Does Britain owe India reparations?

Does Britain owe India reparations? Yes. India's worst economic disasters have been caused by Indians who were educated at Cambridge. Only if Britain follows economic policies approved off by Nehruvians or Sen-apods, will we say that accounts have been squared. But, in that case, Britain's largest ethnic minority- Indian origin people- will head for the nearest exit. 

Two guys who know zero about India have a stupid article in Al Jazeera's ezine. One is Dylan Sullivan, a Graduate student in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

The other is Jason Hickel a Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

I have previously posted on their Junk Social Science paper. What follows is my response to their article-

Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire.

In Britain- sure. The Empire, on balance, contributed to British security and prosperity. Furthermore, there is a substantial colored population originating from ex-colonies. Indeed, the Prime Minister and some other senior Cabinet members are from places once ruled by Britain. It is advantageous to BAME British people to dwell on the positive aspects of the Raj because it increases social cohesion and helps combat racism. Our two White authors disagree. 

High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies.

It is a fact that India has retained British institutions- e.g. Elections and an independent Judiciary. Indeed, in some respects India has improved on that inheritance. Britain only got a Supreme Court recently while American democracy would greatly benefit from an independent Election Commission.  

Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.

Good for them. Black Britishers should take pride in their contribution made by their ancestors to the defense of the Commonwealth and its values.  

This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record.

A bogus historical record- sure- save in settler colonies like Australia.  

According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen,

a nutter who thinks Stalin was very good to the Russian people! 

extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century.

To be fair, Allen knows nothing about India. Still, it is a fact that the transfer of power from British officials to Indians did, quite predictably, increase poverty and- in the case of Bengal- led to two big famines under corrupt and incompetent Bengali politicians.  

Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century,

But rents and profits rose. The countervailing power of the dacoit and thug and Pindari and Nanga Sadhu decreased and this did alter the terms of trade- because that is what the Indians with power wanted.  

while famines became more frequent and more deadly.

No. They reduced in frequency and amplitude. In the famine of the 1870's India lost about half the number of people China did while the two big 1780 famines where both probably twice as lethal. By about 1903, the Brits had successfully implemented Famine Code regulations and so Famine returned to Bengal only after 1937- when all power over food was transferred to elected Bengalis. In 1974, there was another big famine under Democracy in Bangladesh. Amartya Sen responded by claiming there was no food availability deficit in 1943 or 1974!  The stupidity of Indian mathematical economists is the envy of the Robert Allens of the World.  

Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.

Why did the Indian people end up under British rule? Disraeli, addressing Parliament in 1857, acknowledged that India hadn't been conquered anymore than William of Orange could be said to have conquered England. Human tragedies in India were things Indians with money and power were entirely cool with. Indeed, two great Indian heroes- Rajaramohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore had spent their own money lobbying Westminster to end restrictions on European emigration to India. They wanted more cruel and ruthless White planters. Why? Because Whitey would protect oily little Hindu parasites like themselves from 'the turbulent pugnacity ' (in A.O Hume's phrase) of the East Bengali Muslim.  

Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India.

Not if they know anything about India. The Great War and the epidemic that followed it were bad for India but Gandhi & Co never made the thing an issue. They were upset because Brigadier Dyer forcibly enrolled the Amritsar Bar Association into the constabulary and thus forced them to deal with piled up corpses. This was 'defilement' of a casteist sort! Later, after the big cyclone in East Bengal at the end of the Sixties, Mujibur Rehman would complain that the local people refused to bury the dead. British soldiers, who had come to assist with relief operations, had to take on the job. 

What was bad about the Raj was that it created dependency and a childish culture of complaint. 'Grievance Studies' makes you stupid and leads to very very bad policy advise.  

Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s.

These figures are meaningless. Indians very well knew that official statistics were useless because their own relatives simply made them up as part of their clerical duties. One result was that India became very good at sampling and estimation.  

Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.

Only in prosperous districts where there was a good chance this would mean a bigger grant in aid. This remains true in India today. Rich districts have the worst poverty- because they have the capacity to spend the budget allocation. Also, 'everybody enjoys a good drought'.  

