Colonialism Not So Bad?

In the aftermath of World War I, the British Empire reached its furthest territorial extent. “It all looked tremendously worthwhile on the map. But was there any longer the will in Britain to keep this elaborate structure functioning, with the efficiency and ruthlessness and above all the conviction it required to hold together?” The answer, quite clearly quite soon, was no. 

Though Americans engaged in our own brief bout of overseas colonialism, our conservatives tend to have no special stake in it - indeed, to the degree anyone here remembers it, we’d be perfectly delighted to have not engaged in it. But Johnson is a British conservative and one of the more valuable services he provides in Modern Times is to give insight into a defense of Empire in the twentieth century. 

In particular, Johnson argues that colonialism, especially of the British variety, was less exploitation than an ongoing cost - a burden, if you will - and that more than anything, it provided basic law and order and the opportunity for commerce around the globe. “Lord Shelburne, the eighteenth-century statesman who deliberated most deeply on the question, laid down the policy that ‘England prefers trade without domination where possible, but accepts trade with domination when necessary.’” That suggests an overall strategy which colonialism, especially of the non-British variety, did not always have: often enough, bored sailors and soldiers on the frontier just went ahead and conquered whatever was available. Johnson’s principal critique is that British colonialism did not practice strong enough internal free markets, especially in private property, which was too often overly restricted to colonizers. 

But World War I understandably obliterated the nerve of the British establishment, who in the midst of that all consuming conflict, were already accepting moves to place India on the path to independence. Johnson in particular highlights the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which the British Army killed hundreds of Indian protestors - and then actually wrestled with their conscience over the incident, such that “from then on it was not the first object of the government to keep order” and ethnic violence thereafter regularly prevailed in India until and after independence.

Figure 1. World War I’s convulsions led to the strange politics of conservative students fighting leftist police and priests employed by a monarchist church: “Some went very far to the Left. Conrad Noel, vicar of the spectacular fourteenth-century church of Thaxted in Essex, refused to display the Union Jack inside it on the grounds that it was ‘an emblem of the British Empire with all the cruel exploitation for which it stood’. He put up the Red Flag, for which he quoted biblical authority: ‘He hath made of one blood all nations.’ Every Sunday posses of right-wing undergraduates would come over from Cambridge to tear it down, and would be resisted by ‘Lansbury Lambs’, a force of radical ex-policemen who had been sacked for striking in 1919.”

But why should Europe have all the burden? As John Toland showed in his Pulitzer Prize winning Rising Sun, the Japanese cabinet was constantly exasperated by the hypocrisy of western complaints about their own colonialism, especially amidst the rise of Communism. But here again was a colonial power without much central planning, which Johnson arrestingly describes as a militaristic anarchy. As Japan modernized in the late 19th century, it adopted some of the forms of western government, abolishing the anachronism of feudalist samurai. But those suddenly unemployed warriors adapted to the new system, forming secret societies of political thugs whose effect was to normalize assassination. Toland describes one peculiarly Japanese incident where lower-ranked troops invaded the home of a senior military officer, killed him, and then profusely apologized to his wife for making a mess. The higher ranks thus lived in fear of being killed for being insufficiently committed to national glory - which was especially dangerous because they themselves operated without oversight. The Emperor was more or less ceremonial and the military had established not only that they would select their own leaders but that they could veto any civilian administrators. Even then the army did not cooperate with the navy, nor even could its leaders impose much control from the center: the decision to invade Manchuria was made not in Tokyo but on the ground. Keeping the planning for Pearl Harbor a secret was thus fairly easy, but there was never a strategic plan for winning the war (beyond the historic hope that a decisive battle would bring the Allies to terms) and limited resource allocation would prove an ongoing problem.

Figure 2. Demonstrating his famous forecasting ability, “On 15 December 1924 Churchill wrote a remarkable letter to the Prime Minister, scouting any possibility of menace from Japan. For page after page it went on, using every device of statistics and rhetoric, to convince [Stanley] Baldwin – already sufficiently pacific and complacent by nature – of the utter impossibility of war with Japan: ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime. The Japanese are our allies.’”

As I mentioned in our last correspondence, Johnson’s take on WW2 is fairly conventional but I will again hit on some of his highlights: Completely new to me was the suggestion that the Marco Polo Bridge incident that brought Japan and China back into war was eventually suspected by the Japanese to have been instigated by Communists to distract from the Soviet Union. More familiar was Johnson providing evidence that the Roosevelt administration had hopeful anticipation that sanctions against the Japanese might lead to war (even if they didn’t predict the exact circumstances of Pearl Harbor). Johnson offers two insightful statistical sum ups of the Pacific theater, first that “Most Japanese were killed by sea or air bombardment, or cut off and starved. They never set eyes on an American foot-soldier or got within bayonet-range of him.” And second that the “Japanese killed more British troops in prison camps than on the field of battle.”  Johnson laments that the second target of an atomic bomb was a center of Japanese Christianity - but not the dropping of the second bomb itself, revealing that the Japanese consulted their leading physicist about whether “the Hiroshima bomb was a genuine nuclear weapon and, if so, whether he could duplicate it within six months,” suggesting that they were not exactly preparing to surrender. 

Figure 3. In the understatement of the century, Japanese Emperor Hirohito went on radio after the second atomic bomb to proclaim that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” Ever anarchic, “Army officers broke into the palace to destroy this recording before it was broadcast, killed the head of the Imperial Guard and set fire to the homes of the Prime Minister and the chief court minister. But they failed to stop the broadcast; and immediately after it the War Minister and others committed suicide in the Palace square.”

But in the wake of WW2, let’s return to one of Johnson’s main arguments: that colonialism wasn’t so bad. Or, more specifically and obviously, that regardless of colonialism’s problems, its native successors were often quite bad. 

Start with the crown jewel of the Empire. Johnson argues that “All Gandhi’s career demonstrated was the unrepressive nature of British rule and its willingness to abdicate.” And more specifically:

“Gandhi’s eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems or aspirations. Hand-weaving made no sense in a country whose chief industry was the mass-production of textiles. His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own ashram, with his own very expensive ‘simple’ tastes and innumerable ‘secretaries’ and handmaidens, had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. As one of his circle observed: it costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty.’”

Of course Gandhi never ruled. But Nehru did, confessing that on economics “I am completely out of touch,” and launching India into socialist orbit of the Soviet Union only disrupted in 1991 with the simultaneous collapse of Moscow’s regime and the final domestic embrace of free market economics. It’s terribly ironic that Maoist China got there faster.

Meanwhile, France’s premier colony, barely even considered such, was Algeria, just across the Mediterranean pond. Johnson contextualizes:

“In the 1830s there were only 1.5 million Arabs there, and their numbers were dwindling. The Mediterranean people moved from the northern shores to the southern ones, into what appeared to be a vacuum: to them the great inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right to its shores as anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth-creation. And they did: they expanded 2,000 square miles of cultivated land in 1830 to 27,000 by 1954… But rising prosperity attracted others: Kabyles, Chaouias, Mzabite, Mauritanians, Turks and pure Arabs, from the mountains, the west, the south, the east. And French medical services virtually eliminated malaria, typhus and typhoid and effected a prodigious change in the non-European infant mortality rates. By 1906 the Muslim population had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By the mid-1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population had risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by 1950.”

In other words, Johnson argues that the French showed up to a neighboring, poor, mostly empty desert and made it so much more prosperous and healthy that the non-French came to vastly outnumber the French and then had the gall to complain about Gaul. For over a million French who lived in Algeria (and for millions more on the European continent), Algeria was no less French than Arizona is American. Colonial policy would thus so dominate French domestic policy that it inspired a coup in 1958 that brought back Charles De Gaulles - and then he himself had to fight off the prospects of coups to eventually get out of Algeria, leaving behind allies to be murdered and a new country along its own path to authoritarian socialism.

Decolonization had relatively few successes, even when it was thought to have the best chance:

“The outstanding and perhaps the most pathetic example was the Gold Coast [ruled by Britain]. In the post-1945 period it was the richest black state in Africa. It was generally regarded as the most promising. It had no race problem. It was the first to get independence. The road to freedom was a long one. It had had a legislative council since 1850, a black (nominated) member as long ago as 1888; there were six by 1916. Full elections in local government came in 1925. In 1946 the Legislative Council got an African majority. 1948: constitutional inquiry commission. 1949: African-majority committee to devise new constitution. 1951: elections under new constitution. 1952: Kwame Nkrumah Prime Minister. 1954: final ‘independence constitution’. 1956: new elections. 1957: full independence. This was the slow, sure, copy-book progress to self-rule; and Nkrumah was regarded as the model African statesman, his new country, Ghana, the prototype for African self-rule… Yet there were portents even before independence. Ghana’s drive for independence had been the work of the barrister J.B.Danquah, who had hired Nkrumah as a full-time party organizer. Nkrumah was thus from the start a professional politician, nothing else. He hijacked the party organization, turned it into a mass-movement revolving round his own personality, and persuaded the British that he was the best, or simplest, man to back in the independence stakes… Once in power, Nkrumah used British devices, such as ‘judicial enquiries’, and employed left-wing British legal and political advisers, to destroy all other centres of influence, and the constitutional restraints on his personal rule, and to drive the opposition into illegality. Having concentrated power in his party and himself, he then destroyed the rule of law.”

Johnson reports that a “‘bastardized Stalinis,’ ensued.” Despite ruling over maybe 2% of Africans, Nkrumah would soon declare “All Africans know that I represent Africa and that I speak in her name. Therefore no African can have an opinion that differs from mine.” Shockingly, some Africans disagreed, as he was ousted in a coup in 1966. Another coup followed in 1972, then another in 1979, and then another in 1981. Such is the all too common tragedy of Africa. 

Johnson condemns South Africa for its racist regime - but also laments how little condemnation the rest of the continent’s racism endured. “In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a quarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who remained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its Arabs or deprived them of equal rights. In the 1970s Asians were expelled from most states in the Horn and East-Central Africa and they were discriminated against everywhere.” And then there’s the policies against the former colonizers:

“From independence onwards, most black African states practised anti-white discrimination as a matter of government policy. In the second half of the 1970s Kenya and the Ivory Coast [right next to the Gold Coast!] were virtually the only exceptions. Houphouët-Boigny, President of the latter, drew attention to anti-white racism at the OAU, telling the other heads of state: It is true, dear colleagues, that there are 40,000 Frenchmen in my country and that this is more than there were before Independence. But in ten years I hope the position will be different. I hope that then there will be 100,000 Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us to meet again and compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend.”

Alas, after the writing of the book (and the death of Houphouët-Boigny after decades of rule), even the Ivory Coast descended into civil war. 

And I suppose I should push back against the folk observation that British colonialism worked but others did not: would you rather live in once-British Zimbabwe or once-Spanish Chile? Once-British Pakistan or once-Japanese South Korea? Once-British Yemen or once-Dutch Aruba? (Yes, yes, we’d all prefer to live in once-British Singapore or once-British America).

Regardless of whether colonialism of any variety was good or bad for the world, it is impossible to disentangle from most of the world’s history. What history more clearly shows is that capitalism protected by law and order has a far better record of producing prosperity than socialism. 

Figure 4. Click here to buy Modern Times by Paul Johnson (8/10), a British conservative’s view of the 20th century. .