Were colonies ultimately good for the colonizer?

[Dark3lf]

The point about European colonialism is not that it was some of Nirvana, some sort of Utopia. Not every action, not every rule was in the best interests of the colonised people, but overall European Colonialism was clearly beneficial to non European peoples. Because in virtually every case the alternative was not some native democracy but another empire. Take India for example, no Britain wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better than both the local Muslim rulers and the Hindu rulers. Were the Spanish perfect? Again no but they were better rulers than the Aztecs and Incas. Did White Europeans commit atrocities against the natives of North America? Sure but they were as nothing compared to the systematic, murder, rape and torture practised by the native tribes. North America, Africa, New Guinea, had suffered thousands of years of incessant warfare before Europeans arrived and brought peace and the rule of law.

Clearly beneficial? Tell that to China, Japan, Korea and Thailand. Now compare their people fate to African, American Indian and Australian aborigine fate.

Brought peace by wiping out the older population and replace it with white colonizer, hardly desirable end result for the indigenous people.

 

[DoomBunny]

I think we won't see any agreement. "Poisoned gas" is a killing weapon in any case.

Tear gas isn't a killing weapon. He specifically refers to tear gas, and makes clear that he knows its effects.

It is like supporting someone bombing civilians if they "disperse". Man those dead people they shoulda dispersed!

Right. Except it's totally the opposite of that. Because it's non-lethal. And in fact a remarkably progressive form of crowd control for the time.

Also re-read he isn't talking about enemy combatants but "uncivilized tribes".

Who are enemy combatants. Hell, if anything the argument that the conventions of war didn't apply was fully justified. Try surrendering to a Zulu, amaNdebele, or Pathan, you get your throat cut/guts stabbed for your trouble. These were not peoples bound by the rules of war, largely because their culture had no room for such practices.

Concerning India I think we are agreement "circumstances" declined the cottage industry.

Again, cottage industry declined because cheap industrial products arrived. That's not a bad thing, that's just economic development.

The rest I'm not really mad about because I feel I pulled your card at the "power trip" stage. All I'm getting is petty "your wrong" arguments when you've read one general history on the topic. Throw me some sources rather than outlines of an arguments. Altho I understand its a forum so this isn't serious and not worth our effort to go into depth. I just get the feeling DoomBunny we could have a better conversation later when you've read up a little, because we're not giving a shit but your arguments are coming out ... well you read them.

An Englishman has no need of power trips, for he already holds a nice cup of tea.

It's perhaps best if you don't talk about "historical fact" especially not if you capitalise it since you don't seem to have a very strong grasp of it.

In the real world, Churchill lost the election after World War Two and Clement Atlee took over. Atlee was an old school socialist and had been in favour of getting rid of the Empire his whole life. Nothing to do with Roosevelt.

Churchill won the next election then died in office. Most colonies were abandoned in the sixties; by which time Churchill had been dead for twenty years. They'd probably have been given up mnuch earlier but they were hardly in a fit state to rule themselves in the forties (they weren't really in the sixties either but at least people thought they were).

Churchill died in 1965. Well after he had left office.

Um duh. But the seeds were planted before the Labour victory. Roosevelt openly stated he wanted freedom for the African colonies and this sealed the impossibility of the empire surviving in any case. Since you believe that, unlike yourself, I didn't know this beforehand try reading this.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...7997/How-victory-spelt-the-end-of-empire.html

but seriously ... are you disagreeing with the Vietnam fact? It is a fact despite what you want to call it. You can sleep on it and it will still be true. European colonial powers marketed opium to asians in order to ramp a profit. I don't care if it was right or wrong, it is just a fact. I think it is best you don't talk about history if you deny facts, that would be in the realm of holocaust denial and shit.

Marketing of product already sold globally is not the same thing as holocaust denial.

 

[RichStrat]

The great tragedy of European colonisation is that we didn't colonise sub Saharan Africa and central Asia before the Muslims. The great tragedy of the British Raj is that it wasn't bigger and never included Tibet. We could have saved it from Han Imperialism.

