Colonialism and Decolonialization

For much of human history, there was not much difference in the development rates among peoples in different geographies. The Neolithic Revolution came to the Americas and Africa and Middle East and the Yellow River Delta, and people farmed their plot of land for their three score and ten and died without much contact from people who did not look like them unless you lived in a city on a trade route or a port, and even then this was limited compared to what came later. What then happened, was that some people got a hold of gunpowder and some boats and the idea that whatever they saw was by rights theirs because they were graced by God with the divine right to expand wherever their boats led them. These were mostly short white men without any special talent other than that gunpowders and those boats — except some novel pathogens that wreaked havoc on the newly-rediscovered-by-Europeans “New World” starting around 1493. There was also a transfer to a commodity form of production highlighted by mechanization and division of labor with wage workers that we know as “Capitalism” which gave those men in boats the resources to go to those countries and plant a flag (Cypher 83–4).

This adventuring overseas was good for a lot of people. Especially it was good for a lot of the white men with European Tongues who were able to claim the spoils of the adventuring. The negative effects were found on both sides of the ocean. If you open any page of a history like Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, you can find any number of horror stories like how “more than half the population of America, Australia, and Oceania died from the contamination of the first contact with white men” (18), or how conquistadors “killed so many Indians that it made a river of blood which is called the Olimtepeque” (19). On the other side of the Atlantic, observers like Engels in his The Conditions of the Working Class in England could see cities built with “cattle sheds for human beings” (63) where “it often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed” (77).

Colonialism is not just a problem during the time that western countries were in formal administration of nations that they held under its sway. Colonialism became a problem as these western nations wiped their hands clean of these nations. In fact, one of the common threads of today’s less developed countries today is that in the past they were under sway of colonial powers. This means that there is a lasting negative legacy as Cypher notes, “The good of the native peoples of the colonies was of little concern to the colonizers, except in so far as they might best serve to the advantage of the colonizer” (85). The structure on how the colonizing nations shaped the institutions and the physical infrastructure were such that they could maximize the extractive forces over the nations that they had control over and neglected long term regional cooperation amongst neighbor nations.

One example of the long-term problems was the lack of development of industry. As we saw above, part of the reason the Spanish went to Spain was to draw out the riches from the mountains of the New World. Part of the reason the British went to India was to gain their raw materials. In the Spanish case, there were no incentives to develop manufacturing as the Spanish were wholly extractive. Not just in the minerals from the mountains, but also in taking up the people who lived in the areas and putting them to work — making the workers abandon even agriculture so that they could go into the mines and pull silver or poison themselves with mercury as they reduced the ore to its pure state. In the British case, there was an existent Indian industrial base that was in existence, but they took tax and industrial policy and made the Indian peoples convert to raw material producers. By either discouraging or destroying the manufacturing base, the colonial powers made sure that these countries were low on the value chain and made it harder for them to move up. This is an example of path dependence, where “Once institutions have been formed, they tend to lock in a certain evolutionary path for the nation” (Cypher 87). The path dependency is part of why it makes it so much harder to evolve, because there is also a path dependency higher up the value chain, blocking a move for many of these countries.

It is not just the broader priorities that mattered how the colonial regimes shaped the current less developed nations. The legacy of colonialism strikes in how the physical world is built. The geographies are such that often the colonies are built for extraction. Here the example would be cities like Lagos or Kinshasa, built on the coast or a river where the transportation in and out is easy for the colonial powers. But this is not just a colonial issue. London on the Thames or Lisbon on the Tagus have the same general structure of the biggest city in the area being easy to get to. In a lot of ways geography is destiny. What was different with colonial build out was focused on making roads and railroads that could “convert resources into plantation lands and mines” (Cypher 101), bringing resources of a nation into the tradeable economy. And of course, these roads were not just built. Every mile of railroad was paved in bones and blood of the native people, with mortality rates of 25% a year on the work gangs (101). Finally, after all this building, there was only real one-way transportation. It was not about building trade within continents, but from the colony to metropole. This again created path dependence and evolution issues since the colonized world was split between a dozen powers, none of whom had the incentive to work on cross-colony trade and developing those links.

Finally, there were some factors holding down development in the post-colonial world that is not directly applicable to mendacious colonizers. The first would be the relative price of goods from the developing world compared to manufactured products. As the developed world improved their manufacturing productivity in relation to the lower productivity of the agricultural sectors, the relative value of the goods went up for the developing world and down for the developed world. This meant that there was less incentive to try to create a manufacturing base as the goods were importable. The incentive was to try to commit more land to agriculture or find more mines for raw materials (Cypher 102–3). This narrowed the focus of the countries until their economies were dominated one good. Having a strong mono-focused economy is fine just up until the point it is not anymore, if your good goes out of style or there is a less expensive source for it, or there are larger geopolitical issues and the United States decides it wants your oil. Looking at this monoculture though, it is easy to forget that there was only spotty coverage of the European occupation, stuck close to the shores and where they could control. There were a lot of places where there was still untouched subsistence agriculture, in a bifurcation of the economy called “economic dualism” which is the “clashing of an imported social system with an indigenous social system of another style. Most frequently, the imported social system is high capitalism” (Boeke qtd in Cypher 112). This dualism has been a barrier to integration of both the economic and political systems in a post-colonial age.

What we have seen in this essay is the move from colonialism to the challenges that colonialism created while it was in effect for the post-colonial world. In many ways, these were the result of structures put in place by the colonial powers, but others were the structure of market forces not in direct control of the colonizers. Either way, the structures and institutions put in place during colonialism set the countries on a harder path than they would have faced had they been allowed to develop by their selves. A broader question, not answered, is if capitalism could have been able to develop without imperialism.

Works Cited

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Belfrage, C., & Galeano, E. H. (1997). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Foundation Incorporated.

Engels, F., & McLellan, D. (2009). The condition of the working class in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.