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Is it fair to say that * the colonization was a huge net negative and violation of the population at the time * the colonization arguably could be a net posit

Is it fair to say that * the colonization was a huge net negative and violation of the population at the time * the colonization arguably could be a net positive for current and future generations * the latter does not justify the former ?

Latty 6y ago
> the colonization arguably could be a net positive for current and future generations I think this is a misleading statement anyway, because it requires a comparison point. If it was to "no interaction at all with the colonial powers", then maybe? If it was to "free trade with the colonial powers", almost certainly not. Even in the first case I say maybe, because who knows what their society would have looked like. It may have advanced more slowly, but maybe that would have left them with more natural resources, more culture in tact, different advancements that benefited them in different ways. The trade-off there is very unclear and just saying it would be a "net positive" is a massive leap to me.
Emma_Goldman 6y ago
Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars, and that the first world war produced the Bolshevik Revolution, making the Cold War possible. There are a lot of counter-factuals involved in claims like this. Another problem is that settler colonialism exterminated the populations of the Americas and Australasia. The inter-generational comparison in those cases is primarily between two separate populations: the genocide of natives against the wealth of the ancestors of settlers.
- tgflynn 6y ago
  > Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars I'm not an historian but my impression is that WWI was primarily the result of intra-European conflicts between the great powers with any colonial issues being little more than a sideshow. WWII in Europe then seems to have been a nearly inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from the prior war. The only aspect of the two wars that does look a great deal like a war between competing colonial empires was the Pacific Theater of the Second World War.
  - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    The period from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to the First World War was the high watermark of European imperialism. British and French imperial holdings in Africa tripled, and Germany went from a handful of colonial holdings, to owning 10% of the landmass of Africa. By 1913 the European powers had colonised 96% of Africa. The dwindling of territories led to extreme competition among the colonial powers. Flash points in Fashoda (1898) and Morocco (1905 and 1911) nearly tipped over into war. Arguably, the underlying cause was the fact that gross inequality in the European powers created domestic imbalances in which capital outstripped purchasing power, forcing it to seek new investments abroad. One might draw a crude analogy between the way in which the Cold War was externalised to the global South, and the way that European tensions after 1884 played out in Africa. As for the Second World War, I would say two things. First, that Nazi ideology was, in many ways, a product of European imperialism: its ideal of a Pan-Germanic state in Central Europe, its virulently racist and extermanist designs, and even its use of concentration camps. Second, one of the main grievances of Germany was that it was stripped of its colonial territories at Versailles, and that its territories were transformed into mandates run by the League of Nations according to principles of free trade, at the same time that France and Britain continued to run their own colonies as protectionist blocs. It was British sympathy for this colonial imbalance that, in part, stood behind the policy of appeasement. As for Japan, it was a classically imperialist power, reacting to the expansion of the US across the Pacific.
    - tgflynn 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure that Alsace-Lorraine was far more prominent in the consciousness of most French (certainly) and German (probably) citizens in 1914 than were any extra-European colonies. As for the Nazis, their primary target was European Jews who had been living in Europe for millenia as well as other European peoples they viewed as inferior to the Germans, such as the Slavic peoples.
      - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
        Perhaps, but the long-term axis of geopolitical competition and spiralling armament was imperial. If you accept Hobson's thesis that imperialism was a way of off-loading the surplus capital consequent from European inequality, not only was imperialism the axis of competition, but the competition was necessarily imperial in nature. There is no possible narrative explanation of the war that does not centre on the scramble for Africa. Would there have been a great power war between Germany and the status quo powers at some point absent the scramble for Africa? It is very difficult to say. Had it occurred, it would have been radically different in shape. This goes back to my initial point about the uncertainty factored into any big counter-factual like this. As for the Nazis, my point was that the very ideology of racism was a direct product of European imperialism. That it was primarily directed at Jews and Slavs is besides the point. Hannah Arendt - one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century - famously made the case that the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of European imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It's worth pointing out that the one of the main rationales of Nazi imperialism was to create a living space in Europe in which to off-load Germany's surplus population. This had long been one of the main justifications for European colonialism, and the expropriation of Germany's colonies at Versailles made it look to Europe again to solve the problem. What are arguably the first two (imperial!) campaigns of the Second World War - Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - were both justified as means of creating outlets for their soaring surplus populations. Both of them faced profoundly racist immigration restrictions in the main destinations of migration, namely the United States and Australia.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  In many places in the US, colonist showed up to areas that had been densely peopled a hundred years before, but were then nearly empty from disease. It wasn't settlers, but contact that did most of the killing.
filleduchaos 6y ago
Like with many things, it's a mixed bag. It's easy to say "well, the damage is done and all we can do now is take what we've got and look to the future", but if you look closer you can see that the damage is still ongoing and the need for decolonisation is still high. Take architecture, for example. Traditionally pretty much every ethnic group I know of built with mud brick and thatch. During the colonial era - and afterwards, till today really - such building techniques were derided as backwards savagery. Of course the European way of using concrete was "better" and "modern", even though it's a terrible building material for a hot, humid climate. A mud house can keep quite cool in 35°C plus weather with just vents. A concrete house on the other hand traps so much heat at even lower temperatures that we end up needing fans and air conditioners to be comfortable indoors, which of course drives up individuals' carbon footprints and electricity bills. The ghost of colonialism still lingers decades later in a whole lot of little things like that. So yes, we may be headed towards a net positive future but in my opinion the way to get there requires even further divesting from the colonial era and its ways of thinking (re: the architecture example, there are new schools of builders who explicitly aim to incorporate precolonial building wisdom in their work).
- WalterBright 6y ago
  You've piqued my curiosity. Technically, why does a mud house keep the interior cooler? Is it the material, or the design?
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Mud is porous (as long as you don't glaze it) and it has a pretty good R value. So it's the material more than the design, though anything approximating a sphere will do better than something with straight walls due to the maximum enclosed space within the minimum size skin. That also helps when you want to heat it. (Least heat transfer area to the outside.)
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Why would being porous help, unless the mud is damp and there's some evaporative cooling going on? I know in the American southwest adobe construction is popular, but that's about sheer thermal mass moderating the effects of the heat. Small windows also help.

