by Tom Phillips
How bad, exactly? Well, one estimate of the deaths from European colonialism in the twentieth century alone puts the figure in the region of 50 million, placing it up there with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao—and that’s in the century that colonial empires were collapsing. In the hundred years or so following the colonization of the Americas, a fairly conservative estimate is that 90 percent of the continent’s population died from a combination of disease, violence and forced labor—again, a figure in the tens of millions. The only reason we can’t be more specific is because it’s hard to work out how many people were living there before; we literally don’t know what we lost.
Of course, the death toll alone, awful as it is in its vagueness, doesn’t tell the full story. The African slave trade, the invention of the concentration camp, sexual slavery in the Japanese empire, the Spanish encomienda system in the Americas (where conquistadors were personally awarded work gangs of native people, like start-up employees being given human stock options)—the list of horrors is long and almost unbearably grim. And you can add to that the myriad cultures wiped out, the history destroyed and the vast illegitimate transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another, which is still evident in the relative prospects and comfort you’re likely to enjoy today depending on which bit of the world you were born in.
Like I said. Bad. This bit of the book isn’t very funny, sorry.
All of this probably shouldn’t even need saying, but we’re currently in the middle of a rather intense Colonialism Was Actually Good backlash, so here we are. The argument, briefly, is that the benefits of colonialism for the colonized and their descendants—the modernization of their economies, the building of infrastructure, the transfer of scientific and medical knowledge, the introduction of the concept of the rule of law—outweigh the regrettable mistakes that were made. But however you dress it up, this still effectively boils down to a claim that the colonized peoples were fundamentally uncivilized—incapable of self-governance, immune to progress and insufficiently advanced to utilize their natural resources appropriately. They were just sitting on all this gold, poor idiots, with no idea what to do with it.
For starters, this rests more on myths about the state of precolonial societies than it does on facts, and it inflates a few countries’ historically temporary and highly contingent superiority in military technology into some sort of immutable moral law of Who Should Be Allowed to Run Things. What’s more, it relies on the unspoken assumption that without colonization, the rest of the world would have simply remained in stasis for the past five centuries, or that there was no conceivable way—other than marching into a country and claiming it as your own—that people could possibly exchange scientific or technical knowledge across borders. Without all that generous colonization, the implication is that they’d still be stuck somewhere in the 1600s. Now that seems unlikely, especially given the transnational exchange of ideas that led to Europe’s run of technological advances in the first place, but of course it’s impossible to prove one way or the other because there simply aren’t enough countries in the world that were neither colonized nor colonizers for us to check. There’s Thailand, which almost alone managed to escape. I just googled and it turns out they do actually have electricity in Thailand, so on a sample size of one I suspect this argument might be bollocks.
But ultimately, this is all talking at cross-purposes, because waiting for several hundred years to pass and then doing a sort of retrospective cost–benefit analysis of your actions is not actually how humans generally distinguish right from wrong. That seems more like an after-the-fact attempt to justify what you already want to believe. As a result, the conversation about colonialism tends to involve two people shouting, “But trains!” and “Yes, but also the Amritsar Massacre!” at each other repeatedly, until everybody loses the will to live. (For the record, no, trains are not a moral counterweight to massacres, and I say that as someone who really likes trains.)
None of this involves saying that colonialism is responsible for every ill in the world, which it isn’t; or that before the arrival of the colonizers, the societies they would colonize were all blissful oases of peace and comity where everyone lived in harmony with nature, which they weren’t. I hope by now in the book it’s evident that the capacity for being dumb and awful has been pretty common across world history. It just means that as a species we should probably try to think about our past on the basis of what actually happened, rather than a vague nostalgic yearning for uncomplicated narratives about the glories of empire.
To take just one example: the idea that colonialism brought enlightened governance and enshrined the rule of law in the colonized countries doesn’t really square with the history of the numerous treaties signed between colonial powers and indigenous peoples—a history that doesn’t exactly scream “respect for the rule of law.” That notion would be a surprise to, say, the Native American nations who signed hundreds of treaties with the British and then American governments, only to see every one of them broken and their land taken from them. It would be a surprise to the Maori who signed the Treaty of Waitangi, where a series of translation errors between the English and Maori versions of the text led to some rather convenient ambiguity about exactly what had been signed away. It would be a surprise to the Xhosa people who lived in the southern African colony of British Kaffraria (yes, they literally named the territory after a racial slur for black people), who in 1847 were forced to watch as the newly installed governor, Sir Henry Smith, laughed as he symbolically tore up a peace treaty in front of their eyes, then forced their leaders to come forward one by one and kiss his boots.
Those aren’t metaphors by the way. He literally did that. It’s worth noting that British history generally remembers Sir Henry Smith as a dashing and heroic figure, one who was immortalized in a popular romantic novel depicting his fairy-tale marriage to [checks notes] a 14-year-old girl.
