The Case for Colonialism
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Publisher Description
"For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name." So began Professor Bruce Gilley's watershed academic article "The Case for Colonialism" of 2017. The article sparked a global furor. Critics and defenders of Gilley's argument battled it out in the court of public opinion. The Times of London described Gilley as "probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain." The New York Times called him one of the "panicky white bros" who "proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best" and are "busy recyclers of Western supremacism." In this book, Gilley responds to the critics and elaborates on the case for colonialism. The critics have no evidence for their claims, he asserts. The case for colonialism is robust no matter which colonizer or colonized area one examines. Patient, empirical, humorous, and not a little exasperated by anti-colonial ideologues, Gilley here sets a challenge for the next generation of scholars of colonialism. "It is time to make the case for colonialism again," he writes.
Customer Reviews
Empire strikes back
The author is Canadian–American political scientist, economist, and academic, who attracted international acclaim, as well as also a firestorm of hate, in response to an article The Case for Colonialism published, after peer review, in the left leaning journal journal ‘Third World Quarterly’ in 2017. Fifteen members of the journal's board resigned as a result. The NY Times called Gilley a “busy recycler of Western supremacism” among other things, while the Times of London labelled him the academic “most likely to be no-platformed in Britain.” Fearful of losing his job at Portland State University, despite being a tenured professor, he withdrew his article, only to re-publish it the following year in the journal of the ‘ National Association of Scholars’.
Prof Gilley reiterates and expands his case here. While not denying that bad things happened in territories under European colonial control, he uses the economic principle of opportunity cost to argue that no matter which colony you examine, the locals were better off under their imperial rulers than they would have been if left to their own devices. (And in most cases worse off after colonial rule ended.) He supports his argument with a considerable amount of historical research, some of his own but more by others, and asserts that his critics do not, or are unable to, provide similar evidence in support of their positions. I am not qualified to judge the truth, or otherwise, of this claim, other than to say that Prof Gilley is also guilty of selective citation. He refers several times to the positive things Nigerian writer and independence campaigner Chinua Achebe had to say near the end of his life about colonialism at a time his country was suffering under a corrupt and rapacious post-colonial government, but neglects to mention, except in passing, the younger Achebe’s contemporaneous observations about colonial government.
My major criticism of this book is the repetition. It read like a series of essays or lecture notes bundled together, rather than a cohesive whole. While Gilley makes sound arguments, I think British theologian and ethicist Nigel Biggar expressed them better in ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’, published six months before this book.