Many Such Cases For Colonialism (Part Two)
A critique of Bruce Gilley's "The Case For Colonialism"
This is the second of a three part series on The Case For Colonialism
Fans of combat sports will tell you that brawlers are a lot of fun to watch. There’s a stirring magnetism in their sheer reckless abandon; you often can’t help but cheer for them. In the end though, their fanatical commitment to offense ultimately leaves them open to counterattack, and for this reason they rarely win on a consistent basis. Bruce Gilley is discursive brawler. He’s adept at landing blows on his critics, yet profoundly ineffective at shielding his own ideas from criticism. We find ourselves sympathizing with him somewhat as he lands a series of successful combinations before arriving at passages that meekly wither under the barest scrutiny, never quite sure what to make of this maddening mercurial grift.
Gilley’s critics charge him with a form of “Holocaust denialism” and thereby consider it a moral duty to censor him. But bad ideas proliferate more vigorously in the absence of critical scrutiny, which is why X on the one hand and Bluesky on the other are bespoke sewers of curated alternate realities. What these critics don’t realize is that Holocaust denialism serves the tedious but necessary function of cohering the public sphere around an authoritative legitimation of consensus reality; that which isn’t seen as requiring substantiation is by definition doctrinaire and innately suspicious. Rebuttal is always a more effective weapon than suppression, so without futher ado let’s rejoin our anti-hero as he guides us deep into the heart of revisionist darkness.
A Revisionist History of Colonialism
As we saw in part one, much of Gilley’s argument about the superiority of colonial rule rests on dubious comparisons with a hypothetical alternative.
If colonial subjection caused poor performance, then today’s Ethiopia would be the economic miracle of Africa. Instead, 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. (p. 96) … The heroic assumption, of course, is that coherent, self-governing communities in which members consented to be ruled, existed before the white man, or would have emerged absent colonialism. The contemporary evidence from today’s China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Thailand, and Nepal is supposed to be a ringing endorsements of the just and legitimate orders that would have emerged absent colonialism (p. 181)
His exaltation of the Apartheid regime will be dealt with a bit later, but for now let’s examine the cases he brings up as supposed evidence of the unjust, poor performing and illegitimate orders that emerge in the absence of colonial rule. Saudi Arabia is a U.S. client state, its despotism sanctioned and underwritten by U.S. interests and therefore hardly an example of unimpeded political evolution. The case of Iran could support his argument if one were bold enough to claim that the Islamic Revolution wasn’t blowback for imperial meddling such as the toppling of Mossadegh, installing the Shah as a puppet and encouraging the spread radical Islam in the region. More utterly moronic still is the example of Nepal; the idea that this small, landlocked, earthquake-prone country in the Himalayas could have thrived if only blessed by the grace of European colonization is laughable. Completely departing the realm of material reality, Gilley also apparently considers China an exemplar of the doomed fate of non-colonization, as if according to every objective measure that country has not only lapped the formerly colonized , but has in many instances eclipsed the colonizers themselves. But probably the worst illustration of this profoundly asinine argument is Thailand, an industrialized country with a high HDI, the second-largest economy in the region (behind much more populous Indonesia), and a quintessential embodiment of Western-style liberal values in a non-Western society. This leaves only Ethiopia as the last leg standing in Gilley’s theory that not being colonized is worse than being colonized, making it the exception rather than the rule. He also conveniently leaves Japan out of this discussion because it - perhaps more than any other example - completely shatters his thesis that colonization produces better results.
Gilley makes plenty of hay out of a seeming contradiction pervasive in colonial scholarship: the idea that European powers simultaneously destroyed the traditional structures of African society, but also that they weren’t disruptive enough in their modernization efforts.
