Plucky King Leopold

Oliver Cromwell syndrome, innit? Leopold was such a Good Thing domestically in Belgium that nobody can quite bring themselves to believe he was a baby eating monster overseas.

In terms of books, Larry Devlin’s memoirs weren’t written by an African, but he was the CIA guy there post-independence and “Chief of Station: Congo” is quite a good book.

Admitting there were “irregularities,” he said: “We can easily be tempted to exaggerate when it comes to the Congo … I feel instinctively that he was a hero, a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium.”

That’s good enough for me. I suppose you liberals want things like historical facts, arguments, proof, and so on. He feels stuff, just like Tony Blair. And what do we get? Bloody liberals coming at him with numbers.

From another report on and translation of the original interview:

“Michel, a former European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Development, admits that at a certain stage Belgium ruled over Congo trying to acquire sheer power. “But eventually civilisation was introduced.””

It’s worth remembering that Belgium was so bad that it was criticized by other colonising nations, themselves no laggards when it came to exploitation and colonial brutality. However, it probably is no less than the sad truth that the Belgian Congo had a more advanced economic and social infrastructure when the Belgians left than at any time since.

Genuine progress will never be made in international affairs until Europeans (and some Americans) understand that their colonial empires were a bad thing. Not a mistake. Not things that had good bits and bad bits. Not things that had ‘noble intentions’ which sometimes ‘went astray’. But things which were, in their essence A Bad Thing. (which is not to say that all imperialists were actually evil or that some good was not inadvertently produced by colonialism).

The Belgians left hospitals, but no doctors; industries, but no managers; roads, railroads, and factories, but no engineers.

This was deliberate. At the date of independence, in a country of roughly 20 million people, there were less than 20,000 native Congolese with a high school degree and less than 100 with a college degree. The Belgians wanted a docile native labor force with basic literacy and numeracy; they quite explicitly did not want native doctors, lawyers, accountants, managers or engineers.

Mind, the Belgians of the 1950s were wise, kind and good in every way compared to the Belgians of the 1890s and early 1900s.

Doug M.

@10 – that is of course true, provided that it is also acknowledged that every other form of government, prior to the introduction of the welfare state, human rights and democratic accountability, was also a Very Bad Thing for most people who came into contact with it. And then you have to ask from which tradition did we get the welfare state, human rights and democratic accountability. Would those things ever have evolved into a global norm without the power and influence of western liberalism built on the back of imperialist exploitation? In that context, is imperialism a particularly Bad Thing, or just one Bad Thing amongst many? It is a tough, tough call. But the Belgian Congo was definitely an odious shithole.

From the heart of darkness itself I can report: ‘that the opinion of Louis Michel and the opinion of most politicians and intellectuals in Belgium only differ in the fact that Louis has gone on the record in expressing them’. When Belgian officials bash Kabila they really are a tad melancholic about the good times past.

It is one of the rare items uniting the country’s public opinion; maybe because we can talk about Congo like the establishment once could talk about the poor peasant people in Flanders. There’s a good subject for a sociolgical dissertation in this, somewhere ;-(

I first read about Leopold and the Congo in Mark Twain’s
“King Leopold’s Soliloquy” written with his characteristic fury.

Leopold was also the villain in The Young Victoria.

iolanthe:
“However, it probably is no less than the sad truth that the Belgian Congo had a more advanced economic and social infrastructure when the Belgians left than at any time since.”

this is like saying “sadly, the Green Zone in Iraq is the most advanced social and economic hub Iraq has ever had”.

economic and social infrastructure under belgian tyranny operated solely for the benefit of the colonising power and Congolese were excluded, except as workforce and cogs. so it very much depends on which Belgian Congo you’re talking about in this comment – the white one, or the black one. certainly for the latter, things were worse.

Louis Michel:
“The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth (and things were therefore peachy).”

basically, that’s like saying that the American slave trade wasn’t bad because it exposed Africans to a modern production line process and lifted them from the dark ages of their agrarian existence. the ungrateful spawn of mud people just never had the gumption to capitalise on their tremendous opportunity.

fwiw, what the belgian occupation and wholesale parasitism also introduced to the continent was the charming practice of cutting off people’s hands as an example to the workforce, subsequently a valued practice in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. Adam Hochshild’s book has some extraordinary photographs depicting this – one of them has a man holding his tiny daughter’s hands, if I remember right, out in front of him. (they were cut off as an example to him. he was then posed with them, in a merry tableau.) his face tells you everything you need to know about the humanitarian work undertaken by the philanthropic belgians on behalf of the darkies and wogs.

that’s your civilisation, folks. right there.

d

Admitting there were “irregularities,”

Yes, and the methods were “unsound.”

… This guy was in charge of humanitarian aid? Why? They couldn’t find any neo-Nazis to take the job?

23 (et al.)- It is not only stupid people that say stupid things. Louis deserves about everything a commenter on the internet can throw at him – but not defamation of character. If you take him to be beyond contempt than you will not just hold the normal 80% of politicians beyond it, but you will be much closer to, say, ‘the five 9’s’. As I said, this is a common wrong perspective and one would do well not to go all the way; I think Chris hit the mark quite well; no need to go much further than that.

In case anyone doesn’t already know, Tintin was another Belgian colonialist.

@14 provided that it is also acknowledged that every other form of government, prior to the introduction of the welfare state, human rights and democratic accountability, was also a Very Bad Thing for most people who came into contact with it.

How could anyone think this is true? I doubt anyone seriously contends that most people in China and nearby regions were better off after the collapse of the Han empire, or that most people in Iran were better off after the collapse of the Safavid empire. The collapse of the Safavid state in the 1720s had the same kind of results as the failure of a state in the 21st century–civil wars followed by mass-exodus of people who could afford to pack up and leave, and general impoverishment–basic commodities like coffee completely disappearing from the market. Probably a decline in rural population and much larger decline in urban populations. The political rights and other benefits of a democratic welfare state are important, but so are the state’s basic functions of preserving order and enforcing contracts.

Some of the greatest growth in populations in the second millennium AD was in the 1500s and 1600s, under large empires like the Ming and Ottoman (it may not have been limited to those empires, but then smaller states were consolidating their bureaucracies and borders at this time as well). China’s population doubling in size under the Ming dynasty, under any conditions (and the conditions probably weren’t that bad, by pre-modern standards) is a pretty different outcome from what happened in the Congo under Belgian dominion.

