The Case for Colonialism PDF Notes

2_The case for colonialism_at2Oct2017.pdf (file not included in this release)
The Case for Colonialism PDF

The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies. he case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future.

Civilized world that was colonialized turned out better than the parts now that weren’t in history?

Failures of anti-colonial critique

1. Objective Costs/Benefits
   1. Abernethy summarises the objective costs/benefits question as follows: “In times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-gov- ernment, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally indefensible.” The Case for Colonialism PDF > ^7n948qa1km7
2. Measuring counterfactual: What would likely have happened in a given place absent colonial rule?
   1. One is hard-pressed, to take a prominent example, to find a single example of such care in measurement in the vast critical scholarship on the British counter-insurgency campaign against the Mau in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, especially the scolding work of Elkins.7 Daniels argues that ‘[h]ad the British left Kenya to the Mau, there would have been anarchy and further civil war, perhaps even genocide’.
3. Internal coherence (or non-contradiction)
   1. Colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough
   2. Africanists: Too little state-making and too much
   3. Territorial boundaries forcing integration while old ones criticized for reinforcing tribalism
   4. Marxists scholars found fault when colonialism didn’t invest in public health and infrastructure and when it did (in order to exploit it)
   5. Colonialism is credited with near-magical powers to sweep away everything good in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity) and with equally magical powers to make per-manent everything bad in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity).
4. Simple epistemic virtue of falsification
   1. Undoubtedly benefit of colonialism: the abolition of slave-trading
   2. Colonialism a net positive
      1. Research that is careful in conceptualising 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.16 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 knowl-edge, and national identify formation, to mention just a few dimensions.

• Alien rule often been legitimate in world history because it has provided better governance than the indigenous alternative.
• 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’. The Case for Colonialism PDF > ^sxky3cv7b3
• Wanting colonialism
  • Sultan of Brunei having James Brooke running provience of Sarawak until 1841-1946
  • Sir Alan Burns, governor of Gold Coast during WWII
    • Serving in the army and giving gifts to fund wars
• Most subject people faced grave threats from rival group and wanted benefits of modernized and liberal state governments.

The costs of anti-colonialism

• Ravaged countries

• Destroying market economics

  • Pluralistic and constitutional policies

• Guinea-Bissau

  • Anti-colonial hero Amilcar Cabral
    • Too aim at successful colonial state that had quadrupled rice production, sustained gains in life expectancy
    • Couldn’t mobilize people against colonialism
    • 25,000+ dead, 200,000 displaced and economy ruined after wars

• Of the 80 countries that threw off the colonial ‘yoke’ after World War II, at least half experienced similar trauma, while most of the rest limped on.

• A sobering World Bank report of 1996 noted: ‘Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last 30 years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess’.

• Colonialism usually spread with a significant degree of consent from politically salient actors