This all drags us back to one of the themes of this book: our deep and consistent ability to fool ourselves with stories and delusions about what it is we’re actually doing. Maintaining an empire requires active and ongoing efforts to mythologize its present and to misremember its past. This dissonance was in place right from the start: it’s why Columbus’s writing shows he firmly believed he was doing the Lord’s work in spreading the Christian faith at the very same moment he was mentally weighing up the Taíno’s potential for subjugation and servitude. It’s also why the British systematically destroyed tens of thousands of their own colonial records as they left Africa at the end of the imperial age, literally burning them and hurling them into the sea en masse in an effort to erase history and institute a collective amnesia. (In Uganda, this was given the very on-the-nose name of “Operation Legacy.”)
And nowhere is it more clear than in the deep, dark irony of perhaps the most horrifying single act of the colonial era—when King Leopold II of Belgium purchased a million square miles of the Congo Basin as his own personal property, which he turned into a mutilatory, for-profit holocaust of slave labor that resulted in the deaths of perhaps 10 million people over two decades. The irony is this: it was officially done in the name of charity. The land was granted in 1885 to a charitable organization called the International African Association, set up by Leopold. This happened at the Berlin Conference—a meeting in which the countries of Europe carved up Africa between them, catalyzing the “Scramble for Africa” that took colonization of the continent to new extremes. The International African Association’s supposed philanthropic mission was to bring “civilization” to the people of the Congo. What it actually did was turn the entire country into an immense rubber plantation where the population was punished for failing to meet production targets by death, or by having their hands or feet or noses cut off. Because the Belgians wanted to make sure their forces weren’t wasting expensive bullets on nonessential activities—anything other than killing—soldiers were expected to deliver a requisite number of se
vered hands to prove how many people they had killed. One bullet, one hand. And so baskets of amputated hands became a kind of currency in the land, one that was harvested freely from both the dead and the living.
Naturally, Leopold called his country the “Congo Free State.”
So yes. Colonialism was bad.
* * *
This is a book about failure, and while colonialism was definitely bad, it wasn’t exactly a failure. If you somehow ignore the ethics and just look at the bottom line, it was largely a roaring success, and many of the people behind it made out like kings (particularly the ones who were, in fact, already kings).
But while the big picture is that yes, colonial powers succeeded in getting extremely rich by aggressively stealing the rest of the world’s stuff, that misses how an awful lot of the scramble for colonial land was ferociously incompetent. All that self-mythologizing about heroic adventurers, coupled with the lure of supposedly easy money, meant that a lot of the people who threw themselves into the imperial project were—bluntly—complete fucking idiots.
The “Age of Discovery” was rife with the Dunning–Kruger effect writ large. A seemingly endless series of profoundly unqualified, inexperienced and often unhinged men were given expeditions to lead, or colonies to run, on the basis of little more than that they were extremely confident and seemed like the right sort of chap.
Take, for example, John Ledyard, who was entrusted by the British to lead an expedition to find the much-sought-after source of the Niger River, despite his only experience of Africa being a brief nautical stopover on its southern tip. Born in the then-British colony of Connecticut, he developed a reputation as a great explorer thanks to writing a popular book on his voyages as a member of Captain Cook’s crew. His solo ventures, however, left something to be desired.
One skill Ledyard undoubtedly had was making friends with important people and persuading them to advance him money. His first venture was a proposed fur trading company, which repeatedly failed to materialize. But while in Paris looking for business partners, he won the backing of various luminaries—including Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette and several others who aren’t in the cast of Hamilton—for a completely different expedition. This was a bold plan to travel all the way across Russia to the Bering Strait, and from there to cross to Alaska and explore down the entire length of the American continent’s west coast. Jefferson, whose idea the whole affair was, described Ledyard as “a man of genius...and of fearless courage and enterprise.”
Ledyard lost his shoes on the journey to Saint Petersburg, but borrowed some money and managed to make it as far as Irkutsk, where the expedition came to an end after he was arrested as a spy.
It was when a penniless Ledyard eventually made it back to London in 1788 that he was given the opportunity to lead the expedition to what was known as “darkest Africa.” Despite the fact that he didn’t speak Arabic and had at best a patchy track record, the secretary of the African Association—the group who was hiring for the gig—was instantly impressed. The secretary, a Mr. Beaufoy, recounts somewhat breathlessly that on first meeting Ledyard he “was struck with the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance and the inquietude of his eyes... I asked him when he would set out. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ was his answer.” A single evening might seem a suspiciously short time to prepare for an expedition into uncharted territory on a continent you’ve only ever seen from a ship, but then, your chest is probably not as manly as John Ledyard’s.
In the end, Ledyard made it no farther than Cairo, where he became ill with a “bilious complaint” and tried to self-medicate by swallowing sulfuric acid. Which, not unsurprisingly, killed him. He died in January 1789, the only notable products of his African adventure being a few genuinely useful descriptions of caravan routes, and letters to Thomas Jefferson where he called the Egyptians stupid and slagged off the Nile for not being as good as the Connecticut River.
