The so-called case for colonialism
The ethnocentrism of colonialism’s attackers and defenders
My commentary of February 9, 2024, “Western moral reckoning for colonialism,” was based on a 2023 book by Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. In writing the commentary, I came across reference to a 2023 book by Bruce Gilley, The Case for Colonialism.1 Today’s commentary consists of my reflections on Gilley’s book.
At the outset, Gilley makes clear that he is writing of nineteenth century European colonialism, in which England, France, Belgium, and Germany were the leading forces. He considers nineteenth century European colonialism to be different in purpose from the initial period of European colonialism in the sixteenth century, which was led by Spain and Portugal. It turns out that he especially admires the German and English brands.
As we found with Biggar, central to Gilley’s defense of colonialism is his view that colonialism involved much more than force and violence. He writes that colonialism in the nineteenth century became “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.”
Indeed so. And it is the reason that, from the point of view of the colonized, colonialism would be seen as a comprehensive process, including psychological dimensions, more penetrating than previous forms of conquests. But Gilley’s description is incomplete, in that colonialism also included economic structures that were capable of enduring after the abolition of the political dimension of colonialism.
Gilley and Biggar emphasize the noble intentions of many of the participants in the colonialist project to improve the standard of living of the peoples of the earth. In this their work is persuasive, and it is a necessary correction. However, as the seminal work of Immanuel Wallerstein2 in the 1970s and 1980s makes clear, the project of European colonialism also included the establishment, one could say the imposition, of a geographical division of labor between core and periphery, in which the peripheralized zones function to provide raw materials for the manufacturing and commercial center of the world-economy. Given the importance of economic interests in human affairs, it would not be unreasonable to view the economic dimension as the driving motive force of the colonialist project, shaping its perceptions in political and cultural matters. But regardless of which dimension is given priority, the economic dynamics of colonialism cannot reasonably be ignored.
In not seeing the economic dimension, Gilley could not see the capacity of colonialism to perpetuate itself in a new form following independence, which Kwame Nkrumah, who encountered the phenomenon as the head of state of newly independent Ghana, famously called neocolonialism. Overlooking the economic dimension and its central role in the transition to neocolonialism, Gilley views the references by the anti-colonizers to the “legacy of colonialism” as nothing more than a politically motivated pat phrase, lacking in scientific validity.
Gilley’s disdain for the anti-colonizers is not without justification, because the anti-colonizers do not understand the economic dimension any more than colonialism’s defenders. Moreover, the anti-colonizers treat history as the raw material for creative, politically motivated narratives, such that no effort is made to discern actual, objective historical dynamics. As is clear in their narratives, the anti-colonizers are driven by moral outrage and individualist virtue signaling, which they express in the environs of bureaucratized and elite-funded academic institutions. For them, the “legacy of colonialism” is an oft-repeated literary or poetic expression; it is not the product of historical and empirical search for truth. They have invented the jargon term “postcolonialism,” reflecting their ignorance or dismissal of empirical analyses of neocolonialism, formulated by those that have experienced it. They are incapable of formulating a scientific analysis of the political-economy of the world-system, an analysis connected to the current political practice of the neocolonized peoples of the earth, who have become the revolutionary subject of our times.
Moreover, the anti-colonizers have disdain for the liberal principle of the free exchange of ideas based on reasoning and empirical evidence. As a result, they have greatly harmed academic institutions and public debate, limited though these institutions were before the targeting and cancelling anti-colonizers entered the scene. The emergence of the defenders of colonialism, in reaction to this most disturbing phenomenon, is a hopeful sign, in spite of the limitations of the analysis of the defenders of colonialism.
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The contributions of colonialism
Gilley points out that colonialism improved health and nutrition, reduced mortality rates, increased population growth, and elevated life expectancy. It built infrastructure and connected commercial centers, towns, and rural areas to the world economy. It increased the purchasing power of the people on the international market. Colonial policy put forth economic development as the primary goal, with an orientation to eventual self-government.
In German East Africa, Gilley writes, colonialism promoted development through market penetration and the commercialization of agriculture. It expanded infrastructure and wage labor. It established national administration, and it created a system of Western education. King Leopold’s Congo, as another example, introduced new medical interventions against disease, and it put an end to tribal war and slavery. In response to Caroline Elkins’ 2022 Legacy of Violence, Gilley writes: “The [British] Empire did more than fight insurgencies and lock up criminals. It established human rights, documented cultures, created educational systems, built public health infrastructure, saved threatened minorities, protected the environment, reduced poverty, trained native governors, and encouraged civil society and a free press.”
