally tend[s] towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.”9 Quite apart from distorting the humane and diverse content of Orientalism, as Ibn Warraq retorted, Said offered Middle East societies “a kind of comfort and absolution in being told that none of your problems are of your making, that you do not have to accept any responsibility for the ills besetting your society. It is all the fault of the West, of infidels.”10 Said’s main legacy seems to have been to emasculate a previously empirical and well-grounded Middle East intellectual tradition and replace it with an effete, wounded intellectualism. (Location 3550)

In a 2021 book, Elizabeth Thompson claims that Britain and France “stole” democracy from Syria and Lebanon in 1920 by accepting League of Nations mandates, fatally undermining their urges to self-government.12 Colonialism in the Middle East was thus “a crime against humanity” and but for it, these two countries would be flourishing liberal democracies today. Radical Islam is, in her telling, the fault of the West. Thompson promises to “slay the demons” of colonial apologetics about the Middle East and debunk the stubborn belief that Arabs are in any way responsible for their own fates since 1920. (Location 3577)

Colonial Violence (Location 3587)

Harvard historian Caroline Elkins writes of the British counter-insurgency campaign against a protest movement that erupted in Egypt in 1919 as a signal case of her “legacy of violence” thesis. (Location 3595)

Every single sentence of her description is false. While a carnival of protest did erupt in Cairo in response to Zaghlul’s arrest, the peasants were protesting post-war inflation and food shortages, not the arrest. (Location 3603)

An inter-war study of the entire 1919 conflict by a British officer concluded that the British response was wholly apt and always proportionate: (Location 3617)

Contemporary anti-colonial critics avert their eyes from the bloodshed of post-colonial regimes because it does not excite their passions. Mere black and brown people being killed by other black and brown people. A shrug of the shoulders. The only history that stirs mainstream scholars to action is the idea of white men with upturned mustaches and pith hats making pompous statements about the need for order. Everything that comes afterward is a “legacy of colonialism.” (Location 3637)

Case Studies (Location 3641)

In any case, whatever the probabilistic or “tendency” arguments about European colonialism and bad outcomes, it is easy to find one or two cases that show it is not an iron-clad law. The colony at Aden (in today’s Yemen) and its surrounding protectorate, for example, was a whole-cloth creation of the British. The same is true of Israel, which is a pure creation of British imperialism. Without the British presence there in World War I, there would be no mandate, no Balfour Declaration, no Jewish homeland, and no independence in 1947. (Location 3643)

Critics may respond that these small states should not hold equal analytic weight to the “big eight” of Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, which together account for 80 percent of the region’s population. Here again, however, care is advised. Only four of these—Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco—have a significant colonial history. These four account for 49 percent of the region’s population and attract an inordinate amount of attention from anti-colonial scholars, especially scholars of Egypt and Algeria. By contrast, the other four—Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—should, by this measure, be modern miracles showing the benefits of not being colonized. That may explain why most anticolonial scholarship on these countries centers on nonfalsifiable claims of “neocolonialism” made on the basis of political and economic ties to the West. (Location 3655)

Pro-Colonialism (Location 3663)

Colonialism was “the unconscious tool of history.”19 These views found expression in leftist writers on the Middle East who, in Said’s view, were unconsciously captured by the “omnicompetent definitions” of Orientalism despite their otherwise humane instincts, and who went all in for colonialism.20 (Location 3668)

2023, for example, the independent scholar Driss Ghali published Une contre-histoire de la colonisation française (An Alternative History of French Colonialism) with a special emphasis on his native Morocco, as well as on French Tunisia and Algeria. “It is true that my parents and grandparents experienced colonial oppression,” he wrote, “but my ancestors before them suffered from the anguish of underdevelopment.” France had set in place the foundations for successful societies in North Africa, only to see their work destroyed by post-colonial governments. While these governments labored under a “blame colonialism” mentality, the former colonies of French Indo-China have leapt ahead by embracing globalization and good governance. (Location 3695)

