Reading Notes

readings main

Colonialism

Peter's Notes

Aspects of Colonialism

• Genocide
• Brutality
  • Targeted violence
  • Forced labor
    • Chattel slavery
• Extermination
  • Warfare
  • Killings
  • Eugenics/sterilization
• Cultural Suppression
  • Language
  • Religion
  • Knowledge
  • Other traditions/beleifs
• Occupation
• Settlement/displacement
• Resource extraction
• Pollution/overconsumption
• Hierarchical dominance
• Building racism
  • Scientific
  • Popular
• Racist discrimination
  • Social interactions/networks
  • Housing
  • Education
  • Hiring
  • Pay

Excuses for Colonialism

• Denial--It didn't happen.
  • Invisibilization--The colonized did not exist, or did not live there.
• Distraction--Let's talk about something else.
  • Avoidance--Discussing colonization is too dangerous/harmful.
  • Derailment--Something else is also a problem.
• Delegitimization--Only the colonizer's narrative is valid.
• Diffusion--No specific person can be blamed.
• Deflection--Some other group is the real culprit.
  • Expiration--The culprits lived long ago.
  • Projection--The enemies of the colonizers are actually to blame.
  • Fragmentation--The blame is shared by several groups.
• Historicization--It happened long ago, and is no longer relevant.
  • Erasure--It no longer affects anyone.
• Naturalization--Colonization is natural or inevitable.
  • Victim-blaming--The colonized brought colonization upon themselves.
  • Normalization--Everyone at that time considered it normal.
• Condemnation--The colonized deserved it.
  • Vilification--The colonized were worse than the colonizers.
  • Conflation--Both sides were colonizers.
  • Counter-Accusation--Neither side is blameless.
• Disaggregation--Colonization was not systemic or intentional
• Justification--It was not actually bad.
  • Inversion--It was good actually.
  • Minimization--It wasn't that bad.
  • Valorization--The benefits outweigh the harm.
  • Legitimization--Everything was consensual.
  • Compensation--It was bad, but the harm has been more than made up for.

Specific excuses:

• Bering Land Bridge Theory: Native Americans are also (recent) settlers.
• "Savage" and "Barbarian" tropes: a mix of vilification, conflation, and counter-accusation, which also usually includes valorization/inversion and/or victim-blaming.
• TODO: More here

Excuses from Top 10 Settler Excuses for Colonialism:

1. I didn't steal anything.
   • Diffusion and expiration
2. You have to move forward.
   • Historicization
3. Aboriginals must share responsibility for where they are today.
   • Counter-Accusation w/ historicization
4. I was born here.
   • Expiration
5. We all have equal rights.
   • Derailment
6. Look what Aboriginals did with ATSIC.
   • Derailment, historicization, and counter-accusation.
7. Government spends a billion dollars a year on Aboriginals.
   • Compensation
8. Aboriginals don’t work.
   • Compensation
9. We gave you the right to vote.
   • Compensation
10. We must all move forward together.
    • Avoidance, historicization

And more from the comments:

1. Aboriginal people should be glad for the comforts of modern life
   • Valorization
2. Indigenous people were dying out anyway so settlement was inconsequential
   • Invisibilization
3. Treaties were consensual
   • Legitimization
4. Aboriginal people were so small in number that reserve sizes were appropriate
   • Invisibilization, erasure, and minimization
5. Western settlement was benign and inevitable
   • Naturalization & minimization
6. Canadians were nicer than Americans therefore morally superior in their treatment of Aboriginal people
   • Vilification
7. Nobody knew any better (documentation in legislative and news sources shows that there was widespread awareness of treatment)
   • Normalization and delegitimization
8. Discrimination was not racially motivated
   • Disaggregation
9. History has no consequence
   • Historicization & erasure
10. Things were carried out in according to legal process
    • Legitimization
11. Politicians had the best intentions and nothing to gain during western expansion
    • Minimization, delegitimization
12. Aboriginals are dying out now, so it would be redundant to rehash these issues
    • Erasure & derailment

Hannah's Notes

List of Pro-Colonialist justifications found in various sources

1. Why shouldn't the West colonize? From the time of the late Rennaissance to present-day, Europe has made extraordinary advances in fields of science, mathematics, literature, etc. If they can get to the Orient and they can take over with little resistance, why shouldn't they engange in this academic pursuit and advance the knowledge about mankind and the universe?

Found from page 8 of "Orientalism Now").

2. Countries all aorund the world have participated in colonization, not just European countries.
3. The colonized countries had a say, the goal was not to plunder/pillage the colonized countries, but rather to enrich the states were being colonized.

Found in the article "Colonialism : Myths and Realities" by Brandon Christensen"

Also supported in the article "The Truth About Western 'Colonialism'"

4. Colonialism reaffirms the primacy of human lives, universal values and shared responsibilites.
5. There is a mission to civilize, there is a moral obligation to improve the conditions for third world countries.
6. Colonialism is simply part of effective governance and international order.
7. Must prioritize - in a brutally patriarchal society, access to justice for women may be more important than the protection of indigenous land rights.
8. The level of colonial violence must be measured against violence that would have occured without colonialism and the level of violence relative to the population
9. An objective costs/benefits analysis must be performed, colonialism is defensible in places where it resulted in significant social, economic, and political gains.

Found in the article "The Case for Colonialism" by Bruce Gilley

Fun fact: this article led to such discourse in the scholarly community that the editor of the journal it was published in received death threats, the article was promptly withdrawn.

One critic wrote that the article was the "the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes."

In response, Sahar Khan wrote "The Case Against 'The Case for Colonialism'

Kahn debunks the entire article, I highly reccomend checking it out.

Christine's Notes

List of Pro-Colonialist justifications found in various sources

[“The case of colonialism” by Bruce Gilley (later withdrawn)] (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037)

1. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it.

2. The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities – the civilising mission without scare quotes – that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism.

   “Colonialism” published in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
3. Whereas the Crusades were initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian lands that had been conquered by non-Christians, the resulting theoretical innovations played an important role in subsequent attempts to justify the conquest of the Americas.
4. The idea that civilization is the culmination of a process of historical development, however, proved useful in justifying imperialism.
5. According to the stadial theory of historical development, all societies naturally moved from hunting, to herding, to farming, to commerce, a developmental process that simultaneously tracked a cultural arc from “savagery,” through “barbarism,” to “civilization.” “Civilization” was not just a marker of material improvement, but also a normative judgment about the moral progress of society. (Kohn and O’Neill 2006)
6. Given the tension between the abstract universalism of natural law and the actual cultural practices of indigenous peoples, it was easy to interpret native difference as evidence of the violation of natural law. This in turn became a justification for exploitation. “The Changing Moral Justification of Empire: From the Right to Colonise to the Obligation to Civilise” by Camilla Boisen can’t access but looks good :( “The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539-1689” by Richard Waswo

7. As the nations of Westerw Europe began to colonize the Americas, they created a discourse to justify the activity developed from legal codes of the same classical past that provided the fiction model for the activity...It also defined what constitutes civilization itself (settled agriculture and cities: tilting the earth, building walls and towers on it) as opposed to its opposite, savagery (dispersed domadism: hunting and gathering in forests).

Ohana's Notes:

Brainstorming some assumptions

• Property:
  • land not part of a country/owned through legal systems is up for grabs, and once you have grabbed it, you "own" it, which means that you are the only person who can occupy and use it. You may use it in any way (that your country allows), even if this damages the environment around it, or simply eradicates life that was there before you (plant, animal, other, let alone humans). All land eventually will become "property" and this is good.
  • it is objectively better for land to be "productive." Land that is not cultivated, who's resources are not being extracted, which does not have housing or factories, i.e. which does not create capital, is wasteful and bad.
• Progress:
  • technological progress and increase in available material goods improve human life and are objectively good. A person who could theoretically buy plastic toys, premade food, a tv, etc. is better off than someone who does not live in an area or economy with access to these things; even if the former has longer work hours, no stability in jobs, housing, health care, they have a better life due to proximity to material goods
• Paternalism:
  • although property is the most essential thing, people who are "less civilized" are not using their land effectively, therefore it is okay and even good to take that land and make it productive
  • "more civilized" people have a duty to "help" the rest of the world by bringing technology, government, property, religion, etc.
  • "less civilized" people are like children and require harsh rules because they wouldn't know what to do with freedom

Notes on race and colonialism paper

• colonialism occurs (in part) simultaneously with the enlightenment, which posits that all men have inherent, universal rights. How then does one justify the violence, conquest, and subjugation of colonialism? Mahmud claims that race is constructed to bridge this gap

• "I posit that it was to reconcile colonial domination with the ideals of freedom and equality, that a modem discourse of racial difference and hierarchy gained hegemony, whereby capacity and eligibility to freedom and progress were deemed biologically determined, and colonialism was legitimated as the natural subordination of lesser races to higher ones."

• construct of "History": narrativizing the past on a national level, assuming a linear progress, assuming that the current state of things in civilized nations is the high point of humanity, and that all of humanity will eventually get to the point civilized nations are at now, becoming "civilized" themselves

• social darwinism and "History" combine to form a hierarchy of races, which is not only ideological justification for colonialism, but is also codified

• "A typology of savagery, barbarianism and civilization as a hierarchy of the historical stages of man was posited, bringing geography and History together in a generalized scheme of European superiority that identified civilization with race"

• "The modern grammar of racial difference, inaugurated by History and supplemented by liberal exclusions, had four inter-linked premises:(i) that there is an essential difference between Europeans and other races in the world; (ii) that there is a racial hierarchy with the European at the top, followed by Asians, African and aboriginals, in a descending order; (iii) that Europe, being the subject of History, had the right, nay the duty, to govern other races, to impregnate them with reason, progress and the rule of law; and (iv) that the salvation of lesser races rested in subjugation by Europe, to aspire to Europe's present as their future, this being the only path to enter History

• "colonial rule was premised upon the exclusion of the colonized from humanity as essential to their exclusion from institutions of political sovereignty"