Bruce Gilley’s “The Case For Colonialism” is a fascinating and insightful book. Gilley is an unsung hero in academia, a scholar courageous enough to state very politically incorrect truths. He endured the wrath of academia, the worst of cancel culture, for his line of inquiry and thesis, but has held the line.
Gilley’s book proves that the tendency to blame all ills in other parts of the world on the West in general and European colonialism in particular is simply anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-capitalist propaganda. The Brits and Germans administered their colonies especially well, but virtually all Western powers that engaged in colonialism brought benefits to those they colonized. “The only thing worse than being colonized was not being colonized,” as Gilley puts it. At greater length:
“The case for European colonialism is simple. It is the case for humanity itself, for the ways that human beings have always acted rationally to better their situations in life, and those of their children. It is the case for having a teacher, a coach, or a model. It is the case for having opportunity. It is the case for peace, progress, and running water. It is the case for living in a place where life is better and escaping from a place where life is worse. It is the case for human agency and freedom. In short, it is the case for a humble submission to the facts of life rather than the worked up intellectual fantasies of the scholar class. All of this should not be controversial. Indeed, up to around 1945, it wasn’t.”
Gilley’s work exposes the lies about colonization that have been mainstreamed, as part of the West’s self-loathing and self-flagellation for the past. The reality is that colonialism was a great blessing for much of the world. Colonial atrocities were smaller than pre-colonial and post-colonial atrocities. We know about Western atrocities because Westerners documented their own failings; our Christian heritage is self-critical and accountable in ways that non-colonial regimes and peoples have not been. Nations that experienced colonialism have fared better than those that didn’t, and better than they would have without colonialism. Colonialism was not about exploitation; in many cases, it mounted to an expensive humanitarian project (which is one reason why colonizers were quick to give up their colonies – they were often losing money). Many who live in once-colonized nations wish colonization would resume. Chinua Achebe is an especially interesting test case, but there are others from colonized nations who have made the same argument; sadly, their voices are marginalized or silenced by Western academics who have chosen to be offended on behalf of the colonized, even when the colonized see reality differently.
Colonialism especially improved life for women and children; the colonized got clean water, better educational and employment opportunities, and more freedom; while the colonizers did get natural resources, it was only Western technology that made those resources valuable. Gilley makes a case for renewing the colonial project. But sadly, so long as the Marxist oppressor/oppressed paradigm dominates modern thinking about these things, it’s not likely to happen.
The chapter “The Good Fortune of Being Enslaved in America” is especially powerful. An excerpt:
“Today, being black in America is one of the best outcomes for a black person globally. In no other society in the world, do blacks have such a high standard of living, not even close. Blacks in Canada also have an average income approximately 70% of the national average as they do in other Western countries that never had slavery like Belgium. To be black in America is, historically speaking, to have hit the jackpot. For those who came ashore at Jamestown and in the centuries that followed, being enslaved under the British empire was about as good as it got. If your fate was to be African, then being enslaved under the British empire gave you and your descendants a better shot at a decent life than they would have had even as freemen in Africa.
When the Washington Post sent a black reporter, Keith Richburg to be its correspondent in Africa in 1991, the expectation was that readers would be given an “Afro-centric” perspective on the continent. Richburg would have none of it. After three years in Africa, he declared himself an American through-and-through, and one grateful for his ancestors’ unwilling enslavement.
‘I was in Africa, birth place of my ancestor, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them — or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage… We are told by some supposedly enlightened black leaders that white America owes us something because they brought our ancestors over as slaves…So excuse me if I sound cynical, jaded. I’m beaten down, and I’ll admit it. And it’s Africa that has made me this way. I feel for her suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.’
…Imagine if in 1619 the Portuguese had erected a little wooden stand on the beaches of what became Angola with a sign that read: “Seeking volunteers for passage to America. Life as a slave on plantation. Possibility of manumission or emancipation. Inquire within.” Over the next few centuries leading to the ban on slave imports in 1808, the wooden stand remained, later staffed by British and then American slavers. Are we to believe that less than six people per day from all of Africa (roughly 388,000 people up to 1808) would have signed up? After all voluntarily putting oneself into slavery was widespread in Africa at the time. So-called adihyifunafu in today’s Ghana were voluntary slaves who sought the protection of a wealthy or powerful family when they fell on hard times. At other times, “parents who could not maintain their children sold some of them to obtain the means of survival.” In other parts of Africa, people regularly sold themselves into slavery and remained in the same household for life, even when offered the chance to buy their freedom.
America’s great sin was not slavery. It was to have called slavery its great sin. This characteristically American attempt to arrogate for the “City on a Hill” a holy degree of sinfulness, guilt, and contrition will not stand. Doing so dehistoricizes the historical norm of slavery. It imposes a moral calculus of oppressor/oppressed onto every white/black relationship. It is the ultimate grand narrative, the ultimate French structural system. It has left the U.S. caught in a Sisyphean struggle against its history, unable to move on even as other former slave nations did so. Slavery was not a great sin, just an ordinary one. It was common enough and was naturally delegitimated as alternatives became available.
Search in vain for any American intellectual, even a conservative one, to say as much. For plain talk, we need to turn to a brewer. Back in 1984, a scion of the Coors company, William Coors, told black business owners in a private talk: “One of the best things they (slave traders) did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains.”! Coors denied this particular phrasing, and the newspaper apologized. But even in the 1980s, speaking truth was on the ropes. The company coughed up $650 million in reparations for his remarks in the form of payoffs to black and Hispanic community groups.
Asked by the Los Angeles Times to recant in 1988, Coors carried on. “I said: ‘This is a great country, and regardless of how we got here, we all ought to be glad we’re here’….And then, I extended it to the blacks. I said: ‘You ought to be so delighted you’re here… your ancestors for the most part were dragged over here in chains… none of us can tolerate the concept of slavery, but that act in itself got you here, so they did you a favor!… And, even if blacks didn’t originally get here of their own volition, they’ve still cashed in on the same boundless opportunity. I mean, I just don’t see Jesse Jackson, or any of these other blacks, making any mass exodus back to Africa, do you?”
Coors knew more about the history of the failed “Back to Africa” movement than he let on. It failed because life was better in America than in Africa. Even as a trickle of high-profile oddballs show up in than in Africa. Even as a trickle of high-profile oddballs show up in Africa claiming to have escaped the unbearable fate of being black in America, millions of African blacks are desperate to board crammed vessels for the United States. If blacks did not think their life was better in America than anywhere else, more would own passports and would, over time, have migrated to other places, such as Guyana, Liberia, Haiti, or Sierra Leone.”
A condensed version of that chapter is available here: https://web.pdx.edu/~gilleyb/12_1620_Gilley_AsPrinted.pdf
The chapter, “Erasing White Settlers with Fake Indian Rocks,” is frankly, sad and hilarious at the same time, as it shows the ridiculous lengths to which scholars will go to prop up politically correct myths about Amerindians.
This book does on a global scale what books like Jeremy Carl’s book “Unprotected Class” or Jeff Fynn-Paul’s “Not Stolen” do on an American scale. The idea that people were living peaceful lives, in harmony with nature, as “noble savages,” until Western whites showed up and ruined everything, is simply a myth, and a pernicious one. Gilley does not touch on the Spiritual benefit that colonialism brought – but it should be noted that without colonialism, many people groups that have been reached with the gospel would still be in darkness. For an example of this, using India as a case study, I’d point to Vishal Mangalwadi’s “The Book that Made Your World,” which documents the centrality of the Bible in the rise and superiority of Western civilization, and shows the benefit that came to India via contact with Christian Britain. Gilley’s work is definitely worth reading if you want the whole story on colonization, why it happened, why it ended, and what’s best going forward.
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