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The case for colonialism, with Bruce Gilley
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The overwhelming majority of academic articles come and go with little fanfare. There may be the odd admiring nod from a professor, or a few lively debates in university tutorial rooms. But that’s normally about it.
Unless you are Professor Bruce Gilley. In 2017, Bruce authored a watershed paper titled, ‘The Case for Colonialism.’ It sparked a global furore. Far from cowered, Bruce has just released a new book, also titled ‘The Case for Colonialism’, that doubles down on his argument: colonialism was, on balance, good for the colonised, and good for the world.
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. The overwhelming majority of academic articles come and go with little fanfare. There may be the odd admiring nod from a professor or a few lively debates in university tutorial rooms, but that's normally about it.
Controversy of 'The Case for Colonialism'
00:00:35
Speaker
Unless you are my guest today, Professor Bruce Gilly. In 2017, Bruce authored a watershed paper titled The Case for Colonialism. It sparked a global furor. The Times of London called Bruce probably the academic most likely to be no platformed in Britain. The New York Times called him one of those panicky white bros who proclaim ever more loudly that the West was and is best.
00:01:02
Speaker
Furious petitions garnered tens of thousands of signatures. One Columbia University professor said, Gilly must be ostracized, publicly shamed and humiliated, and never ever be called a colleague who should be politely invited for civilized debate. Far from coward, Bruce has just released a new book, also titled The Case for Colonialism, that dives deeper into his thesis. Bruce, welcome to Australia. Thank you. It's great to be here.
00:01:31
Speaker
It's a pleasure to have you on. It's interesting for me, reflecting on the book and also reflecting on those comments. There are two stories here,
Exploring Colonialism and Academic Freedom
00:01:39
Speaker
aren't there? There's the story around colonialism and your study of it. There's also the story about academic debate today and freedom of speech, which you're now deeply intertwined
00:01:53
Speaker
Let's set the scene. Take me back to 2017. Take me back to the response to that article and how it's impacted your life and your career since then. Yeah, it's funny, especially being on this broadcast because the first I heard of this was actually from an Australian colleague who said to me, I was actually sitting in a cafe and he sent me an email. He said, Hey, Bruce, you're lighting up my Facebook page with hate. Well done, mate.
00:02:22
Speaker
And I didn't understand what was going on and was driving home and came across a colleague and she said to me, do you know what is happening? And I said, no, tell me what's happening. She said your articles causing a complete firestorm. This was not a sympathetic colleague, by the way.
00:02:45
Speaker
so much for academic freedom. But the article was simply my attempt to summarize my thinking on the colonial question in anticipation of writing a book, essentially a biography of a British colonial official named Sir Alan Burns, which I subsequently published. And, you know, was obviously taking a view that was not the standard view in the Academy, but I found
00:03:11
Speaker
articles that academics debate. So it did catch me off guard and it caused me to briefly lose confidence in not just my argument but my right to free speech and apologize on my website.
00:03:26
Speaker
Before a couple of days later, I kind of shook out of it and said, what are you doing? This is so wrong. And I took away that apology. Unfortunately, the editorial staff of the journal in London started to get death threats. So I consented to the article being withdrawn. It was then republished elsewhere. The rest is history.
00:03:45
Speaker
Let's take a step back. What
Academic Resistance to Debate
00:03:47
Speaker
are the forces? What are the reasons for this new mindset, newish mindset in academia, which seems to be so scared of debate, so scared of controversial ideas, so scared of ideas that don't necessarily fit the mainstream academic narrative. How have we got to this point? I don't think it's that they're scared of debate. I think it's because the academy as a whole has decided
00:04:13
Speaker
that truth resides largely on the left. I think it's as simple as that. It's very little different than the totalitarian systems of any historical episode where it's decided that this ideology is great, glorious, and correct, and history has proven it, and it's not so much that the Communists
00:04:35
Speaker
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were afraid of debate with the capitalist West. They just thought the capitalist West was wrong and communism was true. And they needed to create societies based on truth, not on falsehood. And the modern academy is a lot like that. It basically has decided that non-left-wing viewpoints are essentially just false. They're not what intelligent, well-read people should think.
00:05:02
Speaker
And so why would you go on debating falsehoods? The academy needs to be a place of truth in their view. And colonialism is just one example where they had reached a point where they decided colonialism, which they didn't really understand as a world phenomena. They thought of that as just a Western phenomena. It was evil and bad and a mistake. And something that, to the extent that there was anything left to research, was just to research the variety of ways
00:05:35
Speaker
how you could overcome those legacies, what needed repentance and reparations would need it. That was the only issue to debate, just like the communists used to allow debate on whether production targets in the state factory should be higher or lower depending on input-output tables. There was debate on that. There wasn't debate on the idea of essentially planned economy.