In a recent paper in the journal World Development, we used census data

because foreigners are stupid enough to think Indian statistics mean shit. But then so did Amartya Sen- but he is a very special fellow deserving very special education.  

to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades.

Four decades when India turned from being a collection of feudal principalities, or tax-farmed shitholes, into a modern nation state worthy of inclusion in the League of Nations.  

Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s.

That data is about as robust as a baby with dysentery.  

If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we

are being as stupid as shit. 

find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.

Why stop there? Why not find that Viceroy Sahib was sneaking into the huts of poor folk at night and draining them of their 'vital bodily fluids' through repugnant acts of fellatio and cunnilingus? Indians don't buy that foreigners stole their wealth because they know their own Princes stole anything they had. Thus we must teach them that Viceroy was raping their ancestors with his mouth. This is why population growth was so slow under the Raj. At Independence, India's population was 348 million. Thanks to Rajendra Prasad's refusal to suck off Ind's teeming masses, our numbers have increased by over a billion. Sadly, the Satanic regime of Narendra Modi is planning to suck every one of us off so as to please Wall Street. This is the reason we must all join Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo- aur hamara jizz chodo- Yatra.  

Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate.

You must factor in all the jizz stolen by greedy Viceroys. Many a poor Indian had heart attack and died when he suddenly woke up and realized that Viceroy Curzon was sucking him off.  

Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels.

The living standards of White ICS officers had declined greatly- that's true enough. But Indian Princes and compradors had never had it so good. On the other hand, some hardworking Parsi carpenters and Marwari or Chettiar traders had become very rich through thrift and enterprise. That's why there was money available for the Nationalist movement.  

Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.'

They were often better for reasons of climate and resource endowment. But if your Princes are- as Gandhi said- robbers and rapists incapable of presenting a united front to foreign invaders then you suffer a 'resource curse' as more and more ruthless 'Stationary Bandits' establish themselves on your territory. There is little point fighting for a Prince whose main recreation is looting his subjects and raping their women.  

We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.

Furthermore India, being much bigger than England, would have had a much bigger Empire- right? I mean if you assume India was the same as England in 1600, then it must have made tremendous strides in technology and the naval and military sciences.  

While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism.

Sadly, this also means that Nehru presided over 200 million deaths during his 17 years in power.  

This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history.

There was no 'policy-induced' mortality. There was no policy and there was death as there always had been. Then there was a policy which succeeded because State capacity had increased. Sadly, elected Governments in Bengal were responsible for two big famines in 1943 and 1974. But corruption and incompetence don't represent a policy.  

It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.

Unless you use a similar methodology to estimate their excess mortality. The fact is Stalin and Mao had 'policy-induced' famines which killed millions. The Brits, in their own economic self-interest, went the other way- if they had administrative capacity. 

How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life?

In the same way that it caused the theft of trillions of metric tons of jizz from poor Indian people who were quietly sleeping in their huts while the Viceroy sucked them off.  

There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector.

No. They encouraged it. They were happy buying handloom cloth and even warships from India. But the country fell behind technologically. Still, the greatest harm was done after Independence when India decided not to go for export-led 'wage-good' based growth.  

Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world,

It was ranked higher in 1947 than in 1987.  

exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete.

Because English weavers had to pay for heating. Also, they objected to going blind for very little money. Indian weaving collapsed because weavers would rather cut off their thumbs than be kept to a horrible trade.  

This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.

Things certainly began to change for the better for Hindu compradors as well as those Muslim magnates who backed the rising power. 

According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs,

i.e. gave the Indian customer cheaper, better quality, cloth! Similarly, evil Neo-Liberals have practically eliminated the British Wine industry by allowing the virtually tariff free importation of Wines from sunny Australia.  

allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.

This is nonsense. Anyway, Indians are very good at smuggling- though the need to do so only arose after Independence. On the other hand, it is true that Viceroy Sahib sucked off each and every Indian cock.  

This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country.

A good thing surely? Industrialization is CAPITALISM. Capitalism is EVIL.  