 

[Furion Matsuya]

The great tragedy of European colonisation is that we didn't colonise sub Saharan Africa and central Asia before the Muslims.

Umm the Imperium Romanum & Basileia Rhomaion would like to have a word with you.

 

[bz249]

The great tragedy of European colonisation is that we didn't colonise sub Saharan Africa and central Asia before the Muslims. The great tragedy of the British Raj is that it wasn't bigger and never included Tibet. We could have saved it from Han Imperialism.

Yes that Sir Younghousband guy was a totally nice fellow...BTW Tibet was about to be saved from the Russian and not Han Imperialism.

 

[keynes2.0]

Again, cottage industry declined because cheap industrial products arrived. That's not a bad thing, that's just economic development.

You are describing it like it's some sort of natural process rather then the result of a deliberate British policy to ban the spreading of industrial technology and introduce price distortions to strangle Indian industry. The logical place to make textile mills in the idealized market was India, that was where there was a large textile industry and where cotton was grown. In order to prevent that you need to ban the sale of industrial machines to the Indians and then collect your taxes in agricultural products but not manufactured ones.

And this wasn't some insignificant or short lived policy. The American revolution can be traced to the backlash against British efforts to kill early american industries in printing, iron smelting, even hats. The Opium wars aren't called the Textiles wars because the British wanted the Indians selling an agricultural product which wouldn't compete with British industry.

Brought peace by wiping out the older population and replace it with white colonizer, hardly desirable end result for the indigenous people.

The far reaching claim that the native american population declined like 99% or whatever...

By the native american population, this statistic refers to the entire western hemisphere, a population that mostly lived in places like Mexico and South America where there are large, populace empires. These empires vanished and the "native" population was replaced with the "hispanic" populations. However that process included interbreeding and assimilation! Most of the population in places like Peru and Mexico have partial ancestry of Pre-Columbian populations. This isn't true is the US but the native population in the US was far smaller and the Post-Columbian immigration was much larger.

 

[Dark3lf]

The far reaching claim that the native american population declined like 99% or whatever...

By the native american population, this statistic refers to the entire western hemisphere, a population that mostly lived in places like Mexico and South America where there are large, populace empires. These empires vanished and the "native" population was replaced with the "hispanic" populations. However that process included interbreeding and assimilation! Most of the population in places like Peru and Mexico have partial ancestry of Pre-Columbian populations. This isn't true is the US but the native population in the US was far smaller and the Post-Columbian immigration was much larger.

Never claim that they are 99%.... Yet doesn't change the fact that in the majority of the case the one who got benefit is the descendant of the white. For the native who got enslaved and their daughter raped, the fact that some of their genes are surviving as interbreeding and assimilation material is a poor consolation prize.

 

[keynes2.0]

Tet doesn't change the fact that in the majority of the case the one who got benefit is the descendant of the white.

Well now, we seem to have shifted the goalposts from native populations were "wiped out" to white people were better off then brown people.

 

[Dark3lf]

Well now, we seem to have shifted the goalposts from native populations were "wiped out" to white people were better off then brown people.

For practical purpose, they are wiped out. With majority of their people died, their nation and culture is destroyed, repopulate with mix of people. Compare that to China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, where their people still the majority and their descendant rule their country.

 

[yerm]

For practical purpose, they are wiped out. With majority of their people died, their nation and culture is destroyed, repopulate with mix of people. Compare that to China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, where their people still the majority and their descendant rule their country.

Unfair comparison. The former inhabitants of the Americas, southern Africa, and southeast Asia were already far behind your Thailand, Japan etc. examples BEFORE colonialism. These places already engaged in massive brutality and genocide of conquered peoples before Europeans showed up. With clear exceptions (eg Congo) the majority of these places had atrocious practices already in place, were devastated by plague, and/or were very sparsely inhabited in the first place.

Compare this to places like India or Egypt that were heavily conquered by first Muslim then European imperialists. What you are describing mostly does not take place (again with some few exceptions).

The pre colonial history of those places is full of ethnic displacement, sometimes akin to colonial domination and interbreeding(/rape), often far worse with wholly displaced or annihilated peoples.

