Western moral reckoning for colonialism
Western moral reckoning for colonialism
The need to respond to the call for North-South cooperation
The West must come to a moral reckoning with respect to colonialism. The West should have done so during the process of decolonization of the 1950s through the 1970s, but it could not, because what occurred was not a true decolonization but a transition from colonialism to neocolonialism. Deception, and not truthful accounting and rectification, was the order of the day. Thus, public discourse did not discuss the historical development of the current stage of the world-system on a colonial foundation, nor did it address the continuation of colonialism in a new form, such that it constituted a de facto denial of the importance of colonialism in the past and present.
Breaking the silence, an indignant shout of anti-colonialism, reflecting a superficial understanding, has emerged in the last two decades. It indulges in blanket condemnation of Western colonialism, frequently focusing on individuals, past and present, as the targets of righteous wrath.
In today’s commentary, I reflect on a 2023 book by Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.1 Biggar writes in reaction to the superficial anti-colonialism that has become the fashion among leftist academics and “activists” of the last two decades. Biggar’s book is far more nuanced and historically accurate than the anti-colonialist superficial denunciation. Nonetheless, it fails to grasp the foundational role of Western colonialism in the construction of the current neocolonial world-system. Moreover, it is blind to the phenomenon of a worldwide movement of anti-imperialist states, which seeks to come to terms with the legacy of colonialism through the cooperative construction of a more just, politically stable, and prosperous world order.
Biggar is, above all, a defender of the liberal international order, and central to his defense of the British Empire was its role in promoting “a worldwide free market that gave native producers and entrepreneurs new economic opportunities.” He maintains that the colonial governments of the British Empire brought to many regions of the world the necessary infrastructure and the political centralization that made possible commerce and economic modernization. And they provided a controlled environment for modernization, which in any event was bound to come to the various regions of the world. Seeing this as an unfinished project, he concludes the book by declaring that the task of the British, along with the Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, is to provide the foundations for the liberal international order, holding back manifestations of authoritarianism from the East and South.
There is in Biggar’s presentation a fundamental problem. If you are going to analyze and morally evaluate colonialism, you are obligated to look at it from the vantage point of the colonized, however much this obligation is ignored in Western scholarship (including the superficial anti-colonialists). There is a body of literature that provides the texts for doing so: Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth as well as Black Skin, White Masks; Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism; Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays in Socialism; DuBois, The World and Africa; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru; Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity as well as The Modern World-System; and Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment.2 These are classic texts, whose principal ideas were formulated in the context of the transition of the world-system from colonialism to neo-colonialism, and they were formulated from the vantage point of the colonized during the historic moment of the fall of the British Empire.
Of these seminal works, Biggar mentions only Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. He does so in the Epilogue, where his intention is to show the intellectual roots of the authoritarian and dogmatic qualities of the new anti-colonialists. Bigger maintains that “Fanon asserts the view that the nationalist revolutionaries are the privileged possessors of the truth.” In Biggar’s rendering, for Fanon, “the needs of revolutionary liberation determine the truth, so black vitality throws off the shackles of European reason;” which leads to “an illiberal totalitarianism that is incapable of self-correction.”
Professor Biggar has the London edition of The Wretched of the Earth , whereas I have the New York edition, so I could not find Biggar’s citations in the book. Suffice it to say that I have not interpreted Fanon in this way. In my view, Fanon was dedicated to describing the profound psychological dimension of the colonial situation, which gives rise to a psychological complex in which the colonized internalizes the worldview of the colonizer. For Fanon, revolutionary nationalism, especially when it takes the form of violent struggle, functions as a cleansing force that emancipates the colonized from the psychological complex of the colonized. I have never read into this any suggestion by Fanon of authoritarianism as a dimension of future post-colonial emancipation. In any event, I seriously doubt that many of today’s superficial anti-colonialists have read Fanon.
