Colonialism

Colonialism October 28, 2015

In a 2004 essay on global history, the late C.A. Bayly challenged the “fashionable emphasis on the wholly destructive effects of Western ‘colonialism.’ Famine, the disruption of local communities, the exacerbation of religious and racial tensions: these are all attributed to the Western impact as vigorously by contemporary cultural critics as by earlier socialist historians” (39).

Bayly does not deny that “huge areas of land were expropriated from native peoples in the nineteenth century and that populations in parts of Australasia and the Pacific were substantially reduced as a result of colonisation, the spread of disease and frontier wars” (39).

But to stress only this is imbalanced: “even at its most violent and intensive European colonialism was friable in its impact and ambivalent in its results.” Within the colonial systems there was “room for local elites and even peasants and labourers, to exploit conflicts and contradictions among their rulers.” Already by 1900, “much of Asia and north Africa had thrown up national movements. . . . Japan’s breakthrough to modernity was echoed on a small scale even in those apparently static societies, the Ottoman empire or China. India had a larger textile industry than Russia in 1914, despite its inheritance of rural poverty” (39).

Anti-colonial narratives sometimes unwittingly adopt a Euro-centric perspective, forgetting that “non-European peoples appropriated and adapted the ideological and political tool of the West” and turned them against the West. During the colonial era itself, the world exhibited a “multi-centered” pattern of political and cultural change. It is false, and even demeaning, to suggest that power was exercises only by colonial oppressors against the colonized oppressed (39).

(Bayly, “Writing World History,” History Today 54:2 [2004] 37-40.)


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