00:05:56
Speaker
There's a difference between not choosing to engage in debate though, and the next step of actively trying to shut down opposing viewpoints. So that quote from the Columbia professor that I mentioned, that went beyond just saying, I disagree, or beyond saying, I don't value this opinion. I'm not engaging. This was, I want this person humiliated, shamed. It was quite confronting. Well, that next step.
00:06:21
Speaker
because the academy thinks of higher education and the institutions of higher education as essentially the party. So it would be one thing if I was just some blogger or journalist, and there actually had been a lot of journalists and bloggers and non-academics who had written articles called The Case for Colonialism. In fact, I've cited several of them, but they were just journalists. I mean, they were outside of the party, right? So they're not members of the party.
00:06:52
Speaker
They're probably not going to get a hearing. What made them apoplectic was I was a member of the party and a member of the party dissenting from the party line was unacceptable because again, they had started to think of Academy as essentially a place where a unified totalitarian ideology on most major social controversies had been settled and the unity of the party and its ability to transform society in its image depends critically on maintaining
00:07:22
Speaker
that unified thinking in the party. It's deviations inside the party that are the threat, hence apoplectic outburst, such as the one you quoted. There's a parallel here with how
00:07:35
Speaker
People colonised voices, people from colonised communities who don't necessarily think that colonisation was all bad are treated as well, and you cover that in the book. We will get to that. But before we do, I think there's another nice little line in the book around the broader discourse, which I wanted to call out, and that was, the soft weapon of shame is an underappreciated part of the armoury of the assault on freedom and truth. What do you mean by that?
00:08:03
Speaker
So people tend to think of assaults on freedom in terms of physical or active measures that prevent people from speaking or being heard. So my article gets
00:08:18
Speaker
canceled or I get filtered on Twitter or acts as sensitive content because there's an algorithm banning me or my university refuses to give me a room to rent, to host a speaker who's dissenting from orthodoxies. We think of censorship as operating in that way, right? This would be
00:08:42
Speaker
And actually, you know, the ways human societies work is we actually work through expectations of what our fellow humans will do and we act preemptively. We act in anticipation of what others will do. And one of the most powerful ways that you can get people to operate according to your wishes is to raise the specter of some form of social ostracization or shaming.
00:09:07
Speaker
And since most people don't like to be socially ostracized and they don't like to feel ashamed, if you can build up an expectation that saying certain things will be shameful, might lead them to be ostracized, might lead
00:09:26
Speaker
departmental colleagues to convene secret meetings to suggest ways to silence you as mine did might lead the university president to say well we'd like to fire this person but unfortunately he has tenure as mine did right if you can raise that kind of specter in addition to 16,000 people signing petitions Columbia University professors suggesting the person needs to be ostracized if that is all in the background in advance then the person will never
00:09:55
Speaker
even write the shameful article or say the shameful thing in the first place. So it's a very effective way. And then the academy says, well, what do you mean a free speech problem? Nobody's been no platforms. Nothing's happened because everyone is smart enough to continue to pair the party line. So this is what I would call a kind of, we call this virtual causation in the social sciences. You can cause something to happen
00:10:19
Speaker
Virtually without actually lifting a finger just through these expectations of social behavior the really tragic thing is that virtual causation isn't just occurring in academia it's occurring in the arts occurring in the corporate world occurring in media across all different institutions and spheres it's really really concerning but it's,
00:10:41
Speaker
It's also really important why moral and intellectual courage to speak on issues like this is so needed. I'm conscious that we can fall into the trap of speaking about the storm surrounding your thoughts and the book, as opposed to the actual ideas themselves. So let's drill down into those. Let me quote what I thought was a nice framing paragraph on European colonialism, which is where we'll start.
00:11:07
Speaker
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.
Reframing European Colonialism
00:11:28
Speaker
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 until 1945, it wasn't. Talk me through how anti-colonialism evolved after 1945.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's important to put ourselves back in a time when colonialism, Western colonialism was seen as the most natural thing in the world because it was the most natural thing in the world. It didn't require great plans. There weren't any great plans. The idea that famous quotation about the United Kingdom having developed an empire in a fit of absence of mind is perfectly true because Western
00:12:30
Speaker
liberal, more accountable, more developed, more technologically advanced, more human rights abiding, and more culturally sensitive than any civilization in the world has ever seen. And the colonized knew that, which is why it was so easy for European countries to establish colonies. And the only real debates were not so much colonialism per se, but the how and the what and the where and the wherefore and the when, i.e. the details rather than the fact.
00:13:01
Speaker
And there was lots of room for debate on the details. Of course, any large-scale human system is going to have lots of failures. There's going to be lots of corrupt people.