As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.”

i.e. Indian farmers get paid more money while the industrialist has to find some other way of extracting 'surplus value'. Why are these two cretins pretending Mercantilism is compatible with woke ideology?  

English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.

Which raises the question, why did Indians not chuck out the Brits? There were very few of them and they came from a place which was very far away.  

To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population

less than they had been previously taxed- that's the reason they were tolerated.  

and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free.

This is the Utsa Patnaik thesis. Using a similar methodology, I can prove that my Bank has robbed me of millions of pounds. This is because I have been paying my salary into my Bank Account for four decades. True I buy stuff with my debit card but that doesn't mean the Bank has any right to take money out of my account to pay for that stuff. 

One could say that Britain forcibly exported public goods- Defense, Law and Order etc- to India and used the revenue from these 'invisible exports' to buy goods and services. However, the 'consumer surplus' from those public goods was still much greater than the trade deficit. That's why there was a Pax Brittanica. Sadly, this meant minorities thrived which is so not what God wants to happen. That was the 'Satanic' aspect of British rule.  

These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state

Nope. Britain was very lightly taxed. The State was kept dependent on Parliament which alone could raise revenue. Otherwise, England would have ended up like Spain or Portugal.  

and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.

So, the profit from trade was used to finance industrial development. How very wicked! 

This system drained India of goods worth trillions of dollars in today’s money.

But it kept the country safe from the Pindari and Thuggee and possible invaders more rapacious than the Brits.  

The British were merciless in imposing the drain, forcing India to export food even when drought or floods threatened local food security.

i.e. farmers were allowed to sell their produce rather than have it confiscated by the State. How very wicked! 

I may say that Rishi Sunak is just as merciless because he forcing my neighbor to go to work in a Merchant Bank even when my food security is imperiled. Sunak should show compassion and pass a law requiring that pretty young lady to first come and cook me breakfast and do the washing up before going off to her fancy-shmancy job. 

Historians have established that tens of millions of Indians died of starvation during several considerable policy-induced famines in the late 19th century, as their resources were syphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies.

But, as Amartya Sen has proved, no famine arises from food availability deficit! The plain fact is that Indian agricultural productivity was very low for reasons A.O Hume explained in 1879. But Britain didn't have the coercive power to change this because the Raj was wholly reliant on the 'loyalist' class of Princes and Zamindars. That's one reason Hume and Wedderburn &c set up the INC. But Gandhi & Nehru were even less bothered by agricultural issues. They were only happy when money was syphoned off to pay for crack-pot schemes.  

Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences of their policies

They were aware that if their policies weren't beneficial to the loyalist Indian class, then they would have nothing to administer. They would be slaughtered in their beds. That's also why even the Reds in India gave up on their dream of fucking over the peasantry by collectivizing land.  

. They watched as millions starved and yet they did not change course.

They instituted an effective Famine Code by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. No doubt, there were sound fiscal reasons for this. Famines cause a rise in real wages and a fall in rents and thus Land Revenue. 

They continued to knowingly deprive people of resources necessary for survival.

In the same way that Amartya Sen accused Manmohan Singh of doing. According to Sen, his old pal was very evil. He wanted to turn India into an 'economic super-power' by using starving, sickly, Indian people. This was very wrong. How can you expect a man to be productive until he has spent a decade being treated in Harley street and another decade being educated at Cambridge? 

The extraordinary mortality crisis of the late Victorian period was no accident. The historian Mike Davis argues that Britain’s imperial policies “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”

Imaginary bombs- sure. Why does Mike Davis not mention the confiscation of billions of tons of jizz personally carried out by Viceroy Sahib? Is it because he is afraid of appearing homophobic?  

Our research finds that Britain’s exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period.

If anyone will pay us to do some more research we will find that the true figure was 100 trillion.  

This is a straightforward case for reparations, with strong precedent in international law. Following World War II, Germany

Herr Hitler made some marvellous contributions to International Law.  

signed reparations agreements to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and more recently agreed to pay reparations to Namibia for colonial crimes perpetrated there in the early 1900s. In the wake of apartheid, South Africa paid reparations to people who had been terrorised by the white-minority government.