Kendhammer also cites the work of Ochonu in support of the statement that in “parts of West Africa, the tax burdens on farmers were so high in the 1930s they created a cycle of poverty and debt that keeps their descendants poor today.” In fact, Ochonu’s book is about the inability of the colonial state to tax farmers during the Great Depression. Still, Kendhammer unintentionally provides a sterling example of the intellectual dead-end of colonial studies that offers scholars two options on every question. As I wrote: “Eminent scholars repeatedly make the contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough.” In this case: colonialism, according to Kendhammer, was bad because it did too much (like taxing effectively); or colonialism, according to Ochonu, was bad because it did too little (like failing to tax effectively). Tax well and you exploit and integrate into the imperialist economy; tax badly and you create patterns of disengagement from the state and the modern economy. Both are bad because both involve colonial rule. As Ochonu writes with puzzling logic: “British colonialism was just as disruptive to Africans’ lives when it failed to exploit them as it was when it did.” (p. 98)
I’m inclined to agree with the notion that Ochonu’s apparent argument - that there exists a sort of Goldilocks, happy medium of European engagement in African statecraft that disrupts just enough, but not too much - doesn’t bear scrutiny. But I’m not sure why Gilley considers two scholars having different interpretations on colonial statecraft to be some kind of AHA moment. He simultaneously condemns the cult-like orthodoxy of colonial history, but then takes instances of academic pluralism as evidence of self-contradiction. He makes the same point with regard to differing views on the drawing of African borders, which some critics allege were drawn by high-handed diplomats “with no regard to local realities” (p. 107), while others claim that the alternative - borders predicated strictly upon ethnicity - would merely have reinforced primordial tribalism and “demeaning ethnic essentialism” on the mistaken presumption that the essence of Africans is to be found in their ethnicity. Gilley is simply baffled by the concept of intramural theoretical disputes among critics of colonialsm; it appears that open debate and academic pluralism are only virtues when practiced by colonialism’s defenders.
An area in which critics of colonialism would unequivocally appear to hold the moral high ground is the issue of forced labour, but even a tactical concession on this one point - if only to add some credibility to his overall argument - is for Gilley too dishonourable a compromise; he goes down swinging on virtually every issue. In addressing the claim that colonial rulers engaged in historically unique forms of brutal treatment of labor, Gilley challenges all the anti-colonial idealists to grow the hell up:
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 (p. 99)
How else were the Europeans to fund the veritable panoply of services and infrastructure projects if not through forced labour? While Gilley omits to specify the presumably utopian suite of public services to which colonial subjects were entitled, it’s reasonable to question whether such investments - to the extent that they existed at all - were in fact for the benefit of the local population, or whether the prime beneficiary was in reality the colonial power. You could defend the morality of pimping by arguing that pimps put a roof over their girls’ heads, but that doesn’t mean the relationship is not, when all is said and done, still primarily to their benefit. Gilley’s critics cite a full twelve sources that document the inhumane and exploitative labour practices that occured under colonial rule, which he unpersuasively attempts to dismiss:
All of them are narrative histories or theoretical forays, rather than scientific inquiries with careful case selection, variable measurement, controls, and estimates … No doubt talking about one-hundred and fifty years of ruling half the globe with a rapidly modernizing global economy, diligent anti-colonial labour scholars can sniff out problems like truffle pigs (ibid)
You may recall from part one that Gilley himself is no stranger to bullshit, outdated and thoroughly unscientific sources (such as articles in The Atlantic), but what I find most interesting here is his childlike naïveté on the capacity of social science to reveal objective truth. He often refers to his work as ‘hard’ social science, which he contrasts favourably with mere ‘narrative history’, the latter apparently too dependent on primary documents and first-hand testimony. According to this paradigm, you get a much more vivid picture of the past using models and estimates than by consulting actual evidence. A tension that permeates the text is this constant vaccillation between being an obvious political pamphlet and a serious social scientific treatise; Gilley struggles tirelessly to distinguish his work from the supposed pseudo-science of his critics, with mixed results. His research is - for the most part - equally if not more value-laden and unscientific as that of his critics.
