The Case for Colonialism

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Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Today’s article is a paid post for our paid subscribers. Like the first, on the necessity of Rhodesian independence, this is a book review. In it, I explore the main concepts in Professor Bruce Gilley’s The Case for Colonialism, a work that covers the justifications for European colonialism as practiced in the 19th century. It’s an interesting book, though one that falls short on a few major marks, as I’ll discuss in this post. If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to read this article in full. Enjoy, and as always, please tap the heart to like this post so the algorithm knows to promote it!

An important facet of the Cold War is that it was not, as its American apologists claim, a war between “freedom” and “communism.” That might have been true in a few cases, such as the fight against communism in Greece at the end of World War II or the French fight against murderous communists in Algeria and Indochina. Generally, however, it was a war over whether a nominally democratic system or openly communist system would replace the old imperial order, with the general agreement on both sides being that the remnants of the European empires constructed in the decades before the Great War had to be and ought to be destroyed.¹

That was, of course, why Rhodesia was destroyed. And the Congo. And South Africa. And Kenya. And Algeria. And Indochina. And on, and on, and on it goes: most recently, Hong Kong has gone from being a thriving and free British colony to a city oppressed by Chinese communist tyranny. That example was typical of the process, if somewhat less bloody; as Dr. Theodore Dalrymple notes in The Mandarins and the Masses, “in all but one or two African states, the accession to independence brought no advance in intellectual freedom but rather, in many cases, a tyranny incomparably worse than the preceding colonial regimes.”

The usual claim given as to why those colonies and old remnants of empire had to be tossed to the wolves is that their existence was unjust. That they had been economically exploitative, unbelievably cruel, politically repressive, and socially stultifying. Thus, the argument goes, they had to be handed off to the natives, regardless of how tyrannical, murderous, or otherwise awful the rulers of those post-colonial natives were.

It is that argument that Gilley addresses in The Case for Colonialism, convincingly dismantling the claim that 19th-century colonialism was exploitative and showing, rather, that it was an unvarnished good for the natives — even in the cases of Germany’s African possessions and King Leopold II’s Congo — effected at great financial cost to the European colonial powers. However, Gilley does so in a flawed way, which makes the book a somewhat frustrating read, as I’ll explore below.

The Great Empires and the Moral Basis for Them