Black politicians paid some Black voters. But they didn't enrich themselves. Perish the thought!

History cannot be changed, and the crimes of the British empire cannot be erased.

especially if we just keep inventing new ones 

But reparations can help address the legacy of deprivation and inequity that colonialism produced. It is a critical step towards justice and healing.

My ancestors may have thrived under Colonialism- or, at least, they may have been enabled to practice their own religion- but I am owed reparations because Viceroy Sahib was incessantly inflicting fellatio and cunnilingus upon them. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.  

Bruce Gilley's Canadian cabin fever of Racism

Bruce Gilley- in a fatuous attempt to rehabilitate himself in an academia which never fucking accepted him in the first place- writes

King Leopold’s private fiefdom in the Congo was precisely the counterfactual to colonial rule and the best argument for colonialism.

How did Leo gain this fiefdom? Did he conquer it with his strong right arm? No. This 'Free State' was given to him by Congress of Berlin. Why? Leo was Queen Victoria's cousin. It was better that Leo get the Congo than France & Britain quarrel over it. The Queen's Advocate General- Sir Travers Twiss, who, like Leo, was generous to whores- provided the legal argument that a private association could form a colony which in turn could acquire sovereignty. This seems reasonable. India is what it is because of the East India Company- though, Muslim or Buddhist majority areas have gone their own way. Indonesia is what it is because of some Dutch Company. Zimbabwe is what it is because of Rhodes. One can multiply such instances. The fact is a Commercial venture is likely to carve up markets along their 'natural'- i.e. proto-national- joints. 

The plain fact is, Congo was a de facto and de jure colony which, technically, was only linked to Belgium, which financed the venture, through a 'personal union' with regards to Leo the whoremonger. But only technically.  Once the thing turned to shit- but coz it was 'too big to fail'- Belgium had to step up to the plate and take responsibility, otherwise the governance model of the Brits and French in that region would have been undermined. Why? The Slave Trade was what had always supplied the 'sinews of war' such that Independence- or at least State Formation, if not Muslim domination- could be maintained. Belgium had to lift up its skirts and wade into that sewer to keep darkest Africa safe for its two more powerful neighbors. This is not to say that non-Muslim Africans didn't traffic in slaves. It was just that they tended to turn Muslim in order to thrive by it. The paradox here is that in Islam- as in the Rome of the Caesars- enslavement was often the first step to not just enfranchisement but supreme power. By itself, the condition of being a slave denoted no soteriological or biological inferiority. Indeed, the reverse could be presumed for 'Black Gold'- i.e. Sub Saharan African slaves who were very costly when compared to 'Black Crows' from India who were a drug on the market in Abbasid Baghdad. 

His inability to control his native rubber agents who continued their pre-colonial business of slave-trading and coercive rubber harvesting showed the problems that would arise if European freelancers allied with native warlords and slave-traders to establish regimes with no outside scrutiny. The idea that there was some feasible good governance model available to this region from indigenous sources is preposterous.

There was a 'good governance model' based on backing Black Monarchs- i.e. supplying them with guns and 'invisible' service exports so as to secure  even better non-coercive gains from trade. It wasn't feasible coz, back then, Whitey was all like Niggers got huge dongs and will definitely bugger our brains out and make us swallow gallons of jizz. The Italians- who don't seem to get Racism at all- liked  Ethiopians very much. Their upper Aristocracy loved Haille Sellaise- whose charisma had made him a global celebrity in 1924. The Brits actually returned the Imperial Crown they had stolen to this photogenic young Prince who would become the Messiah of a religious sect whose Music- Reggae- conquered the London of my teenage years. 

I must tell you that even if some Sub-Saharan African origin men have enormous dicks, they genuinely don't want to shove them up your poop hole. These are just people who get married and delight in their kids moral and educational progress. It is quite true that Black Africans are distinguishable from Black South Indians. This does mean there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' which can become the basis of price, wage or service provision discrimination by a monopolist or monopsonist such that scale and scope economies aren't lost. But the thing is fucking sub-optimal mate. We are all better off, if a Sovereign is similar to the people over whom she has sovereignty. Why? Because a 'bourgeois strategy' is available to the Sovereign such that concurrency deadlock or livelock or McKelvey chaos is avoided. That's actual  Biology, mate. Not shit about how darkies are dim and have big dicks and are bound to bugger your brains out. That's also actual, genuine, Law & Econ type, folk theorem based, mechanism design. 