” In those days it was just the way things were done.”

Given that Leopold’s behavior was pretty vigorously condemned at the time — notably, as mentioned above, by Mark Twain — the “well, that’s just the historical standard, you can’t judge him by modern standards” argument is blown out of the water.

Sorry folks, but Michel’s opinion is quite common among Belgian nationalists–and I mean “Belgian”, not “Flemish”. We’re talking about good old monarchists here.

Anderson @24:

Admitting there were “irregularities,”
Yes, and the methods were “unsound.”

LOL. Thank you.

Europeans are a funny bunch when it comes to the whole colonization thing. It seems they hold a certain nostalgia towards it even while demonizing events like slavery and segregation in the South of the U.S or poor land distribution in Latin American countries.
It is as if having colonized others provides them with a sense of relevance in the world stage that in reality no longer exists.

I find the word “demonizing”, like the phrase “reading comprehension” to be a more or less infallible indicator of a comment that is not going to be worth reading. It’s much more reliable than that Godwin thing (a forecasting regularity which has long been overtaken by Goodhart’s Law).

So if you’re going to use the word, please put it near the front so I can save a few seconds, eh?

Oh, come on, D2, netherworldly fiends may have a respectable place in this thread after all.

Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost,
Burning in hell for his hand-maimed host.
Listen to the demons chuckle and yell,
Sharpening blades for Louis Michel.

@37 I thought your general observation was that pre-modern states were Very Bad Things for most people who interacted with them? I’m not sure why you would want to make a comparison between premodern states and modern democratic welfare states, rather than between premodern states and the alternatives that were available at the time. Only the second comparison resembles any kind of meaningful choice faced by the people involved. And the very general picture is that premodern states made people much better-off than the alternatives.

@29 & 37
Political ideas spread when people see that they work. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. There is an abundance of cases within the Persianate world of people who studied and taught Newtonian physics before the British Empire, or adopted various liberal ideas before the advent of full-blown colonialism. Ming bureaucratization and centralization was probably influential in the tendency towards centralized bureaucratic governance in the Middle East and Central Asia in the 1400s and 1500s–there is even direct evidence that awareness of Chinese bureaucracy inspired similar efforts in the Ottoman Empire. Travelers from the Middle East wrote glowingly about Europe during the brief period between when when the industrial revolution got underway and the beginning of European colonial empires in the Middle East.

‘And then you have to ask from which tradition did we get the welfare state, human rights and democratic accountability’.

Well now you are asking. But for the last in that trio may I suggest you take a loooooooooooooong and careful read through of ‘The Life and Death of Democracy’ by John Keane, especially the first few chapters (based on the most up to date archeological work) before you start praising (or blaming) the ‘West’ for ‘inventing’ democracy. It turns out (qu’elle surprise) that whereas it is not exactly a lie to state that the ‘West’ created democracy, it ain’t exactly the truth either.

As for ‘human rights’, even a cursory glance at the relevant documentation demonstrates that the story is a bit more complex than the ‘standard’ (i.e. eurocentric) one.

European colonialism/imperialism was a Bad Thing, mmmm’kay?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_rights

Guys, give him a break. He’s a descendant of Leopold II.

If your ancestor was Leopold, and if you were a normal, warm-bloodied human being, you would defend him too. At least I would.

Let’s not rag on descendants of horrible people for not ragging on their own ancestors.

Myles SG,

Let’s not rag on descendants of horrible people for not ragging on their own ancestors

Oh yeah? Well, I am the lineal descendant of Attila the Hun, Pope Boniface VIII, T.D. Lysenko and Scott Stapp but you won’t catch my defending them any time soon.

One hates to disagree with Mrs. Tilton, but I suspect that Casement’s homosexuality was a good deal more certain than his treason.

It’s a Bad Thing now, but a hundred years ago it was just a Thing.
Eating animal flesh is a Thing today; a hundred years from now it’ll be a Bad Thing.

Backward-looking moral relativism doesn’t cut it, really.
Leopold put a lot of effort into presenting a misleading picture of what his rule was like. Opponents put corresponding emphasis on the contrast between the bullshit and the reality. A moral argument, each side using the ethics of the time.

No, back then colonialism was close to being just a Thing. Belgian colonialism in the Congo was largely regarded as a Bad Thing even at the time. It was condemned by lots of people who thought it gave their “kindler, gentler” colonialism a bad name which, they believed, it did not deserve.

The Congo Free State really was atrocious. Even contemporaries thought it reprehensible.

Colonialism is structurally a Bad Thing for the people being colonized. The reasons were diagnosed by Machiavelli five hundred years ago. Roughly speaking, a ruler from country A who manages to exploit country B will be capable of gaining more power in country A than a ruler who is nice to country B. Machiavelli was so concerned about Italy being colonized that he wrote a whole book devoted to advising a prince on how to unify it against potential occupiers (in spite of his personal preference for republican rule)

Amartya Sen has of course written about the vast death tolls which can result from famines caused by economic and political inequality. See his review of the anti-imperialist polemic “Late Victorian Holocausts” by Mike Davis. That book is about famines caused by imperialist policies (cf. the Irish potato famine). To given an indicator of the horribleness of imperial rule, life expectancy in India has doubled since Independence, in spite of most of its politicians. [a ref to this latter statistic is “India’s Economic Development since 1947”, ed. Uma Kapila, in Google Books, can’t get it to link, sorry]

Michel’s comment reminds us how little is taught about the concrete horrors of colonization in many European countries, especially Belgium. I am sure almost all of my fellow Dutchmen agree that colonization was a Bad Thing, but in school you learn very little about the concrete policies and practices which made it so horrible. This tempts nationalists, including historians, to emphasize how useful those railroads became after the colonizers had left.

They believe that it is wrong, that it is wrong right now, not that it will be wrong in a hundred years time. Do you think they are mistaken?

I should imagine that I wouldn’t much care to live in a world where you can’t eat animal (including marine) flesh. That sounds like a horridly tedious world.

It’s probably worth noting that Joseph Conrad was a steamboat captain in the Congo Free State, so he had first-hand experience on which to base Heart of Darkness.

I see egocentricism rears its ugly head with noen’s last comment. Inevitable I suppose not least of which because if, as a previous poster suggested, Leo II privately owned the Congo.

Moral realists have a tough time these days, and the Michel’s of the world are of little help. However, the outrage genderated by atrocities such as the Congo seem to suggest all is not in vain. It’s been a decade since I’ve ready any Gert, but I remember distinctly enjoying his approach as structuring the debate around evils as harms and not the promotion of the “good”. I think Leo could’ve benefitted from such an approach.

@Henri V.T. your bang on about the eating animals thing by the way. Of course, I have definite feelings about its utility and morality in the now first and foremost. I think it’s harmful now, and don’t spend too much time worrying about if the future will find it “good”.

@noen

I realize now, that my use of egocentricism was missplaced (although more likely missequenced as I feel that eventually all moral relativist arguments end here). My moral realism is a peccadillo I’m not sure I’m willing to give up yet. And my post wasn’t meant as insinuation or attack.

Arguments for morality being subjective generally tend to leave me cold. I’m willing to entertain a reasonalbe discussion about it however.

I’ll check back in the morning, this thread has definitely got my attention.

Colonialism, can best be summed up by a bit of dialogue, from “Cool Hand Luke”:

Boss: “I’m just tryin’ to help you Luke.
Luke: “Boss, please quit tryin’ to help me.”

“the population of India increased very quickly under british rule. India is actually a relative success story when it comes to colonization.”

British rule did cause tens of millions of famine deaths (see the Mike Davis book listed above, along with Amartya Sen’s review), but that could happen and still one might have had a population increase. Mao caused tens of millions of famine deaths and both population and life expectancy increased in his time.

I note that we here in the US learned a great deal from the Iroquois and fashioned our political institutions after theirs. Also, while it is very cliché people really do yearn to be free and are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

I am trying to laugh at the fashionable idiocy on display in the sentence above, but I am just frankly floored.

Really, there are Glenn Becks of the world, and then there are the poster above, who not only spouts bullshit, but actually believes in it.

Facepalm. Please read Harry Frankfurt.

Pure facepalm.

Sorry, I thought he meant that people didn’t yearn to be free.

My mistake.

Henri: why do you gloss over the point that Leopold’s actions in Congo were seen as a very very bad thing at the time – his idea of exploiting his personal property at his own whim was as bad as can be. If you want to find a nutshell on which to float your elephantof relativist assumptions, I recommend you to ignore the glaring points made above. Otherwise, it may be best to wait for a next thing to float by.

In directing your anger, you might direct it at the many families (including the royal one) that in the present day are directly profiting from the wealth accumulated at the expense of the fear of having one’s hand cut off. You will find (indeed, see comment higher) the Belgian establishment.

Instead of apologies, maybe we should ask their contribution into a fund for rebuilding Congo?

http://www.cesran.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=866%3Atony-blair-gordon-brown-michael-gove-proud-of-the-british-empire-&catid=56%3Amakale-ve-raporlar&Itemid=75&lang=en

Henri, that’s already something. Still, you have traded your nutshell for a fig leaf, and I doubt it will carry your elephant (even if it is now reduced to a baby elephant). One would be tempted to think that foreign rule was always considered a bad thing. It would be difficult to show that it is not an essential feature of colonialism that the colony is under foreign rule. I am quite sure that some colonialists made complex argumentations to plead colonialism was an exception but this does not mean there arguments were successful, not even in their times (as you know, freedom of opinion and general voting rights and opinion polls were not quite as powerful back then).

One would be tempted to think that foreign rule was always considered a bad thing.

“Foreign rule” implies the concept of nationalism, which is a relatively modern phenomenon. Without it there is no “foreign rule”, just one ruler or another. It makes no difference whether his name is Yaroslav or Genghis.

84- Well, whatever, at the time of colonialism we had nation states so that’s good enough.

87: I was actually quite proud of my ironic reference in 16.

Women were seen to roast their own children

Oh aye.

Seconding ejh @90 – ‘mothers roasting their own children?’ Yeah, right.

Not to mention, of course, that the Mughals were themselves a foreign government imposed by armed force on India.

@noen

Hey, I’m no professor either:)

For me, discussion of the social construction of moral codes are interesting, but not necessarily fatal to the moral realist. It’s a bit wobbly, but my “best possible” approach would be to tie the concept of moral realism to metaphysics: harm/evil as facts. I’d reserve decisions about moral culpability or responsibility to any one actor’s epistemological context. And before anyone thinks to straw man me, I think that Leo II’s epistemological context was just fine to prevent him from cutting off hands– had he wished to.

I had an absolute loon for a prof one term (not the whole term as I got out while I still could) who began every class by drawing a chart on the board listing Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Morality. In a roundabout (discussions about why Europeans were smarter than North Americans because they read more books per annum!) way she touched on the first two, but never did get to spend much time on the third.

Morality, modern philosophy’s red-headed step-child.

noen @95,

Or better still: Try the priest

Given their sedentary, pampered, well-fed lifestyle, they’re no doubt the Long Pig equivalent of Kobe beef.

Pound equated priests with capons and, as everyone knows, capons are the best of all fowl for the table. Given the revelations of the past decade or so, though, it’s sadly clear that priests are capons in a figurative sense only.

But why not make it literal? In fact, there’s an idea for a global plea-bargain with the hierarchy. All criminal charges dropped; in exchange, the entire priesthood, worldwide, submit to the gelder’s knife.

It’s win all round. The Church spared further investigation and the inevitable horrific revelations; the altar boys safe at last; the spit and the roasting-pan delighted; and Origen vindicated after all those long centuries.

Shocking. The men of the naval infantry may be rough, tough, sometimes even brutal; but it goes too far to class them amongst the animals. Unless you mean to place all humans in that category, of course, which would be biologically correct. In that case, though, your typical marine is a poor choice for the table. Lots of meat there, yes, but it will be tough and stringy; made palatable, if at all, only through long slow braising.

Myles clearly doesn’t think cannibalism a Bad Thing. I reserve judgement as to whether it will be thought a Bad Thing 500 years hence.

Lengthy and complicated attempts to wring humor out of a single word intended clearly with another meaning are, generally, not very funny.

Which seems to be the case here. And yes, I noticed that I ought not to call fish “flesh”. My mistake.

MPAVictoria @ 83 and 69:

Perhaps we should be more concrete. This is from an op-ed which mentions the Mike Davis book.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 320,000 tonnes of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way.” The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94 per cent.

As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived, was used by Lord Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, such as Stalin’s in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud, and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25 million died.

The reason relief efforts were discouraged (by locking up Christian missionaries with a conscience) was to provide sufficient incentives for the farmers to work. The invisible hand, you see. This slamdown of imperial apologetics by Niall Ferguson has another prize quote by Curzon:

The second, more proximate factor was the administrative response to famine, which is neatly summed up in the Report of the Famine Commission of 1878: “The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief . . . would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times . . . which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.”…

Curzon, who oversaw the decimation wrought by the 1899 famine, warned that “any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.”

Hence the labour camps for famine victims: lethal conditions were necessary to prevent the weakening of moral fibre which would result from famine relief.

To say that the U.S. Constitution was in some part inspired by Iroquois democracy is to simply invite ridicule.

Myles, I am not a historian, and I am asking this sincerely. First, are you a historian; that is, do you have good reasons? Next, what is the basis for rejecting the oft-repeated idea that the federal structure of the US owes something, intellectually, to the Six Nations? I’m willing to believe that it’s one of those well-known things that are just wrong, but I’d like to hear why. (For instance, in my field, when I hear people saying that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the major Shakespeare plays, I feel as you do about inviting ridicule. But I realize that if one has never read much about how we attribute authorship, the question look reasonable, so I avoid pure ridicule or pompous pronouncements, and I explain.)

As far as I’ve heard, the basis for the Six Nations –> US federalism idea is Benjamin Franklin’s career. In the Autobiography he has a chapter about serving as a delegate in treaty negotiations with the Iroquois, and I reckon historians and biographers probably could put a lot more context on colonial encounters with the Iroquois confederation. From this non-historian’s point of view, it seems very reasonable that Franklin and maybe others took an idea from this government they had done business with. They wanted checks and balances; the Iroquois model had some.

As to India, however, despite the horrors of British Colonial rule described above I have to question—along with V.S Naipaul—whether the modern nation-state we call India could have even possibly have come into being or continue to exist without the unifying British imposed English language, Governmental, Judicial and merit-based Civil Service (such as it is) to bind such a disparate people and Tower of Babel worth of local languages/dialects together.

Yeah, I am personally never sure if Britain actually ever made any money on India. It seemed to be a money-losing venture starting the latter half of the 19th century. Of course, Africa was even worse, given that everyone knew that Britain never made a penny on the entire continent north of South Africa and sans the Suez Canal, but my impression is that India was pretty bad too.

It’s funny how unprofitable imperialism. Germany was the clearest case of the metropole subsidizing all the colonies for purely egotistical reasons, for the entire duration.

‘As to India, however, despite the horrors of British Colonial rule described above I have to question—along with V.S Naipaul—whether the modern nation-state we call India could have even possibly have come into being or continue to exist without the unifying British imposed English language, Governmental, Judicial and merit-based Civil Service (such as it is) to bind such a disparate people and Tower of Babel worth of local languages/dialects together.’

In some alternative Universe, there is doubtless some Muslim (or Scandanavian or Roman) imperialist arguing that, without the conquest ‘it is difficult to see how the modern nation-state we call Europe could even have come into being…..without the unifying force of (X)…to bind such a disparate people and Tower of Babel worth of local languages/dialects together. ‘

But of course Europe IS NOT a “nation-state” Hidari, for all the Balkanizing reasons of separate languages, culture and history that characterized pre-Colonial India. India, btw, has a long history of being ruled by conquering outsiders who brought with them a dominate foreign language, And the current “nativist” movement notwithstanding (such as it is) not just all educated “progressive” Indians scheme, bribe, pay a small ransom for English tutors, etc., to get their children in the best English-speaking schools possible and the best English-language programs possible, lip-service to the glories and “authenticity” of native languages/culture notwithstanding, but so too do the hard-working and ambitious members of the “lower” castes who wish their children to advance and prosper.

Can you POSSIBLY make a statement about the “tea-baggers” which is more broad-brushed, and over-broad–let alone untrue on its’ face, rm? And down-right insulting by way of using the widely bandied-about homosexual-originated term to boot?

Classy, #113

To Virgil@105 I would happily admit that the railroads, language, courts etc. became really useful after the British had left. The Brits also left India some cool neo-gothic-mughal-victorian architecture, cricket and P.G. Wodehouse novels. So the British Empire does beat Leopold II’s Congo. Indeed, the British Empire did some good, too. This is because there were heroic people among the British who leveraged the empire for good ends. Read Adam Hochschilds other book, Breaking the Chains for a truly inspiring account of the grass-roots British anti-slavery movement. That book gives you Hope that Change is possible.

However, the fact that evil can be transformed into good does not make it less bad. I am sure that in some alternate universe, a sentient version of Yersinia Pestis is defending a nuanced view of the Black Death by pointing out it led to labour scarcity, hence higher wages, thus more investment in productivity growth, and ultimately the discoveries which made Early Modern Europe possible.

“Not to mention, of course, that the Mughals were themselves a foreign government imposed by armed force on India.”

Give India back to the Dravidians!

Seriously, is any government which is not some form of a democracy not a foreign body imposed by armed force (and some would not even allow that exception)? On some level there is no India, no Ireland, no Congo, but bloody peasants and blood-sucking elites. It doesn’t matter if they came from across the ocean or if they were homegrown, if they were benevolent or brutal, they all existed for moving resources from A to B without the consent of A. And B being their Bottomless appetites. Western colonialism may have been better at this, or more transparent, like the Nazis were better and more transparent in their anti-Semitism, but we can’t blame every pogrom on Hitler. Likewise we can’t blame every atrocity and famine on pesky foreign governments.

. . . and Curzon. Lord Lytton and the Famine Commission and George Nathaniel Curzon. Must read more about this.

And there is not its’ — its is possessive all by itself.

Sorry. This is it, unadorned:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

The overwhelming likelihood, if we’re waving around counterfactuals about the development of India, is that some time in the nineteenth century, the Russians would have marched over the Khyber, and that India would now be where ex-Soviet Central Asia is now: a series of arbitrarily-bordered pseudo-nation-states governed by various grades of Mad Dictator.

Or, if you stick up for the ‘fending off imperialism’ model, India would be a series of states, either recently-revolted-from or still monarchies, their borders determined by centuries of warfare, with an aristocracy as rich as Croesus, and/or a heritage of divisive revolution and expropriation, and an unpredictable quotient of Hindu-Muslim permanent conflict. [On that element alone, then, not much different to now].

But, ejh, they are if they would only get past their petty emotional resentment & dare to acknowledge how barbaric they would still have been without the benefit of our culture ;-(

Why was European imperialism a ‘problem’? It was a major, global political phenomenon of a period of history that is now past. It was the last [to date] of a series of waves of expansion that had created ’empires’ of a variety of sizes and durations at least since 3000 or 4000 BCE. Seen in that light, European imperialism was exceptional in its extent, but not in its duration, and certainly not, overall, in its willingness to exploit human resources to enrich the imperial elite. In its capacity to do so, it was certainly remarkable, but it has also been remarkable for its legacy – which is a global position in which it is now possible, with a little optimism, to believe that there won’t be another such imperial wave in the future.

And this is largely because, notwithstanding nice stories about how being nice to each other has been a tenet of this or that political or philosophical system in every corner of the world since the year dot, it was not until the conditions of systemic prosperity and productivity had been created, historically, by European imperialism that a public sphere of sufficient durability, extent and variety developed, such that ideas such as Marxism, liberal individualism, the droits de l’homme, and so forth could not merely be posited, but endure, thrive, spread and become implicitly part of the global political culture. Maybe, swinging counterfactuals around some more, equivalent ideas could have emerged some other way, but, historically-speaking, they didn’t.

If some people want to cling to a nostalgic view of imperialism’s benefits, they should be confronted with the facts – all of them. But other people who choose to try to use the evils of imperialism as a justification for – well, really I’m not sure what they want to use it for, they just like using it – are just as nostalgic, in a perverse sort of way. I suppose it might be something to do with the great illusion that humanity is good, except for the powerful – if only we could get rid of them, if only, in this context, every last scrap and vestige of what Whitey did to the rest of the world could be hunted down, extirpated, execrated and expunged, everyone else would get on just fine. Which is a nice idea, in some respects, but it has actually been tried, over and over again, and the pigs always end up looking like the farmers.

Fergusson also thinks Germany would have won WWI without those social democrat wimps on the homefront )-:. Meaning hes pretty close to holocohaust denialism aswell, not a good source to back up anything.

alex 06.26.10 at 2:18 pm:

“…And this is largely because, notwithstanding nice stories about how being nice to each other has been a tenet of this or that political or philosophical system in every corner of the world since the year dot, it was not until the conditions of systemic prosperity and productivity had been created, historically, by European imperialism that a public sphere of sufficient durability, extent and variety developed, such that but endure, thrive, spread and become implicitly part of the global political culture. Maybe, swinging counterfactuals around some more, equivalent ideas could have emerged some other way, but, historically-speaking, they didn’t.”

You’d love this fellow I worked under at a DoD shipyard. He wore a beltbuckle that actually said, “God, Guts and Guns Built This Country” . (It WAS a big beltbuckle.) He would surely have been happy to have added “Germs” on there, too, if he’d been a little better-read.

Is Goldberg presenting the inverse to the argument that prompted the “Eugenics and Guilt By Association” thread?

A Supreme Court justice once said: “The essence of democracy is that if the majority of the people are determined to go to hell in a hand-basket, you’ve got to stand back and let ’em.” Which is why our Founding Fathers created a Constitutional Republic instead of a direct democracy, as they feared the mob in the grip of the passions of the moment. It has always amused me how anyone could think that there was anything “democratic” about a fixed, written document–the core of American government–which limits the ability of “the people” to act, as being interpreted by nine individuals appointed for life. But it seems that Hidari is indeed arguing for direct democracy for places like India; or at least equating “national self-determination” with “democracy.”–else why would she argue to vehemently against colonialism? That is to say, as alex has pointed out, historically “national self-determination” has produced LOTS of unpleasant forms of government far worse for its subjects than Colonial India was for the Indians, so Hidari seems to assume that ANY outcome for those living on the sub-continent of India would have been materially and morally better than the path down history that British Colonial rule established. Thus by this logic Hidari seems to be arguing national self -determination=democracy=better outcome than Imperial Colonial India as being axiomatically pre-determined.

I wonder if the Time Lords decided to give today’s educated,
middle-class Indian professional the choice to remaining living in the moment or that of re-arranging time to erase the presence of the British in India and replace the current conditions in 2010 with what would be the resultant product if that alternate history had played out–with the young Indian of today having to live with the result if he so chose–which choice the young English-speaking middle-class Indian professional would make? To remain a product of “hated” British Colonialism or roll the “national self-determination” dice–trusting that one’s ethnic ancestors and history would have on their own produced a better outcome? (or one could even present the same choice to a present-day member of the “untouchable” caste, for that matter)

I think those unpleasant forms of government are necessary evolutionary steps, leading, hopefully, to less and less unpleasant forms; getting rid of foreign control being the prerequisite.

‘And colonialism is not ancient history: people talk about WWI, the Great Depression and WWII as if they have contemporary relevance all the time, yet imperialism, which went on until more recently, is somehow comparable to the Romans and Djenghis Khan. Apart from which, even the 18th century intellectual arguments are relevant now.’

Indeed. ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Empire’ by Lawrence James identifies the Falklands War (1982) as the last war fought by the British Empire (on its own), although some might say that the more recent re-invasion and re-colonisation of Sierra Leone is an even more recent example (Operation Palliser: 2000). The Portugese Empire, the earliest of the European Empires, was also the longest lived, lasting from the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to the handover of Macau in 1999. Almost all of the European Empires still have colonies dotted throughout the wold (Britain the Falklands, Gibralter, the Pitcain Islands, etc.). The French have French Guiana . The Spanish have (some would say) the Canary Islands and a few others. And so on.

We are not talking ancient history here.

“The Spanish have (some would say) the Canary Islands and a few others.”

Ceuta for example…..

OK if you want to be pedantic, ‘alleged’ recolonisation or ‘de facto’ recolonisation or ‘quasi’ recolonisation or what have you. But there is no doubt that Britain holds the whip hand in Sierra Leone nowadays, not the Sierra Leone Government.

