Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism? A common reaction of national conservatives to this idea is that what happened during imperialism is time-barred and each country is responsible for their citizens.
How much does Mongolia owe Russia? How much do North African countries owe Europe for the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into the Arab slave trade in north Africa? The notion is itself ridiculous.
It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word “owes” is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb “decides” to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying “a group decides” simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word “owe”, even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word “owe” in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word “owe” from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
“Western civilizations” is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb “owes” is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word “owe” entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that “being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism” is very dissimilar from “having a window broken by a neighbour”, it is not a concrete thing. The central example of “owing something” is “owing a concrete and well defined thing”. Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as “western civilizations” owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb “owes”. I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply “new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones”, while some of them wouldn’t, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: “owns”, “chooses”, “decides”, “prefers” (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.
If you focus on utilitarianism the question doesn’t come up. The important thing isn’t who “owes” but how we can produce utility. If that means the best way is to give betnets to African’s than that’s the thing to do, regardles of the concept of “owing”.
I would only count debts toward the specific peoples directly affected; e.g. the Spanish Empire lived off Bolivian silver, the Belgians worked the Congolese to death, and the United States is literally built on stolen Native land. Those examples and many others allow for a case in favor of reparations.
However, the passage of time sometimes blurs the effects of exploitation and aggression. Should the UK sue Denmark for the Norman Conquest? Should Italy sue Germany because Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire? Should Hungary sue Mongolia for what the Golden Horde did to them? I admit I don’t know how to answer to that in a way that is consistent with my first paragraph.
I think that framing “Imperialism” as belonging to the past is inaccurate.
Many of the problemmatic behaviours grouped together into the term “Imperialism” have not actually stopped. There are Western developed countries that are doing horrible things to non-Western developing countries right now, and doing horrible things to their own people too.
I think a good first step would be to stop doing the horrible stuff now. If the problemmatic behaviour stopped, the topic of redress for past wrongs could be considered from a better vantage point. “I’m sorry I killed your ancestors and stole their stuff 100 years ago” tastes like ashes when coming from someone who is killing your family and stealing your things now, or who is doing something more subtle but equally awful.
“Disadvantaged” is a word that glosses over the damage done. Also, the whole question could benefit from being more specific and defining terms better.
Could you explain why you see it this way? Our wealth is partly based on exploitation. Wouldn’t it be fair to fix the damage we’ve done to exploited people? This could perhaps be also justified in terms of utilitarianism, as fairness might bring people closer together which prevents wars.
Not to any significant extent. Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history. In addition, I doubt most western-colonized countries were made substantially worse off compared to non-colonized countries, since the Europeans introduced some level of infrastructure, medicine, etc.
Wouldn’t it be fair to fix the damage we’ve done to exploited people?
First of all, who is this “we” you speak of? More importantly, there are a few “control-group” countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don’t seem better off than their neighbors. Unlike most African countries, which abolished slavery when the Europeans took control, Ethiopia banned slavery only in 1942--under pressure from the British, who were a bit embarrassed to be allied with a slave state.
Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
More importantly, there are a few “control-group” countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don’t seem better off than their neighbors.
There is also Japan, which was better off than its neighbors. In 1905 Japan was strong enough to win a war against Russia.
Because the people directly responsible for the colonization profited, even if their nation as a whole did not. To go back further in history, the general of a roman legion often came home from a campaign fabulously wealthy, while the people back home saw far less of the plunder. And asking modern italians to pay spain for what ceasar looted is kind of absurd
Is that true? I can think of examples, like Cecil Rhodes arranging for the British Empire to pay for the Boer Wars for his personal enrichment, but is that typical? The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch. I think the question at hand is the 19th century, when European states claimed vast swaths of land.
(I don’t like the comparison to Caesar. I believe that he paid to outfit his army, so the Romans as a whole made a profit, in contrast to knb’s claim about European colonialism, which I believe is correct.)
The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch.
Yeah, the ‘light touch’ thing is just not true. For all the history Moldbug reads, nRxs seem pretty unaware of the nightmare true corporate governance was historically.