Because of these benefits, European colonialism spread easily, and it was maintained with a relatively low level of coercive force. Gilley maintains that the people cooperated with colonialism: they sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, migrated to colonized areas, reported crimes to colonial police, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes. The collaborators far outnumbered the resisters, at least until very late. Taking these facts into account, we must assume that European colonial rule from the time of Napoleon until World War II was “highly legitimate.”
Gilley’s presentation with respect to these points is credible, although he is not able to see it as a historic process of neocolonialism under construction, and he is not able to see the inherently limited economic opportunities for the neocolonized in the neocolonial world order. Moreover, he is not able to account for the spectacular collapse of colonialism in the post-World War II era.
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The political defeat of colonialism
European colonialism was, as Gilley insists, a civilizing mission, which included the creation of a social class of Western educated Asians and Africans, graduates of the great Western universities of London, Paris, and elsewhere. In the plan of the civilizing mission, the educated class was supposed to represent the colonial power and its interests before the people. But instead, the Western educated class among the colonized appropriated Western knowledge and reformulated it from the vantage point of the colonized, imagining a world in which all nations would possess sovereign equality and the right to development, and all persons would have socioeconomic rights. They were able to delegitimate European colonialism and to lead their peoples in the taking of political power in the name of the colonized, thus abolishing colonialism in practice. Moving beyond the prevailing expectation that independence would arrive some day in the future, they demanded independence now, with characteristics freely decided by the colonized.
In French Indochina, semi-colonized China, and neocolonized Cuba, the process began in the 1920s, with intellectuals influenced by communism and the October Revolution. Petit bourgeois leaders synthesized class and colonial analyses; and they organized the peasant masses and other sectors of the people in armed struggles, taking power in 1945, 1949, and 1959, respectively. In most of Africa and Asia, the awakening of the 1920s gave rise to anti-colonial protest organizations. In the post-World War II period, a new generation of leaders was less patient; they were oriented to the creation of mass organizations directed toward the taking of political power and establishing independent nations. They stood against both colonialism and tradition.
Gilley has disdain for this worldwide process of political change from below, which left colonialism discredited everywhere in the post-World War II era. He attributes the transformation to the resignation of the European colonial powers in the aftermath of two world wars, rather than to the agency of the colonized as a new revolutionary subject on the world stage. He writes that “the Europeans handed over power to political neophytes with little knowledge of or support from the countries they claimed to represent.” In fact, their insight into worldwide structures of colonial domination was penetrating, enabling them to elevate the political consciousness of the people and to marshal their support, ending the era of colonialist legitimacy seen by Gilley.
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The pitfalls of independence
Gilley writes that the handing over of political power was a disaster everywhere, in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He maintains that the countries granted independence from 1945 to 1976 were not ready for independence, and they have been plagued by civil war, political tyranny, and economic collapse. The newly independent governments have failed to promote economic development, a phenomenon that is a testimony to their false assumptions, he sustains. Anti-colonial thought was, in his view, one big error, as the former colonies fell into the hands of indigenous tyrants and madmen, like Nasser.
Gilley cites David Fieldhouse, who maintained that the “incorporation [of the colonies] into the world-economy as exporters of raw materials had provided the first steps in domestic industrialization,” which would have led to “export-based economic success,” if leaders had followed practices of good governance and sound investment. This recommendation goes against the experiences of newly independent countries (that were not oil-rich), which encountered the problem of the declining terms of exchange, in which the price for raw materials on the world market was continually falling relative to the cost of manufactured goods, such that it increasingly cost many times more tons of sugar, for example, to buy a tractor. And the recommendation goes against the reality of foreign ownership of raw materials export industries, in a worldwide political context in which neither the companies nor their countries were willing to cooperate with a project of economic development for the newly independent and developing countries.
Inasmuch as Gilley is engaging in a broadside attack, and not an analysis, he ignores or dismisses offhand a number of interesting cases of Third World governance from the 1940s through the 1980s, namely, China, Vietnam, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, Tanzania (Nyerere), Libya (Gaddafi), Chile (Allende), Nicaragua (Sandinista Front), Iran (Islamic Revolution), and Burkina Faso (Sankara). Six of these revolutionary governments have attained political stability and have maintained themselves in power for decades. They took different roads to power, but they share common principles. Their political systems tend toward local nominations, indirect elections, people’s councils, and mass organizations, with political parties that play an educational role. They have mixed economies, with private and state-owned enterprises, but under state direction and with state planning. They tend toward public rather than privately-owned mass media, seeking to protect the public discourse from economically interested and morally irresponsible actors. Moreover, in a manner entirely different from the anti-colonial ideologues, the six countries share the common epistemological assumption that there is universal truth, and it is learned collectively in political practice and through dialogue across civilizations. These ten cases are worthy of our investigation as efforts at post-colonial construction by the colonized; they should not be ignored or dismissed out of hand, nor should they be perceived through the lens of Western propaganda.