‘Britain sent troops to Sierra Leone in mid-2000, ostensibly to evacuate British nationals when rebels responsible for appalling atrocities against civilians threatened to overthrow the elected government.

The rebels finally began disarming late last year

But it quickly became apparent that there was a long-term plan, and Brigadier Davidson Housten now heads the team that has re-trained and re-armed an 8,000-strong government army.

Britain and other Commonwealth countries had been fulfilling a similar role for the police force for several years.

“The people actually want to be recolonised”, said Zainab Bangura, a political activist and publisher of the first serious political opinion poll in Sierra Leone.

“Now 70% of the respondents to our survey, all of whom were in Freetown, said they would like Britain to assume trusteeship of Sierra Leone until a new political dispensation can be worked out.”

Recolonisation is of course out of the question, however President Kabbah has, in effect, gone halfway to doing this by appointing British advisers to top positions and welcoming the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world.’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1811731.stm

‘British political influence in Sierra Leone is far greater now than it has been since the end of the Empire.

British government officials sit in the main offices of state here – monitoring what the ministers do, supervising, scrutinising, guiding the country toward European-style good governance.

Critics might call this level of direct, hands-on intervention neo-colonialism, others say Britain is simply helping its former colony for future generations.

Valnora Jones of the non-governmental organisation, Campaign for Good Governance, said that to some extent, the British have been pretty much running the country.’

http://papernews.info/2010/06/25/is-uk-recolonising-sierra-leone/

I like how this thread turned from a critique of Belgian denialism into British denialism.

What about some Flemish denialism? Two Flemish writers have gone on record saying that if we just make sure to say colonialism is wrong, we can move on from the moral cramp we are having to acknowledging the many good things that colonialist have done in the past (the oldest of the 2 was a colonialist). We see: you can both condemn your Louis Michel & eat your colonialism too.

(for the people knowing Flanders: Jef Geeraerts and Erwin Mortier, the latter is the boyfriend of the ‘art journalist’ that accompanied the former in his come-back tour to the Congo featuring an enormous amount of great insights on the nature of black men and women (one of whom he had made pregnant just before he left her))

The fact that after years of therapy I have recovered from your abuse does not make your abuse morally praise worthy. Yes my history made me who I am and I am happy and have made peace with myself but I really wish you hadn’t beaten and raped me when I was a developing infant.

I know I know, you feel ashamed and guilty about what you did and so you’ve constructed a delusion that your abuse was really good for me. That I could never have achieved the things in my life I have without your cruel tutelage so really I should just get on my knees and thank you. Yeah well fuck you. The truth is I would have been much better off if you cared about someone other than yourself and didn’t just take what you wanted from my body politic by brute force. If you had just allowed me some self dignity I would have given you everything you wanted anyway.

But don’t worry, one day you’ll be weak and I’ll be strong. You’d better pray that in the meantime I learn to be a better nation than you ever were.

Sincerely:
Your former Colony.

sg @146: I Suppose the OP said all that could be said about the original subject. That Michel’s attitudes are apparently quite common in Belgium is one of those disappointing facts about human beings. And British denialism seems alive and kicking too. Hidari’s link @ 80 taught me that the current British education secretary has just asked pro-imperial historians to rewrite the curriculum and present the Empire in a more favourable light. Seumas Milne in the Guardian gives a critique. Will British schoolchildren soon be taught by those who wish to “celebrate” Empire and believe it “is more necessary in the 21st century than ever before?”

But it’s not just the Brits. From European to Japanese imperialism, from the Armenian genocide to the Cold War to Hindu Nationalist curricula, there seems to be this global agreement that rewriting ones own history in a more positive light is highly desirable. Enjoy George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism on the causes. See especially the passage on “Indifference to Reality”.

When the British ruled their empire they established monarchies among the regions or nations which they occupied. When the Americans ruled their empire they established democratic republics. When the Soviets ruled their empire they established socialist republics. Hell, the French established Napoleonic “empires”, ruled by local “emperors”. Failing these (monarchies – constitutional or otherwise, democratic republics, socialist republics or “empires”) they established fascist dictatorships. Typically, the form of government is irrelevant, or less relevant than the ability of the occupiers to subordinate the occupied to their ruling elites, who were themselves subordinate the the ruling elites of the occupiers.

When the British ruled their empire they established monarchies among the regions or nations which they occupied
I suspect the monarchies were generally there already. Maharajah is not an English loan word.
When the Americans ruled their empire they established democratic republics.
Yep, if there’s one thing the CIA is famous for it’s establishing democratic republics. That’s why it’s so well-liked in Latin America. And Iran.

But there is no doubt that Britain holds the whip hand in Sierra Leone nowadays, not the Sierra Leone Government.

In other words, there are a lot of British advisors in SL, and if the SL government said “OK, we want you to leave now”, the British would say “No, we’re staying, as these Marines will remind you forcibly if necessary.”
You actually think that’s what’s happening in SL?

‘In other words, there are a lot of British advisors in SL, and if the SL government said “OK, we want you to leave now”, the British would say “No, we’re staying, as these Marines will remind you forcibly if necessary.”’

Oh I’m sure if push came to shove and that that eventuality happened then the British would leave. But my point is (or rather, the point of the BBC, in the first article I quoted from) is that that eventuality is highly unlikely to happen, as the SL government relies on the British for…well…everything. In any case, if it looked likely that the SL govt. was on the point of asking the Brits to leave I’m damn sure that the Brits would put a huge amount of ‘soft’ ‘backroom’ pressure on the SL Govt not to make any such statement.

Look for example at the Japanese Government’s attempts to kick the Americans out of Okinawa. It’s already brought down one PM. These attempts of course can be succesful (look at France). But that occurred only because France was a major (imperial) power with a lot of money and a political tradition of and independent foreign policy (and even then it wasn’t that independent: France remained part of NATO: cf also the Lemnitzer-Ailleret Agreements).

It is vanishingly unlikely that the SL govt will be able to make such a decision at any point in the immediate future. To quote from the second article: ‘Valnora Jones of the non-governmental organisation, Campaign for Good Governance, said that to some extent, the British have been pretty much running the country.”