Eh… the story preceding that rebellion argues, if anything, that the Company tried too hard to bend to local practices, and the British public was outraged that “Clemency Canning” didn’t want to come down like a hammer on the natives.
Look, explanations of complex stuff that happened is basically what historians do. The fact of the matter is, the EIC policies led to an enormous rebellion that ultimately resulted in the Crown taking over in India, and the EIC ending its independent existence. The EIC policies were terrible and very heavy handed, here is one example:
(And it’s not like it was not known by this point that people hated salt taxes, they could have just asked the French about how the gabelle worked out for them.)
I am not sure in what sense it can be said that the EIC used a ‘light touch’ in India, unless that phrase can mean basically anything you want it to mean.
The Dutch EIC in Indonesia was much better (but then the Dutch were much better about free trade than the English. The Dutch idea was always to be super efficient about maritime trade and thereby drive others out of a market, the English idea was always to let things run and put tariffs on them. That sounds like a ‘light touch’ policy, but in fact this always got them into trouble, see also the Molasses Act.)
Look, explanations of complex stuff that happened is basically what historians do. The fact of the matter is, the EIC policies led to an enormous rebellion that ultimately resulted in the Crown taking over in India, and the EIC ending its independent existence.
I suspect we should not use “fact of the matter” to describe counterfactual claims. You know how hard the problem of inferring causal knowledge from statistical data is, and specifically, how difficult it is to differentiate between different counterfactual hypotheses. (A says that a plan will fail because it is insufficiently yellow, B says that the plan will fail because it is insufficiently purple. When the plan fails, who do you update towards?)
And even this is highly suffused by interpretation—enormous rebellions are common against governments during this time period, and the implication is that the rebels won, because the EIC lost, which isn’t correct. The EIC forces were 80% Indian, and I can’t easily find numbers, but it seems likely that more Indians fought on the side of the EIC than on the side of the mutineers.
The EIC policies were terrible and very heavy handed, here is one example:
One example… where the British government continued to use similar policy for 90 years? This is pretty terrible evidence for the EIC being worse than the British government, and that you put this forward to support your claim suggests to me you might want to approach this a bit more carefully.
(If you want to argue that governance in general is terrible and heavy handed, we have a case, but to argue that the EIC is bad by the standards of Indian governance seems to me fairly mistaken.)
I am not sure in what sense it can be said that the EIC used a ‘light touch’ in India, unless that phrase can mean basically anything you want it to mean.
In this specific instance, I mean that they recruited from the highest caste of the natives and respected their superstitions, instead of recruiting soldiers who already shared their values or would be more pliable.
More broadly, I share Napier’s views on the EIC and Indian cultural practices.
The Dutch EIC in Indonesia was much better (but then the Dutch were much better about free trade than the English. The Dutch idea was always to be super efficient about maritime trade and thereby drive others out of a market, the English idea was always to let things run and put tariffs on them. That sounds like a ‘light touch’ policy, but in fact this always got them into trouble, see also the Molasses Act.)
I have grown less impressed by these sorts of comparisons since reading Albion’s Seed. because there’s pretty good evidence that people move to places where their strategies will work. American colonists varied widely in their approaches to the Indians, for example, but picked places where their preferred strategy would work. Those who wanted peaceful interaction with Indians settled near peaceful tribes (as determined by their relationships with other Indian tribes) and those who were not opposed to fighting Indians for land settled near aggressive tribes (again, as determined by their relationships with other Indian tribes). It seems highly likely that the Dutch sought out the lands where they expected their approach to work best, and likewise for the British.
I suspect we should not use “fact of the matter” to describe counterfactual claims.
Well, there are two competing claims here: EIC was a light touch government, or the EIC was a heavy-handed disaster. Now you can argue that the EIC was in fact a light touch government, and all the disasters in India that resulted in EIC terminating its existence were just due to confounders of the time and place. Maybe that’s true! But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?
One example… where the British government continued to use similar policy for 90 years?
I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn’t really evidence for this.
I mean that they recruited from the highest caste of the natives and respected their superstitions
I define ‘light touch’ operationally—did it work as intended?