What about colonial violence? Surprisingly, not a dealbreaker for Gilley:
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. Only later, with a shift in battle strategy on the ground under Lothar von Trotha, did the German campaign become unintentionally brutal. The changed strategy, wrote Kuss, “emerged entirely independently of any conscious decision for or against a strategy of concerted racial genocide.” Trotha, she argued, “did not intend to bring about a situation in which the Herero would be subject to a slow death through adverse natural conditions.” In subsequent research, I showed that the loss of life in the Herero (and Nama) populations has been vastly exaggerated. (p. 110)
So it was justified, and even when it wasn’t justified it was fairly circumscribed - not enough to invalidate colonialism - and even if it did occasionally raise eyebrows, those isolated incidents were basically accidents, and even though they were accidents and the colonial power more or less blameless, their impact was nevertheless greatly exaggerated and scholars are making a big deal out of nothing. All bases covered. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but every single defense he mounts is a facsimile of the arguments that the despised anticolonial ideologues make in apologia of post-independence African regimes. For Gilley, when egregious violence occurred during decolonization, it was the direct result of choices made by wide-eyed zealots, but when the same egregious violence occured under colonization it was “independent of any conscious decision”. There’s not really any hope of reasoning with such blinkered partisanship; we should simply recognize that he’s not even attempting to win over rational minds and move on. He does have one final card to play vis-à-vis colonial violence, however:
Simply scouring colonial history for “bad stuff” proves nothing, and indeed the fact that colonial governments so scrupulously documented the “bad stuff” bespeaks an accountability and transparency that was missing before and after colonial rule. (p. 111)
We’re damned lucky that those colonial governments were so humane and accountable that they deigned to document their crimes. An old maxim in the history profession is that the Nazis were the best record-keepers of all time, to the extent that it’s genuinely puzzling how meticulous they were in documenting their incriminating behaviour. According to Gilley’s logic, we ought to thank the Nazis for their accountability and transparency; the fact that they kept records is the ultimate symbol of their humanity and legitimacy.
Speaking of legitimacy, let’s examine an issue where Gilley is on slightly more solid ground. The book begins with an anecdote about the founding of the first British colony in Nigeria. Since the interior of the continent was so hostile to Europeans and the rate of death so high for white men who dared ventured there, the British were inclined to set up a trading post at the port of Lagos and use local rulers as intermediaries in their trade with the continent. The problem was that the political scene was highly unstable, with king Akitoye of Lagos deposed in a palace coup in 1845, confounding the establishment of stable commercial and treaty relationships. Akitoye and his allies invited the British to establish a sort of informal protectorate, reinstalling him on his throne in exchange for commercial rights and an end to the local slave trade and human sacrifice. Rather than simply bulldozing their way to power, the British actually offered the same deal to the usurper Kokoye, who refused, leading to a British naval attack and Kokoye’s eventual deposition. Therefore, British presence in the region brought with it an end to both the slave trade and barbaric practices like human sacrifice. While this anecdote represents but one scenario of a complicated and chaotic process, it nevertheless adds necessary perspective often lacking in our understanding of colonialism. We tend to make the mistake of projecting our modern nationalist sensibilities backwards and assume an armed imposition of European rule over the united resistance of locals, which was rarely the case. In reality, native inhabitants usually saw the superior technology and wealth, and wanted in on the action.
However, Gilley’s defense of the fundamental legitimacy of colonialism becomes shakier when he tries to characterize the basic human desire to pragmatically pursue material prosperity as evidence of legitimacy.