Gilley doesn't get any of this. Still, the guy was born Canadian- i.e. a loyal subject of Queenji, Gor' Bless 'Er. Canada is considered the 'elder sister' (in Tamil, 'Akka') of the Commonwealth. For a low IQ, utterly worthless, Tambram, first generation British citizen, like myself, Gilley is, at least potentially (he may now hold an Amrikan passport) one of the good guys. His 'oikeiosis' with respect to a 'Commonwealth' identity is something he shares with Shahid Qadir- who wanted to publish his defence of colonialism for the same reason he definitely WOULD have published one by a Hindu like me (if I weren't as stupid as shit and had credentials of some sort).  The fact is, all us guys get along well enough. Why pretend otherwise for the sake of virtue signaling or Socioproctology (defined as pointing at, but not further interfering with, academic and other such assholes) or engaging with BLM or LBM or whatever?

The Batambatamba Afro-Arab slave traders of the area?

No. Their customers who should have had the power of mechanism design such that outcomes were improved by this heteroclite class- whose collective name is similar to an onomatopoeic word used by some Indian tribals for fat non-tribal traders whose buttocks and thighs make a squishy sound just as 'batambatmba' means 'heavy tread'. But this true of any type of Governance. Compliance costs have to be imposed on market makers in a manner which is less and less 'coercive' and more and more 'normative'. But we are simply speaking of the burgeoning of Civil Society as grounding Civilization. 

This happened for White peeps in Canada & Oregon or whatever. It didn't happen for most Black peeps. It's not that 'Colonialism' is necessarily bad, but Racism is. The trouble is, we don't need historians to tell us this. We can see this for ourselves. Kids want to play with other kids- not get buggered by Priests or bored to death by pedagogues like me- and Color and Gender and Sexuality and 'posh Accents' and shite are ir-fucking-relevant. We want kids to trust us and talk to us and let us participate in their expanding epistemic universes of peer-related oikeiosis. Of course, it doesn't matter very much- at least in my case- if this does not happen coz I iz as stupid as shit. But Gilley and Shahid Qadir and so on ought not to waste time fighting amongst themselves while their kids and grandkids have 'depassed' their collective or artificially simulated identitarian traumas.

The African warlord Msiri whose compound decorated with human remains was the inspiration, along with a similar compound of the king of Benin, for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (transposed onto a white trader to elicit the predictable outrage from white readers)?

Gilley doesn't get that Msiri wasn't fucking over peeps coz they dun be bleck and had big dicks which posed a clear and present danger to tender white assholes. He was doing 'State formation'. Backing him for economic reasons, and then helping him to do productivity enhancing 'Civil Society' mechanism design- would have been better than backing Leo who didn't know shit about Africa and who squandered his ill gotten gelt on some whore or the other. 

I have the greatest respect for the House of Saud- for the simple reason that many Indians have worked hard and done well in their realm. They are 100 per cent loyal- more particularly if Hindu. One could easily distort the historical record to depict Ibn Saud as a Msiri. But, who in their right mind, would do anything so mischievous? 

Let me be very clear. Even before Mahatma Gandhi set foot on African soil, Hindu India knew that the Religion and Ethics and Philosophy of all Sub-Saharan people was based on the highest type of 'Ubuntu' or 'Oikeioisis' or 'Vasudhaiva kutumbakam'- i.e. widening circles of kinship type reciprocity encompassing the entire globe. 

We know Leo was worse than Msiri. A properly backed Msiri may have yielded a much better economic and moral equilibrium. The trouble was, Msiri was too fucking bleck and probably had one of those enormous dongs Sir Richard Burton kept measuring so assiduously that it was the American Stanley, not Livingston or Burton, who made a profit on one of the dirtiest transactions in history.

