Identifying the legacies of European rule is fraught with conceptual and methodological perils.
I construe colonialism narrowly as control of a territory’s public sector by a metropole. Instances in which informal influence was exercised apart from formal governance are not considered.
I focus on what Europeans did in trying to carve out and consolidate dominant positions for themselves. If one broadened the definition of colonialism and equated it with westernization or modernization, its impact would be considerably greater than claimed here. But so many things would have been tossed into the causal side of the equation that sorting out which aspect of westernization had which effects would become an unmanageable operation.1 Likewise, if one considered everything that occurred during the colonial era, including responses and initiatives of colonized peoples, the independent variable would be too comprehensive and complex to generate meaningful cause-effect statements. It is more appropriate, for instance, to treat anticolonial nationalism as a significant legacy of colonialism than to regard the two as part and parcel of the same thing.To assert that colonialism had consequence X or Y is not to claim that it is the only cause of X or Y. Indeed, a safer assumption is that outcomes noted here were shaped by many factors. Clearly, the greater the time gap between the end of colonial rule and events or patterns one wants to explain, the less plausible the claim that colonialism was the sole or even principal cause. The colonial impact on today’s world is more obvious and direct for phase 5 states than for those gaining independence in phase 2. Effects on the latter have been filtered through personalities, events, and trends in postindependence decades that had little or nothing to do with the time when Europeans were formally in charge.
No one can confidently assert what kind of world would have emerged had
Europeans not projected power to other continents.
To identify legacies of empire is implicitly to contrast what occurred in modern world history with speculation about what would have happened in the absence of empire. Different scenarios of the likely course of counterfactual history account for many of the differences in people’s assessments of European rule. Counterfactual thinking is inherently contestable. But can efforts to account for the past do without it? “We can avoid counterfactuals only if we eschew all causal inference...,” assert Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin. “Everyone [carrying out historical analysis] does it and the alternative to an open counterfactual model is a concealed one.”2 Where appropriate, assumptions about alternative pasts are made explicit rather than concealed.European rule affected more than colonies. It helped shape Europe’s own development and eventually influenced worldwide patterns of thought and action. Propositions about each of these categories are arranged in the same sequence: impacts on society, politics, economics, religion, culture, and psychology. References to politics, economics, and religion parallel the analysis of the triple assault.