# Colonialism  ## Metadata - Author: Nigel Biggar - Full Title: Colonialism - Category: #books ## Highlights - The case against Rhodes was that he was South Africa’s equivalent of Hitler, and the supporting evidence was encapsulated in this damning quotation: ‘I prefer land to n---ers … the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism … one should kill as many n---ers as possible.’[6] However, initial research discovered that the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners had lifted this quotation verbatim from a book review by Adekeye Adebajo, a former Rhodes Scholar who is now director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. Further digging revealed that the ‘quotation’ was, in fact, made up from three different elements drawn from three different sources. The first had been lifted from a novel. The other two had been misleadingly torn out of their proper contexts. And part of the third appears to have been made up.[7] ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=150)) - Rhodes did support a franchise in Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites; he helped to finance a black African newspaper; and he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black (American) beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.[9] ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=163)) - This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.[11] ([Location 172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=172)) - The reason for this focus is that the real target of today’s anti-imperialists or anti-colonialists is the West or, more precisely, the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=189)) - The anti-colonialists are a disparate bunch. They include academic ‘post-colonialists’, whose bible is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and who tend to inhabit university departments of literature rather than those of history.[13] ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=195)) - One important way of corroding faith in the West is to denigrate its record, a major part of which is the history of European empires. ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=221)) - Politically, this makes good sense. If you want to make others obey your will, it is surely useful to subvert their self-confidence and exploit their guilt. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=225)) - If Henry Kissinger is to be believed, ever since Sun Tzu’s Art of War in the fifth century BC, China’s Realpolitik has placed a premium on gaining psychological advantage.[16] ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=226)) - After a century and a half of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, the British abolished both the trade and the institution within the empire in the early 1800s. They then spent the subsequent century and a half exercising their imperial power in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave trade across Africa.[20] ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=239)) - If they meant that historians are not primarily in the business of making moral assessments, then they were quite correct: historians are not trained to do that. ([Location 256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=256)) - On the other hand, it is true that we should not judge the past by the present, if it means one of two things. One is that human beings are always in the process of learning morally, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=266)) - However, to most of our ancestors up until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery was a fact of life – an institution that had existed all over the world since time immemorial. ([Location 268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=268)) - The second sense in which it is true that we should not judge the past by the present is that the circumstances of the past were often very different from our own, and that good moral judgements will take that into account. The peace and security that most people in the early twenty-first century West take for granted as normal are, historically, quite extraordinary. ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=273)) - When Joseph Chamberlain, British colonial secretary, commented on imperial policy in South Africa in 1900, ‘We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us’, he spoke with an admirable practical wisdom that academics – including ethicists – and student activists typically lack.[24] Not having such wisdom, they lack a compassionate appreciation of the constraints under which human beings so often have to act. Consequently, they also lack forgiveness for honest error and tragic failure. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=293)) - A culture that can write is superior in that technical respect to one that cannot. A culture that knows that the earth is round is superior in that intellectual respect to one that does not. A culture that abhors human sacrifice to the gods and female infanticide is superior in that moral respect to one that practises them. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=303)) - the maintenance of just law and order sometimes requires physical coercion. The fact that the need for such coercion is regrettable, even lamentable, does not lessen its necessity. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=313)) - History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=332)) - The resultant posture, situated between cynicism and utopianism, is well captured by Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: ‘God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.’[26] ([Location 335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=335)) - England’s resistance to imperial Spain’s domination, therefore, was a defence not only of Protestantism, with its seeds of anti-authoritarian politics, but also of a relatively liberal ecclesiastical arrangement, which was designed to prevent civil war. ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=453)) - Turning the emergence of the empire … into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state … The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’ … The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to rule India.[9] Rival Indian rulers were keen to enlist British military expertise and British-trained and -led troops, with a view to prevailing in local wars. ([Location 506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=506)) - the EIC’s Indian empire grew without any sense of imperial mission and without any grand plan, and simply in ad hoc response to commercial and money-making opportunities and the consequent requirements of security. ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=519)) - Warren Hastings, for example, achieved fluency in Bengali and had a decent working knowledge of Urdu and Persian. Fascinated by India’s Hindu and Buddhist past, which had faded from sight during seven centuries of Muslim rule, he pioneered the revival of Sanskrit and sponsored the first ever English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In 1784 he supported the prodigiously polyglot Sir William Jones in founding the Calcutta Asiatic Society, which became the centre of a cultural revival that would blossom into the Bengal Renaissance, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[14] ([Location 539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=539)) - According to Nirad Chaudhuri, in rescuing classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion, Hastings, Jones and other European Orientalists ‘rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler.’[19] It gave him the material out of which to build ‘the historical myth’ of a Hindu civilisation that was superior to Europe’s.[20] ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=554)) - One thing that never happened in British India was the mass immigration of Britons. This was largely because India was already a long-settled country, but also because the EIC discouraged European immigration, lest it cause social friction and create political trouble. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=559)) - inspired by a Christian ideal of basic human equality, a popular, national movement arose in late-eighteenth-century Britain to bring about the abolition, first, of the trade in slaves from Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the American colonies, and subsequently of the institution of slavery itself throughout the empire. ([Location 589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=589)) - After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, humanitarians turned their attention to the plight of native peoples as they suffered the large-scale influx of European migrants in British North America, Australia and New Zealand. So, in 1837, led by Quakers such as Thomas Hodgkin, they founded the Aborigines Protection Society, which flourished for the next seventy years. Merged with the Anti-Slavery Society in 1909, it lives on today as Anti-Slavery International.[28] ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=596)) - They saw themselves not as India’s conquerors but as its emancipators.’[30] Francis, 1st Marquess of Hastings, for example, who was governor-general from 1813 to 1823, expressly dedicated himself to promoting the ‘happiness of the vast population of this country’.[31] ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=614)) - In addition to suppressing the inland slave trade, curbing the influence of militant Islam and imposing Pax Britannica, from the late 1880s Britain also acquired a strategic interest in the ‘inter-lacustrine’ region between Lakes Victoria, Kyoga, Albert, Edward and Tanganyika in East Africa. This was because whoever controlled the sources of the Nile could threaten Egypt’s agricultural surplus, finances and ability to service its debt.[37] ([Location 644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=644)) - Among the groups threatened by these reforms were native Egyptian Army officers, who, with the halving of the military budget, were faced with compulsory early retirement. Partly because of this, but also to impose constitutional constraints on the khedive, to end the domination of government by Turco-Circassians and reform it on Islamic principles, Colonel Ahmed ‘Urabi led an attempted coup in 1882. Alarmed that this might lead to a default on Egypt’s debts and Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal, and with the encouragement of the khedive, the generally intervention-shy British government of William Gladstone authorised a military response, leading to the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Alexandria and the British Army’s defeat of ‘Urabi’s forces at the Battle of Tel El Kebir. ([Location 670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=670)) - His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The declaration was made partly because Balfour, reportedly moved to tears by Chaim Weizmann’s stories of Jewish suffering from antisemitism, had been won over to the Zionist vision of the undoing of an ancient wrong by restoring a people, long exiled and yearning to return home, to their native land.[53] ([Location 742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=742)) - But Balfour’s astonishing insouciance prevailed. As he wrote in August 1919, ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country … Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’[60] At the time of his declaration in 1917, those Arabs had amounted to 93 per cent of the population.[61] ([Location 779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=779)) - Ronald Storrs, who was governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1926, expressed their frustration with characteristic wryness: ‘Two hours of Arab grievances drive me into the Synagogue, while after an intensive course of Zionist propaganda I am prepared to embrace Islam.’[63] ([Location 786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=786)) - Eventually, after twenty-five years of failing to buy Arab political consent with improved infrastructure and reduced judicial corruption,[64] after searching in vain for a compromise to which both Jews and Arabs would agree, after attracting violence from both sides, after fighting an exhausting Second World War, in the wake of the dislocation of European Jewry by the Holocaust, and in the face of pressure from the United States not to delay in establishing a Jewish state, the British Empire unilaterally surrendered its mandate to the United Nations in February 1947 and evacuated Palestine. In the following November, the UN voted in favour of two states with Jerusalem under international control. The United Kingdom abstained.[65] ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=789)) - The post-war idea that ‘advanced nations’ were provisional trustees, charged with the responsibility of promoting the development of certain peoples to the point where they could stand on their own feet in the modern world, impressed itself upon the British Empire. But the idea was no novelty. The American War of Independence at the end of the eighteenth century had taught the British that their Empire should cede an increasing degree of autonomy to its constituent parts. ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=857)) - The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesman. They sometimes differed between London, Cairo, Cape Town and Calcutta. ([Location 876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=876)) - The slave is the slave-owner’s disposable property, to be put to whatever use the owner decides, and to be bought and sold – and perhaps even killed – at will. That is the pure form or ‘paradigm’ of slavery, and it is the treatment of another human being as absolutely disposable property that makes it categorically worse than other forms of unjust employment.[2] ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=908)) - As the late-nineteenth-century moral philosopher David Ritchie put it, slavery was a necessary step in the progress of humanity … [since] [i]t mitigated the horrors of primitive warfare, and thus gave some scope for the growth, however feeble, of kindlier sentiments towards the alien and the weak … Thus slavery made possible the growth of the very ideas which in course of time came to make slavery appear wrong. Slavery seems to us horrible … It used not to seem horrible.[4] ([Location 924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=924)) - One estimate has it that raiders from Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli alone enslaved between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century.[6] Another estimate reckons that the Muslim slave trade as a whole, which lasted until 1920, transported about 17 million slaves, mostly African, exceeding by a considerable margin the approximately 11 million shipped by Europeans across the Atlantic.[7] ([Location 938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=938)) - Even the maroons – runaway slaves who hid out in the forested interiors of Jamaica and elsewhere – were prepared to secure their own autonomy in 1739 by agreeing to stop freeing slaves and to assist white settlers in suppressing slave revolts.[37] They also kept slaves of their own.[38] ([Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=1053)) - One was a body of Enlightenment philosophers, which included the Baron de Montesquieu and Adam Smith. In his highly influential De l’esprit des lois (1748, translated into English two years later), the former objected to slavery because of its demoralising effects on both parties: by robbing the slave of his freedom, it makes it impossible for him to act ‘through a motive of virtue’, and because, ‘by having an unlimited authority over his slaves [the master] insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and from thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel’.[39] Smith went further, romanticising Africans in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and attributing to the slave a superior moral dignity: There is not a Negro from the coast of Africa who does not … possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of receiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind than when she subjected those [African] nations of heroes to the refuse of the gaols of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.[40] ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=1057)) - The efforts of the campaigners finally bore fruit in 1807, when Parliament legislated to abolish the slave trade. It took a further twenty-six years to achieve the empire-wide abolition of the institution of slavery itself, initially because the leading abolitionists were politically conservative and assumed that cutting off fresh supplies of slaves would doom the slave-based economies to wither naturally, gradually, and with minimal disruption. Even most black abolitionists were gradualists until the 1820s.[45] ([Location 1094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09R94BS6W&location=1094))