It seems highly likely that the Dutch sought out the lands where they expected their approach to work best, and
likewise for the British.
The Dutch were late to the game, and got what they could. They did not have a luxury of choosing. Even the British, who essentially were the premier power in a multipolar world, had to worry about other powers sniffing around.
But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?
Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it’s likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use native power structures to suit their own ends, and colonial governments were more likely to replace native power structures. Whether or not this is a ‘light touch’ depends on what specifically you’re measuring. For example, the EIC never outlawed sati (though individual officers did in regions they had control over), and generally prevented Christian missionaries from operating in their lands, presumably because this would disrupt the creation of profit.
I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn’t really evidence for this.
I agree with you that the salt tax isn’t relevant evidence, because both the EIC and the British government enforced that policy. The point I was making is that you introduced the salt tax as relevant evidence for comparing the EIC and the British government, and that suggests to me that you may want to be more cautious in reasoning about this area.
(I don’t think inertia has enough of an effect to make creating and continuing a policy significantly different, especially given the amount of time involved.)
Initially, the company struggled in the spice trade because of the competition from the already well-established Dutch East India Company.
The Dutch and British appear to have been operating at roughly the same time—the first British voyage to the area seems to have been a few years sooner, but the first significantly profitable voyage seems to have been Dutch.
and got what they could.
I wouldn’t describe the Moluccas as “got what they could!”
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
That is a very good question on which books have been written. Some of this was about religion and prestige, and competition with others. Some of it was various sovereigns being convinced to fund dubious (in retrospect) ventures by good marketing.
We have our biases and our cultural zeitgeist, and folks in the past had theirs. After the Otman Turks conquered Constantinople and killed off the Roman empire for good, the Portuguise started looking for an alternative route to do spice trading (and also look for Prester John, the mythical Christian king in the east). “We are looking for spices and Christians” was the motto.
The English had complicated reasons to start colonizing that were not all about money. A lot of the times it felt like colonial things happened for complex reasons (e.g. having to do w/ what was happening w/ Christianity at the time), and the Crown tried to find ways to make money off it.
It was the case that at some point the sugar trade became very valuable (e.g. to Napoleon the tiny sugar-producing possessions of France were worth much more than the entirety of Louisiana), but this happened much later—there wasn’t a “master imperialist plan” at all.
I don’t see any basis for this claim. More explicitly, I don’t see any reasonable and consistent legal/moral theory which would justify such a claim. Note that I do not consider the popular “deep pockets” legal theory to be reasonable.
Meh, companies did clearly got rich on exporting western technology
Capturing only a tiny fraction of the value they created, and that’s just the for-proft companies, not to mention all the scientists and charitable organizations that gave out western science and technology for free.
This seems to be clearly an ethical question to me, and the field of ethics is far from scientific. What kind of answer are you looking for?
My system of ethics would suggest that developed nations are morally obligated to help poorer nations (at least in so far as significant human suffering is caused by limited resources), and that this is the only relevant factor. So help disadvantaged peoples yes, but the cause (imperialism or otherwise) is irrelevant in determining the need.
If you would like a different answer, I can surely construct an argument pointing in the direction you prefer.
I get the feeling that “national conservatives” is the name of some specific political movement or affiliation in your own country. It is not a phrase I have heard before. What specifically does it refer to? The movement discussed in the Wiki article appears to be of significance mainly in the former-communist European countries, and even there consists mainly of minority parties. These countries are not the ones for which an argument is being made for post-imperial reparations.
I meant people from the right nationalist, conservative spectrum, not a particular group with that name. It’s just that I’ve read that argument often expressed by people who I’ve associated with this spectrum.
I think that people in a position to actually do something about it generally take a similar view, but not so loudly, preferring the idea to just go away, while avoiding the media storm that would result from saying straight out, “We’ve got ours, deal with it.” That is something that can only be said by those who are not in a position to do anything but talk.
The opposite view, “all of the developed world’s prosperity was extorted from the rest and should be restored in full” is of the same nature. No-one can say it and get into power to do it.
Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism? A common reaction of national conservatives to this idea is that what happened during imperialism is time-barred and each country is responsible for their citizens.
How much does Mongolia owe Russia? How much do North African countries owe Europe for the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into the Arab slave trade in north Africa? The notion is itself ridiculous.
It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word “owes” is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb “decides” to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying “a group decides” simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word “owe”, even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word “owe” in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word “owe” from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
“Western civilizations” is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb “owes” is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word “owe” entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that “being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism” is very dissimilar from “having a window broken by a neighbour”, it is not a concrete thing. The central example of “owing something” is “owing a concrete and well defined thing”. Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as “western civilizations” owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb “owes”. I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply “new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones”, while some of them wouldn’t, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: “owns”, “chooses”, “decides”, “prefers” (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.
Is anywhere on Earth inhabited by the descendants of the humans who first moved in?
Off the top of my head Iceland for sure, Māori-inhabited areas, and possibly the Basque Country. But yes, that’s pretty much the exception.
I’m not sure about “first moved in” but there are families in England who have been there for a very long time.
If you focus on utilitarianism the question doesn’t come up. The important thing isn’t who “owes” but how we can produce utility. If that means the best way is to give betnets to African’s than that’s the thing to do, regardles of the concept of “owing”.
How can I convince a national conservative of utilitarianism?
Why do you ask?
In general that question sounds like you are not focused on understanding but on persuasion.
The same way that they would convince you of their own views.
By giving me a persuasive reason to care about the subjective utility of people I can’t ethnically identify with.
I would only count debts toward the specific peoples directly affected; e.g. the Spanish Empire lived off Bolivian silver, the Belgians worked the Congolese to death, and the United States is literally built on stolen Native land. Those examples and many others allow for a case in favor of reparations.
However, the passage of time sometimes blurs the effects of exploitation and aggression. Should the UK sue Denmark for the Norman Conquest? Should Italy sue Germany because Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire? Should Hungary sue Mongolia for what the Golden Horde did to them? I admit I don’t know how to answer to that in a way that is consistent with my first paragraph.
Related: A British answer.
I think that framing “Imperialism” as belonging to the past is inaccurate.
Many of the problemmatic behaviours grouped together into the term “Imperialism” have not actually stopped. There are Western developed countries that are doing horrible things to non-Western developing countries right now, and doing horrible things to their own people too.
I think a good first step would be to stop doing the horrible stuff now. If the problemmatic behaviour stopped, the topic of redress for past wrongs could be considered from a better vantage point. “I’m sorry I killed your ancestors and stole their stuff 100 years ago” tastes like ashes when coming from someone who is killing your family and stealing your things now, or who is doing something more subtle but equally awful.
“Disadvantaged” is a word that glosses over the damage done. Also, the whole question could benefit from being more specific and defining terms better.
No.
Could you explain why you see it this way? Our wealth is partly based on exploitation. Wouldn’t it be fair to fix the damage we’ve done to exploited people? This could perhaps be also justified in terms of utilitarianism, as fairness might bring people closer together which prevents wars.
Not to any significant extent. Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history. In addition, I doubt most western-colonized countries were made substantially worse off compared to non-colonized countries, since the Europeans introduced some level of infrastructure, medicine, etc.
First of all, who is this “we” you speak of? More importantly, there are a few “control-group” countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don’t seem better off than their neighbors. Unlike most African countries, which abolished slavery when the Europeans took control, Ethiopia banned slavery only in 1942--under pressure from the British, who were a bit embarrassed to be allied with a slave state.
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
There is also Japan, which was better off than its neighbors. In 1905 Japan was strong enough to win a war against Russia.
Because the people directly responsible for the colonization profited, even if their nation as a whole did not. To go back further in history, the general of a roman legion often came home from a campaign fabulously wealthy, while the people back home saw far less of the plunder. And asking modern italians to pay spain for what ceasar looted is kind of absurd
Is that true? I can think of examples, like Cecil Rhodes arranging for the British Empire to pay for the Boer Wars for his personal enrichment, but is that typical? The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch. I think the question at hand is the 19th century, when European states claimed vast swaths of land.