Virgil @ 158:
I think attacking the issue through counter-factual history, like Alex, is intellectually weak. The argument seems to be that one should adopt a morally more neutral attitude towards imperialism because in spite of its horrible crimes, if it hadn’t occurred, someone else would (counterfactually) have managed to make an even bigger mess of things. Now, this is not how we usually reason about culpability. A counter-factual history is simply a fantasy. For any fantasy about an independent third world ravaged by war and oppression one can substitute a fantasy where it develops and prospers. We don’t usually excuse crimes if the criminal can develop a fantasy where things would have been worse if the crime had not been committed. And what fantasy is being developed? It is a weaker version of the imperial fantasy that we imperialists are saving them from their horrible rulers. Now we have counterfactually saved them from rulers as bad as us. Oh, and we left them good ideas they were allowed to use once we were thrown out.

Apart from the philosophical weirdness of it all, is this even plausible? Many, many imperialists have ended up in the innermost circles of tyrant hell. The death tolls of imperial famines are comparable to those of communist collectivization. Would the counterfactual Maharaja of independent Punjab (surely an SOB) have exported his people into famine in bounty years? Would the king of independent Eire (another SOB) have caused the potato famine? The relative death toll in the Belgian and French colonies in central Africa would give Pol Pot a run for his money. They turned the region into a slave labor death camp. The inmates were motivated by special whips made of hippopotamus skin, which cut to the bone. To punish parents, they cut off the hands of their children to condemn them to a life of beggary and starvation. Millions died. Even if we play the counterfactual game, why do you think the onus is on me to prove that the alternative would not have been equally bad?

Secondly, the comment about ‘leftist intellectuals in the West and Africa’. You are conflating anti-imperialism with ‘leftist intellectualism’ with ‘Stalinist fellow-travelerhood’. As you admit, the vast majority of anti-imperialists are democrats. If they are on the left they are social democrats. The idea that people X are not ready for democracy is not a ‘leftist intellectual’ argument, it is an imperial excuse to rule over X or to install your preferred ‘strongman’. I am sure defenders of the Soviet empire used it as well as Europeans or Americans. But anyway, the argument that ‘leftist intellectuals’ are responsible for the fate of sub-saharan Africa is extremely implausible. The place was ravaged by colonialism and endless wars, colonial wars, cold wars, independence wars, ethnic wars. It is not, and can not be, a demonstration of what a non-colonial counterfactual history would have been like.

Shorter points: I am *not* committed to the claim that all local tyrants are better than imperialists. I am committed to the claim that no imperialists are better than tyrants, while some forms of self-rule are better than tyranny. I think non-counter-factual history bears this out. I also think the current US democracy is a better place than the old US Republic, since it has universal suffrage, has abolished slavery, etc.

virgil @155, obviously India and Japan are completely different societies, but to argue that heterogeneity and lack of a single language are somehow more important than (or equally as important as) being invaded and occupied by a foreign power seems to be already implicitly assuming that the colonialism applied by that foreign power was “good.” Orwell’s account of British economic wrecking in India suggests otherwise, and their behaviour around the time of partition was not exactly a model of responsible governance.

There is the possibility, for example, that multi-cultural pre-British India would have formed a series of separate, solid modern states, trading with each other and developing/importing technology, until they decided ultimately to federate/form a cooperation forum/whatever. There’s no reason to suppose that British occupation was the only way that India could have developed; if just one state of (at that time) 60 million people with one language and two religions (Japan has two religions) could develop so far in 60 years, why couldn’t the multiple states of India?

Again, it’s interesting that in an English-language thread that started on Belgian colonialist denialism, the topic so quickly has managed to turn so thoroughly to arguing that British colonialism probably-wasn’t-so-bad-and-maybe-even-helped. It seems to undermine the moral case for the OP.

@163 I wish I could add something, but I don’t think I know enough about that for it to be helpful. What you said re Hong Kong and imperialism sounds about right.

@165 present-day Turkey retrogressing before our eyes into an Islamist-movement dominated government/society

Serious question: where did you hear this? This is complete news to me. Not a single one of my many (largely non-religious/secularist) Turkish acquaintances and friends seems to see things this way. Some of them talk a good bit about Turkish politics. I’ve not once heard anyone characterize the situation in Turkey as anything remotely like this anytime in the past year, or five years.

I have heard of a few people in the American media saying this immediately after the flotilla incident, for reasons that I think are transparent and transparently disingenuous.

167: well, no, but it was part of a fairly Islamic one (literally, a Caliphate) before the war, so I think that’s fair enough. Whether it’s actually happening or not is a different question. Cutting Virgil as much leeway as possible, it’s true that there is an avowedly Islamic party in power in Ankara, of course, and there wasn’t ten years ago. (Though there was 15 years ago, and my very sketchy impression is that Refah was if anything more Islamic than AK is.) And there’s a bit more pressure for women to be allowed to put bags on their heads. But it’s quite a leap from that to “retrogressing before our eyes into an Islamist-movement dominated government/society” which raises images of the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.

‘Oh, well, if you’re damn sure then it must be true I suppose.’

Yup that’s about the size of it.

#171

One should note that the counter-factual argument is very carefully played by the ‘oh but British imperialism wasn’t that bad really’ school. They are pretty keen to play it (however tendentiously) in the case of the Indians .

In the case of the Tasmanians, not so much.

(And if we are talking about European imperialism generally there are many other examples to be used, not least that of the Belgian occupied Congo which was, after all, the subject of the original post).

@173, either you are actually, certifiably, insane; or you’re writing from some kind of counterfactual history universe; or you’ve been conned by some nasty people.

In the hope that it’s the latter: MEQ is the rag in which Daniel Pipes publishes neocon conspiracy theories. It is not a serious academic journal; it has no credibility outside of neocon circles. Krespin is a member of MEMRI, an institution whose sole function is to lie to Americans about the Muslim world in order to keep US public opinion behind Israel.

Also, your point about earthquakes and Wahabis tearing down mosques seems to be taken from someone’s comments box last week, rather than from anyone credible, or even someone incredible-but-not-an-anonymous-nutter-on-a-blog.

My God, that review is worrying me! Imagine if a modern secular democracy were run by “men who pray”… it boggles the mind doesn’t it, how backward these middle easterns are!!?

ajay: because Flashman was there. Don’t you know anything about history?