Standing up to the anti-colonial criticisms of the Left is easy because they are so cliché. The more significant challenge may be standing up to anti-globalists of the right who see the sovereign state as inviolable and national interests as necessarily excluding foreign assistance. The deeply entrenched European ideal of sovereign modern states overseen by Weberian bureaucracies is one that is more popular today outside of Europe than within. Even if the reality of Middle East governments reflects the sovereignty of despots rather than of the people, and the states are more often failed than modern, still the ideal holds sway. (Location 3732)

One little-noted aspect of the Abraham Accords between Israel and other Middle East states may be the creation of an alliance that, unlike the Arab League, is committed to regional stability, good governance, and modernization, the very heart of the colonial enterprise. (Location 3747)

8     Why European Colonialism Was Right* (Location 3846)

Even if there was nothing wrong per se with one group extending its power over another and settling on its land, the critics continue, European colonialism always had terrible results. Exploitation, violence, racism, famine, and oppression were widespread, not to mention a lot of prurient photographs of brown breasts, the exclusion of the colonized from colonial drinks clubs, and colonial names in plant nomenclature. (Location 3865)

What’s more, the indictment continues, these colonial evils were no oversight. They reflected a horror at the heart of the West itself. A true ethical reckoning would admit that the problem was not Western colonialism but the West itself, premised on the triple evil of Christianity, capitalism, and Caucasianness.4 Had the world been left to the tender mercies of Islam or African fetish priests, and then put under socialist management with white people scattered to the winds, life would have been better. That a lot of black and brown people continue to jostle to live in the West with its Christianity, capitalism, and Caucasians is merely an act of mercy to rid it of these ills. (Location 3883)

Thus the debate on the ethics of European colonialism is nothing less than a debate on the ethics of the West itself. Since colonialism was evil, on this account, the West is evil. The only remaining work to be done is to liquidate Western countries through mass immigration, reparations, and the erasure of white culture. That the resulting polities are unlikely to be liberal, wealthy, or stable is merely comeuppance for colonial crimes. (Location 3889)

Germany as Exemplar (Location 3901)

German colonial empire in Africa and Asia is a good case study because of its compact and short-lived nature. (Location 3904)

The High Ethical Standards of German Colonialism (Location 3984)

German colonial empire was indeed little more than a sausage factory when compared to the British, or even French empires. Even at its greatest extent, it was at best a large industrial estate. In 1913, it ruled 12.5 million people, about 2% of the European colonial total or 7% of the ex-Raj total. As with all European colonial empires, there was a “big part” and then all the rest. In the German case, the big part was German East Africa (later British Tanganyika, mostly today’s Tanzania as well as Rwanda and Burundi), accounting for 7.7 million people in 1913, or 57% of the “people-years” (number of people times number of years) of German colonialism. (Location 3986)

The next biggest part was German Cameroon (today’s Cameroon), with 30% of the colonial people-years. The rest was made up little bits: German Togo (mostly today’s Togo with one small part in Ghana) at 8%, the two Pacific colonies of New Guinea and Samoa (today’s Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, and Solomon Islands) at 3%, and two small holdings of 1% each at Jiaozhou (better known as Qingdao) in China and a tiny enclave in German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia). (Location 3990)

These colonies all came into being sometime in the 1880s or early 1890s, and they all came to an abrupt end as German holdings at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. German colonialism is thus unique in being a late arrival and an early departure from modern European colonial project. Although German historians have predictably carved it up into an impossible complexity of phases, places, purposes and results, it is better understood as a piece—a 30-year experiment in overseas rule. (Location 3994)

German colonialism was both inherently ethical, as well as ethical in practice, in every place where it was found. It arose from natural processes of human endeavor, violated no formal or informal laws in doing so, and found a ready welcome in all places. (Location 4000)

If there is anything remarkable, it is how little colonialism German pursued until very late—especially given its undisputed stature as the center of Oriental studies (contra Edward Said’s theory that Oriental studies caused colonialism) and being the second largest economy in Europe (contra Lenin’s theory that capitalism caused colonialism). (Location 4025)

