19. Imperialism | Part I — Everyone likes their own Empire
Colonialism, empire-building, expansionism, imperialism and so on generate a wide range of emotions from pride in the alledged achievements of the colonising empire to the desire for justice from the descendents of the coloniser (or often people who happen to look like them) via reparations to the descendants of the colonised.
The words today almost invariably invoke (or are intended to invoke) an image of Europeans, but usually British, if not exclusively English colonisers and painted in racial terms.
Much of this can be attributed to the recency of the British Empire. Many communities residing in Britain today are the descendents of peoples once ruled by the British. Same can be said of those residing in ‘transplated’ British terrorties such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and even America.
Similarly, many communities residing in parts of the world such as Fiji, Hong Kong, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore to name a few, can trace their ancestry back to countries once ruled by the British from where their grandparents or great grandparents would have moved and where they now regard to be home.
Historians like Niall Ferguson and Bruce Gillies have courted controversy for their respective texts Empire, How Britain Made the Modern World and The Case for Colonialism.
To their detractors, these authors are, at best apologists for imperialism, or outright racists. That one of them is married to a lady of Somalian descent and has children who would be regarded to be Black seems to be an inconvenient fact.
There are of course, many inconvenient facts in the history of imperialism, not least to mention that the English or the British or even the Europeans were not the only to have expanded beyond their borders.
The Mali Empire of one of many historical non European empires that grew through military conquest subjugating all neighbouring kingdoms. Mansa Musa, who reigned c. 1312 — c. 1337, is said to have made his pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves (presumably not counting those who may have been left behind in Mali).
Some 513 years later, Joshua John Ward, known as the largest American slaveholder held 1,092 slaves. An inconvenient fact is that it was not until the arrival of French troops in Mali during the late 19th century that slavery and human sacrifice is abolished.
Then there are inconvenient questions. If, as many allege, the European empires grew rich solely on the back of slave labour, why were the African kingdoms who practiced slavery not similarly wealthy?
Why not keep these slaves and grow rich like America and Britain allegedly did? Why instead sell your fellow African to Arab imperialists and later to White Europeans?
Was there any impact of technology imported into colonised lands or infrastructure built by the colonisers?
The Mughals ruled over the areas known today as India and Pakistan, expanding their domain over the territory. Historians attribute the bringing together of almost the entire Indian subcontinent under one domain through enhanced overland and coastal trading networks to the Mughals. The cultural impact of the empire is similarly lauded for the architecture, cuisine and musical influences on India.
And there is the inconvenient question of how the colonisers recruited troops for the conquering of the colonised lands?
Professor Niall Ferguson in Empire writes:
For the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white.
His wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on the other hand had this to say:
“Syria was Christian, Iran was Zoroastrian, Pakistan was Hindu, Palestine was Jewish and Afghanistan was Buddhist. These people lost their land and lives because of pseudo secularism. Now all these nations are Islamic”
Samory Toure was a Mandinka Muslim cleric, military strategist, and founder of the Wassoulou Empire, an Islamic empire that stretched across present-day north and eastern Guinea, north-eastern Sierra Leone, southern Mali, northern Côte d’Ivoire and part of southern Burkina Faso.
Toure’s army was armed with modern weaponary bought from the British allowing him to expand his empire rapidly across West Africa.
Côte d’Ivoire, or the Ivory Coast, tried to resist Toure’s expansionist policies, his impostion of Islam and demanding slaves as tribute. They sought the support of the French army.
General Alfred-Amédée Dodds, a quadroon and Métis gained fame in the African diaspora as an example of African leadership. He was the commander of French forces in Senegal. Dodds subsequently completed the conquest of West Africa.
Such inconvenient facts and questions are easily dismissed as ‘whataboutery’, however as Professor Christian Christensen has argued accusations of whataboutism are themselves a form of the tu quoque fallacy, as it dismisses criticisms of one’s own behavior to focus instead on the actions of another, thus creating a double standard:
“The so-called ‘whataboutists’ question what has not been questioned before and bring contradictions, double standards, and hypocrisy to light. This is not naïve justification or rationalization […], it is a challenge to think critically about the (sometimes painful) truth of our position in the world”.