In not encountering the seminal anti-colonial literature, Biggar is not focused on the economic dimension of colonialism, which is a key component of these classic texts. Particularly important is the geographical division of labor between core and peripheral regions of the world-economy, in which the function of the periphery is to provide cheap, low-wage-based raw materials that are exported to the manufacturing centers in the colonial countries, in which the wages of workers are relatively high. This core-peripheral economic relation is the structural source of the continuing underdevelopment of the colony, which endures after the colony becomes an independent nation.
Biggar’s lack of focus on the core-peripheral relation leads him to oversight with respect to manufacturing in India. He notes that the British Empire was committed to free trade from 1846 until the First World War, and that “during the liberal period, traditional industries such as the Indian spinning and weaving of muslins were rendered uncompetitive by the untaxed import of cheap, machine-made cottons from Britain.” However, Wallerstein and Frank report that the destruction of Indian textile industry and the conversion of India into an exporter of raw materials had previously occurred. They note that India had been one of the world’s major centers of cotton textile production prior to 1800, but by 1840, Indian textile manufacturing had virtually disappeared as a result of British colonial economic policies, with a tariff structure that favored British manufacturers. Moreover, Wallerstein reports that in the period 1750 to 1850 there were dramatic increases in India of the exportation of indigo, raw silk, opium, and cotton, as a result of the expansion of cash crop agriculture. Biggar confirms this, noting an increase in employment in indigo, opium, and saltpeter.
But Biggar is not observing with a core-peripheral frame. He sees new employment in new economic activities, but he does not see that it is low-wage employment, part of an imposed unequal exchange, rooted in core-peripheral structures. In contrast, Wallerstein and Frank were looking at these complex issues with a core-peripheral frame, that is, with a frame of reference that was constructed from the analytical vantage point of the colonized. This was not, I ought to be clear, a narrative based on the “lived experience” of the colonized, but a political-economic analysis from the vantage point of the colonized, just as Marx had developed a political-economic analysis from the point of view of the worker, in a different and earlier historic context.
Biggar notes that India later rebuilt her textile capacity. Indian entrepreneurs visited England and observed English industrial methods, and they developed factories in India employing Indian labor and eventually outcompeting Manchester using imported English machinery. He does not say if the Indian manufacturers were outcompeting the English due to cheaper Indian labor, and he does not note if the machines in India were dependent on parts manufactured in England, issues that suggest the possibility of an Indian manufacturing system that is complementary and subordinate to English manufacturing. This is different from developing an autonomous system of manufacturing, with methods decided by India in accordance with its own direction and concepts, which may have existed before the British arrived.
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With his orientation to defend the British Empire and the virtues of the British peoples, Biggar tends to understate the role of conquest. He stresses that agreements were made with heads of states in India and Africa, which typically included permission to engage in commerce, and in some cases British presence was requested for protection. He insists that it was not a question of territory attained by brute force.
However, the Encyclopedia of Invasions and Conquests3 gives more stress to the role of military force in the development of the British Empire. It describes the British East India Company as a military and commercial enterprise that constructed fortifications and that provided military protection for British merchants, enabling their access to markets all over India, and that included military engagement with the Bengali army to attain control over Bengal. Subsequent governors-general functioned as heads of state, extending power in part through conquest.
Furthermore, the Encyclopedia describes the British military conquest of the Ashanti beginning in 1824, culminating in the deposing of the Ashanti king in 1875, and the declaration of the Ashanti Empire as an English possession in 1902. The Encyclopedia further reports on the British military conquest of Ceylon from 1796 to 1815, ending a line of rulers in the Kingdom of Kandy that had endured for 2,300 years.
With respect to the widely used head tax in Africa, Biggar writes that “this was certainly a form of pressure, but it was not forced labour in the strict sense of labour that was legally obliged and unpaid.” Technically true, but in contrast, Wallerstein describes the head tax as indirect force based in institutional power.
In addition, it should be kept in mind that the formation of the British Empire was not a phenomenon that stood alone. It was an integral part of a process of European conquest of the world, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Caribbean and Latin America. The gold and silver that was attained through the conquest of the Americas played a central role in the expansion of industry in England and northwestern Europe, capacitating the English for conquest.
