I’ve become a fan of Still Standing!, a Canadian television show where comedian Jonny Harris visits small Canadian towns and villages that often experienced a boom in the past but are struggling in the present. The boom might have been related to timber, mining, or simply a strategic stop on a railroad. Harris does a beautiful job of interviewing the residents that have remained, learning their stories and listening to their plans to revitalize their communities.
When he visits Skidegate, British Columbia, he features the Haida tribe of Native Americans who have resided on islands off the coast of modern British Columbia for over 12,000 years. In the segment, he speaks with tribal leaders who express pride in their reputation as fierce warriors. Harris mentions that they were strong seafarers and often conducted raids up and down the coast. What Harris didn’t mention is that they also enslaved people from other tribes and that their reputation among those tribes was much like the Vikings’ reputation in Scotland in the 9th century. Instead, he did what most Americans of European descent do when confronted with Native American history – they celebrate all that was good about those tribes, ignoring the bad, and lamenting the impact European colonization had on them. The Haida were even invited to dance at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony. I wonder how surviving members of tribes like the Tlingit and Coast Salish, who were often raided by the Haida, felt about that?
There’s nothing innately wrong with Harris’ approach. He was polite, respectful and sincerely inquisitive. Plus, his light-hearted show is not the place for ideological debates. But since More Spock is a place for ideological debate, I thought I would examine the revelations of this feel-good piece in the context of the current debate on Colonialism taking place in the U.S. and western Europe.
I recently completed The Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley. Gilley is a highly credentialed academic who teaches at Portland State University. He is routinely pilloried by his peers for pushing back against current orthodoxy in academia (or the academy) which is overwhelmingly anti-European. One definition of Post-Colonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands.
I touched on this topic a couple of times prior to finding Gilley. In Some Thoughts on the Legacy of Slavery. I began by quoting Kamala Harris who reflected the modern orthodoxy. In Courageous Conversations about Race, I referenced Galileo and what happened when he challenged the orthodoxy embedded in the academy at the time (hint: he spent his last days in mandatory confinement). Gilley has provided academic rigor and context to topics that I had merely touched on. It’s nice to find someone smarter than you who communicates your ideas better than you do.
In The Case for Colonialism, Gilley challenges not only the conclusions, but the methodology of critics like Caroline Elkins, professor of History and African American studies at Harvard. Elkins has published books highly critical of Colonialism including Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of the British Gulag in Kenya and Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. Gilley’s biggest complaint is that Post-Colonial thinkers ignore both what might have happened to those “victimized” cultures in the absence of the appearance of European colonizers. He also criticizes their academic rigor.
Gilley does a masterful job at looking at various places around the globe where British and other Europeans wound up establishing Colonial governments. These include the Middle East, Africa, North America, Malaysia, and of course, India. He also looks at areas that were not colonized, like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Ethiopia and Ivory Coast (Liberia). His research sets out to identify the threats that faced areas that were eventually colonized, the trajectory those areas were on prior to being colonized, and their post-colonial situations compared to nearby areas that were never colonized.
Post-Colonial writers excoriate the British for the death of hundreds of rebels at the hands of British soldiers in various skirmishes, but choose to ignore the tens of thousands that died at the hands of Afro-Arab slave traders like Tippo Tip and African strongmen like Msiri before Colonialism. They also ignore the tens of thousands that died in various coups and revolutions after the Europeans pulled out or simply blame that on Colonialism as well.
Gilley illustrates how in some cases, colonized countries invited the Europeans in to help protect them from the likelihood of worse outcomes. In most cases, Colonialism began not as a government-initiated military action, rather with the arrival of a private enterprise which set up trading centers. The British and Dutch East India Companies are the most famous, but there was also the Royal African Company, and many others. When these companies set up a trading outpost, the local population tended to move towards those posts for both security and for jobs. As the European governors moved in to enhance stability, they invested in infrastructure like roads, railroads, water systems, etc. that increased the standard of living for the colonized. Indigenous peoples again migrated toward the Colonizers not away from them. He also identifies many cases where even highly regarded anti-colonial writers like Chinua Achebe admit that those countries were very well run by the Europeans and their departure lead to many problems.
Gilley also points out that the countries that have faired the best since the end of the Colonial period have been those that retained vestiges of the Colonial system. Those that were supported by communist Russia or China in their efforts to run out the colonizers and seize power subsequently abandoned anything resembling the Colonial period. They have fared much worse. Compare North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Sudan, for example, to South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong (pre-1997) and Taiwan.
Members of the academy who fall in line with Post-Colonial orthodoxy have called for him to be terminated from Portland State (even though they can’t refute his research), with some even calling for his PhD to be revoked. The fact is that the Colonial period did exist. Gilley believes it is possible to examine the atrocities of the period while also acknowledging the benefits to those societies. Many of his colleagues are loathe to admit any benefits because to do so would compromise their modern political ideology which is anti-capitalist and anti-European. Gilley compares Caroline Elkins, and I’ll lump in Kamala Harris, Nichole Hannah-Jones (1619 Project), current or former university presidents Claudine Gay (Harvard), Liz Magill (Penn), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) with Mao’s cultural revolution in which history is re-written, if necessary, to support the ideology.
World history is the story of empires ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning. It includes the Haida tribe terrorizing neighboring tribes in the pacific northwest to enhance its wealth. It includes the Comanche and Lakota Sioux who often warred with other plains Indian tribes. It includes the Maori of modern New Zealand wiping out competing tribes like the Moriari. It includes the Zulus of southern Africa or the Bantu of eastern Africa violently consolidating power. It includes the Khmer of southeast Asia. It goes back to the earliest recorded civilizations like Assyria, Egypt and Babylon. Before that, Homo Sapiens overwhelmed Neanderthal.
Because Europeans embraced the written word and maintained detailed records, it is easy to over-study and over-weigh the ebbs and flows of European empires, but they are no more, and often less violent than the empires they replaced. It is academically irresponsible to stigmatize Europeans as violent colonizers while ignoring the rest of human history. Mao did this for the sake of one party domination of the means of production (Marxism). It’s not hard to assume the orthodox members of the modern academy have a similar objective.
some people just need to be victims