Of the five points above, the first—about the superiority of European civilization—carries extra weight because of its epistemological implications. A key dimension of European civilization is its self-critical tradition. To carry the logic, as members of liberal society, we participate in such critiques since this is the heart of the Western tradition—the self-critical, contentious, free speaking, and Christian natural rights traditions that elevate the moral and material well-being of the individual above all else.25 So, to make the point sharply: the very fact that we sit in a conference room in Oxford debating “the ethics of European colonialism” is evidence that European colonialism was ethical. We make the point all too well. Let me assure you that there are no conferences in China on ethics of Qing imperialism, no conferences in India on the ethics of the subjugation of Goa, no conferences in Pakistan on the failed subjugation of what became Bangladesh, no conferences in Turkey on the ethics of the Ottomans, no conferences in Oklahoma on the ethics of Comanche empire, no conferences in Saudi Arabia on the ethics of Arab expansion, and no conferences in Africa on the ethics of Bantu or Buganda or Fulani expansion. (Location 4068)

The Spirit of Berlin (Location 4089)

Operational Questions (Location 4119)

As two German scholars concluded: “The imperialists, including the Germans, provided peace, settled rule, an expanded trade area, infrastructure, bureaucracy, a tax system—the essentials of a modern state which would rule over a wider swath of territory than would have obtained if African and Pacific ethnic rivalries had been allowed to persist.” Faced with similar circumstances, they wrote, “Germans acted much like their French and British imperial counterparts.” (Location 4161)

What should an intelligent person make of this case? Certainly, they should not take their cue from German academics, who fly into a rage with cries of misogyny, racism, and exploitation. These great minds make no effort to imagine what it was like for a lone German official in a remote station to bring security and development to a region long plagued by tribal warfare and human carnage. In addition to his governing duties, Leist was patron of the local nursing association that cared for rescued black slave children. He also, unusually, offered free medical services to all black staff lucky enough to work for the German authorities. More pointedly, the Dahomey soldiers who rebelled had been purchased by a German explorer from a local chief who planned to use them in a human sacrifice ritual. Their fate under German colonialism was by definition better than under tribal rule. How many Dahomey women and slave children would have been beaten, whipped, and left to die by fellow Africans absent German colonial rule? Was the overall trend of justice under the Germans improving or getting worse? (Location 4196)

Another hotly contested issue of legality is the German use of forced labor. One must distinguish here between the ideal and the practice. The ideal is perfectly defensible. Colonial government projects and services needed to be funded and taxation was impractical. Moreover, a key element of development was labor force participation. Mandatory labor in lieu of the payment of taxes served both purposes and was historically the norm throughout empires. So, when critics describe German colonies as “slave states” because they imposed a mandatory annual labor requirement, they are challenging the very idea of mandatory labor, not its practice. Since that idea was more than ethical, the challenge fails. (Location 4283)

After colonialism retreated from the Third World, fascism took root again in its original home: the totalitarian circles of the West where extreme right and left were indistinguishable. Calls to “decolonize” life in the West were made by radicals who hoped to replace the liberty and equality of liberal democracy with race-based hierarchies and spoils systems. The West is still trying to recover its colonial identity under ongoing assaults from the inherent illiberalism of anti-colonial ideology. The stakes are no less than they were in the past. (Location 4396)

11   Colonial Yemen, Post-Colonial Yemen (Location 5439)

As a case study in the triumph of colonialism and the tragedy of decolonization, the former British colony in what is today Yemen is unrivalled. What today might have been a relatively stable and prosperous Arab country alongside neighboring Oman and the emirate states of the Persian Gulf is instead a cauldron of human suffering. Post-colonialism, an attitude that spurns the colonial past and envisions some anti-Western notion of modernity, is blinkered at the best of times. In the case of Yemen, it is a cruel joke. (Location 5448)

