Friday 1 November 2019

"When a more advanced society is given the opportunity to diffuse its economic, technological, administrative, and educational systems to a less advanced society that by and large welcomes its presence, the results are so obviously good compared to what would otherwise have happened in that society that the only interesting questions are how large the positive effects are." #QotD


"When a more advanced society is given the opportunity to diffuse its economic, technological, administrative, and educational systems to a less advanced society that by and large welcomes its presence, the results are so obviously good compared to what would otherwise have happened in that society that the only interesting questions are how large the positive effects are...    "[Yet] for the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart  sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places."
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~ Bruce Gilley, from his lecture 'The Case For Colonialism' [link to pdf here], and hist article 'The Case For Colonialism' [link to pdf here]

5 comments:

Blazer said...

Do you have any examples to back up this nonsense?

paul scott said...

Blazer's nonsense is not worth replying to. The proposition is self eviddently true.

Blazer said...

'given the opportunity'=translation...when loans are made to 3rd world countries by the dominant,the monies do not go to the people/workers of the 'less advanced society'but responsibility to pay off the compounding debt ..does.
As for Scott -pathetic,go and read some comics.

MarkT said...

I'd suggest almost every (if not every) location where there's been European colonization is an example. NZ for instance. Do you have any examples where that has not been the case? You have to show not just that there was some negatives from European colonization, but that the negatives outweighed the positives, taking into account the status quo prior to the colonization.

Peter Cresswell said...

There are abundant examples and references for them in the linked lecture, in the linked article, and in the related bibliography: 'Contributions of Western Colonialism to Human Flourishing'