(I don’t like the comparison to Caesar. I believe that he paid to outfit his army, so the Romans as a whole made a profit, in contrast to knb’s claim about European colonialism, which I believe is correct.)
Yeah, the ‘light touch’ thing is just not true. For all the history Moldbug reads, nRxs seem pretty unaware of the nightmare true corporate governance was historically.
A light touch compared to 19th century state colonialism, which is the context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
Light touch indeed. They fucked it up so badly, the Crown had to come in and take over directly.
Eh… the story preceding that rebellion argues, if anything, that the Company tried too hard to bend to local practices, and the British public was outraged that “Clemency Canning” didn’t want to come down like a hammer on the natives.
Look, explanations of complex stuff that happened is basically what historians do. The fact of the matter is, the EIC policies led to an enormous rebellion that ultimately resulted in the Crown taking over in India, and the EIC ending its independent existence. The EIC policies were terrible and very heavy handed, here is one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_salt_tax_in_India
(And it’s not like it was not known by this point that people hated salt taxes, they could have just asked the French about how the gabelle worked out for them.)
I am not sure in what sense it can be said that the EIC used a ‘light touch’ in India, unless that phrase can mean basically anything you want it to mean.
The Dutch EIC in Indonesia was much better (but then the Dutch were much better about free trade than the English. The Dutch idea was always to be super efficient about maritime trade and thereby drive others out of a market, the English idea was always to let things run and put tariffs on them. That sounds like a ‘light touch’ policy, but in fact this always got them into trouble, see also the Molasses Act.)
I suspect we should not use “fact of the matter” to describe counterfactual claims. You know how hard the problem of inferring causal knowledge from statistical data is, and specifically, how difficult it is to differentiate between different counterfactual hypotheses. (A says that a plan will fail because it is insufficiently yellow, B says that the plan will fail because it is insufficiently purple. When the plan fails, who do you update towards?)
And even this is highly suffused by interpretation—enormous rebellions are common against governments during this time period, and the implication is that the rebels won, because the EIC lost, which isn’t correct. The EIC forces were 80% Indian, and I can’t easily find numbers, but it seems likely that more Indians fought on the side of the EIC than on the side of the mutineers.
One example… where the British government continued to use similar policy for 90 years? This is pretty terrible evidence for the EIC being worse than the British government, and that you put this forward to support your claim suggests to me you might want to approach this a bit more carefully.
(If you want to argue that governance in general is terrible and heavy handed, we have a case, but to argue that the EIC is bad by the standards of Indian governance seems to me fairly mistaken.)
In this specific instance, I mean that they recruited from the highest caste of the natives and respected their superstitions, instead of recruiting soldiers who already shared their values or would be more pliable.
More broadly, I share Napier’s views on the EIC and Indian cultural practices.
I have grown less impressed by these sorts of comparisons since reading Albion’s Seed. because there’s pretty good evidence that people move to places where their strategies will work. American colonists varied widely in their approaches to the Indians, for example, but picked places where their preferred strategy would work. Those who wanted peaceful interaction with Indians settled near peaceful tribes (as determined by their relationships with other Indian tribes) and those who were not opposed to fighting Indians for land settled near aggressive tribes (again, as determined by their relationships with other Indian tribes). It seems highly likely that the Dutch sought out the lands where they expected their approach to work best, and likewise for the British.
Well, there are two competing claims here: EIC was a light touch government, or the EIC was a heavy-handed disaster. Now you can argue that the EIC was in fact a light touch government, and all the disasters in India that resulted in EIC terminating its existence were just due to confounders of the time and place. Maybe that’s true! But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?
I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn’t really evidence for this.
I define ‘light touch’ operationally—did it work as intended?
The Dutch were late to the game, and got what they could. They did not have a luxury of choosing. Even the British, who essentially were the premier power in a multipolar world, had to worry about other powers sniffing around.
Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it’s likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use native power structures to suit their own ends, and colonial governments were more likely to replace native power structures. Whether or not this is a ‘light touch’ depends on what specifically you’re measuring. For example, the EIC never outlawed sati (though individual officers did in regions they had control over), and generally prevented Christian missionaries from operating in their lands, presumably because this would disrupt the creation of profit.
I agree with you that the salt tax isn’t relevant evidence, because both the EIC and the British government enforced that policy. The point I was making is that you introduced the salt tax as relevant evidence for comparing the EIC and the British government, and that suggests to me that you may want to be more cautious in reasoning about this area.
(I don’t think inertia has enough of an effect to make creating and continuing a policy significantly different, especially given the amount of time involved.)
From the East India Company wikipedia page:
The Dutch and British appear to have been operating at roughly the same time—the first British voyage to the area seems to have been a few years sooner, but the first significantly profitable voyage seems to have been Dutch.
I wouldn’t describe the Moluccas as “got what they could!”
History can be all things to all people, like the shape of a cloud it’s a canvas on which one can project nearly any narrative one fancies.
Compared to what?
That is a very good question on which books have been written. Some of this was about religion and prestige, and competition with others. Some of it was various sovereigns being convinced to fund dubious (in retrospect) ventures by good marketing.
We have our biases and our cultural zeitgeist, and folks in the past had theirs. After the Otman Turks conquered Constantinople and killed off the Roman empire for good, the Portuguise started looking for an alternative route to do spice trading (and also look for Prester John, the mythical Christian king in the east). “We are looking for spices and Christians” was the motto.
The English had complicated reasons to start colonizing that were not all about money. A lot of the times it felt like colonial things happened for complex reasons (e.g. having to do w/ what was happening w/ Christianity at the time), and the Crown tried to find ways to make money off it.
It was the case that at some point the sugar trade became very valuable (e.g. to Napoleon the tiny sugar-producing possessions of France were worth much more than the entirety of Louisiana), but this happened much later—there wasn’t a “master imperialist plan” at all.
Because conquering new lands helps spread the meme that one should conquer as much as one can.
Money is not the only motivator. Power is another one.
I don’t see any basis for this claim. More explicitly, I don’t see any reasonable and consistent legal/moral theory which would justify such a claim. Note that I do not consider the popular “deep pockets” legal theory to be reasonable.
Do all other civilizations owe something to western civilization for the benefits they gained stemming from western science and technology?
Meh, companies did clearly got rich on exporting western technology (and they often didn’t export our ethical standards to maximize profit).
Capturing only a tiny fraction of the value they created, and that’s just the for-proft companies, not to mention all the scientists and charitable organizations that gave out western science and technology for free.
I would love to see some statistics on that, but it’s probably too hard to measure; also how much % of the exported technology was charity.
This seems to be clearly an ethical question to me, and the field of ethics is far from scientific. What kind of answer are you looking for?
My system of ethics would suggest that developed nations are morally obligated to help poorer nations (at least in so far as significant human suffering is caused by limited resources), and that this is the only relevant factor. So help disadvantaged peoples yes, but the cause (imperialism or otherwise) is irrelevant in determining the need.
If you would like a different answer, I can surely construct an argument pointing in the direction you prefer.
But the cause is relevant to determining the incentives created by your help.
I get the feeling that “national conservatives” is the name of some specific political movement or affiliation in your own country. It is not a phrase I have heard before. What specifically does it refer to? The movement discussed in the Wiki article appears to be of significance mainly in the former-communist European countries, and even there consists mainly of minority parties. These countries are not the ones for which an argument is being made for post-imperial reparations.
I meant people from the right nationalist, conservative spectrum, not a particular group with that name. It’s just that I’ve read that argument often expressed by people who I’ve associated with this spectrum.
I think that people in a position to actually do something about it generally take a similar view, but not so loudly, preferring the idea to just go away, while avoiding the media storm that would result from saying straight out, “We’ve got ours, deal with it.” That is something that can only be said by those who are not in a position to do anything but talk.
The opposite view, “all of the developed world’s prosperity was extorted from the rest and should be restored in full” is of the same nature. No-one can say it and get into power to do it.