(06-24-2026, 12:59 PM)ArMaP Wrote: That's why the best thing is to leave countries alone instead of invading them...
We’d have to rewind history back to a time when there still weren’t any countries – a few centuries before the invention of writing, at least. In an ideal world we might be able to do that.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, and must make do as best we can with the one we inhabit. In this world, the benefits of colonialism are significant. Obviously so to the coloniser, perhaps less obvious to the colonised; but in the end the two become one and the same, so it does not signify. In pragmatic terms, it is the benefit to humanity as a whole that counts, and it would be absurd to argue that colonialism has not been a net benefit to mankind.
I would identify this benefit (basket of benefits, in fact) simply as modernity. The benefits of technological civilization – roads and bridges, properly built houses, schools, public healthcare, running water, electricity, industrialisation, international trade – would not be as universal as they are today without the vehicle of colonialism, which carried them around the world.
My own country had the unhappy distinction of enduring not one but three successive waves of European imperialism. The first was Portuguese. Your people were only just emerging from the Middle Ages when they began to build their empire. It was nothing but a maritime extension of the wars of conquest that had been fought in Europe and the Mediterranean basin for centuries. You were just carrying on as your fathers and forefathers had done before you.
Among my compatriots, it is generally agreed that the Portuguese were the cruellest and by far the bloodiest of our conquerors, though – due to practical limitations – less ruthlessly exploitative than the modern industrialised empires that came after them, the British and the Dutch. Unlike these, the Portuguese weren’t race- or colour-conscious; they intermarried freely with those of us who would submit to baptism, fornicated energetically with the heathen and left their mark on our language, our clothing, our food, our music and dance, and of course, in our blood. For all your cruelty, you are fondly remembered; we have become you, and you are us.
The Dutch weren’t in the empire-building business for Christ or glory. Money was what drove them, and their imperial instrument was in fact a joint-stock company, the
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Company). They ran their colonies as profit centres while encouraging their officers to enrich themselves privately on the side.
The Dutch were unloved in my country. They thought themselves superior to the natives and were unapologetic, doctrinaire racists. Their half-caste descendants continued to think of themselves as Europeans and to hold themselves aloof from the rest of us for as long as they could, but they were always a very small community and emigration has thinned out their numbers further, to the point where they no longer constitute a viable ethnic group.
The British were by far the best imperialists. This, however, is due as much to the general course of history as anything else. By the time they ousted the Dutch from our shores, the Enlightenment had been in full swing for over a century and the harshly exploitative nature of mercantile colonialism was being leavened by liberal and humanitarian values. The ideals of Utitlitarianism – the greatest good of the greatest number – and practical experience in India and elsewhere had taught the British the value of investing in colonies as if they were commercial assets. Building the roads and railways, educating the populace, promoting more efficient agriculture and improving public health, that sort of thing. Establishing a legal system under which everyone, theoretically at least, was equal.
They went even further. When it became clear that my country would sooner or later become independent, they did everything in their power to create a pluralistic modern democracy in place of their colonial state: one with a parliamentary government whose representatives were elected by universal suffrage. They handed over, without a murmur, all the vital elements of a modern nation-state that they had already built in my country – the police, various domestic military formations, the colonial bureaucracy, the whole national infrastructure – to us, their successors. They did it gradually, over a period of about 25 years, to make the process as easy as possible. They had planned to take longer, but there was much impatience, from many quarters, and the process had to be rushed. A pity; a few more years and we may have been able to avoid the worst of the mistakes we have made since independence.
The country I live in today is very different from the British colony that gained its freedom in the aftermath of the Second World War, but it is still recognizably that colony, greatly expanded and transformed. As for me, I am literally a product of colonialism; I would not exist at all were it not for the mingling of Eastern and Western affections. And so, I fear, I must object most earnestly to your statement. Colonialism has no inherent moral value, positive or negative. It can be benign; if it is more often cruel and at times shockingly inhumane, that is due to human nature rather than anything inherently evil in the institution itself. All countries need rulers, and many are better ruled by outsiders than by their own people.
