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Version 2.0 Contributions of Western Colonialism to Human Flourishing Cover
Abstract
This bibliography is intended to serve as a resource for students, scholars, and the general public interested in the contributions of Western colonialism to human flourishing. It covers most of the ways that the public good has been variously defined and selected statements for each dimension concerning colonial contributions. The intent is to bring together representative research findings concerning Western colonial contributions in order to encourage a more objective account of the subject than presently exists.
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The article presents a new research agenda which links the composition of the British colonial administrations in the mid-20th century with the economic development of former colonies. It presents the first findings taken from the biographical records of over 14,000 senior colonial officers which served in 46 colonies between 1939 and 1966. Legal transplanting, i.e. the process of copying foreign law into countries lacking them, is discussed as a common practice in international development efforts and as new approach in understanding long-term economic development. The approach puts emphasis on the senior bureaucrats who are in charge of institutional copying. Successful transplanting requires very specific training and personal experience in the receiving society. Colonial officers with such characteristics served in the British colonial administrations while decolonization provides a historic period of intensified legal and institutional transplanting.
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Institutional reforms in developing countries often involve copying institutions from developed countries. Such institutional copying is likely to fail, if formal institutions alone are copied without the informal institutions on which they rest in the originating country. This paper investigates the role of human actors in copying informal institutions. At independence, all British African colonies imported the same institution intended to safeguard the political neutrality of their civil services. While the necessary formal provisions were copied into the constitutions of all African colonies, the extent to which they were put into practice varies. The paper investigates the connection between the variation in the legal practice and the presence of British colonial officers after independence. A natural experiment around compensation payments to British officers explains the variation in the number of officers who remained in service after independence. Interviews with retired officers suggest that the extended presence of British personnel promoted the acceptance of imported British institutions among local colleagues.
This article explores an episode of post-colonial state violence in the newly independent Zimbabwe, namely state-sanctioned atrocities by the army unit known as Fifth Brigade, perpetrated against the Ndebele of Matabeleland and Midlands region. This episode of political and ethnic violence that occurred between 1983 and 1987 is referred to as both the Matabeleland Massacres and Gukurahundi. Members of the British government in Zimbabwe, which included a British Military Advisory Training Team (BMATT) on the ground, were intimately aware of the violence that resulted in the death of between 10,000 and 20,000 people. This article analyses official British and US government communications between the British High Commission, Harare, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Defence, London, as well as between the US Department of State and the US Embassy in Harare. Analysis of the documents dated between January and March 1983 sheds a critical new lens on Gukurahundi, establishing what knowledge was available to the British and US governments about the persistent and relentless atrocities taking place; the diplomatic approaches pursued by both governments in response; and their rationale for same. The hitherto unavailable material presented here was obtained by Freedom of Information requests to various British Government offices and to the US Department of State. Analysis establishes that the British High Commission, Harare, had detailed knowledge of events unfolding in Matabeleland from an early stage of Gukurahundi, yet senior members of BMATT and the British diplomatic team in Harare, in contrast to their US counterparts, were consistent in their efforts to minimise the magnitude of Fifth Brigade atrocities. That the British government chose to adopt a policy of wilful blindness towards the atrocities undoubtedly constituted naked realpolitik.
The prominence of colonization in Tocqueville's life and works has been widely noted, yet scholars disagree about its importance. The perceived tension between Tocqueville's analysis of democracy and his advocacy of colonization continues to be the subject of heated scholarly debate. Revisiting Tocqueville's analytical and practical engagement with colonization, this essay reexamines its relationship to Tocqueville's account of democracy. It argues that, while lending political support to the French empire, Tocqueville was a clairvoyant critic of colonial rule; and that his involvement with colonization could only be properly understood in light of the historical and civilizational vista that informs his oeuvre as a whole. Proposing that Tocqueville viewed European expansionism as an instrument of the global movement toward democratic equality, the essay concludes with an assessment of the significance of Tocqueville's colonial writings for his “new political science,” and their relevance today.
The late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was a key figure in the rise and persistence of anti-colonial ideology in Africa. Yet in his final work, Achebe made a clear statement about the positive legacies of colonialism, praising the British project of state formation and nation building in the lower Niger basin. A careful study of his writings and comments from 1958 until his death in 2013 shows that Achebe was never the simple anti-colonial figure that most assumed, and that his seeming reversal could be read as the culmination of a lifetime's meditation on African history and politics. Achebe's final views have significant paradigmatic implications for the knowledge relevant to national identity formation and state building in Africa today.
Most institutional economists agree that Africa's overall poor economic performance is connected with its weak institutions. Among others, institutional research has highlighted the importance of cultural norms and the colonial past. In this context, colonialism presents a "natural experiment" - a phase in which European institutions were imposed on local and predominantly informal institutions. While the persistence of informal institutions have been highlighted among others by Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, case studies investigating their influence on institutional development are rare. This article aims to contribute to filling this gap. It focuses on the institutional development of the Kanuri, a larger ethnic group in north-eastern Nigeria. It uses a theoretical framework of institutional hierarchy to examine the development of key institutions throughout the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial period of the Kanuri. The article argues that informal Kanuri institutions have prevailed throughout colonial times and still present powerful norms today. Wherever Kanuri pre-colonial institutions conflict with modern, formal institutions of the Nigerian federal state, they set adverse incentives for economic behavior. Furthermore, the article's findings shed light on the hitherto neglected role of informal institutions in the institutional development of former African colonies.
During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies held their breath, waiting to see how their fates would be decided. President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for "a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims," giving equal weight would be given to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations now paying close attention to Wilson's words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of four disparate non-Western societies--Egypt, India, China, and Korea. That spring, Wilson's words would help ignite political upheavals in all four of these countries. This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader "Wilsonian moment" that challenged the existing international order. Using primary source material from America, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements - Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others - were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time. The importance of the Paris Peace Conference and Wilson's influence on international affairs far from the battlefields of Europe cannot be underestimated. Now, for the first time, we can clearly see just how the events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonating globally today.
This article examines and historicizes the relationship between ceremonial stone landscape (CSL) activism and professional archaeology in New England from a perspective grounded in critical race theory. Using documentary sources, CSL activism's rise is traced from the articulation of its theory by avocational stone structure researchers in 1989 to its current stature as a cause endorsed by federally recognized tribes. Engaging professional archaeology as statecraft, CSL activism pragmatically censures and recontextualizes information to support its identity politics. Ultimately, CSL activism compels White citizenry, stigmatized by their association with settler colonialism and racism, to choose between reclaiming their moral authority, by signaling support, or renewing their moral bankruptcy in a narrative about Native American cultural survival. Against this backdrop, professional archaeology's legitimacy stands contested from within and without.
NORTHEAST ANTHROPOLOGY 85/86: 47-72.
Did British colonial rule promote post-independence democracy? We provide evidence that the relationship follows a strong temporal pattern. Former British colonies were considerably more democratic than other countries immediately following independence, but subsequent democratic convergence has largely eliminated these differences in the post-Cold War period. Existing theories expounding superior British culture or alternative colonial institutions cannot account for divergent inheritances and diminishing legacies. To explain the time-varying pattern, we analyze European powers’ varying policy approaches to decolonization as well as changes in the international system. Britain more consistently treated competitive democratic elections as a prerequisite for gaining independence, leading to higher initial democracy levels. However, nascent democracies that lacked deep-rooted societal transformation faced challenges to democratic consolidation because of Cold War superpower competition. Later shifts in the international system toward promoting democracy further contributed to convergence by destabilizing colonially rooted dictatorships.
Health outcomes in India vary substantially across regions. Motivated by mounting evidence of the historical persistence of institutions and behavior, this paper studies the historical origins of this health variation. We examine the long-term consequences of the Protestant medical missionary enterprise that spread throughout India in the nineteenth century. Protestant mission medicine sought to place itself within non-European social and institutional milieus, contributing to the diffusion of Western medicine among the local population. We construct a novel fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on missionary activities. We document a robust positive association between proximity to a Protestant medical mission and current individuals' health outcomes. Our analysis indicates that this long-run link is not driven by religious conversion or persistence of infrastructure, but possibly by improvements in individuals' health potential and changes in hygiene and health habits.
Democracy doesn't build nations, but already-built nations democratise more easily.
What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue “Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies” surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism’s long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis.
This introductory chapter by Robert Burroughs outlines the dimensions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, and of British naval efforts against it. It then briefly reviews previous book-length studies of the naval suppression campaign, while explaining the present volume’s main aims: to come to a more nuanced understanding of the motivations behind Britain’s anti-slave-trade policies and actions; to highlight the impact of anti-slave-trade measures upon enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans, and the lack of attention to African perspectives in earlier writings about the subject; and to identify how understandings of the work of the anti-slave-trade squadron were developed through complex dialogues between and among its metropolitan architects and critics, and those who experienced it at the coal-face, as the idea of anti-slavery floated between ship and shore.
The Congo Free State was under the personal rule of King Leopold II of the Belgians from 1885 to 1908. The accolades that attended its founding were soon contested by accusations of brutality, oppression, and murderous misrule, but the controversy, by itself, proved insufficient to prompt changes. Starting in 1896, concerned men and women used public opinion to influence government policy in Britain and the United States to create space for reforming forces in Belgium itself to pry the Congo from Leopold’s grasp and implement reforms. Examining key factors in the successes and failures of a pivotal movement that aided the colonized people of the Congo and broadened the idea of human rights, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement provides a valuable update to scholarship on the history of humanitarianism in Africa. The Congo Reform movement built on the institutional experience of overseas humanitarianism, the energy of evangelical political involvement, and innovations in racial, imperial, and nationalist discourse to create political energy. Often portrayed as the efforts of a few key people, especially E.D. Morel, this book demonstrates that the movement increasingly manifested itself as an institutionalized and transnational campaign with support from key government officials that ultimately made a material difference to the lives of the people of the Congo.
In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in what is known as the Women's War. This book brings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and examines its various actions within a single, gendered analytical frame. © Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent 2012. All rights reserved.
Decolonization has brought political independence to half the Caribbean states in the last half of the 20th century, while the other states remain affiliated. Previous studies suggested a beneficial impact of affiliated status on population health, which may be mediated by more favorable economic development. We assessed how disparities in life expectancy between currently sovereign and affiliated states developed over time, whether decolonization coincided with changes in life expectancy, and whether decolonization coincided with similar changes in GDP per capita.
Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP’s key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. For NAACP’s leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a ‘third way’ to democracy for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.
In this important new study, Charles Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. By demonstrating how French colonial rule allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures, Keith discovers the ways race defined ecclesiastical and cultural prestige and control of resources and institutional authority. This, along with colonial rule itself, created a culture of religious life in which relationships between Vietnamese Catholics and European missionaries were less equal and more fractious than ever before. However, the colonial era also brought unprecedented ties between Vietnam and the transnational institutions and culture of global Catholicism, as Vatican reforms to create an independent national Church helped Vietnamese Catholics to reimagine and redefine their relationships to both missionary Catholicism and to colonial rule itself. Much like the myriad revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, this revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life was ultimately ambiguous, even contradictory: it established the foundations for an independent national Church, but it also polarized the place of the new Church in post-colonial Vietnamese politics and society and produced deep divisions between Vietnamese Catholics themselves.
This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese, and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as migration, race, and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.
From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region's experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam's millenarian imperial tradition. The author explores the history of Islam's imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam's war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.
Why did colonial subjects mobilize for national independence from the French empire? This question has rarely been posed because the answer appears obvious: in the modern era, nationalism was bound to confront colonialism. This book argues against taking nationalist mobilization for granted. Contrary to conventional accounts, it shows that nationalism was not the only or even the primary form of anti-colonialism. Drawing on archival sources, comparative historical analysis, and case studies, Lawrence examines the movements for political equality that emerged in the French empire during the first half of the twentieth century. Within twenty years, they had been replaced by movements for national independence in the majority of French colonies, protectorates, and mandates. Lawrence shows that elites in the colonies shifted from demands for egalitarian reforms to calls for independent statehood only where the French refused to grant political rights to colonial subjects. Where rights were granted, colonial subjects opted for further integration and reform. Nationalist discourses became dominant as a consequence of the failure to reform. Mass protests then erupted in full force when French rule was disrupted by war or decolonization.
Despite the billions of dollars devoted to aboriginal causes, Native people in Canada continue to suffer all the symptoms of a marginalized existence - high rates of substance abuse, violence, poverty. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry argues that the policies proposed to address these problems - land claims and self government - are in fact contributing to their entrenchment. By examining the root causes of aboriginal problems, Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard expose the industry that has grown up around land claim settlements, showing that aboriginal policy development over the past thirty years has been manipulated by non-aboriginal lawyers and consultants. They analyse all the major aboriginal policies, examine issues that have received little critical attention - child care, health care, education, traditional knowledge - and propose the comprehensive government provision of health, education, and housing rather than deficient delivery through Native self-government. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry presents a convincing argument that the "Aboriginal Industry" has failed to address the fundamental economic and cultural basis of native problems, leading instead to policies that offer a financial benefit to the leadership while entrenching the misery of most aboriginal people.
In 1960, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker embarked on a campaign to see the United Nations (UN) recognise and censure Soviet colonialism. This effort is often cited as an example of Diefenbaker's populism and his pandering to ethnic voters. But to the prime minister, it was unconscionable that, with Eastern Europe under Moscow's thumb, the UN should direct its opprobrium entirely towards Britain, France, and other colonial powers then in a process of imperial devolution. Ultimately more than a mere quixotic reflection of populist pandering, Diefenbaker's campaign to secure a UN condemnation of the Soviet Union was a nascent but imperfect effort to inject the promotion of human rights into Canada's foreign policy at a point where self-determination was a significant area of international contestation. This initiative raised valid questions about the commitment of anti-colonial powers to universal self-determination thereby showcasing the ambiguities extant in the effort by the anti-colonial movement as it employed human rights.
The missionary upsurge of the mid-nineteenth century resulted in the establishment of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria (PCN) in 1846. The mission was undertaken through the sponsorship of the United Secession Church and later the United Presbyterian Church (UPC), which subsequently became part of the United Free Church of Scotland. In 1876, the 'white African mother' and 'Queen' of Calabar, Mary Slessor, arrived in Calabar as a missionary of the UPC. She served for thirty-nine years, died and was buried in Calabar. This paper presents a contextual background for understanding the missionary work of Miss Slessor. It critically surveys some of her legacies within Nigeria, and demonstrates how contemporary PCN and Nigerians are appropriating them. The paper further analyses the state of contemporary Nigerian-Scottish partnership and argues for new patterns of relationship between Nigeria and Scotland which draw on the model of Miss Slessor.
The period between the two world wars was formative for the emergence of anti-colonialism on a conceptual and organizational level. This article takes a closer look at the role Berlin played in that process during the First World War and the Weimar era. During that time emigres from different parts of Africa and Asia found a temporary home and political space in the German capital to promote their demands for national self-determination. Contrary to most studies on metropolitan anti-colonialism focusing on a particular national group this article uses the presence of a multitude of migrants from different imperial contexts to emphasize the coherence of anti-colonialism as a political field shaped by transnational and transimperial links. By asking what kind of interactions Berlin made possible or required of these migrant activists the article aims to contribute to the history of early anti-colonialism and, at the same time, add a transnational perspective to the established assessments of German society and politics between 1914 and 1933.
The centenary celebration for Scottish missionary, Mary Slessor, took place on February 14, 2015 in Melle, Belgium. Slessor saved many newborn twins and their mothers from death and disownment by members of their community, including their families, who believed twins harbored evil spirits. The events of this unusual and significant gathering are described. Next, twin research and reports concerning Kleinfelter's disease, atopic diseases, autism and psychotherapy are presented. General interest subjects include identical female twin pole-vaulters, the longest twin birth interval, Franco-Cuban twin vocalists, and Croatian twin models.
Much has been written about the Brookes of Sarawak, rather less about the Anglican Mission. Very little has appeared about the interaction between the two. This painstaking and well-researched study, based on a wide variety of primary sources, especially hitherto unpublished letters, helps to fill many of the existing gaps and is an admirable addition to scholarly knowledge of Sarawak under the White Rajahs and British missionary activity there.