Meanwhile, the European ethnicities were all made up of mixings of inhabitants with migrants or conquerors with few exceptions. Did the major population centers in America become wholly interbred with Spanish? So what? Those Spanish were intermingled with Africans and Arabs over centuries before this, by a Germanic people before that, by many peoples under Rome, which followed its colonization ny Carthiginians who were themselves mixed between North Africans and Phoenicians.

Intermingling of peoples to the point of wholly changing racial makeups was common, and NOT bad in and of itself. Places like Japan resisting it for so long were the rare exception. Usually it only happen via lack of contact. Classical Greece followed an ethnic intermixing over its ancient inhabitants, Britain was a giant amalgamation, and so was almost everything in between.

 

[yerm]

Ugh wrote a novel at a derail. So sorry.

Colonies were usually good for the colonizer in the way that roads, bridges, and tunnels are good. Or sometimes in the way that monuments, parks, and memorials are good. Often both.

The problem is trying to look at net crown revenue as a raw measurement. A colony can have huge benefits while running a loss. Does it allow the citizens themselves to profit? Does it increase the overall military strength? Does it help a nation be taken seriously on the world stage? These are benefits (besides military) are hard to buy elsewhere!

Take Belgium as an example. Leopold II didn't just get profit from the Congo, he got Belgium recognized and legitimized in European circles. For an arbitrary construct with exposed borders, political recognition was worth more than money.

 

[Henry IX]

The point about European colonialism is not that it was some of Nirvana, some sort of Utopia. Not every action, not every rule was in the best interests of the colonised people, but overall European Colonialism was clearly beneficial to non European peoples. Because in virtually every case the alternative was not some native democracy but another empire. Take India for example, no Britain wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better than both the local Muslim rulers and the Hindu rulers. Were the Spanish perfect? Again no but they were better rulers than the Aztecs and Incas. Did White Europeans commit atrocities against the natives of North America? Sure but they were as nothing compared to the systematic, murder, rape and torture practised by the native tribes. North America, Africa, New Guinea, had suffered thousands of years of incessant warfare before Europeans arrived and brought peace and the rule of law.

There is some truth here mixed in with a whole lot of... not truth. While the Aztecs were a special kind of awful but many of the other nations in pre-Hipanic America were just normal. Into these groups strode the conquistadores murdering, stealing and commiting massive genocides. If there had been goings on in Latin America on a similar scale to the Spanish invasion there would have been a great deal less native peoples than there were.

The far reaching claim that the native american population declined like 99% or whatever...

No, just 85% or so. Some particularly conservative demographers put the native population decline as low as 65%.

Just think about that number for a moment. 65%. Imagine if 2/3rds of the people you know were to die as a result of the actions a group - there is no way that can be classified as beneficial.

Of course India is a different case entirely and the British cannot be accused of causing a massive decline in the population there. Indeed, the arguments regarding the positive and negative impacts of colonisation on the Indians are far more complex, however, it does need to be noted that India was deliberately run with an economic policy designed to increase the wealth of Britain at the cost of India. Any justifications about 'civilising' or 'creating peace' need to be measured against that fact.

In the case of New Guinea one can argue that Europeans brought very significant benefits and real cost to themselves with little in the way of short term benefits and so could be marked as one of the few cases of genuinely altruistic colonisation. This is something even New Guinean nationalists agree upon - although they tend to feel that sytems of exploitation were still built in and they are still paying the price for this today.

So I guess the point is that the truth lies somewhere in between 'we brought civilisation' and 'we brought nothing but suffering' and where it sits depends very much on the individual cases as well as which criteria you think m,ost important.

 

[keynes2.0]

Just think about that number for a moment. 65%. Imagine if 2/3rds of the people you know were to die as a result of the actions a group - there is no way that can be classified as beneficial.

That would be horrible. Now tell me, did you read the paragraph I wrote?

Take Belgium as an example. Leopold II didn't just get profit from the Congo, he got Belgium recognized and legitimized in European circles. For an arbitrary construct with exposed borders, political recognition was worth more than money.

I believe that the myth that Belgium exists was already quite widespread by the 1870s.