Wasn’t Britain’s presence in India all about the French anyway?

Nice to see this is still going. Not sure where it’s going, but there it is. One does well to separate a view on how Western Imperialism should be seen as an historical phenomenon from questions of how one thinks the world ought to be run today [unless one is Niall Ferguson, of course]. Compared to the general run of human history, Western Imperialism was pretty meh when it comes to unpleasantness. [Roman amphitheatre, anyone? Aztec blood-sacrifice? Iroquois torture-stake?]

Compared to what came immediately after it, at least in terms of global ideals [I refer you to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the drafting-panel of which were several ‘imperialist’ representatives] it looks jolly unpleasant. But then so does everything else that ever happened in history, with the exception of a few rare and possibly semi-mythical golden ages such as that of Ashoka.

Therefore the question is, does the globalised and industrialised economy achieved under imperialism, and the wide and diverse public sphere of intellectuals and critics that was allowed to flourish by its masters [oh yes they were!] have anything to do with the sudden repudiation of the previous millennia of human dedication to defining some of us as ‘other’, inferior and ripe for exploitation? Or is the whole thing just a miraculous coincidence? You could try, I suppose, to make the argument that the ‘goodies’ were so repelled by Imperialism’s excesses that they summoned up their opposition out of thin air, but, gosh, is there a lot of ‘othering’ involved in that idea.

#Because it’s not generally thought of as being part the European Imperialist ‘project’, which had a mainly Christian ideology, and was more orientated towards conquest via sea (European Empires after the 16th century tended to be sea empires, whereas before this time period, empires tended to be land empires, although, as with all generalisations, there were exceptions). The Ottoman Empire was more of a land empire (although it had an efficient navy, and it was based round the mediterranean).

OTOH, the fact that the Ottomans were known in the 19th century as ‘the sick man of Europe‘ shows that at least some people saw them as being part of Europe, and the extent to which the Turks are, or are not, part of Europe is still a live issue (cf Turkey’s bid to join the EU). As I pointed out earlier, the other European powers spent much of the 19th century attempting to keep the Ottoman Empire from collapsing, so they certainly didn’t view it as being wholly ‘other’.

But I don’t really understand why you are asking me, or what you think would have been proved if the answer was ‘no’ (or ‘yes’ for that matter).

ajay @177:

Yes, invading from the Northwest has been done successfully by people who were native to the area and controlled it. Russia never controlled Afghanistan successfully (and failed spectacularly to do so in more modern times), and most of Soviet Central Asia was fundamentally different from Afghanistan, being much more flat, for instance.

The British had a huge manpower advantage and all the wealth of India and never managed to conquer Afghanistan. I’m surprised that you think the Russians would have magically done so with the insanely long supply lines they would have needed.

And this would be after the Indians or whatever successor states were extremely well-versed in modern tactics and armaments.

Following on from my last post, I should have pointed out that when Mehmed II conquered Constantinople he took the title ‘Caeser’, and he argued that, if only by virtue of conquest, he was now the ‘next in line’ (so to speak) of the Byzantine (ie. Eastern Roman Empire) line of Emperors: he was also related to various Byzantine nobility by blood, so this claim wasn’t that outlandish.

If one accepts this line of reasoning then the Ottomans were absolutely part of the European imperialist project (which took much of its inspiration from Rome). This argument also depends on how similar one considers Islam to be to Christianity.

@ Hidari, ajay, and others, re the Ottoman Empire being imperialist, doesn’t it basically boil down to a somewhat arbitrary choice to use the word “imperialism” for certain modalities of empire, but not for empires in general? Do we even generally use “imperialism” for the Spanish Empire? There’s nothing about the Ottoman or Spanish Empires that makes them less *imperial* than the British Empire, and we don’t call their imperial ideologies “imperialist”, afaik, because “imperialist” refers to the more hierarchical form sometimes taken by a set of diffuse commercial and diplomatic relationships whose primary purpose was commercial. Had imperial China, sometime between 1400 and 1800, tried to exercise direct governing authority over Southeast Asia, where there was already a large Chinese diaspora doing business, that would be “imperialist” in this sense. Chinese in Southeast Asia were not agents of the Ming or Qing governments, they didn’t try to rule over local populations. The presence of Muslim traders led to conversion of local rulers to Islam, and/or attempts by Muslim elites in Indonesia to conquer territory and bring it under their own rule, but they were doing so as independent local rulers who happened to be Muslim, not as agents of any other political entity that was to govern parts of Indonesia, even indirectly, from abroad. The Portuguese in S E Asia made a lot (most?) of their money from local shipping routes, not from shipping raw materials or spices to Portugal.

@182 Were the famines in which millions died in India, much less the atrocities committed in the Congo, really “pretty meh” compared to the Roman amphitheater and Aztec sacrifices? In terms of overall numbers of people involved, the latter two things were at least a few orders of magnitude smaller in scale. And relative to the sizes of the populations, did the Aztec sacrifices or Roman amphitheater kill off half, or all of any large population?

As for the Declaration of Human Rights and other responses, any kind of “excess” can provoke a more or less effective response intended to prevent that excess from being committed in the future. Just like the struggle against industrial-scale racially-based slavery (as was practiced by Europeans, in the Americas) and segregation in the US led to a stronger discourse of civil rights in the US and Europe, which is then broadened to other social struggles. And the Holocaust helped give anti-Semitism a bad name, and greatly reduced its importance, although it hasn’t even completely disappeared in Europe. The response is part of the legacy. But another part of the legacy is that the damage was done. In the case of colonialism, part of that damage is the continuation of those same exploitative relationships between local “native” elites and foreign corporations or governments that were produced by colonialism.

Doing a quick google search, I see people do talk about “Spanish imperialism”, but “British imperialism” gets many times more hits (~900k to 40k). It does seem to me that there is a convention of using “imperialist” in a narrower sense than “imperial”, but I don’t know if or when anyone has spelled out the difference.

#189

Indeed. ‘The Ebionites were a Jewish-Christian sect that insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah but not as divine. The Ebionites used only the Jewish Gospels, revered James the Just as the head of the Jerusalem Church and rejected Paul of Tarsus as an apostate towards the Law….Some scholars argue that they contributed to the development of the Islamic view of Jesus due to exchanges of Ebionite remnants with the first Muslims.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites