A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

It would be convenient to side with balance-sheet moderates against proponents of either extreme position as a way to resolve—or evade—unending controversy. But this move is too convenient.

These widely shared norms are appropriate ones to reframe as evaluation cri­teria. One way to proceed is to say that in times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-government, 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.

This way of framing the issue takes into account the enormous variability of colonial situations and permits ethical judgments distinguishing one metropole from another, one time period from another, and one colonized society from an­other. Using the self-government criterion, for example, one can conclude that in colonies of occupation Britain did a distinctly better job than other metropoles because representative institutions were available through some variant of the West­minster parliamentary model. By the labor allocation criterion, regimes permitting the slave trade and enforcing domestic slavery were worse than regimes, from phase 3 onward, that outlawed such practices. By the same criterion, colonies that routinely relied on forced labor were more oppressively governed than colonies that did not.

By the material well-being standard, a colony in which indigenous claims to land were respected and non-European incomes rose was better governed than one in which land was alienated and non-European living standards fell. A colony with minimal prospects for modernization under indigenous leadership, whose indige­nous incomes were raised by investment of European capital and technology, was better administered than a colony in which the opposite conditions applied.

By the human dignity standard, a regime practicing overt discrimination on the basis of race—which may be considered invariant for a given individual and is presumably irrelevant to job performance—was more immoral than one practicing discrimination on cultural grounds, at least in cases in which cultural assimilation was possible. Both regimes were worse than one practicing less discrimination on either racial or cultural grounds. A colony whose rulers suppressed human sacri­fice and widow burning was better governed than one in which such practices were tolerated.

There is, to be sure, plenty of room for dispute over the application of these criteria to particular situations. Even if critics and defenders agreed on what colonial rulers did in a certain time and place, they could still offer very dissimilar assess­ments of precolonial society. And they could invoke very different scenarios of what would have occurred had a society retained its autonomy. The grounds for conten­tion are legion. Nonetheless, progress will have been made if people with widely divergent worldviews are willing to share criteria for making moral judgments.

Another approach is to assess how well colonial regimes, considered collec­tively, performed in each major issue area. The obvious problem here is overgeneral­ization: whatever is said might apply to an imagined “typical” situation but definitely not to all situations. This approach has the advantage, however, of permitting us to identify arenas in which European rulers frequently performed well and others in which their behavior was consistently indefensible. What follows is my attempt to draw up a moral balance sheet, proceeding from most positive to most reprehensible aspects of the overall record.

Colonial rulers performed best in the economic arena. The explore-control- utilize syndrome led them actively to manipulate the natural environment so as to enhance people’s material well-being. By introducing capital, advanced technology, new flora and fauna, and profit-seeking individuals and institutions to overseas territories, Europeans took the lead in generating unprecedented wealth there. To the extent that these factors of production would not have been exported had Europeans not controlled the public sector, colonial rule can be considered close to a necessary condition for sustained economic growth. To the extent that wealth generation depended upon utilizing hitherto untapped resources, Europeans increased the pro­ductive capacity of colonies without depriving non-Europeans of resources they would have enjoyed absent foreign rule.

The record was clearly worse when it came to distributing gains from growth. Because Europeans controlled the public as well as private profit sector and because the two sectors regularly collaborated for mutual benefit, Europeans could and did allocate themselves most of the benefits of development. In effect they unilaterally decided that factors of production they contributed should be generously compen­sated while the labor contributions of local people should be assigned low priority. A related distributional issue is geographical: a high proportion of the profits from colonial natural and human resources was sent to Europe and not consumed or productively reinvested in lands generating these profits.

The record was mixed with respect to labor allocation choices and personal upward mobility. Slavery and forced labor severely constrained peoples’ freedom to work for their own benefit and deprived them of income they should have earned from their labors. Discriminatory policies limited upward mobility on grounds that were arbitrary and unrelated to personal qualifications or performance. On the other hand, economic development opened up new occupational options. Even when discrimination limited access to top positions in sectoral institutions, the existence of these institutions created new opportunities for advancement in low- and middle­level ranks.

The colonial record was mixed but, on balance, poor with respect to cross- cultural communication. Diffusion of European languages permitted people from diverse backgrounds who otherwise would not have understood each other to share a lingua franca. Diffusion of literacy and numeracy to societies lacking them permit­ted a wider expression of ideas across barriers of time and space.

The overall record is uneven but generally poor when it comes to training for self-government. This is not surprising, for administrators had an active interest not only in making key policy decisions but also in retaining the power to make them. Metropoles varied greatly in the training function. Britain did considerably better than Portugal and Belgium, which refused to acknowledge self-government as a legitimate goal and did virtually nothing to prepare subject populations for it. But even the British record is mixed. Where settlers were present indigenous prospects for autonomy were severely set back, permanently and fatally so in North America and Australasia. Britain’s indirect rule policies often had the effect, intended or not, of making self-government at the colonywide level more problematic.

On the positive side, colonial public sector institutions operated over a wider area and affected far more people than did most precolonial stateless societies. Local communities with poorly institutionalized governance mechanisms cannot hope to survive in a world of states. Colonialism extended the “self” in self-government far beyond the level of face-to-face interaction. It was the colonial state, moreover, that nationalist movements targeted for capture. Nationalists were able to use available civil and military bureaucracies to govern large areas once they replaced Europeans in top policy posts.

Among the most reprehensible aspects of colonialism, in my judgment, were its deliberate, systematic, and sustained assaults on human dignity. The assertions of cultural and racial superiority accompanying European rule had devastating effects on the self-respect of many peoples. In myriad, unsubtle ways rulers violated the right of their subjects not to be individually and collectively demeaned. The point was well put in a memorandum from one English official to another in early nineteenth-century India: “Foreign conquerors have treated the natives with vio­lence, and often with great cruelty, but none has treated them with so much scorn as we; none has stigmatised the whole people as unworthy of trust, as incapable of honesty, and as fit to be employed only where we cannot do without them.”³⁰ The harmful effects of such attitudes were further magnified when colonized peoples learned the lesson too well and came to accept the charge that they were indeed inferior. This psychological complex hampered their will and limited their capacity to live full, satisfying lives.

The imperial project consumed the fives of millions of human beings and blighted the fives of millions more. Its worst aspects—the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, forced labor, sexual exploitation—should not be forgotten or excused. The forests of the Amazon and Congo basins were killing fields, as were the Banda islands and Tasmania and lands inhabited by Araucanians, Pequots, and Hereros. A recurring corollary of land acquisition by settlers was that indigenous peoples deprived of access to land lost inherited ways of life and patterns of thought and belief as well. Alienated lands should be thought of as dying fields. Things fell apart for non-Europeans—many things—under the triple assault. But colonialism was not just the sum total of its worst-case scenarios. New crops, medicines, and occupations extended the life spans and enhanced the welfare of millions of subject peoples. New ideas and beliefs were not only comforting and enlightening but also empowering.

These personal assessments may or may not resonate with other people. By its very nature European colonialism ensures continuing controversy not only over its causes, characteristics, and consequences but also over its morality. The challenge in today’s postcolonial era is to frame the debate so that arguments are more informed and directly engaged, assumptions and normative standards more explicit, than they were in the past when west European powers confidently strode the world.