 

[Henry IX]

That would be horrible. Now tell me, did you read the paragraph I wrote?

Sorry, forgot to point out that it was wrong. The most solid data we have comes from the tribes in the Florida area, and the of quoted 95% figure comes from those areas. The conservative 65% measurement is a population change that occured including immigration and birth.

To give a solid example in the Soconusco district the population fell from over 80000 to around 7000 in the space of 50 years. That is not the decline in native population but rather in absolute population. While this was one of the harder hit districts, and some of that population decline is likely due to refugees fleeing the murder and misstreatment of Spanish rule, it does not suggest assimilation and interbreeding. If you want to read more this article gives a good range of possible figures and uncertainties. Whatever the details suggest the overall picture in South and Central America is of long term, sustained and catastrophic declines in population. Not assimilation and interbreeding. Death on a massive, massive scale, not to matched again until the 20th century.

 

[keynes2.0]

If you want to read more this article gives a good range of possible figures and uncertainties.

All of which revolve around a population mostly consisting of natives and mixed ethnicity at the time of independence, with whites and Africans being a tiny minority.

 

[Arilou]

Again, cottage industry declined because cheap industrial products arrived. That's not a bad thing, that's just economic development.

That's likely. However, that's not looking at the entire picture. First of all, the british tariffs at an earlier stage, second, the deliberate british attempts to sabotage (via tariff policy and other ways) attempts at changing the circumstances.

Yes, it's likely indian cottage industry would have been outcompeted sooner or later, but how it actually happened was not the result of free and fair competition but one state enforcing it's will on a bunch of others via military force. The fact that one competitor would have won anyway doesen't really excuse him for breaking the leg of his competitors.

Whatever the details suggest the overall picture in South and Central America is of long term, sustained and catastrophic declines in population. Not assimilation and interbreeding. Death on a massive, massive scale, not to matched again until the 20th century.

To be fair, these aren't neccessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible to interbreed with and/or assimilate natives at the same time as there's a catastrophic population decline. (if anything from what we can tell of early spanish dealings with the aztecs post-conquest that was precisley what happened)

Intermingling of peoples to the point of wholly changing racial makeups was common

It really wasn't, if DNA studies are anything to go by.

 

[Henry IX]

All of which revolve around a population mostly consisting of natives and mixed ethnicity at the time of independence, with whites and Africans being a tiny minority.

How is thast relevent? I was talking about the decline in poulation over the first 20 years of occupation - far too early for intermarrige to have had a marked effect on the population. The article has several tables documenting the change in population shortly after the arrival of the Spanish clearly demonstrating that the overwhelming theme for the first 50 years of occupation was of massive and sustained population declines. The native population dissapearing due to the formation of a mixed population only happended after a massive decline reduced the poulation to point that ethnic assimilation was possible.

 

[keynes2.0]

I was talking about the decline in poulation over the first 20 years of occupation

Well your source provided number immediately before independence which backed up what I said. And you said I was wrong. I dont really care about some other date, I was simply defending my statement against your accusation that I was wrong.

 

[Henry IX]

You claimed that assimilation was a significant part of the demographic shift in the New World and poured scorn on the "99%" figure. I simply pointed out that the very high mortality figures are based on the initial arrival of of the Spanish and are not based on a decline into the modern day. You then claimed I did not read your argument and quoted figures that were irrelevant to the discussion on hand. The 90%+ mortality figures are explicitly linked to the first phase of Spanish conquest and are not related to the current numbers or percentages of indigeonous populations. I assumed you knew this and proceeded on that basis. If you were arguing that the current mixed heritage population of much of Hispanic America is formed by a process of assimilation then I have no argument with that proposition other than to point out that it is largely irrelevant to discussion I seem to have derailed.

Apologies if I have missunderstood or missrepresented what you have said.

 

[keynes2.0]

If you were arguing that the current mixed heritage population of much of Hispanic America is formed by a process of assimilation then I have no argument with that proposition other than to point out that it is largely irrelevant to discussion I seem to have derailed.

It's not irrelevant. It was in response to the claim that the native population was butchered and replaced. They may have been butchered but they were not replaced.