by Thomas R. Wells
European colonisation is a hot topic these days, among my academic colleagues and students, and the people who like to spread moral indignation on the internet. This surge in concern over the evils of colonisation is somewhat surprising. Thirty years or so ago when I first acquired a political awareness there was much less interest in colonisation, and a much more pros and cons format to its discussion. In the normal course of things, events recede in significance as time goes by and other events become more relevant to explaining where we are and why. So why is colonisation getting bigger as it gets further away?
The clue is in the moral indignation and the rise in recent decades of the politics of pity. Pity – feeling sorry for those worse off than ourselves – has become a dominant schema for understanding ourselves, society, and morality. It successfully displaces more egalitarian modes of empathy (‘compassion’) because every act of pity contains within it the gratifying confirmation of our own superiority. The politics of pity turns around identifying who gets to be counted as a victim, and thus free from blame as well as moral agency, and who the bad guys are who should be made to pay. The fixation on colonialism appears a classic case, supplying a psychically satisfying hierarchical division of the world into victims (poor countries whose only role is to suffer injustices) and perpetrators (rich countries with the status of moral actors, capable of initiating good and bad actions).
This is troubling in various ways. First, it excises the moral agency of political actors in poor countries. When a poor country government does wrong – tortures journalists, steals elections, embezzles oil revenues – moral judgement of their choices is considered inappropriate. Instead a causal explanation is sought for such regrettable events. What could have made those governments do such a terrible thing? With enough imagination, an explanation can always be found in the extended consequences of historic colonialism. The people in those countries who think their own governments do deserve moral criticism go largely unheard.
Second, in this zero-sum moral relationship, all moral agency is transferred to the rich ‘coloniser’ countries. This includes blame for their original crimes (when they ruled those countries) but also for crimes carried out by governments independent of their rule for many decades. It also includes responsibility for fixing the contemporary consequences of their colonial era crimes, even though this implies a renewal of external political rule that the critics of colonialism are supposedly committed to opposing.
This seems to me a rather narcissistic way of looking at the world that is actually reminiscent of the attitudes that made colonialism seem reasonable in the first place. It is hard to see what good could possibly come from it.
My pessimism is reinforced by the zero-sum view of economics that typically accompanies the zero-sum view of moral agency around colonialism. A major piece of evidence for the ‘colonisation explains everything’ thesis is economic. During the colonial era, European states looted many countries, and many of those countries are still poor now while their former colonists are rich. Therefore, it must be that Western countries (now including their colonial offshoots in N. America and Australasia) became rich by making other countries poor.
Many many people seem to believe that rich countries are rich because of colonialism; that they are only rich because of colonialism; and that poor countries are only poor because of colonialism.
None of these beliefs make economic sense.
The world is much richer now than it was a couple hundred years ago when colonialism was a thing. What this means is that the quantity of valuable goods and services produced and consumed produced in the world has increased multiple times over. This cannot be explained in terms of zero-sum transfers from victims to colonial muggers. There is plainly not a limited amount of economic wealth in the world about which we can only hope to decide who should get it by fighting or moralising.
From an economic perspective the puzzle to be explained is not, why are some countries poor (let alone, who can we blame?), but how did at first a handful and then most countries escape from the extreme poverty that characterised all of human history and pre-history?
The answer, according to economists since Adam Smith, is capitalism not colonialism. Colonialism can certainly succeed in forcing transfers of resources from one group to others, which can make some well-placed and ruthless individuals stinking rich, but it cannot make whole countries multiple times richer. Most obviously, dragging piles of gold around the world doesn’t make more clothing, food, or furniture to buy with it. Empire was not a European innovation – indeed many of the places they invaded were already ruled in that way. Capitalism was the thing they did that was new, and the countries that did it better (like Britain) got rich much faster than those that did it worse (like Spain), regardless of the size or resources of the empires they ruled over.
The key point about capitalism is that it is positive-sum: it generates additional economic production from the same original resources by increasing the efficiency with which resources are allocated, and new technologies developed and adopted. This is achieved by large numbers of consumers and producers freely interacting in markets with little central control or direction. From an economics point of view, stealing things from people is inefficient, as were the other encumbrances of the tightly managed colonial trading relationships. Compared to a freer trade counterfactual scenario, rich countries would have gotten even richer even faster if they had not bothered with colonialism. Thus, colonialism was not just a crime, but a costly mistake.
Even if the present wealth of rich countries cannot be explained by their links to colonialism, it might still seem that the enduring poverty of poor countries can be so explained. Colonising powers devastated the political institutions of many societies. Perhaps this has hindered their ability to adopt the political and economic institutions that would give their people the prosperity, freedom, and security that every human deserves. Presumably some such cases can be found. However, just because European colonisers broke what was there is not evidence that what was there was doing a wonderful job of meeting human needs and rights, or was likely to spontaneously evolve to provide such things. Pursuing such an analysis rigorously would require considering evidence that at least sometimes the colonisers’ influence on institutional development was a net positive.
Puzzling over the fantastical economics arguments provided for the enduring wickedness of colonisation, it all seems to follow from a basic error of argument, a case of the fallacy of the objectionable cause in which an overhasty causal claim is derived from the conjunction of two things that one feels must be related. This is especially common in cases involving two ‘bad’ things, where the logic of the storybook (previously) pushes human minds to assume a causal link. Hence colonialism and global inequality get stuck together not just by history (like everything else), but as cause and outcome.
It can be true that
- Colonialism was a bad thing and that
- Many colonised countries are still poor and unfree compared to those that did the colonising
Without it being true that
Colonialism is the cause of global poverty and unfreedom today
***
Thomas Wells teaches philosophy in the Netherlands and blogs at The Philosopher’s Beard
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