Despite Ottoman attempts to tempt tribes away from the British, the colonial sphere of influence grew as the tribes under its protection prospered. The population of Aden itself soared from just 600 in 1839 to 25,000 by 1844. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 ignited Aden’s importance as a transit hub and in-migration accelerated. (Location 5464)

British rule in Aden was a magnet for Arab migrants who “self-colonized” by fleeing Arab tyrannies in the inland. The only fear among the locals was that the British would not stay.3 Fortunately, they did, signing treaties with 90 sheikhs, sultans, emirs, sharifs, and naibs in the hinterland and expanding the port colony of just 75 square miles into a larger protectorate in southern Arabia of 112,000 square miles.4 A cosmopolitan “Adenese” identity emerged that included Jews, Muslim Indians, Arabs, Iranians, and Somalis, all of whom spoke Arabic as a lingua franca.5 The modernist French poet Arthur Rimbaud moved to Aden in 1880 to work for a French coffee trader and ran a café that was a center of intellectual life. (Location 5472)

By 1962, the north was in civil war after the Iman was overthrown. The population of the port of Aden reached 150,000 by 1965, while another half million lived in the surrounding protectorate. (Location 5511)

In a 2017 BBC television mini-series on the final days of Aden, Last Post, an arrogant rebel leader tells a British diplomat: “I want my country back.” But the “country” the insurgents laid claim to was a creation of the British. It had not been “taken” from anyone. Nor was it “theirs.” Most of them were Yemeni migrants and Egyptian mercenaries. The pro-British sultans in the colony bitterly opposed these self-styled liberators who wanted to replace the moderate and liberal administration of the British with a northern tyranny. The Adenese sultan Muhammad Farid al Aulaqi travelled to the United Nations to beg for the support of British rule in order to save the region from collapse. (Location 5514)

The critics of empire averted their gaze the moment the Brits were sent packing. For the Western media, the history of the 650,000 people in Aden and vicinity ended on November 29, 1967. After all, it might disturb their readers to know that the stately procession towards freedom and self-determination had turned into a wreck. It took just four months before the NLF-ruled South Yemen suffered its first coup. In 1968, the head of Aden security forces fled to North Yemen and joined the rebels. In 1970, the former prime minister went before the firing squad, followed by the Chief Justice. (Location 5557)

After snickering at the hasty departure of the Brits and admiring the post-independence celebrations, a pall of silence fell upon the New York Times. There is one article in 1968 with a loving mention of the “revolutionary dynamism” of South Yemen followed by a surprised article on the “lack of progress” towards human betterment.20 Then comes a ten-year silence, punctuated by only a brief mention that South Yemen had been included in the United Nations’ list of countries in a “starvation belt.” (Location 5562)

Amnesty International, which had whipped up world public opinion with its reports of bruised cheeks and cold showers under the British, issued a grim report on human rights for South Yemen for 1976: (Location 5580)

In 1978, the Soviet Union installed a Marxist regime. It soon had all the trimmings of a Soviet satellite state: starvation, East German police, and high-sounding resolutions on the rights of women. The first president went to the firing squad. The collapse of the Soviet global system led to a hasty unification with North Yemen in 1990. Things got worse. Civil wars erupted with tick-tock regularity in 1994, 2004, and 2014. (Location 5598)

The rise and fall of colonial Yemen, like the rise and fall of colonial Hong Kong (see Conclusion), is an unambiguous example of the case for colonialism. But it remains stuck in the public imagination as a lost cause. (Location 5620)

PART III   Colonialism in the United States and Canada (Location 5692)

12   The Good Fortune of Being Enslaved in America (Location 5697)

For all such groups—Bohemian rebels, Bastille prisoners, Chinese and Indian serfs, Caribbean settlers, Scottish malcontents, and African slaves—life was nasty, brutish, and short around the year 1619. The Reformation was only a century old and had yet to achieve its moral revolution in the world. The Industrial Revolution, through which capitalism generated unprecedented human welfare, was over a century away. None of us would choose to have belonged to any of these groups: canapés and an honest Grenache at Versailles for me, please. But if one were forced to make a choice, a plausible argument could be made for the good fortune of the “20. and odd Negroes,” not just compared to the other unfortunates but also compared to the millions of slaves of African and Arab owners that they left behind. (Location 5713)

While slaves were always part of war plunder in Africa, most slaves in Africa were a result of market transactions not war. The Jesuit chronicler Pero Rodrigues wrote in 1594 that the number of “slaves taken in war are nothing compared to those bought at feiras [markets], at these feiras the kings and lords and all Ethiopia [i.e., east Africa] sell slaves.”3 Those who ended up in Jamestown were headed for the Caribbean and would otherwise have ended up in east Africa or the Middle East. (Location 5722)

The Spanish and Portuguese believed they were doing African slaves a favor by rescuing them from cruel local tyrannies and that they would fare better as slaves under Christian masters, their souls saved. (Location 5727)

Mary Grabar, in her critical response to The 1619 Project of the New York Times, notes that slavery was so common and presumed normal through the period leading up to the American Revolution that it is better to see free wage labor as unusual, as well as the astounding assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence. “Though it is hard for us to imagine a worse fate than slavery as it existed in North America, slaves in other societies sometimes faced even worse prospects, such as the possibility of being used as human sacrifices.” (Location 5736)

In the event, the life chances of those enslaved under the British empire improved markedly compared to what they would have been in Africa even as freemen, and certainly compared to other slave colonies in the Americas. Within a flourishing capitalist system, the value put on slaves meant that slave owners had every interest in keeping them healthy. That is why black slaves in the United States were healthier than most people in Europe, and indeed healthier than poor whites in the United States itself. By their 17th birthday, American male slaves were taller than “the working classes of England, the poor of Italy, students in Habsburg military schools, the middle class of Stuttgart, German peasants, and factory workers in Russia. As adults they also exceeded the aristocrats of Stuttgart, Moscow middle school pupils, and were…less than one inch below the nonlaboring classes in England.” By their 18th birthday, American female slaves “exceeded Boston women of American or Irish parents, factory workers in England or Russia, and the upper class in Italy.”5 It is also why U.S. slave population expanded more rapidly than elsewhere through natural increase. Elsewhere in the Americas, the slave problem resolved itself when imports declined because slaves were worked to death. (Location 5742)

As time passed, the moral revolution against slavery that began in Britain would sweep the United States. From 1619 until the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the moral revolution was building. Slave traders were increasingly held accountable for the humane treatment of their slaves and their legal rights. Where else would there have been such a protracted legal process as at Newport, Rhode Island in 1791 for a captain accused of throwing a slave woman overboard because her smallpox threatened to kill everyone on his ship? The case went on for five years before a lengthy opinion acquitted him on the grounds of emergency measures.7 All this for a single slave woman. Nowhere else in the world, certainly not in Africa, was human life treated as so precious. (Location 5772)

The moral awakening against slavery took place in the West, not in Africa, and certainly not in the Islamic world. Throughout Africa, the British used antislavery treaties as the basis of their influence. A full 10 percent of British naval resources were assigned to anti-slaving duties in the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the 1840s. Brazil and then the U.S. joined in the abolition of slavery, and then in the latter half of the 19th century the abolition spread to Africa. (Location 5788)

The slaves brought to the United States were a tiny sliver (about 3%) of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but they created a uniquely African-American culture that would attract generations of voluntary migrants from Africa, which totaled 2.6 million from 1820 to 2022. In other words, of all the Africans who have come to the United States, seven times more have come voluntarily than as slaves. Black America is today composed mainly of the descendants of Africans who came to the United States of their own accord. To speak of “the legacies of slavery” as shaping the fate of this entire population is to engage in a Promethean act of French structuralism: nothing for blacks is every contingent or even causal, on this view. Everything is enmeshed in a vast structural system of oppression from which there is no escape because it constitutes the very logic or language of black existence in America. It is demeaning and false. (Location 5801)

Blacks in Canada also have an average income approximately 70% of the national average, as they do in other Western countries that never had slavery like Belgium. To be black in America is, historically speaking, to have hit the jackpot. (Location 5809)

When the Washington Post sent a black reporter, Keith Richburg, to be its correspondent in Africa in 1991, the expectation was that readers would be given an “Afro-centric” perspective on the continent. Richburg would have none of it. After three years in Africa, he declared himself an American through-and-through, and one grateful for his ancestors’ unwilling enslavement. (Location 5814)

America’s great sin was not slavery. It was to have called slavery its great sin. This characteristically American attempt to arrogate for the “City on a Hill” a holy degree of sinfulness, guilt, and contrition will not stand. Doing so dehistoricizes the historical norm of slavery. It imposes a moral calculus of oppressor/oppressed onto every white/black relationship. It is the ultimate grand narrative, the ultimate French structural system. It has left the U.S. caught in a Sisyphean struggle against its history, unable to move on even as other former slave nations did so. Slavery was not a great sin, just an ordinary one. It was common enough and was naturally delegitimated as alternatives became available. (Location 5868)

13   Erasing White Settlers with Fake Indian Rocks (Location 5938)

It began in New Zealand in the 1990s when Māori activists began to demand payments from the government for alleged violations of the country’s founding treaty. This led to a rethinking of the country as Māori first and British only by regrettable accident. (Location 5949)

Australia was not far behind. Having previously erased the name New Holland used for more a century after the island’s discovery by the Dutch, white Australians were all too happy to erase their own colonial term of Australia with any number of alternatives. (Location 5956)

Racing to catch up was Canada, seeking a post-Christian and post-British identity amidst rising ethnic pluralism. Enter Turtle Island, the new name for Canada. (Location 5961)

The United States remained the lone hold-out among Anglo settlement countries, refusing to expunge its actual history in favor of an child’s tale of native spiritualism. (Location 5968)

Other sites represent cellar holes from farmhouses long gone. The whole history of farm abandonment as new areas were opened up in the West is an important part of the American story. It explains why these stone piles or cellar holes are mostly found in wooded areas because the trees grew back after the farms were abandoned. When excavated by excitable graduate students hoping to find Indian ceremonial items, they always reveal, instead, rusting barrel hoops, bricks, and farm detritus from “just beyond the edge of social memory.” (Location 6137)

14   Defending the British Empire on the Canadian Prairies (Location 6249)

PART IV   Voices of the Colonized (Location 6428)

15    Africa’s Chinua Achebe on the Positive Legacies of Colonialism (Location 6433)

While Achebe was a critic of the forms that the colonial encounter often took, he also believed that the challenge of modernity put to Africa by colonialism was a healthy one. Moreover, while he decried the ways that colonialism disempowered African societies, he believed that re-empowerment required embracing, not spurning, many of the same forms of governance practiced under colonialism—educational, administrative, and social. In other words, Achebe’s work is a reminder that amidst the theorizing on pathways and sources of state capacity in Africa, scholars have overlooked the most obvious one: the colonial legacy itself. At a time when arguments for “going with the grain”4 or “developmental neo-patrimonialism”5 have revitalized discussions of indigeneity as the best approach to state-building in Africa, reclaiming Achebe’s views on the positive aspects of the colonial legacy could not be more important. (Location 6452)

16   India’s V.S. Naipaul and the Reckoning With Empire (Location 7027)

Conclusion   Elegy for a Colonial Perspective (Location 7395)

1. India: The author argues that British colonialism in India was beneficial as it brought advancements in education, infrastructure, and technology.

2. Congo: The author discusses how colonialism in Congo led to economic development and improved living standards for the local population.

3. Algeria: The author argues that French colonial rule in Algeria was necessary for the region’s economic development and modernization.

4. South Africa: The author praises British colonialism in South Africa for bringing stability and economic growth to the region.

5. Nigeria: The author argues that British colonial rule in Nigeria helped to unify the country and improve its infrastructure.

6. Kenya: The author discusses how British colonialism in Kenya led to economic development and improved living conditions for the local population.

7. Zimbabwe: The author argues that British colonial rule in Zimbabwe was necessary for the region’s economic development and modernization.

Sure, I’ll provide a timeline and history of colonialism, focusing on the key events and countries mentioned in your highlights from “The Case for Colonialism.” I’ll add relevant details to create a more comprehensive picture.

Timeline and History of Colonialism

Pre-19th Century

• 1603: British colonialism begins with the subjugation of Ireland.
• 1607: Establishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
• 1609: British colonize Bermuda.

19th Century

• 1814: British take control of the Cape of Good Hope.
• 1819: British establish Singapore as a trading post.
• 1824: British acquire Burma, marking the beginning of the grander post-Napoleonic phase of British colonialism.
• 1841: Sultan of Brunei installs James Brooke as Rajah of Sarawak, leading to British protectorate establishment in 1888.
• 1851: British and African allies restore the legitimate king in Lagos, leading to the establishment of the colony of Lagos.
• 1869: Opening of the Suez Canal, enhancing the strategic importance of British-controlled Aden.

Late 19th Century to Early 20th Century

• 1903: Frederick Lugard marches north with a force composed mainly of Hausa Africans, consolidating British control in Nigeria.
• 1919: End of World War I leads to the collapse of Ottoman rule, with British and French mandates established in the Middle East.
• 1920: Britain and France accept League of Nations mandates, influencing Syria and Lebanon.
• 1941: Anglo-American Atlantic Charter promises self-determination, influencing decolonization movements post-World War II.

Mid-20th Century

• 1945-1975: Rapid decolonization as many countries gain independence from European colonial powers.
• 1963: Zanzibar becomes independent from Britain.
• 1967: British withdrawal from Aden leads to the establishment of South Yemen.
• 1980: Zimbabwe gains independence from British colonial rule.

Post-Colonial Era

• 1991: South Africa begins dismantling apartheid, a system rooted in colonial governance.
• 1997: Hong Kong is handed over to China, ending British colonial rule.
• 2005: Liberia’s GEMAP gives extensive powers over spending and budgeting to external actors, showing a form of neocolonial governance.

Additional Historical Context

• European Economic Rise and Industrial Revolution: The 19th century saw Europe’s economic and technological advancements, leading to its dominance over non-Western empires, which relied on force and spectacle.
• Local Collaboration and Resistance: European colonialism was often facilitated by local elites who saw benefits in aligning with European powers rather than resisting.
• Comparative Outcomes: Countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Botswana thrived by adopting colonial governance practices, while others faced turmoil post-independence.
• Economic Impact: Colonialism integrated many regions into the global capitalist system, laying foundations for future economic development.

Case Studies

• Nigeria: Initially consolidated under British rule by Frederick Lugard, Nigeria became a significant British colony and is now one of the largest countries in Africa.
• Middle East: Post-Ottoman mandates by Britain and France influenced the political landscape, with countries like Lebanon and Syria experiencing different outcomes from non-colonized neighbors.
• Zanzibar: Independence from Britain in 1963 led to a period of instability and human tragedy.
• Aden/Yemen: British rule brought prosperity and stability, which quickly unraveled after independence.

Reflections on Colonialism

• Positive Legacies: Some scholars and political figures argue that colonialism brought infrastructure, education, and governance structures that benefited former colonies.
• Critique of Anti-Colonialism: The book argues that anti-colonial movements often led to chaos and regression, contrasting with the stability provided by colonial rule.

This timeline and historical context should help you understand the key events and broader implications of colonialism as discussed in “The Case for Colonialism.”

When did British colonize Yemen aden?

The British first established a presence in Aden, Yemen in the 19th century. They officially took control of the port city of Aden in 1839 and it became a key strategic location for the British Empire in the region. The British maintained control over Aden until it gained independence from Britain in 1967.

When did Britain colonize Hong Kong?

Britain colonized Hong Kong in 1842 after the First Opium War.

When did Britain colonize Zanzibar?

Britain colonized Zanzibar in 1890.