Dang, I got the wrong image. These guys actually rebelled against the Colonizers.
In 2017, Political Science Professor Bruce Gilley published this essay. The Left tried to destroy his life and career. Here is the story from the National Association of Scholars, the prominent academic society of intellectually honest scholars across America who do God’s Work in trying to save Western Civilization.
NAS member Bruce Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” went through double-blind peer review and was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. It provoked enormous controversy and generated two separate petitions signed by thousands of academics demanding that it be retracted, that TWQ apologize, and that the editor or editors responsible for its publication be dismissed. Fifteen members of the journal’s thirty-four-member editorial board also resigned in protest. Publisher Taylor and Francis issued a detailed explanation of the peer review process that the article had undergone, countering accusations of “poorly executed pseudo-‘scholarship,’” in the words of one of the petitions. But serious threats of violence against the editor led the journal to withdraw the article, both in print and online. Gilley was also personally and professionally attacked and received death threats. On the good side, many rallied to his defense, including Noam Chomsky, and many supported the general argument of the article. We publish it below in its entirety, conformed to U.S. English and our style.
The Case for Colonialism
There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. The “good governance” agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, should be replaced with the “colonial governance” agenda. A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about “shared sovereignty” or “neo-trusteeship,” such actions should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.
“A second way is to recolonize some regions.” Good God, it is a miracle the childless cat lady professoriate didn’t organize a lynching for Bruce Gilley.
Yet anti-colonial critics simply assert that colonialism was, in Hopkins’s words, “a foreign imposition lacking popular legitimacy.”18 Until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes—all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facieevidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives. The “preservers,” “facilitators,” and “collaborators” of colonialism, as Abernethy shows, far outnumbered the “resisters,” at least until very late: “Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.”19 In Borneo, the Sultan of Brunei installed an English traveler James Brooke, as the rajah of his chaotic province of Sarawak in 1841. Order and prosperity expanded to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established in 1888, the Sultan preferred to leave it under Brooke family control until 1946.20
The few, the brave idea men who preserve the best ideas of mankind…
Reclaiming this colonial trajectory abandoned at independence is key to the colonial governance agenda. No less an anti-colonial “hero” than Chinua Achebe ended his days with a memoir that explicitly affirmed the positive contributions of colonialism to governance in his native Nigeria: “It is important to face the fact that British colonies were, more or less, expertly run,” he wrote.45 What was important about Achebe’s “articulation of the unsayable,” as Msiska called it, was his rediscovery of “the colonial national formation as a habitable community.”46 This had concrete implications for how to organize the civil service, how to manage federalism, and how to promote education. As with democratic episodes in a country’s past, colonial episodes become an attic to ransack in search of a livable past. This also underscores the importance of reinvesting in a non-biased historiography of colonialism so that the colonial periods are seen not as objects of resistance but as fruitful sources of creativity.
I know this academic historical work is out in the weeds for a lot of readers, but it is a landmark essay in the cultural wars and something to know about.
Remember this: When the British came to colonize India it was a chaotic society of more than 200 dialects and communication was a nightmare. The Brits started teaching English, not to dominate the citizens of India, but so all the peoples of the Indian continent might be able to simply talk to another. It unified and created one of the most powerful nations on earth.
Here is Professor Bruce Gilley’s response to his many critics.
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