Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom passed away on September 8 and this historical event dominated the news cycle for many weeks. As expected, mourners from around the globe have posted tributes to her. Not as expected, comments from certain sectors have used the event as an opportunity to speak out on how the royal family represents colonialism and white supremacy. I won’t address the tackiness of the timing of the monologues by people like Ali Velshi on MSNBC. But I will take a look at the concept of colonialism.
Colonialism noun
- the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
Most modern commentary on colonialism focuses on activities of the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese in the western hemisphere from 1492 through around 1800. The same actors were also active in Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries, attracted by the profitability of the spice industry. Sometimes commentators are referring to the colonization of Africa which occurred much more quickly between 1881 and 1914 (just prior to the beginning for World War I).
Sports fans will understand that when a team in any sport innovates and then dominates, other teams will copy the innovation. In football, for example, Paul Brown of Cleveland Browns fame, was the first coach to use film study to scout opponents, the first to use a playbook, the first to use face masks, and the first to racially integrate his team. His teams won 8 championships in 10 years in the 1940s and early 50s.
Likewise, Bill Walsh’s “west coast offense” innovated football offense in the 1980s and was widely copied after his team’s multiple championships in the 1980s. There are plenty of examples in other sports, too, where innovation lead to championships and to imitation.
That’s one way to look at Colonialism. The history of the world from the iron age through at least World War II was the history of one population seizing the land and exercising economic control over (typically) geographic neighbors. The Global Policy Forum identifies at least 14 major empires in the BCE era including the famous ones (Egypt, Persia, Rome…) and some lesser known ones such as the Norte Chico empire in South America, the Shang and Chou empires of ancient China, and the Harappa and Mohenjo-Darro empires of the Indus Valley.
Moving to the Pre-modern era (up to 1500), they identify another 25+/- empires that span the globe, including four in Africa (Ethiopian, Mali, Songhai and Fulani), several dynasties in China, the Khmer and Burmese empires in Southeast Asia, Maya, Inca, Aztec and others in South America, several Islamic empires including the Ottoman, all in addition to the Mongols and the medieval European empires.
A common thread with all of these empires is that they adapted technologies and strategies learned from earlier empires to make themselves more powerful. From developments in metallurgy, such as learning to combine copper and tin to make bronze around 3500 BCE to innovations in extracting iron from ore around 1800 BCE gave certain empires a competitive advantage while their neighbors tried to catch up. The chariot, the bow and arrow, the catapult, the trebuchet, gunpowder, rifling, the airplane, the rocket, and nuclear weapons are all examples of technologies that affected the ability of a society to become an empire.
Why do humans do this? Well, as mentioned in an earlier blog, humans are essentially predators. We have hunted and consumed animals as individuals and in groups since the beginning of recorded history. When food or other resources were scarce, we resorted to taking it from neighboring tribes. Humans are also motivated by self-interest. Some tribes more aggressively took things from neighboring tribes in order to enrich themselves. Humans replicated this behavior over and over with one result being the migration of humans to all corners of the globe – either in search of resources or to escape a stronger, more aggressive tribe. In one sense, the term “indigenous people” can be misleading. Indigenous people are simply the people who were there when the most recent aggressor arrived. They might well have been the aggressor at a different point in history and either ran off or absorbed the “indigenous people” they encountered during their time of prominence.
Slavery as an institution was a part of many if not most cultures as humans’ ability to capture, control and govern larger and larger territory developed. Yes, Europeans used slave labor from Africa to support the agriculture initiatives, primarily in the South. But this was Europe’s last gasp as it pertained to the use of slavery. The U.K. abolished slavery in 1807, France in 1848, and the US in 1865. In contrast, China didn’t abolish slavery until 1910 (yet still uses forced labor today), and the Ethiopian Empire didn’t abolish slavery until 1942!
Those in the U.S. whose goal is to eliminate all vestiges of slavery and the colonial period are guilty of discarding the good with the bad. The Europeans in the 17th through the 19th century positioned the U.S. to become the most free and most wealthy country in the history of the world. The Native American tribes who occupied North America at the arrival of the first European settlers were simply not sophisticated enough. Had the Europeans not arrived, the Aztec Empire, who were much more sophisticated than their northern neighbors, would likely have swallowed-up many of the North American tribes that were later dislodged by the Europeans anyway.
Strong, innovative humans have colonized territories near and far from the beginning of written history. The current conflict in the Ukraine, however, has taught us that is much more difficult in the modern world for a country to simply decide that it will annex some neighboring territory the way it has been done throughout history. Modern communication and a 24 hour news cycle makes it much easier for the global community to intervene when an aggressor becomes aggressive. And modern weapons are certainly a deterrent. When an unmanned attack drone that cost less than $1 million can take out a $9 million tank or sink a $1 billion battleship without putting any soldiers at risk, it makes one think about the future of warfare.
But more importantly, the European colonists developed capitalism as an economic system so that it is no longer necessary to “plunder” to accumulate wealth. A stable, healthy banking system is more important to building wealth in the 21st century than a well-trained army or possessing tracks of land. When the progressives trash the winners of the colonial period in favor of the losers, they miss the key advances that occurred during that time, including the ending of slavery and the evolution of workplace safety and worker protection laws.