Latty 6y ago

> the colonization arguably could be a net positive for current and future generations I think this is a misleading statement anyway, because it requires a comparison point. If it was to "no interaction at all with the colonial powers", then maybe? If it was to "free trade with the colonial powers", almost certainly not. Even in the first case I say maybe, because who knows what their society would have looked like. It may have advanced more slowly, but maybe that would have left them with more natural resources, more culture in tact, different advancements that benefited them in different ways. The trade-off there is very unclear and just saying it would be a "net positive" is a massive leap to me.

Emma_Goldman 6y ago

Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars, and that the first world war produced the Bolshevik Revolution, making the Cold War possible. There are a lot of counter-factuals involved in claims like this. Another problem is that settler colonialism exterminated the populations of the Americas and Australasia. The inter-generational comparison in those cases is primarily between two separate populations: the genocide of natives against the wealth of the ancestors of settlers.

tgflynn 6y ago
> Keep in mind that inter-imperial conflict arguably led to two world wars I'm not an historian but my impression is that WWI was primarily the result of intra-European conflicts between the great powers with any colonial issues being little more than a sideshow. WWII in Europe then seems to have been a nearly inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from the prior war. The only aspect of the two wars that does look a great deal like a war between competing colonial empires was the Pacific Theater of the Second World War.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  The period from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to the First World War was the high watermark of European imperialism. British and French imperial holdings in Africa tripled, and Germany went from a handful of colonial holdings, to owning 10% of the landmass of Africa. By 1913 the European powers had colonised 96% of Africa. The dwindling of territories led to extreme competition among the colonial powers. Flash points in Fashoda (1898) and Morocco (1905 and 1911) nearly tipped over into war. Arguably, the underlying cause was the fact that gross inequality in the European powers created domestic imbalances in which capital outstripped purchasing power, forcing it to seek new investments abroad. One might draw a crude analogy between the way in which the Cold War was externalised to the global South, and the way that European tensions after 1884 played out in Africa. As for the Second World War, I would say two things. First, that Nazi ideology was, in many ways, a product of European imperialism: its ideal of a Pan-Germanic state in Central Europe, its virulently racist and extermanist designs, and even its use of concentration camps. Second, one of the main grievances of Germany was that it was stripped of its colonial territories at Versailles, and that its territories were transformed into mandates run by the League of Nations according to principles of free trade, at the same time that France and Britain continued to run their own colonies as protectionist blocs. It was British sympathy for this colonial imbalance that, in part, stood behind the policy of appeasement. As for Japan, it was a classically imperialist power, reacting to the expansion of the US across the Pacific.
  - tgflynn 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure that Alsace-Lorraine was far more prominent in the consciousness of most French (certainly) and German (probably) citizens in 1914 than were any extra-European colonies. As for the Nazis, their primary target was European Jews who had been living in Europe for millenia as well as other European peoples they viewed as inferior to the Germans, such as the Slavic peoples.
    - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
      Perhaps, but the long-term axis of geopolitical competition and spiralling armament was imperial. If you accept Hobson's thesis that imperialism was a way of off-loading the surplus capital consequent from European inequality, not only was imperialism the axis of competition, but the competition was necessarily imperial in nature. There is no possible narrative explanation of the war that does not centre on the scramble for Africa. Would there have been a great power war between Germany and the status quo powers at some point absent the scramble for Africa? It is very difficult to say. Had it occurred, it would have been radically different in shape. This goes back to my initial point about the uncertainty factored into any big counter-factual like this. As for the Nazis, my point was that the very ideology of racism was a direct product of European imperialism. That it was primarily directed at Jews and Slavs is besides the point. Hannah Arendt - one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century - famously made the case that the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of European imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It's worth pointing out that the one of the main rationales of Nazi imperialism was to create a living space in Europe in which to off-load Germany's surplus population. This had long been one of the main justifications for European colonialism, and the expropriation of Germany's colonies at Versailles made it look to Europe again to solve the problem. What are arguably the first two (imperial!) campaigns of the Second World War - Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - were both justified as means of creating outlets for their soaring surplus populations. Both of them faced profoundly racist immigration restrictions in the main destinations of migration, namely the United States and Australia.
merpnderp 6y ago
In many places in the US, colonist showed up to areas that had been densely peopled a hundred years before, but were then nearly empty from disease. It wasn't settlers, but contact that did most of the killing.

filleduchaos 6y ago

Like with many things, it's a mixed bag. It's easy to say "well, the damage is done and all we can do now is take what we've got and look to the future", but if you look closer you can see that the damage is still ongoing and the need for decolonisation is still high. Take architecture, for example. Traditionally pretty much every ethnic group I know of built with mud brick and thatch. During the colonial era - and afterwards, till today really - such building techniques were derided as backwards savagery. Of course the European way of using concrete was "better" and "modern", even though it's a terrible building material for a hot, humid climate. A mud house can keep quite cool in 35°C plus weather with just vents. A concrete house on the other hand traps so much heat at even lower temperatures that we end up needing fans and air conditioners to be comfortable indoors, which of course drives up individuals' carbon footprints and electricity bills. The ghost of colonialism still lingers decades later in a whole lot of little things like that. So yes, we may be headed towards a net positive future but in my opinion the way to get there requires even further divesting from the colonial era and its ways of thinking (re: the architecture example, there are new schools of builders who explicitly aim to incorporate precolonial building wisdom in their work).

WalterBright 6y ago
You've piqued my curiosity. Technically, why does a mud house keep the interior cooler? Is it the material, or the design?
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Mud is porous (as long as you don't glaze it) and it has a pretty good R value. So it's the material more than the design, though anything approximating a sphere will do better than something with straight walls due to the maximum enclosed space within the minimum size skin. That also helps when you want to heat it. (Least heat transfer area to the outside.)
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Why would being porous help, unless the mud is damp and there's some evaporative cooling going on? I know in the American southwest adobe construction is popular, but that's about sheer thermal mass moderating the effects of the heat. Small windows also help.