Gilley is probably a much nicer guy than me. But he has fucked up here. Why? It's a Canadian thing. Those good people have to put their foot in their mouth and then chew through it to recover from the 'cabin fever' associated with being bright but not Canadian level nice and hence being part of a Commonwealth in a but solipsistic manner. 

Gilley was a journalist- a good one, so I have heard. He must know that Msiri was killed so crazy, sadistic, uneconomic, shite could go down. Why write worthless nonsense which anyone with access to Wikipedia or the ability to post a Quora or Stock Exchange question can quickly see is a HATEFUL RACIST lie? 

Msiri's skin and physiognomy looked more like mine than it did Gilley. Is that going to be the basis of the 'uncorrelated asymmetry' foundational to his argument? Does he not get that young Canadians think some dark skinned peeps be cool but some white peeps be shite? 

The feared Arab slavers Tippo Tip or al-Zubayr?

 I went to school for 4 years in Kenya. Then, at the LSE, I met descendants of all concerned. I know the complex, ideographic, truth. Gilley is advertising his ignorance. Why? Is it some sort of Jordan Peterson type shtick? Or is it just Canadian-too-Canadian cabin fever resulting in outre solipsistic behavior? 

Belgian colonization of the Congo in 1908 put an end to “independence” for the Congo and thank goodness for that. In making this small mistake, my critics open us to the wider world of their misunderstanding of colonial history

There is no misunderstanding. Congo is rich in resources. We should have backed their equivalents of Ibn Saud so Nation States were properly carved up according to geo-ethnic 'joints' . Instead we got stuck with stupid Belgians who were dragged into this coz they had invested their savings in a scheme of a whoremonger King.  

Gilley writes ignorant shite about a period and a part of the world about which he has no emic knowledge. Nor do I. But I played with kids that did. Later we all could meet up through the magic of Social Media. None had studied Gilley level stupid shite though some of us were educators. Why? Our countries were poor. We had to study useful stuff or do business of some sort. But, after the abject failure of Idi Amin's, essentially economic, policy of expelling the smaller schlong type of bleck, us guys reknit our sense of an anti Racist oikumene.  Gilley could have been part of it. He chose to go in the other direction. Sad. 

Bruce Gilley and the case for his colon.

The Third World Quarterly has withdrawn Bruce Gilley's article 'The case for Colonialism' on the basis of  'credible threats' of 'personal violence'.

Was the article any good in the first place? Let us see- (my comments are in  bold)

For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. Nonsense! A little less than a hundred years ago, the British and the French and the Belgians were given League of Nations' Mandates- later the U.N would do the same thing- over territory controlled by defeated powers. Clearly, at the time, Western Colonialism was considered a good thing, not a bad thing at all. It is true that Colonialism wasn't a particularly paying proposition and ceased to be militarily & financial viable by the late Forties or Fifties. However, Colonialism didn't really have a bad name at all. India's annexation of Portuguese Goa was vigorously protested. Niradh Chaudhri was acclaimed by the Brits as a master of English prose because he said that Bengalis were a pile of shite and needed proper Aryans to rule over them. He hoped the Americans would step up to the plate. 

Later, V.S Naipaul got a Nobel for harping on the same theme. However, once Americans discovered that 'Nation building' was tough- which is why the Army refused to do it- and an excuse for colossal corruption- they too recoiled from it. Colonialism has a bad name today because the thing can't be done profitably & without a lot of body bags. Similarly, Professors of Political Science have a bad name today because everybody can see that the sort of shithead that would take the job under current conditions must be stupider and more ignorant than anyone able to work Google Assistant on her smartphone.

 It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Why? What's changed? 

Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. So what? The thing was supposed to make a profit or contribute positively to one's defence capacity. In order for that to be possible, obviously, it either had to wipe out or marginalise indigenous people or else it had to 'objectively benefit' them in some way and thus gain some sliver of 'subjective legitimacy'. Otherwise it wouldn't have existed. There would have been no 'Western Colonialism' just a war zone where Westerners kept wasting money and getting killed. 

