A word to the wise… read the footnotes.
A review of the long history of violence and abuse by ancient rulers the world over would make a sensitive soul ill. Even so, much of the anti-colonial chatter of those advancing the most colonizing ideology in human history (Marxism) intentionally ignores the fact that much of Western Civilization’s colonizing growth, though imperfect, sought to replace the most abusive and vile practices among the remaining pagan nations and in the case of India among those also brutally conquered by Islam.
Western colonization brought a worldview that elevated human value and promoted, even if only by mere habit, the path of life among those bound for centuries to the path of death. The struggle was often ugly, and the motivations were not pure for everyone involved, but the trajectory was clear. The West needed their practice to catch up with their confession, particularly in the matter of the slave trades that began before human memory and continue to this very day in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.
When it did catch up, the struggle became far more noble in its pursuits, and Britain became the only nation in world history to spend vast sums aggressively ending the slave trade wherever their arm of power and influence reached. The grand issue is NOT that the West practiced slavery given slavery’s ages-long role in all human societies, but that the British Empire awoke to its horror and its innate violation of their core values and put an end to it wherever they could.
Again, slavery is still practiced in places that Islam rules[1] and in many parts of Africa and Asia, though many conceal this reality with slight of tongue. In fact, there are supposedly more slaves on earth today than in any time in human history. The U.N.’s International Labor organization reports that right now some 50 million people are living in “modern” slavery.[2] “Modern” slavery has to be carefully picked apart[3] given the UNs anti-Western agenda, but the fact remains that, even without “legal” recognition, slavery continues in places like China, India, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mauritiania, Uzbekistan, Libya, Lebanon, Bahrain, and North Korea.[4]
Of course, the social Marxists of Critical Theory fame are far more angry about the West’s participation in the global slave trade over a century and a half ago than they are about the ongoing practice today in non-western places. Just as they are more enraged that Westerners bought slaves from Africa than they are that Africans betrayed their own people by selling them into slavery… an act that should be regarded as a far greater sin by far. So many are ready to celebrate Africa as some magical homeland, but never stop to think, “Africa was the place where my forebears were betrayed by fellow Africans… by neighbors… by family.”
One difficulty that plagued colonization is that you cannot govern the wicked, the unruly, the unrestrained, the morally unhinged, in the same way one might govern those who already govern themselves in keeping with basic standards of natural rights drawn from Scripture. The unrestrained need a heavy hand to bring order to their chaos, but the heavy hand SEEMS to stand in complete opposition to the biblical ideal. Unlike the tyrannical hand of Marxist regimes who oppress forever and never deliver their promised Utopia, the heavy-handed governance driven by biblical worldview WAS temporary… a tutor to bring a fledgling society to moral and ethical adulthood through the promotion of biblical worldview.
Ask yourself an honest question.
Should one nation interfere with the vile internal actions of another nation?
If a people are oppressed by wicked rulers, should other nations reach in a hand to deliver?
If women are routinely being raped as a matter of cultural tolerance, abused, degraded, marred in unseemly ways, denied basic levels of humanity, should the women of the world where these things are NOT tolerated demand intervention?
If one group routinely eats the people of the groups around them should they be left to their own devices?[5]
If powerful city states comb the villages round about them to find sacrificial victims for their gods and to dedicate their temples, should we just call it culture?[6]
If child sex traffic is common, overlooked, or even accepted, what should outsiders do?
If kings confiscate all the wealth and produce of their people and dole out bare subsistence to them while growing fat and wealthy themselves, what should others do about it, especially if the people seem unable or unwilling to do something about it themselves?
How about child sacrifice?
How about slavery in prostitution, be it a forced serving of Jihad soldiers or some cult requirement?
What should be done about a nation that sells young girls into child marriages to old men knowing that they will soon be burned alive on their funeral pyres?
What about nations that routinely chop up people with genetic abnormalities to use their body parts in magical potions and spells?
What if you had a local ruler who liked to watch people drown and would often command his men to put his people in sinking boats while he watched on shore?
These are not easy questions to answer. It can be hard to deliver people from the oppression of their own cultures. It is not unlike the time my father and his friends intervened when encountering a man severely beating his wife. They stepped in to restrain him and the wife attacked them from behind.
It is troublesome indeed to strive to change a culture no matter how dysfunctional when the people in it have not grown sick enough of it yet themselves. The pain of abuse and oppression often feels preferable to the uncertainty of change… culture is bound close to the soul. But should global witnesses do nothing?
This may sound mercenary, but, historically, it has been the hope of profit and access to new resources that will bless one’s own people, particularly untapped resources in dark and wild places, that provided the impetus to step in.
There was a time not too long ago that a conquest narrative governed the whole human race. Economics were, for the most part, socialist, mercantile, or feudal, being in one way or another held in a stranglehold by governments of the elite dominating the masses. Slavery was part of these systems and was practiced almost everywhere. Great empires arose from dominant city states and, in addition to much death and misery and oppression through heavy taxation, did offer benefits that bless the modern world to this day.
We should be allowed to analyze these patterns honestly without being shut down by those pursuing an even worse agenda in our civilization.
Those under imperial authority received the protection that imperial armies could bring. Trade was made easier and safer. The cooperation of nations led to advances in everything from agriculture and architecture to transportation and weaponry. (I tried really really hard to think of a Z but none came to mind… sorry.)
It was better to be under the authority of Cyrus the Great, for instance, than under the rule of the tyrants that defined the region before him. Opposing forces often betrayed their own masters by switching to Cyrus’ side; people were known to open the gates for his armies.
Alexander the Great helped unify the world around the Greek language and culture which was not only a boon to these peoples, but together with the Peace of Rome set the stage for rapid spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ… the single greatest blessing to the human race in history. Sorry, but the “oppression” of living among people with sexual morals is not worse than the oppression of cultures that do not hold human life sacred.
One of the great failings of those who set Marxist dialectics as the lens for their “historical” work is the framing of every story around suffering and victimhood without comparison with either with the past, the alternatives in the present, or legitimately likely future under Marxist domination. Marxists routinely fictionalize cause-effect in all human suffering and paint themselves saviors of the oppressed. As racists, Marxists tend to frame conflicts that are NOT racial as racist.
In places like South Africa or the Congo, we are not dealing with a unified majority of “blacks” being oppressed by some minority of “whites,” but with one organizing group easily distinguished by race trying to govern in an area where warring tribes and the reasoning of tribal affiliation have kept the region in a state of war for untold centuries. These are places where even now their new and tenuous governance keeps their regions in a perpetual state of volatile corruption.
We should ask what life was like in the regions that we call India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh today before Britain and the Portuguese moved in. We might consider what life would have been for the “Indian” people if the Muslims invaders had full sway among them, having already murdered according to some estimates 80 million people there before A.D. 1525.[7]
On the flip side, if I begin to list what blessings the British brought to these regions, in the face of many centuries of oppression by cultural paradigms of governance, I will be accused of bias and racism (the ever-ready standby), so let me simply include a list from Dadabhai Naoroji in 1887:
The Benefits of British Rule for India:
- In the Cause of Humanity: Abolition of sati and infanticide. Destruction of Gangs, Thugs, and other such pests of Indian society. Allowing remarriage of Hindu widows.
- In the Cause of Civilization: Education, both male and female, though yet only partial. Leading gradually to the destruction of superstition, and many moral and social evils. Resuscitation of India’s own noble literature, refined by the enlightenment of the West.
- Politically: Peace and order. Freedom of speech and press. Higher political knowledge and aspirations. Improvement of government in the native states. Security of life and property. Services of educated administrators, who have achieved these results.
- Materially: Loans for railways and irrigation. Development of a few valuable products, such as indigo, tea, coffee, silk, etc. Increase of exports. Telegraphs.
- Generally: Growing desire to treat India equitably. Good intentions. No nation on earth has ever had the opportunity of achieving such a glorious work. If I have omitted any item of importance, I will gladly insert it. I appreciate what England has done for India, and I know that it is only in British hands that her glory can be accomplished.
He follows this list with some complaints saying:
The Detriments of British Rule in India:
- In the Cause of Humanity: Nothing. Everything is in your favor under this heading.
- In the Cause of Civilization: There has been a failure to do as much as might have been done, but I complain not. Much has been done, though.
- Politically: Repeated break of pledges to give Indians a fair share in the administration of their own country, which has much shaken confidence in the good faith of the British word. An utter disregard of the feelings and views of the natives.
- Financially: All attention is paid on new taxes without any effort to increase the means of the people to pay; and the consequent vexation and oppressiveness of the taxes imposed, imperial and local. Inequitable financial relations between England and India.
- Materially: The impoverishment of the country, except it has been partly relieved and replenished by the railway and irrigation loans, and the American war, since 1850. Even with this relief, the poor have hardly a daily meal and a few rags to wear. The famines they could have prevented, if they had done their duty, as an intelligent government. An increase of exports without compensation; loss of manufacturing industry and skill.
- Summary: British rule has been: morally, a great blessing; politically, peace and order on one hand, blunders on the other; materially, hunger. The natives call the British system “Sakar ki Churi,” or the “knife of sugar.” In other words there is no oppression, it is all smooth and sweet, but it is the knife. I say this that you should know these feelings. You do not know our wants. When you will know our real wishes, I have not the least doubt that you would do justice. The genius and spirit of the British people is fair play and justice.[8]
Now, a careful analysis of many of the complaints of Dadabhai Naoroji might themselves benefit from a contextual framework of what was and wasn’t British leadership’s fault in terms of the poverty and famine.[9] Were these the result of mismanagement?[10] Did India suffer famine routinely before British rule?[11] Would alternative leadership patterns have done any better? Did the Brits “impoverish” India?[12] Did the level of prosperity dissipate during British rule in truth? And if so was it because of British rule? What part did Indian cultures play in their own failings? What role did the radical divergence of British and Indian cultures play in terms of expectations, communication, differences in authority gaps, etc? Ultimately would the people of the sub-continent have done better being left to the Muslims, their war lords, and their own uninterrupted cultural practices? Those who have a Marxist agenda and wear Critical theory glasses would say yes. Those who value human life and natural rights would want to say no, but still crave a little more data.
This is all well illustrated by the skit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where we attend a planning meeting of zealot party members to kidnap Pilot’s wife. Expressing rage about all that the Romans have taken from them, one asks, “And what have they ever given us?” The room is silent for a minute and then a voice squeaks, “The Aqueduct?” The leader, confused at first, finally says, “Yeah, yeah, they did give us that, that’s true.” Another voice pops, “And there is sanitation.” Another leader goes, “Oh, yeah, the sanitation… remember what the city used to be like.” The leader goes, “Well, alright, I’ll grant you that the aqueduct and sanitation are two things the Romans have done.” A voice yells, “And the Roads!” The leader says, “Obviously the Roads. The roads go without saying, don’t they?” But apart from the aqueduct and sanitation and roads…” Someone meekly adds, “Irrigation.” Another, “Medicine.” And still another, “Education.” The leader hangs his head and says “Yeah, well, alright.” Someone says, “And the Wine.” Everyone heartily agrees. One says, “Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss if the Romans left.” Someone adds, “Public Baths.” Someone else, “And it’s safe to walk on the streets at night.” Someone else says, “And they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it, they’re the only ones who could in a place like this.” The leader finally says, “Alright, but apart from…” he runs the list, “What have the Romans ever done for us?!”[13]
This is the spirit of the age concerning the long history of national and imperial growth. We are no longer allowed to examine empire and colonization to weigh each version of it for pluses and minuses. Indeed, being ruled by Babylonia vs. Persia vs. Rome vs. England vs. even Leopold II of Belgium were radically different experiences.
No! We must assume without question that colonization is all bad, unacceptable, damnable, and cause for burning down the world to eradicate everything that came to us by way of “man as a wolf to man,” save Marxism which is the very essence of “man as a wolf to man.” There is no greater colonizing force among men than Marxism. In point of fact, those who wish to burn down the world to undue the impact of empire don’t want to return people to their pre-empire state, but, rather, to a new domination under Marxist leadership of one stripe or another. The “systemically” “Racist” West must burn along with its many gifts to the world, but Racist Marxism must rise in spite of the mountain of corpses and shattered people piled under his feet.
[1] It can be hard to get down to actual belief in practice when so much of the face presented to the public is “the face of the dove,” as opposed to the “face of the falcon” which is reserved for positions of power. Left leaning media and academic presenters also conceal a good deal about what is common feeling and practice among Muslims, just as Islamic rape across Europe his commonly concealed by authorities there who do not want their immigration policies questioned. In Al Muqaddimah’s “History of the Islamic Slave Trade,” the narrator begins, “In 1842CE, the British Consul General in Morocco wrote a letter to the Sultan to ask him if he had taken any measures to stop slavery or at least, slave trade. The sultan replied that he will not do anything about it because it has been the norm since the time of the sons of Adam and no sects of Islam are against it. Hence, he will not permit anything the Qur’an forbids and will not make unlawful anything that the Qur’an has allowed. In the Sultan’s reply, we see the simplest justification or at least, excuse, for almost 1300 years of slavery in the Islamic world.” “There were four ways someone could end up a slave. First, a child born to slave parents was a slave. Second, a person captured in a Jihad against non-Muslims could be made a slave. (Jihad is a permanent state of struggle against infidels… i.e. non-Muslims.) Third, a slave could be purchased or finally, a slave could be given as a tribute.” Slaves were still being sold in open markets in Mecca as recently as 1962. The documentary estimates that over 17 million Africans were enslaved by Muslims, in addition to the millions taken from parts of Europe and Caucasus Asia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OdIqeWkhHU (6/23/2023).
[2] Some of these are being counted in countries that have outlawed slavery and focuses on forced labor and forced marriage. The sex traffic industry would account for many in the free countries, but many nations like Associated Press, “50 Million People Are Living in ‘Modern Slavery’, and the World’s Richest Countries Are Fueling It,” 5/25/2023 https://time.com/6282610/modern-slavery-richest-countries/ (6/23/2023).
[3] “Legal ownership of people was indeed abolished in all countries over the course of the last two centuries. But in many countries it has not been criminalised. In almost half of the world’s countries, there is no criminal law penalising either slavery or the slave trade. In 94 countries, you cannot be prosecuted and punished in a criminal court for enslaving another human being. Our findings displace one of the most basic assumptions made in the modern antislavery movement — that slavery is already illegal everywhere in the world. … The database considers the domestic legislation of each country, as well as the binding commitments they have made through international agreements to prohibit forms of human exploitation that fall under the umbrella term “modern slavery”. This includes forced labour, human trafficking, institutions and practices similar to slavery, servitude, the slave trade, and slavery itself.” And “This is because for nearly 90 years (from 1926 to 2016), it was generally agreed that slavery, which was considered to require the ownership of another person, could no longer occur because states had repealed all laws allowing for property rights in persons. The effective consensus was that slavery had been legislated out of existence. So the thinking went: if slavery could no longer exist, there was no reason to pass laws to prohibit it. This thinking was galvanised by the definition of slavery first set out in 1926. That definition states that slavery is the “status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised”. But courts the world over have recently come to recognise that this definition applies beyond situations where one person legally owns another person.” Piyal Adhikary, “Slavery is Not a Crime in Almost Half the Countries of the World—New Research,” (sic) The Conversation, 2/13/2020, https://theconversation.com/slavery-is-not-a-crime-in-almost-half-the-countries-of-the-world-new-research-115596 (6/23/2023).
[4] Sharon Lynn Pruitt, “Thought Slavery had Ended? Not for Everyone,” Oxygen: True Crime, 4/9/2018, https://www.oxygen.com/very-real/6-countries-where-slavery-still-exists (6/23/2023); Madeline Boeding, “Countries that Still have Slavery,” The Borgen Project, 7/4/2017, https://borgenproject.org/countries-that-still-have-slavery/ (6/23/2023).
[5] Add piece on Columbus
[6] Add piece on Aztecs, Mayans, Incas.
[7] Kishori Sharan Lal, Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1000-1800), (Delhi, Research Publications, 1973.)