00:13:16
Speaker
And if you can't put up with that, then you shouldn't put up with human society. That's why I say it's the case for humanity itself. So yes, the debate on colonialism was not so much should we have a government. It's what sort of government should we have. How much should it tax? What should it do with its resources? Where should its remit end and where should it begin? I mean, just the normal debates on any governing system were what were called the debates on colonialism.
00:13:46
Speaker
here, or that somehow the governing system that existed prior to the colonial encounter was some Valhalla of peace and community barbecues. Nobody said that. It's only after World War II, and this is largely, I think, because the European powers are exhausted by a Second World War.
00:14:05
Speaker
willingness of European publics to provide public goods to alien peoples is at a low point. The Soviet Union has emerged from World War II really not as an ally of the West or as a force for global peace, but as a force for global disorder and is styling itself a liberator of colonized peoples, even as it colonizes the Baltics and Eastern Europe and continues to hold on to its colonial possessions from Czar's times in Central Asia.
00:14:36
Speaker
And so suddenly the possibility arises that one could be anti-colonial, not in the first sense of critical of the colonial government in place and wishing for better colonial governments, but anti-colonial in the sense of wishing to be free of colonialism altogether.
00:14:53
Speaker
Of course, several countries had become independent during World War II. The French had made their mandates in the Middle East independent. And India, of course, had long been on a trajectory for independence, which came in 47. So there's suddenly this idea that takes place that, well, if India can be independent and if Lebanon can be independent, we can all be independent. So all of the empiricism of when and how should a country be made independent gets thrown by the wayside.
00:15:23
Speaker
And in order to do that, you have to stand up an argument that says colonialism itself is a blight on humanity, right? And this is where this idea begins, is it's a rhetorical strategy that's needed in order to say, well, it's not so much a, it's a question of how and when it's a question of never. And thus anti-colonialism in the second sense is born.
00:15:47
Speaker
And is that why it's so rare to see a pros and cons or cost benefit view of colonialism today? Because in order to justify that position, you almost by definition can't look at the benefits of colonialism. It has to be a one-sided point of view.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Because a cost-benefit analysis could end up suggesting colonialism was beneficial. It could also end up showing colonialism was not beneficial. I myself have not come across a single case where I would say there is a cost-benefit analysis which suggests that the colonial encounter with the place was a net negative. But it's true. Once you're talking about that sort of framework, you have to talk about
00:16:32
Speaker
The possibility of it being a net positive and this idea then arises that well. You know there's certain sorts of violations of human norms that are so great that no amount of benefits can. Overcome them can compensate for them and so what is the what is the grave human rights violation that colonialism is well it's.
00:16:52
Speaker
supposedly, to have robbed people of self-government. Of course, the presumption here is there's anything like self-government prior to the colonial encounter, or anything like self-government was likely to have evolved absent the colonial encounter, and that anything that came after colonialism had any slight vestige of self-government, which in most of the countries in West Africa it didn't. But you have to kind of turn a blind eye to that and say, well, the cost
00:17:23
Speaker
But it's actually a bizarre claim, if you think about it, that was used to justify the argument that we can't have a debate on colonialism. But the irony, and this is something I struggle to get my head around, is in order to have that belief that there could be self-government before colonial powers entered a particular area.
00:17:43
Speaker
it relies you to think from a Western lens of how they organize themselves in that time. It is, in some respects, a colonial way of thinking.
00:17:53
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. The whole idea of self-government, the whole idea of land rights, the whole idea of cultural integrity, the whole idea of a fair economic system, these are all colonial ideas. So if you really want to decolonize, then get rid of the idea of self-government because self-government somehow refers to a demos governing itself through some method, but there's no
00:18:21
Speaker
And there's certainly not a recognition that the demos has any right for any control over the political system, and it didn't. So that's Western property rights. Forget that. Not just property rights of neighboring tribes, but the property rights of those within the group itself didn't exist.
00:18:41
Speaker
So if you're going to decolonize, you're talking about a great leap backwards into Stone Age civilization in many cases. And hence we get this idea that decolonization would lead to some authentic form of self-government that would
00:19:04
Speaker
not be Western itself. And then this is where you get this cookie 50s and 60s and 70s era in the third world that is still, to my mind, underappreciated in its bizarre nature. Not just the death and the famine and the tyranny, but the cookie ideologies that were invented throughout the third world to try and suggest that this was some authentic form of self
00:19:31
Speaker
Tanzania and Sukarno's nationalist, Islamist, communist ideology in Indonesia. And you can go on and on. And this ended up being truly a form of denial of self-government compared to what had come before. I think that that goes to one of the three common critiques or anti-colonial critiques that you put forward in the book. And that is around legitimacy and that colonial powers are illegitimate. The other two are
00:20:01
Speaker
colonialism was harmful and that it offends modern sensibilities. Let's knock those out one by one. What do you say to the historian who focuses on the evils and harms of colonialism?
Critique of Historical Narratives
00:20:14
Speaker
I say that they are focusing on the evils and arms of colonialism exactly as your question states it. So if I want to go and engage in a deliberate search for bad stuff that happened under colonialism and I want to measure that bad stuff in a simply absolute way, something
00:20:37
Speaker
of any country, any episode of how terrible it is. I remember when I was actually working on legitimacy in my doctoral days and
00:20:46
Speaker
And I ended up measuring legitimacy. And I came up with, not surprisingly, that Scandinavian countries have the highest level of legitimacy. And Denmark was, of course, at top. We have this phrase we called getting to Denmark. Everyone tries to look like Denmark. And I said to myself, you know, I bet if I go and look at the debate inside the Danish political science community, they'll all talk about how illegitimate their country is. And sure enough,
00:21:12
Speaker
When I went into the Danish political science ledger, all the academics were talking about legitimacy crisis in Denmark. So yes, historians who I think long ago gave up any pretense of being scientific in what they do and really just began to think of themselves as literary scholars with kind of competing panache with which they could deliver verdicts on the evils of the past and in particular, the colonial past.
00:21:36
Speaker
Just like truffle pigs running around looking for anything that's bad in the colonial past, it's by definition not scientific, it's by definition not representative of the entirety. And in particular because they never construct counterfactuals, which has got to be the most important thing to do as a historian. So this happened in history.
00:21:55
Speaker
what would have happened absent that is the critical question all the time. And historians never ask that counterfactual question. They just assume that if, you know, one of the examples I give is when the Germans were trying out solutions to sleeping sickness, which was ravaging East Africa and West Africa in the early 1900s. And sleeping sickness hasn't had a mortality rate of about 80 to 90%. So if you got sleeping sickness, it was a death sentence.
00:22:22
Speaker
The Germans and the French began testing some prophylactic medicines that eased the symptoms and at least extended the life. Now those prophylactic approaches had very dire side effects, one of which was turning about one in five people blind.
00:22:38
Speaker
The other was probably another two-fifths of the people died of the side effects, so about a 60% fail rate. But again, compared to what? Compared to a 90% death rate for those who had sleeping sickness. So sign me up for the prophylactic. Do you think historians who study this prophylactic intervention talk about that? No, they don't. It's just an evil colonial medical endeavor just showing how spiteful the evil colonialists were of black lives and
00:23:08
Speaker
medical experimentation on black bodies and yada yada yada, right? It's just unscientific. I think is that the two things I would say is, first of all, it's unscientific. The other thing is stupid. It's intellectually shallow. It suggests that the modern academy is not just totalitarian and illiberal. It's actually full of kind of stupid people. And that's, I think for an intellectual, that's almost the most annoying part of it. I can deal with
00:23:34
Speaker
people who are incorrect and unscientific, but none of us likes to suffer fools, and the academy is full of them.
00:23:41
Speaker
The absence of the counterfactual was a feature of the recent voice referendum in Australia, which you may have heard of. We had a failed constitutional referendum for an indigenous voice to parliament. Colonialism loomed large over the conversation, and there was a general consensus on the yes side of the campaign that the British Empire was evil. The obvious counterfactual in that situation is
00:24:07
Speaker
With the British Empire, Captain Cook never showed up. If Arthur Phillip never showed up in the 1700s, what's the alternative? Australia is going to be discovered at some point, and the other European empires of that time probably don't look as good as the British Empire in comparison. And even if you want to imagine a world in which no one ever turns up to Australia, the counterfactual there is life expectancies and living standards are undoubtedly lower than
00:24:34
Speaker
the outcome with a British colonial power. It's a very important point.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, exactly. Imagine the European powers had said, we're going to declare Australia to be a kind of a natural protected zone, a kind of Galapagos Islands of the South Pacific. And nobody can go there except with a special permit. And we'll run it out of Singapore or something. And we're going to observe, we're all going to dress up as, you know, kangaroos and observe the locals, but not interfere, kind of like Star Trek, you know, observe, don't interfere. Now,
00:25:12
Speaker
Western diseases are going to come. The other Asian countries probably are not going to abide by this. What are you left with? I mean, it's an interesting question. One easy way is to just look at the independent countries of the South Pacific and maybe take away the aid they get and the systems that they inherited to some extent from German
00:25:39
Speaker
of the Australian aborigine absent the British colonial encounter. So look at the life expectancy, look at the income per capita, look at the access to health, look at the access to accountability in the legal system and ask whether you think that they're better off.
00:25:54
Speaker
Why is, and this is particularly prevalent on the left in academia, and I think now on the left more generally, this romanticized notion of pre-colonial cultural tribes, like the Australian indigenous population, where it is romanticized in a very particular way, what gets to the essence of why that feeling is there?
00:26:17
Speaker
Well, it's funny because the romanticization is largely funded and institutionalized by white people. That's the funny thing. You know, absent white funding and white support, none of this aborigine fetish or what we call Indian fetish would exist, right? Because the aborigines wouldn't probably devote the resources that it gets towards that. The more important thing is we actually do have reasonable amount of archaeological, anthropological documentation of pre-European
00:26:49
Speaker
You know, the archaeological record speaks. There's early explorers, diaries, right? We actually have a pretty complete picture of these societies, and we know that they were not nice. They were the sort of societies that one would want to escape from if one could, which is why
00:27:06
Speaker
the natives so often moved closer to any colonialist who set up a shop or a trading port. You would see the natives immediately start migrating closer to the more intensely colonized area. Why? Because they had food, they had guns, they had medicine, they take the German, the way
00:27:31
Speaker
cluster around it. Those are basically all the cities of Tanzania now. Why? Because the natives migrated to be closer to the Europeans. So we know that this pre-European contact life was not attractive, not just objectively from the record, but subjectively because the pre-European contact natives did everything they could to escape from it the moment there was an alternative in the form of a port, a trading station, a coaling station, whatever it was that
00:28:03
Speaker
Again, that kind of scientific understanding of the past became an obstacle to anti-colonial ideology and the party. The party, meaning mainly white academics and white intellectuals on the left. And so one of the moves you've seen recently is this idea that, well, the understanding of the past needs to be coming only from
00:28:27
Speaker
the knowledge keepers and the oral traditions of modern aborigine or native american or indigenous society right so all this old white man bullshit of the past with your books and scientific studies that's all no longer acceptable why of course because we need to make sure that this notion of the romanticized path
00:28:51
Speaker
to empower these native knowledge keepers and oral traditions who are not allowed of course to disclose the sources of their information because that's again part of their non-disclosure agreement with their ancestors that then allows the romanticization to carry on as part of the bigger political project. That's looking back. I want to look forward. We recently spoke with Nigel Bigger, your esteemed colleague. I noted he was the first name that you mentioned in your list of thanks in the book.
00:29:22
Speaker
From what I can see of his work and of your work, he's with you on re-evaluating how we think of the history of colonialism. Where it would appear you go further than him is that you propose an agenda for the future that is, in some respects, colonial. Talk me through your plan to reclaim colonialism going forward.
00:29:42
Speaker
You know, I'm great friends with Nigel. I don't think we're exactly on the same page. I think he takes a more, let's say, morally complex view of colonialism than I do. Maybe that's to be expected from a moral philosopher and an ethicist and a theologian. I actually think he's too anti-colonial. And I wrote as much in my book.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yes, basically speaking, we both take a view that colonialism was largely positive and justified. I think he's more critical than it needs to be. I think largely it's a kind of British tick of trying to be reasonable. And I'm not British, so I don't try and be reasonable. I try to be correct. But in terms of the future, yeah, I do pitch the argument forward. And I think I state, first of all, that it's important to reclaim the word colonialism.
00:30:29
Speaker
Because the moment you give up on that and you allow colonialism to be used as a bad word, then every time you try and work around the world to reestablish or rebuild failed states, you're accused of colonialism. And if that's a bad word, then the argument
00:30:47
Speaker
polarizing the past in order to reevaluate or reenergize the word itself is important here, at least removing the stigma at the very least. And the second part of that is I don't think that Western countries are probably the appropriate actors in most cases in governance failure and failed states in the third world, because first of all, their publics are not interested. That's the most fundamental thing. I talked about actually in the original article about the Australian mission to the
00:31:16
Speaker
the Solomon Islands and how incredibly costly it was to Australia and how the moment the Solomon Islands started to talk about colonialism, the Australians packed their bags and went home. So I don't see an appetite in Western countries for dealing with state support unless it's a very nearby country with a direct impact on the interests of that state.
00:31:38
Speaker
So mostly what I'm talking about with reestablishing colonial type of relationships are going to be other third world countries with neighboring third world countries who need their help. I've written about Yemen and I think the Gulf States and India are both natural actors to help to rebuild Yemen. I've written about cases in Africa where
00:32:02
Speaker
Maybe a former colonial power could come back to establish a framework, but much of the work is going to need to be done by other African countries. And to some extent, you've seen that in Africa. I think the bigger issue is, what does it mean to say that a people is self-governing?
00:32:22
Speaker
By self-governance, we mean that no external actor has any share in sovereignty, then yes, you can have that form of self-governance. But that form of self-governance invariably means corruption, tyranny, and civil war. So the degree of self-government should actually be measured as the extent to which the people actually are able to access institutions of accountability and voice and participation in politics.
00:32:48
Speaker
which invariably will mean you need institutions to make voice and accountability and participation possible. And since those institutions will never arise domestically, you need some form of external intervention to create them. You know, that was the colonial project itself in a nutshell. And then do you see that as a state building exercise where when they get to the point of self-sufficiency, the colonial power in that instance does fade into the background?
00:33:15
Speaker
Well, you know, it's interesting because the places certainly within the former French empire that retained their French association, think of Martinique, which is probably the most ironic for a
00:33:32
Speaker
the overseas departments, as they call them in France, have voted to continually maintain their colonial relationship to France. Why? Because of course they would. Because it gives them French passports, it gives them French defense forces, it gives them access to French institutional stability and therefore makes them the most
00:33:51
Speaker
highest GDP per capita, highest human development index, most flourishing economies in the Caribbean, and they just need to look at their neighbors. And that's why they keep voting for continued association as part of the French Empire. You know, the people of Hong Kong would have voted for a continued British colonial rule if they'd been given a chance. We know that, that the polls are very clear on that. So that kind of
00:34:14
Speaker
relationship, if allowed to continue until the people decide it's no longer needed, would potentially be a lot longer than we realize. But the idea is that once you build a country's institutions and education and one on up to a certain point, the amount of Western or outside role will be quite small. I mean, even by the time Hong Kong was taken over by China in 1997, I mean, Britain
00:34:41
Speaker
I mean, it was always a self-financing colony. The only appointed British official was the governor by that point. The Brits and the police force were there on secondment at the request of the Hong Kong police force. So it wasn't a burden at all other than maintaining the institutional and the defense link. And that's a kind of relationship that I think could be sustainable for a long period.
00:35:05
Speaker
the meat of the book and indeed some of the more provocative moments are where you look at specific episodes of colonialism in history and you reevaluate them. Let's start with the Middle East. This is going to be a very broad question, interpret it as you will. How can what we are seeing in the Middle East today, specifically in Palestine and Israel, be understood through the lens of colonial history?
00:35:29
Speaker
Well, Israel is a settler colonial state. There's no doubt about that. So I'm not aligned with many people on the conservative side who say, oh, well, the Jews were there since the Second Temple and whatnot, which is true, but it's not relevant to modern Israel history. Modern Israel is a product of the British Empire. The British Empire took over the Ottoman areas in Palestine.
00:35:57
Speaker
That's why the mandate was put under Britain. And because of the British mandate, the possibility of creating an independent Jewish
00:36:09
Speaker
in Europe and part of the world were divided, internally daughtering, unable to agree on something. If Jews had just started going back to Palestine in the interwar period and the British had simply said, right, we're out of here, there would not be an Israel today. There would have been a second Holocaust because the Palestinian Arabs were aligned with the
00:36:32
Speaker
with the Fascists in World War II and you would have had a second Holocaust in the Middle East alongside the Holocaust taking place in Europe. So Israel owes its existence to British colonialism. So it is therefore a successor state to a British colonial mandate and it was settled by Jews who largely had never lived in the Middle East, whatever their ancestral ties, but these were not returnees. These were settlers. These were migrants.
00:36:57
Speaker
And I think Israel should accept that because that's the great thing about Israel. That's why Israel is such a successful state is because it succeeded from a British colonial possession with all the preparations for self-government that that entailed. And Palestine, the broader part of Palestine, was initially also under the British colonial mandate and the plan existed for a year.
00:37:27
Speaker
separate from the Israeli state. It could have been successful. It had every possibility to be successful. You know, the French had created Jordan and Lebanon and Syria. I mean, the model was there for an independent Palestine. And why was it not accepted? Was it because the colonialists didn't want it to be? Well, no, they were very happy to create Arab
00:37:51
Speaker
possessions. Indeed, they were the champions of Arab independence from the Ottomans. So what is it about the Palestinian areas that they failed to take up the colonial mantle, to succeed the colonial state? Well, it was Jew hatred. Nothing but that simple, raw, hate-filled Islamic Jew hatred that has destroyed Palestinian lives since the founding of modern Israel.
00:38:16
Speaker
And that is a form of anti-colonialism in the sense that, I mean, when they say they're anti-colonial, they're being honest about themselves. They are opposed to Israel, and Israel is a descendant state of the British Empire. And they're also being anti-colonial in the second sense of that they're refusing to accept
00:38:35
Speaker
their own history, which could have been a lot better if they had been less anti-colonial and more cooperative with the colonial power in creating a viable modern Palestinian state. I mean, that was there for them. That opportunity was there and they didn't take it. I mean, when they say we're anti-colonial, I say you sure are. And more is the tragedy for you. Can you see any path forward?
00:39:00
Speaker
Well, there's two separate issues. One is the issue of Islam. I don't see a path forward for Islam. I don't see that an Islamisized or theocratic state could ever live peaceably with Israel because Islam is deeply, deeply anti-Semitic. On the other hand, I do see a path forward because Arab societies are more plural than just their religion.
00:39:22
Speaker
They have, obviously, non-Islamic minorities. They have Arab identities which are separate from there.
00:39:38
Speaker
I mean, there are many Arab Islamic states that have decided to get along just fine with Israel. So, I mean, that was the Abraham Accords and going even back to Camp David. Of course, Camp David's a dirty word in the PL and the Palestinians lingo now. But, you know, Camp David was an Arab Islamic state making peace with Israel. So there is a path forward there, but it mainly involves unstooling
00:40:01
Speaker
the Islamic theocratic role in the governing system. That's a challenge that's internal to the Palestinians, but it's central to the viability of a Palestinian state. I think beyond both of our pay grades, perhaps the most provocative line in the book is the chapter title, The Good Fortune of Being Enslaved in America. What do you mean by that?
00:40:26
Speaker
So this was, in some ways, a response to the 1619 Project of the New York Times that sought to paint the United States history as nothing more but an irredeemable story of slavery and evil. And a lot of the responses to that were of the sort, well, yes, we were a slave state, but we weren't only a slave state. We also created a lot of opportunity. A lot of good things happened. Slavery was indeed a blight and a sin, but no country's perfect. And the idea that this terrible sin
00:40:57
Speaker
All futures for all black people is not historically defensible, yada, yada, yada. And you know, my question is, so what was so bad about enslaving blacks and bringing them to the United States?
00:41:13
Speaker
The most fundamental thing is to enslave someone, to press someone into service against their will is a moral wrong. I think that's right. I don't think anyone would disagree that in pure theoretical terms to force someone against their will to work for you for life and not have freedom is an evil, is a moral wrong.
00:41:33
Speaker
Correct. At the time of the enslavement of the black Africans who came to the United States, of course, it was not seen as a moron, so that's an important thing to keep in mind. Slavery was widespread.
00:41:45
Speaker
And secondly, from a consequentialist standpoint, i.e. what was the result of being enslaved, the best thing that could have happened to you in terms of your life chances, your survival chances, certainly the survival and life chances of your children was to be a black African enslaved abroad.
00:42:09
Speaker
the 1619 group was intended for, and certainly better than your life in Africa because European colonialism was still 200 years away for the most part. So I make a consequentialist argument saying that a moral evil does not need to necessarily have morally evil consequences. And I think this is indelibly true for black African descendants of slavery, is
00:42:41
Speaker
don't move back to Africa. The back to Africa movement never got any legs, even in the pre-Civil War period in the United States. Blacks preferred to be slaves in the southern United States or to be freed slaves, having been manhumed or bioevolved method, even in a deeply segregated and racist society because life was better in those societies.
00:43:04
Speaker
than anywhere they can imagine. I mean, Haiti was right off the coast. You could go participate and be a member of a free black republic in Haiti if you wanted to. Nobody went there. Even the Haitians were fleeing black freedom. So the chapter is about a consequentialist argument, and I cite several black writers who have made that argument
00:43:24
Speaker
throughout American history. It's not a new one. It's one that blacks themselves often made. I mourn for my ancestors who were dragged out of the jungle and enslaved, but I thank God that they were. Because here I stand as a free American participating in this great project called the American Dream. Freer, more prosperous, more physically strong, more mentally able than I ever would have been.
00:43:53
Speaker
And again, this is kind of an argument that was made frequently. Don't forget, the United States banned slave imports in 1807. Abolitionist movement was spreading throughout the United States, throughout the antebellum period. The United States goes to war and dies, kills and loses as many Union soldiers as there were total slaves imported in the United States in the Civil War.
00:44:19
Speaker
After the Civil War, mass migration to the United States from Africa begins, and it accelerated particularly in the 1990s. Today, of the total people who are of African ancestry who have ever entered this country, only one in eight entered as a slave.
00:44:39
Speaker
whoever came to the United States came here voluntarily. What does that tell you? It tells you that the United States is a magnet for black Africans because of its opportunity, because of its living standard, because of its flourishing black culture, all these things. And so all I do in the chapter is I point out these obvious things and
00:45:00
Speaker
Note that, and again, the counterfactual is important here. We say the act of enslaving a black on the shores of Angola as the 1619 project was a wrong, correct. And what is the counterfactual? Well, they were already being enslaved for the most part, or they already were slaves on their way to East Africa, probably, to be sold in markets to the Middle East.
00:45:21
Speaker
So the incremental evil was nil in this case. These were slaves being transferred from one master to another, right? And then secondly, what was different about the slaves that came on Spanish and the Portuguese, these were Portuguese ones, but Spanish as well, is that they were all baptized on the shores before being put on board. What on earth were they doing baptizing them?
00:45:47
Speaker
because the distinctive feature of Western civilization arising from its Christian heritage was the view that every single person had a soul in the image of God. This was the seeds of what became the great emancipatory struggle against slavery. It never arose in Africa. It never arose in the Middle East. Trust me.
00:46:08
Speaker
And so even this initial evil becomes evil only in the most abstract sense. There is no concrete historical manner in which we can say the enslavement of blacks who were brought to the United States was an act of evil in a historical sense. And that's what I say in that chapter.
00:46:27
Speaker
You're saying that evil must have some sort of, like, an understanding of a moral wrong at the time, and there wasn't an understanding that that was a moral wrong at the time. Is that what you're suggesting there? Not only there wasn't an understanding it was a moral wrong at the time, but it wasn't an incremental addition to the moral wrong they already faced.
00:46:47
Speaker
So to oversimplify dramatically, if you were a black African in the 1650s, very sadly, there were no good outcomes really for your life. And the best of all of those bad outcomes was the American slave ships. Is that, is that, that's the argument? That's correct.
00:47:07
Speaker
The final theme of the book is around the voices of the colonised. You've just mentioned a couple of them there. And I mentioned the referendum that we had in Australia earlier. One of the saddest features of the debate surrounding that referendum was how no campaigners who were of indigenous origin, Warren Mundine and Jacinda Price were too, were slurred with terms like coconut, like
00:47:34
Speaker
Uncle Tom, all these sorts of things, because they were perceived to go against their bribe. What are your reflections on how those sorts of voices are treated in academia and more widely in this debate? Yeah, so I have two chapters at the end, although I cite lots of colonized voices on the benefits of colonialism, many of which will surprise such as Patrice Lumumba, who was the first elected prime minister actually of the Congo, who
00:48:03
Speaker
became anti-colonial very, very late in his life and opportunistically because he was a product of Belgian colonialism. He was very pro-colonial. He wanted to secede the Belgian rulers as the ruler and praise Belgian colonial rule. But one chapter is on Chinua Kebbe, the African novelist, which was also one of my early writings on this topic, making me think that something has been completely obliterated from history because it turns out Chinua Kebbe was never
00:48:31
Speaker
blanket anti-colonial. He was a mixed complex thinker. He thought colonialism had good things and bad things. And when asked, do you think colonialism is evil, he would always say, no, what a stupid idea that is. I mean, I myself am a product of benefits of colonialism, my education, my opportunities. My father was a Presbyterian minister. My book would never have been published. Things fall apart would never have been published.
00:48:59
Speaker
which got the manuscript to London, yada, yada. The second one is on V.S. Naipaul, who I think is truly a totally underappreciated genius. I mean, yes, he was finally given the Nobel Prize in Literature because even the Nobel Committee, despite its wokeness, could not at some point deny that this man's staggering and great literary output did not deserve a Nobel Prize. But of course,
00:49:28
Speaker
was very clear in his pro-colonial views. And that's because Naipaul grew up in the Caribbean and never
00:49:37
Speaker
drank that mother's milk of anti-Raj rage, which dominates South Asian intellectuals. And NYPAW was also brilliant and spent a lot of time trudging through the back roads of the Third World in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s when the intellectuals defining Third World ideology were all sitting in their comfortable studies in Bristol and Chicago.
00:50:01
Speaker
writing about the evils of the white man, but Naipaul was out there in the field seeing the reality of post-colonialism and seeing what a disaster it was. And I think Naipaul ends up really being more important to my book because the scorn poured on him when he died, mainly by South Asian intellectuals.
00:50:23
Speaker
currently living in London, currently living in the United States, was immense, was worse than the scorn poured on me because they couldn't understand how an upper caste Hindu to boot, especially the upper caste Hindus are the ones who are so anti-colonial.
00:50:47
Speaker
So their upper caste rule, they couldn't understand how an upper caste Brahmin like themselves could say nice things about the British empire. And I think his voice is immensely important. Well, Bruce, I would extend on that. I think your voice is immensely important in this debate. I think it is a tragedy how conversations around colonialism can make the argument historical conversations more generally seem to be so tainted by the
00:51:13
Speaker
trends and ideologies of the moment, they seem to be incredibly scared to discuss alternative viewpoints. And it does take a great deal of moral courage and intellectual courage to say things which sometimes aren't comfortable in the way that we talk about these things. You certainly do that. I think kind of your book was fascinating to read. And I think if anyone wants a balanced view of this topic, they should go out and get it. Thank you very much for coming on, Australiano. Thank you. I enjoyed it.
00:51:43
Speaker
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