Or there’s Robert O’Hara Burke, an imposing bearded Irish policeman with a furious temper and no sense of direction, who in 1860 set off to explore the center of Australia by tracing a route from Melbourne to the northern coast. Leaving Melbourne to cheering crowds, his party made their way incredibly slowly across the country, largely due to the fact that they were traveling with 20 tons of equipment that included such vital items as a large cedar-topped oak table-and-chair set, a Chinese gong and 12 dandruff brushes.
Thanks to Burke’s temper and complete lack of exploring skills, turnover among the expedition party was high, with numerous members either being fired or leaving of their own accord. When their painfully slow progress finally convinced him to dump some supplies, he opted to lose most of their guns and ammunition, plus their supply of the limes that helped to prevent scurvy. Eventually, after around 2,000 miles, having left most of the party behind and taken just three other men and some camels with him, a half-dead Burke made it to within 12 miles of the north coast, before turning back because there was a mangrove swamp in the way. He died on the return journey, shortly after responding to some Aborigines—who’d wandered past and offered the emaciated men food and aid—by firing his gun at them.
Even some technically successful colonial explorers were actually really bad at it. Like René-Robert Cavelier, a Frenchman who ended up claiming much of the American gulf coast for France, and naming what would become the state of Louisiana. Described by one French official as “more capable than anybody else I know,” his initial feats of exploration were prompted by his belief he could find a route to China by going through Ohio. He was also an arrogant sod—an unfortunate character trait for an explorer—with a talent for annoying most of the people he traveled with. His final expedition in 1687 was an attempt to invade Mexico and take it from the Spanish with an army of just 200 Frenchmen. After quarreling the whole journey and losing several ships, then missing his planned landing spot by 500 miles, Cavelier was eventually murdered by his own men somewhere in Texas.
But perhaps nowhere is the self-delusion and hubris of the colonial age better illustrated than in the history of the colony that never was—a nation’s failed attempt to become a global player that instead ended up leaving the country impoverished and humiliated. This is the unhappy tale of the Scottish Empire.
Robert O’Hara Burke (1820–1861)
The Man Who Broke Scotland
William Paterson, like many people whose lives have ended up firmly in the “losses” column of history, had a vision.
Not only did he have a vision; he had the skill and tenacity to convince others to go along with it. Paterson was a banker and financier by trade, but a salesman at heart: a man who seemed to combine the rigor of an actuary, the soul of a poet and the fiery conviction of a preacher in one irresistible package. It’s just a shame that his particular vision ended up with thousands dead and his home country of Scotland in financial ruin—and worse, at the mercy of its southern neighbor. In fact, without Paterson’s disastrous plans, the UK as we know it might not exist today.
A 1721 map of the isthmus of Darien
It’s a story of a country committing itself to grand but vague ambitions based on the proclamations of ideological true believers, of expert warnings not being listened to and of a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality and change course, even when the world is sending you very clear signals that you might have made a mistake. (It’s also a story of the English being dicks, but that probably goes without saying.)
Paterson’s vision was of nothing less than a Scottish empire that would become the beating heart of global trade. And he knew exactly where he wanted the first outpost of that empire to be: a verdant paradise on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, located at the fulcrum of the Americas. That place was called Darien.
Between 1698 and 1699, around 3,000 colonists set sail from Scotland, backed by a wave of nationalist sentiment and as much as half of the country’s wealth
, giddy with the hope of finding Paterson’s paradise and founding that empire. Before the century was out, they’d discovered it was very much not a paradise, most of them were dead and the nation’s wealth might as well have been hurled into the waters of the Atlantic.
Now, in fairness to Paterson, not all of his visions were calamitous. In fact, one of his other visions lasts to this day—in 1691, he first proposed, and then in 1694 cofounded, the Bank of England. (And in case you’re wondering: a year after the Bank of England was founded by a Scotsman, the Bank of Scotland was founded by an Englishman.) In many ways, Paterson saw far earlier than most how the contours of globalized trade would shape the world we live in today. But he was both optimistic (“Trade is capable of increasing trade,” he wrote, “and money of begetting money to the end of the world”), and extremely stubborn. His attitude managed to piss off his fellow Bank of England directors sufficiently that he was forced to resign from the board less than a year after the bank was founded.
And so Paterson returned to the idea that had been something of an obsession for him for many years: a trading colony at Darien, on the eastern coast of the isthmus of Panama, the thin ribbon of land that formed the narrowest point of the American continent. Centuries before the building of the famous canal, it was already clear that Panama was where the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back was easiest. Not easy, exactly, as the terrain was far from simple to traverse—but still quicker and safer than the perilous sea journeys via the southern tip of the Americas, around Cape Horn or through the Strait of Magellan. By connecting the two oceans, Paterson wrote with a melodramatic flourish, Darien would become the “door of the seas, and the key of the universe.”