The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Nonsense! Countries stable enough to maintain administrative continuity did better than countries too unstable to maintain any sort of continuity.  Why? Was it because of stuff to do with 'embracing' or 'smooching' or anything of that sort? Nope. What mattered was if effective Governance was achieved on an incentive compatible basis. Inheritance had nothing to do with it.

Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. This is sheer stupidity. Subject people are incapable of harming themselves no matter what ideology they espouse because, by definition, they have no power. That's what makes them a subject people.  Perhaps what this idiot Professor means is 'newly liberated people suffered because they did not understand that Colonial institutions were useful and thus they destroyed those institutions because they were motivated by a mischievous anti-colonial ideology.' However, this view is foolish. Why? Because 'newly liberated people' cared about bread and butter issues- not about ideology. Their leaders cared about increasing their own power and revenue. They may have pretended to care about ideology but it was all just pretence. Why? Because ideology is shite. Only very very stupid and ignorant people- the sort who might become Associate Professors of Poli Sci at Portland State Uni- think 'ideology' aint a joke word used only by gobshites and blemmya whose heads are lodged securely up their rectums.  

Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch. If a State is weak and fragile it can't enforce its authority even within its own borders. Thus it can't do any of these things Gilley suggests. Myanmar has a pretty impressive army. Yet, it struggles to 'recolonise some areas'. Aung San Suu Kyi would last for about 5 minutes if she tried to 'reclaim colonial modes of governance'- like putting the Army Chief on trial for genocide.  Even if she granted the Americans a naval base in Rakhine, she would still have to flee. China may be able to operate a naval base there, but it would have to turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing. No Western nation is going to set up a 'new Western Colony' in some 'weak and fragile state'. It wouldn't be profitable for one thing. It also probably wouldn't be legal because of things like the Alien Torts Act.

Gilley thinks Colonialism ended because of 'anti Colonialism' rather than because it was no longer viable.
 I suppose, in the case of Singapore and Cyprus and Aden, there is some truth to this. After all the Royal Navy might have wanted to retain these strategic colonies and the Americans could have supplied the cash to make it feasible. Sadly, anti-colonial demagogues; like Lee Kwan Yew, and that 'Castro of the Mediterranean', Archbishop Makarios; put paid to this dream. True, Britain retains its base in Cyprus- but only because the US insists they stay. The Greek Cypriots know that the Americans will recognise the Turkish breakaway Republic if they make trouble.

 governments and peoples in developing countries (need) to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts – as successful countries like Singapore, Belize and Botswana did

Gilley thinks Singapore replicates as far as possible 'the colonial governance' of its past. He must be mad. It is run on very different principles. That's why Mrs. Thatcher wanted to make Britain more like Singapore rather than the other way round. Unfortunately, she was too stupid to understand how the Singapore Financial Sector actually works. Lee Kwan Yew didn't try to explain it to her. British politicians are as thick as shit. Why waste your breath?
Cyprus, it is true, is better than Greece, because of the superiority of British institutions, but those institutions were still shit when compared to Singapore's which is why they are now in a hole.

What about Botswana? Is it replicating 'colonial governance'? Hardly. There was hardly any governance to replicate. It made things up as it went along. Belize has an even tinier population than either Singapore or Botswana. It can either continue in vassalage to some private company or other or else get gobbled up by Guatemala.

Gilley quotes Africans in failed states asking 'when are the Europeans coming back?' The answer is never. The thing isn't profitable and Europe is, in any case, too weak.

On the other hand, it is quite true that stupid shitheads write books about evil colonialists. But only shitheads read those books. The debate is a circle jerk for dickless wonders. It may be that these guys get paid a little for this fluff but it is very very little. Now that they are getting physically threatened, they will drop even the pretence of 'critical' argument and 'peer review' and other such bullshit.

Western Colonialism is as dead as the dodo. Western Poli Sci is as brain dead as that dodo's Uncle wot sexually molested it when it was but a chick. Now, more than ever, it is vital that we create a truly autonomous Academy where sexually molested dodos can speak truth to power and recover memories of having been Bruce Gilley's colon. There is a case for serious debate on only that last aspect of the extinct bird.