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Chaudhuri , India and China were central to an expansive world economy long before the first European traders managed to circumnavigate the African cape. During the heyday of British rule, or the British Raj, from to , Indian life expectancy dropped by a stunning 20 per cent. By contrast, during the 70 years since independence, Indian life expectancy has increased by approximately 66 per cent, or 27 years. A comparable increase of 65 per cent can also be observed in Pakistan, which was once part of British India.
And to transport food out of productive regions for export, even in times of famine. This explains the fact that during the devastating famines of and in which 12 to 30 million Indians starved to death, mortality rates were highest in areas serviced by British rail lines. Gilley argues current poverty and instability within the Democratic Republic of the Congo proves the Congolese were better off under Belgian rule. The evidence says otherwise. Since independence in , life expectancy in the Congo has climbed steadily, from around 41 years on the eve of independence to 59 in This figure remains low compared to most other countries in the world.
Nonetheless, it is high compared to what it was under Belgian rule. Under colonial rule, the Congolese population declined by estimates ranging from three million to 13 million between and due to widespread disease, a coercive labour regime and endemic brutality. The Spanish quickly concluded that the habits of the native Americans, from nakedness to unwillingness to labor to alleged cannibalism, clearly demonstrated their inability to recognize natural law.
This account of native customs was used to legitimize the enslavement of the Indians, which the Spanish colonists insisted was the only way to teach them civilization and introduce them to Christianity. Some of the Spanish missionaries sent to the New World, however, noticed that the brutal exploitation of slave labor was widespread while any serious commitment to religious instruction was absent. Members of the Dominican order in particular noted the hypocrisy of enslaving the Indians because of their alleged barbarity while practicing a form of conquest, warfare, and slavery that reduced the indigenous population of Hispaniola from , to 15, in two decades of Spanish rule.
Victoria gave a series of lectures on Indian rights that applied Thomism to the practice of Spanish rule. He argued that all human beings share the capacity for rationality and have natural rights that stem from this capacity. From this premise, he deduced that the Papal decision to grant Spain title to the Americas was illegitimate. Unlike the position of Pope Innocent IV, Victoria argued that neither the Pope nor the Spaniards could subjugate the Indians in order to punish violations of natural law, such as fornication or adultery.
Furthermore, according to Victoria, the pope and Christian rulers acting on his mandate had even less right to enforce laws against unbelievers, because they were outside of the Christian community, which was the domain of Papal authority Williams Despite this strongly worded critique of the dominant modes of justifying Spanish conquest, Victoria concluded that the use of force in the New World was legitimate when Indian communities violated the Law of Nations, a set of principles derivable from reason and therefore universally binding.
The legitimacy of colonialism was also a topic of debate among French, German, and British philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At first it might seem relatively obvious that Enlightenment thinkers would develop a critique of colonialism.
The system of colonial domination, which involved some combination of slavery, quasi-feudal forced labor, or expropriation of property, is antithetical to the basic Enlightenment principle that each individual is capable of reason and self-government. The rise of anti-colonial political theory, however, required more than a universalistic ethic that recognized the shared humanity of all people. As suggested above, the universalism of Thomism proved to be a relatively weak basis for criticizing colonialism.
Given the tension between the abstract universalism of natural law and the actual cultural practices of indigenous peoples, it was easy to interpret native difference as evidence of the violation of natural law. This in turn became a justification for exploitation. Diderot was one of the most forceful critics of European colonization. Diderot also challenges the dominant justifications for European colonialism. Although he grants that it is legitimate to colonize an area that is not actually inhabited, he insists that foreign traders and explorers have no right of access to fully inhabited lands.
This is important because the right to commerce understood to encompass not only trade but also missionary work and exploration was used as a justification for colonization by Spanish thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. If the native peoples resisted these incursions, the Spanish could legitimately wage war and conquer their territory.
Before enlightenment thinkers could articulate a compelling critique of colonialism, they had to recognize the importance of culture and the possibility of cultural pluralism.
The claim that all individuals are equally worthy of dignity and respect was a necessary but not sufficient basis for anti-imperialist thought. They also had to recognize that the tendency to develop diverse institutions, narratives, and aesthetic practices was an essential human capacity. The French term moeurs or what today would be called culture captures the idea that the humanity of human beings is expressed in the distinctive practices that they adopt as solutions to the challenges of existence.
The work of enlightenment anti-imperialists such as Diderot and Kant reflects their struggle with the tension between universalistic concepts such as human rights and the realities of cultural pluralism. The paradox of enlightenment anti-imperialism is that human dignity is understood to be rooted in the universal human capacity for reason. Yet when people engage in cultural practices that are unfamiliar or disturbing to the European observer, they appear irrational and thus undeserving of recognition and respect.
In other words, he emphasized that human beings all share similar desires to create workable rules of conduct that allow particular ways of life to flourish without themselves creating harsh injustices and cruelties. Muthu 77 There are infinite varieties of solutions to the challenges posed by human existence. Societies all need to find a way to balance individual egoism and sociability and to overcome the adversities that stem from the physical environment.
From this perspective, culture itself, rather than rationality, is the universal human capacity. Unlike many other eighteenth and nineteenth century political philosophers, Diderot did not assume that non-Western societies were necessarily primitive e. One of the key issues that distinguished critics from proponents of colonialism and imperialism was their view of the relationship between culture, history and progress.
Many of the influential philosophers writing in France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had assimilated some version of the developmental approach to history that was associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.
The language of civilization, savagery, and barbarism is pervasive in writers as diverse of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. It would therefore be incorrect to conclude that a developmental theory of history is distinctive of the liberal tradition; nevertheless, given that figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Ferguson and Smith were among its leading expositors, it is strongly associated with liberalism. Smith himself opposed imperialism for economic reasons. He felt that relations of dependence between metropole and periphery distorted self-regulating market mechanisms and worried that the cost of military domination would be burdensome for taxpayers Pitts The idea that civilization is the culmination of a process of historical development, however, proved useful in justifying imperialism.
According to Uday Mehta, liberal imperialism was the product of the interaction between universalism and developmental history A core doctrine of liberalism holds that all individuals share a capacity for reason and self-government. The theory of developmental history, however, modifies this universalism with the notion that these capacities only emerge at a certain stage of civilization McCarthy For example, according to John Stuart Mill hereafter Mill , savages do not have the capacity for self-government because of their excessive love of freedom.
Serfs, slaves, and peasants in barbarous societies, on the other hand, may be so schooled in obedience that their capacity for rationality is stifled.
Only commercial society produces the material and cultural conditions that enable individuals to realize their potential for freedom and self-government. According to this logic, civilized societies like Great Britain are acting in the interest of less-developed peoples by governing them.
Mill, a life-long employee of the British East India Company, recognized that despotic government by a foreign people could lead to injustice and economic exploitation. These abuses, if unchecked, could undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the imperial project. In Considerations on Representative Government , Mill identifies four reasons why foreign e.
European peoples are not suited to governing colonies. First, foreign politicians are unlikely to have the knowledge of local conditions that is necessary to solve problems of public policy effectively.
Second, given cultural, linguistic, and often religious differences between colonizers and colonized, the colonizers are unlikely to sympathize with the native peoples and are likely to act tyrannically. Third, even if the colonizers really try to treat the native peoples fairly, their natural tendency to sympathize with those similar to themselves other foreign colonists or merchants would likely lead to distorted judgment in cases of conflict.
Finally, according to Mill, colonists and merchants go abroad in order to acquire wealth with little effort or risk, which means that their economic activity often exploits the colonized country rather than developing it.
Recent scholarship, however, has challenged the view of Burke as an opponent of imperialism. Members of this specialized body would have the training to acquire relevant knowledge of local conditions. Paid by the government, they would not personally benefit from economic exploitation and could fairly arbitrate conflicts between colonists and indigenous people. Mill, however, was not able to explain how to ensure good government where those wielding political power were not accountable to the population.
Nineteenth century liberal thinkers held a range of views on the legitimacy of foreign domination and conquest. Colonies would provide an outlet for excess population that caused disorder in France. Tocqueville also suggested that imperial endeavors would incite a feeling of patriotism that would counterbalance the modern centrifugal forces of materialism and class conflict.
Tocqueville was actively engaged in advancing the project of French colonization of Algeria. As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville argued in favor of expanding the French presence in Algeria. Instead, Tocqueville defended controversial tactics such as the destruction of crops, confiscation of land, and seizure of unarmed civilians.
The stability of the regime, he felt, depended on the ability of the colonial administration to provide good government to the French settlers. Tocqueville emphasized that the excessive centralization of decision-making in Paris combined with the arbitrary practices of the local military leadership meant that French colonists had no security of property, let alone the political and civil rights that they were accustomed to France. Tocqueville was untroubled by the use of martial law against indigenous peoples, but felt that it was counterproductive when applied to the French.
For Tocqueville, the success of the French endeavor in Algeria depended entirely on attracting large numbers of permanent French settlers.
Given that it was proving impossible to win the allegiance of the indigenous people, France could not hold Algeria without creating a stable community of colonists. The natives were to be ruled through military domination and the French were to be enticed to settle through the promise of economic gain in an environment that reproduced, as much as possible, the cultural and political life of France.
Recent scholarship has also drawn attention to the writings of less canonical figures Bell In Mr. Mothercountry , Keally McBride focuses on the career of James Stephen and uses new archival research to explore the gap between the practice of colonial administration and the ideal of the rule of law.
In Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism , Karuna Mantena challenges the idea that liberal notions of progress and civilization played a central role in the justification of Victorian empire.
Mantena shows that the work of Victorian legal scholar Henry Maine played an important role in the shift toward a new culturalism that emphasized the dangers and difficulties of trying to civilize native peoples.
In recent years, scholars have devoted less attention to the debates on colonialism within the Marxist tradition. This reflects the waning influence of Marxism in the academy and in political practice. Marxism, however, has influenced both post-colonial theory and anti-colonial independence movements around the world. Marxists have drawn attention to the material basis of European political expansion and developed concepts that help explain the persistence of economic exploitation after the end of direct political rule.
Although Marx never developed a theory of colonialism, his analysis of capitalism emphasized its inherent tendency to expand in search of new markets. In his classic works such as The Communist Manifesto , Grundrisse , and Capital , Marx predicted that the bourgeoisie would continue to create a global market and undermine both local and national barriers to its own expansion.
Expansion is a necessary product of the core dynamic of capitalism: overproduction. Competition among producers drives them to cut wages, which in turn leads to a crisis of under-consumption. The only way to prevent economic collapse is to find new markets to absorb excess consumer goods. From a Marxist perspective, some form of imperialism is inevitable. By exporting population to resource rich foreign territories, a nation creates a market for industrial goods and a reliable source of natural resources.
Alternately, weaker countries can face the choice of either voluntarily admitting foreign products that will undermine domestic industry or submitting to political domination, which will accomplish the same end.
In a series of newspaper articles published in the s in the New York Daily Tribune , Marx specifically discussed the impact of British colonialism in India. His analysis was consistent with his general theory of political and economic change. He described India as an essentially feudal society experiencing the painful process of modernization.
He reached this conclusion because he believed incorrectly that agricultural land in India was owned communally. According to Marx, oriental despotism emerged in India because agricultural productivity depended on large-scale public works such as irrigation that could only be financed by the state.
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