Also worthy of attention is the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), born from the Bandung Conference of 1955 and established as an organization of states in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961. NAM’s proposal for a New International Economic Order was approved by the UN General Assembly in 1974. It has repeatedly proclaimed the principles of respect for the sovereignty and equality of states, big and small; of non-interference in the internal affairs of states; and of mutually beneficial trade among nations. It presently has 120 member states, nearly all former colonies. It is, in effect, the collective voice of the Third World.
As the newly independent nations have struggled to attain sovereign and modern nations, they have from the outset repeatedly confronted the maneuvers of the Western colonialist and imperialist powers. Political interference, military interventions, and economic sanctions have been a central aspect of their struggle to attain self-determination. Gilley writes that colonial officials spoke of uplifting the people through colonial rule, and I am sure that this was a sincere belief on the part of many participants in the colonialist project. But the full truth is that when Third World nationalist movements took political power ahead of the scheduled time, the ex-colonial powers, led by the imperialist USA, adopted maneuvers of all kinds to defend their interests.
Because of the maneuverings of the Western powers and limitations in capital inherent in the global unequal exchange, Third World governments were not able to make sufficient progress in overcoming the economic and political obstacles to development, especially when measured against the hopes of the peoples in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, it is to some extent true, as Gilley declares, that “by the 1980s, Third Worldism was on its way to being discredited.” He reports on the 1979 address to the UN General Assembly by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Singapore, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, who declared that Third World failures are self-induced. Gilley notes that at the NAM Summit in New Delhi in 1983, Rajaratnam and other representatives of the “Asian Tigers” were able to steer the organization away from its classic principles and its affirmation of state-directed development and toward a reduction of the role of the state in national economies. In the 1980s, Gilley declares, former colonies begin to reclaim the colonial structures, such as market economies, democracy, property rights, and foreign investment.
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The struggle continues
Gilley appears to be unaware that the war between the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist Third World was far from over in the 1980s. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Third World revolution entered a new stage, which was provoked by the turn to the market that Gilley lauds.
The turn to the market was fundamentally undemocratic and anti-popular. It was not so much that former colonies began to reclaim colonial structures, as Gilley puts it, but that the Western imperialist powers began to impose an extreme form of economic liberalism. It was imposed not by armies but by international finance agencies, and their principal weapon was the Third World debt, which was created when Northern banks resolved the problem of excess liquidity (caused by petroleum dollar deposits) through excessive lending to Third World governments, followed by financially motivated manipulation of interest rates. In the situation of Third World government debt, the International Monetary Fund floated new loans, but on the condition that the extreme liberal economic policies be adopted. It was thus a matter of economic manipulation and coercion, ensuring the flow of capital from the developing to the advanced economies, above and beyond the unequal exchange built into core-peripheral economic relations.
This global turn to a new stage of economic liberalism, called neoliberalism, was contradictory, because exceptions were made with respect to liberal economic policies that had harsh consequences for the Western economies. But the harsh recipes were fully imposed with respect to peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world-economy, where poverty was widespread, with the six mentioned countries less directly impacted by the turn.
For the peoples of the developing nations, the imposition of neoliberal policies had concrete negative consequences. Especially important was the decline of the purchasing power of national currencies, because states were no longer adopting monetary policies designed to protect their currencies. To this was added the reduction of state subsidies for such necessary items as water and public transportation. It may have been that the previous economic policies of states were not sustainable in the long term, but their immediate elimination was not a workable solution, even though it had the advantage of stimulating the flow of capital from the peripheral regions to the core, compensating for the declining productive and competitive capacity of the major advanced economies. Since neoliberal policies reduced the national markets of most the world’s economies, it had negative consequences for the world-economy as a whole in the long term. Accordingly, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s can be seen as a clear sign that the West had entered into decadence, unable to address its own problems or the problems of the world-system that it directed.
Popular protests against neoliberal policies began in the 1990s, initially taking the form of protests against concrete measures, such as road blockages in Bolivia in protest of the higher price of water. On this basis, a new generation of leaders emerged, capable of connecting concrete problems to the neoliberal project and of drawing upon the Third World revolutionary insights of the 1950s through the 1970s to critique neoliberalism and the neocolonial world-system.