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 (p. 44) … anti-colonial scholars have been slow to admit the role of indigenous agency and to abandon their Eurocentric perspective on colonialism, preferring “helpless victims” rather than active participants (p. 120)
I challenge Gilley to conjure an example of an illegitimate regime wherein no one joins the army, reports crimes, or sends their kids to school. He apparently takes as a ringing endorsement of colonialism the fact that Africans accepted foreign rule as preferrable to futile guerilla resistance; by this logic, any regime that isn’t toppled by its subjects is de facto legitimate. He makes much out of the fact that Africans migrated to colonial areas, and to return to his ideal African state, Apartheid South Africa, let’s further examine his rationalization of white minority rule:
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 (p. 28)
It must be said that economic push/pull factors have an immense influence on migration, therefore this statistic isn’t altogether surprising; Afro-Carribbean immigration to the U.S. didn’t cease when Jim Crow laws were introduced, and to cite a more recent example, low-skilled South Asian workers still apply in droves to work as modern slaves in Qatar. Moreover, an unskilled Zimbabwean would be further incentivized to work for higher wages in South Africa as he or she could eventually leave, unlike the black South African for whom emigration was fraught with difficulties as they weren’t technically citizens of South Africa. Black migrant workers likewise couldn’t obtain citizenship, but they maintained the citizenship of their home country, therefore if wages were higher in South Africa it was perfectly logical to temporarily tolerate second-class status for better pay. But perhaps the best rebuke to Gilley’s notion that black migration to South Africa somehow legitimized Apartheid is the fact that migration positively exploded after the Apartheid regime was dismantled; between 2001-2006, South Africa accepted 491,000 immigrants, according to Statistics South Africa, and the more recent figures are closer to a million a year1. The country has its problems, no doubt, but if we’re measuring legitimacy based on the willingness of black Africans to move there, then the ANC regime - for better or worse - is still more legitimate than the Apartheid regime.
I’ll conclude this section on a slightly more commendatory note and highlight something I think Gilley gets right. He’s correct that decolonization was sudden, fairly unexpected and therefore messy, with worse outcomes than might have resulted from a more protracted road to independence.
[T]he process of going from colony to independent state was a sudden and largely unexpected movement in most places, whatever the decades of “calls” that preceded it. As noted, when Lumumba wrote his autobiography in 1956, no one was even talking about independence. Four years later, a country was birthed. The same story could be told of dozens of colonies. When Julius Nyerere testified at the United Nations in 1955, he estimated that Tanganyika would require another twenty years before it was ready for independence. Instead, it came like a firecracker in 1961. Throughout the 1950s, British policymakers talked of a renewal and expansion of empire, a fact too often obscured by the retrospective lens of knowing that this did not happen (p. 124)
The main problem in most colonies was that there weren’t enough qualified people to assume responsible control of the machinery of government. The wealthier British colonies of Ghana and Kenya appeared best equipped for such a challenge, as both had nascent middle classes of lawyers, doctors and businessmen. The Congo, on the other hand, had perhaps 35 college-educated citizens in a country of 10 million. It’s simply impossible to administer a modern state under such conditions, with eventual military dictatorship being the inevitable result. The Belgian government, to their credit, warned Lumumba that he was playing with fire, and pleaded with him for more time to prepare the country for self-rule, but he would have none of it. Lumumba is often lionized by the left as an anticolonial martyr, but he was in truth an impetuous and incompetent leader, in way over his head and lacking a firm belief in anything save his own greatness.
We can blame the Belgians and the other European powers for underdeveloping Africa, but it should also be recognized that when independence appeared on the horizon in the 1950s, the Europeans didn’t fight it, but rather tried to establish a reasonable timeline of 10-20 years wherein they could train the next generation of civil servants to ensure a neat and tidy transfer of power. Most African independence movements imprudently rejected the idea of an extended timeline, demanding immediate self-rule, with the result that there was limited awareness of what the state’s purview ought to be, and of which state resources belonged to whom. In this experimental atmosphere where patience and caution should have been the order of the day, an exuberant delirium instead pervaded. Undelivered promises of rapid development and higher living standards made by political neophytes led to widespread disillusionment which was then exploited by military strongmen, who could rationalize coups as saving the nation from incompetent leadership. Gilley is wrong that anticolonial scholars exculpate the post-independence regimes entirely, but he’s probably right that they’re for the most part too reluctant to apportion them their merited share of the blame.
Critiquing this book is the intellectual equivalent of a hack and slash RPG; it flings a seemingly endless supply of level one arguments at you, and the interminable task of slaying them rapidly becomes a meaningless chore. My final verdict on Gilley’s revisionist history of colonialism is that he’s on the mark maybe 5-10% of the time, but his work is an inverse image of everything he hates about anticolonial scholarship.
Stay tuned for part three…
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-africa-immigration-status-history