Biggar is right in insisting that the Empire was not built on force along, and that it involved considerable cooperation among the colonized peoples. Nonetheless, I think that we need to acknowledge that the European colonial process was in essence conquest.
Recognizing this, however, does not give credence to superficial anti-colonial moral posturing. Conquest has been the foundation of human development since the agricultural revolution. Generally, conquest led to civilization and science and to benefits for humanity, even if the conquered initially were sacrificed at the altar of progress and did not experience its benefits at first. In the case of the modern European domination of the world, conquest has laid the technical foundation to great technological advances and to worldwide economic integration. It also has generated an advanced anti-imperialist movement among the neocolonized states, which is calling all peoples and nations to a dialogue of civilizations and to the construction of a more just and sustainable world.
The issue that we confront today is the fact that conquest is no longer sustainable as the foundation of progress. There are no new lands and peoples left to conquer, so the world economy cannot expand in the way that it previously did. It is necessary to learn a new road of progress through cooperation, which is what the colonized peoples have been declaring since the 1950s.
The superficiality of the new anti-colonialists is not in their stress on conquest, for which there is reasonable evidence. It is in their simplistic moral indignation about a characteristic that pertains to the human condition; it is in their selection of recent European conquests over the peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa as the target of their simplistic moral indignation, ignoring countless other cases of conquest, enslavement, and injustice; and it is in their incapacity to see numerous good intentions and good works as an integral part of British Empire. Biggar rightly rebukes the anti-colonialists for these shortcomings.
Biggar maintains that the British Empire did some good things, and I am in agreement. However, some items in his list of good things reflect a partial understanding. (1) Biggar maintains that the Empire “promoted a worldwide free market that gave native producers and entrepreneurs new economic opportunities.” He does not see that it did so in the context of core-peripheral economic relations that advantage core zones. (2) He notes that the Empire developed infrastructure, without noting that it often did so in ways that facilitated the core-peripheral relation rather than autonomous national economic development. (3) He observes that the British Empire “helped save both the Western and non-Western world for liberal democracy,” without discerning that the promotion of liberal democracy occurred in the context of the emergence of a fundamentally undemocratic neocolonial world-system. (4) He observes that the British Empire helped create the United Nations, without mentioning the undemocratic and unequal power between the West and the Third World in the design of UN structures. (5) He observes that the British Empire in alliance with Western powers developed international development agencies, without noting that the Western powers consistently interfere in the internal affairs of nations, whenever their national development plans are inconsistent with Western interests. (6) He notes that the British Empire allied with other powers against Chinese communism, without appreciation of the advanced democratic characteristics of people’s democracy as developed by the People’s Republic of China. These limitations are consequences of Biggar’s dismissal of the discourses of pivotal leaders and intellectuals of the colonized.
On the other hand, a list of good and bad things is beside the point. The British Empire was part of the march of history; and as such, it provided a foundation for further technological and democratic development. The task from here is to build further on that foundation, through cooperation with the neocolonized peoples, who share recognition of and appreciation for the modern foundation that the Western colonial empires have built.
The point is to construct from here. In this regard, both the superficial anti-colonialists and the defenders of British imperialism appear to have not heard the call of the neocolonized, and therefore they are not prepared to participate with the neocolonized in the construction of a more just, stable, and prosperous world. We have not yet found the road to moral reckoning. Not yet.
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Biggar, Nigel. 2023. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. London: William Collins. Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, and the Director of its McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. He earned a BA in Modern History from Oxford and an MA and Ph.D. in Christian Theology and Ethics from the University of Chicago.
Dubois, W.E.B. 1965. The World and Africa. New York: International Publishers.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.
__________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1979. Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press.
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1966. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers.
Nyerere, Julius. 1968. Ujamaa: Essays in Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Odinga, Oginga. 1967. Not Yet Uhuru. New York: Hill and Wang.
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.
Davis, Paul K., Ed. 2023. Encyclopedia of Invasions and Conquests, 4th edition. Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing.