Two types of colonialism

In an offshoot of the discussion on “Saletan’s solution to racial differences in intelligence,” Karen from England said that the English of the Church of England “need to have a group of people they can look down upon, and if this group behaves in an utterly dysfunctional manner, they like them all the better.” She found examples of this behavior in the days of the British empire. Alan Levine, who is a historian, replied that this was a “very strange picture of the Victorian British. They rarely intervened in their subjects’ lives except to prohibit the most grotesque and evil customs involving loss of life…. I can’t think of a case where the British admired the most dysfunctional of their subjects.” Here Karen replies by explaining that the British had two very different and conflicting approaches to colonialism.

Karen writes:

Alan Levine has a superficial view of British imperial history. I will expand upon what I wrote yesterday.

During the time of Empire, the “British Elite” was not a unitary group with a single set of beliefs. It consisted of two distinct groups which were culturally and ideologically different and often opposed each other over policy issues leading to many clashes. There were the English/Welsh who favoured the colonial model of the Spanish/Portuguese, and the Scots who favoured and practised the colonial model of the Dutch. The Dutch model produced economic powerhouses like South Africa, Rhodesia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia; the other model produced economic basket cases like India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines and Latin America.

The late Ian Smith typifies this difference in colonial style. A man of Scots descent, he believed, as did the Dutch, that the whites were God’s chosen people to run Africa (and the colonies). He believed in racial differences and the inability of human beings to change these differences. (Only God has the ability to ameliorate these differences and he evidently does not want to). This is a style which was not shared by most English who ultimately became his main opponents.

The two models are described here:

Dutch/Scottish Model

1. The Dutch and Scots are Calvinists who believe in a Covenant religion, race and nationality. The basis of nationality is ancestry and not where one is born or lives. They also believed in a God-given mission to colonise.

2. Humans do not have the ability to transform people, make Africans or Asians into Europeans, or change racial differences. Transformation or progress must be initiated by people from within their own communities (e.g. Japanese). Hence there was no attempt by the Dutch or Scots to impose their civilisation/religion on colonised peoples.

3. Since we have no ability to improve or transform people, and since racial differences exist, the colonised people should be kept separate from the colonisers to protect the standards of the colonisers and protect the colonisers from violence/barbarity/immorality or other negative influences. It is not racism but a realistic recognition of racial differences and of our inability to change them.

4. Dutch and Scots focused on setting up strong economic/administrative systems focused upon efficiency and profit and largely excluded non-Europeans from working in these systems by means of apartheid or segregation.

5. Examples: South Africa under apartheid, Rhodesia under Smith, Hong Kong, Singapore.

English/Spanish/Portuguese Model

1. Not Covenanted people.

2. Method of colonisation haphazard.

3. Belief that all humans can be Hispanics or English and become Catholics or Anglicans. (As Jung said, primitive people should have primitive religions, and Third World peoples have corrupted Christianity horribly by adding Voodoo and other superstitions).

4. Emphasis on spread of language/culture/religion (and in the later stages, democracy) rather than effective administration and economics and the generation of profit.

5. Inclusion of colonised peoples in colonial economic and administrative systems.

6. Inordinate concern with the “civilisation” of primitive peoples and a refusal to accept obvious racial differences.

A good comparison of the two styles is South Africa/Rhodesia and Nigeria. Ian Smith and the Afrikaners did not seek to teach the blacks English or Dutch and did not seek to impose the Church of Scotland or Dutch Reformed Church on the blacks. They left the blacks to their own devices and got on with running the country efficiently, marginalising the blacks but producing a better standard and quality of life for them. Blacks in Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa had the best standard of living of all the blacks in Africa and lived in the least corrupt countries.

Nigeria: English prioritised teaching Africans English and Christianity bringing the Anglican Church to Nigeria. Poor administrative systems and economic development of the country was chaotic. Promotion of “democracy” and universal suffrage. Involved Africans in running the country. Result: the most corrupt country in Africa with one of the lowest standards of living in the world despite being a major oil producer.

If Nigeria had been run like Rhodesia or South Africa, the blacks would have been better off (except for the klepocrats in the government) and Britain might have had a stable source of high quality oil at a cheap price.

The difference between these colonial styles has led to many clashes throughout the time of Empire and even until the present day.

1. Hong Kong- before the handover to China, the English sought to grant (or impose) democracy on Chinese Hong Kong Peoples. This was opposed by the Scots who ran HK including the Governor David Wilson who believed that Chinese people do not need democracy and the colony can be run more efficiently without it. Wilson was removed and the bungling idiot Chris Patten came to impose democracy on a people who had never asked for it. Subsequently curtailed by Chinese Communists.

2. India: Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, said to Queen Victoria, “When you send me a book about civilising a savage, ma’am, I just throw it away.” English belief: sending an Asian or African to Eton and Oxford will turn him into an Englishman. This naivety has lead to them being conned many times over. Scots belief: this education will put a veneer on what remains irredeemably a Third Worlder. India was run efficiently by a few British soldiers and administrators and there was no need for a vast Civil Service.

3. Northern Ireland and Britain; The English favoured granting British citizenship to Irish immigrants who had declared a war of independence against Britain in 1916. Result: civil war in Ulster and terrorism and political subversion within the UK. Scots favoured mass deportation of all Irish immigrants with entry only for those with jobs on visas with no political rights or citizenship. These differences of beliefs lead to a 20 year fight between Scottish and English Conservatives.

Salman Rushdie was correct when he said that the English “need to have people to look down upon and so imported lots of backward people after the Empire was lost.” The English style of colonialism currently adopted by Americans does not work and creates political and economic instability. The Americans have not learnt that lesson from the fall of the British Empire, which they seem to be trying to replicate. The spread of religion, culture and democracy achieves nothing. The death of Ian Smith should be a reminder that economic and political stability can be achieved only by the repression and containment of primitive peoples and their exclusion from world power and influence.

- end of initial entry -

Dimitri K. writes:

I really don’t understand why one needs this complicated classification of colonialisms to prove that British looked down upon the governed people. Even less sense I see in the Mr. Levine’s argument: what is the connection between not interfering into subjects’ lives and not looking down on them? The former is the way of government, the second is the psychological attitude. The argument is so meaningless that it need not be confronted with some artificial classification.

My personal opinion is that lots of people feel some satisfaction from looking down on others, and that may be one of the hidden psychological reasons for liberals’ supposed “embrace of the other,” which they do only verbally but never really. It seems to me that liberals see life as some play, in which they are not participants but the audience. By their permanent criticism they try to tell the director what kind of scenario they would prefer.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2007 07:05 PM | Send