In Latin America, a new political reality emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries. Alternative political parties were able to take power from established political parties that had been junior partners to U.S. imperialism in the neocolonial world order. Progressive governments and governments proclaiming “socialism for the twenty-first century” emerged in Venezuela, Nicaragua (again), Bolivia, Ecuador (for a time), Brazil, Mexico and Honduras, which are deepening economic, diplomatic, and cultural relations with the above mentioned six countries.
The Non-Aligned Movement has retaken its classic Third World agenda, a phenomenon that became evident at the 2006 NAM Summit in Havana. Today, both NAM and the G-77 plus China put forth anti-imperialist declarations, in accordance with the principles and concepts of the Third World project of the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s.
Regional associations have emerged in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia, explicitly seeking a pluripolar world order through South-South cooperation and implicitly seeking to sidestep the need for a dependent relation with the Western imperialist powers. These regional associations have formed relations with China, which has adopted a foreign policy of promoting South-South cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among nations as the foundation for world peace and prosperity. Because of its large and dynamically expanding economy and its foreign policy of worldwide cooperation, China is playing a leading role in the construction of an alternative world order based on respect for the sovereignty of nations and mutually beneficial trade among nations.
Gilley does not appear to see these developments. And it is unfortunate, because unlike the superficial anti-colonizers of the West, the Third World anti-imperialist construction does not see colonialism as the essence of evil. To the contrary, it discerns the beneficial aspects of European colonialism and Western political-economic-cultural systems. Today’s agents of social reconstruction see themselves as advancing modernization on the foundation of structures brought by colonialism but redesigning them in accordance with their conditions as historically colonized nations and peoples. They appropriate from the West and from the colonial past in the construction of a new, more just world order. They advocate a dialogue among civilizations in the common quest for a common human future characterized by advanced scientific and economic development and world peace and prosperity.
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Final considerations
Gilley maintains that Chinua Achebe and other great intellectuals who actually lived under colonialism understood the complexity of colonialism. They appreciated the benefits of Western medicine and education, and the noble motives of some of those who dedicated their lives to bringing these benefits to the subjected people. “Yet, as time has passed, their children had become monomaniacal anti-colonial critics.”
I would like to suggest that the intergenerational degeneration made evident by today’s anti-colonial analysis pertains not to actual Third World revolutionaries but to the West and the Third World in the West. The current, superficial anti-colonialism is a Western phenomenon. It is rooted in the colonial analysis that entered Western consciousness in the 1960s from the Third World and from black intellectuals in the West. Said colonial analysis demonstrated the colonial foundations of the modern world. It explained the economic and psychological dimensions of the colonial relation, and it explained the continuity of the economic structures in the neocolonial era. But Western intellectuals, black and white, failed to develop the colonial analysis of the 1960s into a continuous critique of Western imperialist foreign policies, present in the public debate. I have in mind something along the lines of Jesse Jackson’s proposal for a U.S. foreign policy of North-South cooperation, but as a permanent political and intellectual movement, and not merely as a platform of a presidential candidate. Western intellectuals failed to develop a mature anti-colonial analysis, based in empirical evidence in history and contemporary reality, and tied to Third World political practice.
It appears to be the case that Western intellectuals, including Third World intellectuals in the West, have made their peace with the neocolonial world order. They have not had a sufficient spirit of self-sacrifice to challenge the structures of Western higher education and journalism. Many were channeled into segments that missed the story of the whole: race, gender, and ecology. Others who sought comprehensive understanding were channeled into one form or another of Western Marxism, with limited understanding of the colonial process and anti-imperialist movements. By the late 1970s, the potential of the West for anti-colonial critique had fallen into division and confusion.
In the Third World itself, however, the struggle continued, involving a great synthesis of West, East, and South tied to political practice; a worldwide anti-imperialist movement of imperialist states and organizations, dismantling neocolonial structures piece by piece. The Third World struggle is scarcely noticed by the West, but it is there that we must go to expand and deepen our understanding.
In the debate between the defenders of colonialism and superficial critics of colonialism, the essential insights of the worldwide and impacting anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s are overlooked. The debate reflects the intellectual immaturity of the West.
Setting aside superficiality, we ought to understand that colonialism was the foundation to modernization. Colonialism created education, infrastructure, and an interconnected world. It also generated a new revolutionary subject, the neocolonized, that today is forging modernization with Third World characteristics.
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Gilley, Bruce. 2023. The Case for Colonialism. Nashville and London: New English Review Press. As the book itself makes clear, The Case Colonialism is a centerpiece in an academic cultural war between leftist anti-colonizers and defenders of colonialism.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System, Vol. I. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 1980. The Modern World System, Vol. II. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 1989. The Modern World System, Vol. III. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 2005. Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Includes two previously published books in a single volume: Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967)
__________. 2011. The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.