[8] Dadabhai Naoroji, Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings, (Bombay: Caxton Printing Works, 1887), pp. 131-136
[9] “Accusations that Britain drained India of resources and starved Indians to death are nothing new in some circles, but at the moment they are being spread with religious zeal. Al Jazeera, the media conglomerate funded by the Qatari government, has recently joined in. But this accusation has long been disproved, and the truth is that British rule in India mitigated famine.” Tirthankar Roy, “Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines” History Reclaimed, 1/18/2023, https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/colonialism-did-not-cause-the-indian-famines/ (6/24/2023). He goes on, “First, the claim that colonialism caused famines cannot be verified against previous experience because there is no evidence that famines were less frequent or less deadly before. …(He notes that the famines were localized and not consistent where British ruled) The British Raj did not start the famines. Geography did. 1877 was the driest year in over a century (1871-1978) for which rainfall data exists. The average rainfall that year was 30 percent short of the long-term level, and a 25 percent shortfall developed again in 1896 and 1899. Monsoon failure of such an order can cause distress by drying up all accessible water sources. (He notes that data collected to suggest dropping standards of living were poorly done and manipulative in selection and in attachment to cause) That Sullivan and Hickel rely on weak data is the least of their problems. The evidence is not relevant at all. Almost all the data that Allen and others used came from the Indo-Gangetic Basin, which did not see famine in the nineteenth century. There is nothing comparable—in fact, nothing at all—for the regions where the Deccan famines broke out. … Fourth, the nationalist criticism of food exports has long been discredited. The economist Martin Ravallion showed in a 1987 article that food exports did not expose the countryside to a food shortage. … Fifth, that colonialism caused famines is based on flawed logic. Dryland Deccan famines disappeared after 1900, though weather shocks did not. The significance of the end of dryland famines was momentous for India. It led to a permanent fall in death rates.” (i.e. The Brits overcame natural obstacles to keep this from happening again… he adds “Michelle McAlpin in the 1980s and recently Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson suggested that the end of famine was owed to the railways. … The Raj learned lessons. The three Deccan famines generated data and research under government sponsorship on a scale not seen before. The results were famine codes (a blueprint for relief), canal construction, railways, sanitation of water bodies, cholera control, and collection of weather, crop, and water data.”)
[10] This is a common complaint, blamed on a lack of British concern for Indian lives, but the realities of British rule in India should exonerate them given their steady improvement of the country generally and of dealing with famine more specifically. We may compare British organization in the subcontinent vs. say, at home, if we like, but should keep in mind that the context in the subcontinent was radically different. What infrastructure was needed to handle these situations effectively was almost completely lacking before the British arrived and the cross-cultural challenges between the British and “Indian” people made even the simplest tasks complex undertakings. In a comparison between the “Indian” culture cluster (Southern Asia) and The British culture cluster (Anglo) mapped in the ten major cultural values, each stands on opposite sides of the sliding scales in almost every one. For example, where the British are open communicators, the Indians are contextual communicators. Where the British are Universalist in rule keeping, the Indians are highly particularist. While the British lean toward authoritarian on the power scale, India is one of the most authoritarian cultures in the world. The Brits are individualist and competitive while the Indians are collectivist and cooperative. While the Brits are an extreme doing culture the Indians are extreme on the being side of the scale. The consequences of contact and cooperation between such places if fraught with troubles big and small.
[11] Yes. Although the East India Company first began doing business in India in 1608, starting small and growing over time, British rule also began small in 1757. The same region that plagued British leadership in regard to famine had a long history of famine… 1396, 1407, 1460, 1520, 1629-32, 1655, 1682, 1702-04. Indeed, almost all the regions we now call India, Pakistan and Bangladesh suffered many famines before British rule, some of note were the 7th century famine mentioned in the Periya Puranam, the twelve year famine Dvadasavarsha Panjam, Muhammad bin Tughluq faced famine devastation from 1335-1342, and Abd al Qadir Badayuni witnessed cannibalism in the famine of 1555. But those using Marxist Dialectics as an historical lens are just certain that British colonialism caused every famine after that, in spite of the fact that British presence and industry seriously reduced death by famine as their rule continued.
[12] Recurring famines are a prosperity killer. While the British did remove resources of value for various parts of their empire (The sun never set on the British empire), they also sought to import prosperity inducing infrastructure and to teach wealth building processes and industries. Given the cultural distance between various groups in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh these were not always adopted or preserved after English departure.
[13] Monty Python, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, (Warner Brothers, 1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZkTnJnLR0 (6/22/2023).
