The Case For Colonialism

 From the National Association of Scholars, The Case for Colonialism.

Editor’s Note (Updated June 6, 2021): 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. 

I dunno, it looks pretty reasonable and objective to me.

Noting some of these complexities, Abernethy summarizes the objective cost/benefit question as follows: “In times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-government, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally indefensible.”

It is a result of knee-jerk thinking, responding automatically to a word like colonialism, with no further thought required.  Let me correct that: no further objective thought required.   A great deal of mental energy goes into making the rationalisation sound nice.