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kate_nepveu) wrote2006-10-14 02:28 pm
Colonialism, part two
Timing is everything. Last night while I was making myself dinner, I read the part of Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History called "The Arrival of the West," which is highly relevant to the prior discussion of whether and how colonialism is different.
Basically Armstrong points out that Europe took three hundred years to become modern, through a gradual and unplanned transformation of all parts of society. When colonizing started,
The colonized country provided raw materials for export, which were fed into European industry. In return, it received cheap manufactured Western goods, which meant that local industry was usually ruined. The colony also had to be transformed and modernized along European lines, its financial and commercial life rationalized and brought into the Western system, and at least some of the "natives" had to acquire some familiarity with the modern ideaes and ethos.
This colonization was experienced by the agrarian colonies as invasive, disturbing, and alien. Modernization was inevitably superficial, since a process that had taken Europe three centuries had to be achieved at top speed. . . . [I]n the colonies, only a small number of people, who were members of the upper class and—significantly—the military, could receive a Western education and appreciate the dynamic of modernity. . . . Society was divided, therefore, and increasingly neither side could understand the other. . . . People felt lost in their own countries. Above all, local people of all classes of society resented the fact that they were no longer in control of their own destiny. They felt that they had severed all connection with their roots, and experienced a sinking loss of identity.
. . . in the developing world, modernity has been accompanied not by autonomy but a loss of independence and national autonomy. . . .
The Islamic world has been convulsed by the modernization process. Instead of being one of the leaders of world civilization, Islamdom was quickly and permanently reduced to a dependent bloc by the European powers. Muslims were exposed to the contempt of the colonialists, who . . . . lacked historical perspective to see that they were simply seeing a pre-modern agrarian society, and that a few centuries earlier Europe had been just as "backward." They often took it for granted that Westerners were inherently and racially superior to "orientals" and expressed their contempt in myriad ways. All this not unnaturally had a corrosive effect. . . . [Muslims] would not be able to come to modernity as successfully or as smoothly as, for example, Japan, which has never been colonized, whose economy and institutions had remained intact and which had not been forced into a delibitating dependency on the West.
As I said, I don't have the history to judge this independently, but it makes a good deal of sense to me. Comments?
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(Islam, like Judaism, is about orthopraxy not orthodoxy. Its profession of belief is a sentence long (compare the Nicene Creed!) and only one of the five pillars; the other four are all behavioral. If I were shopping for a major monotheistic religion, it would probably be the closest fit for me, except for the bit about ultimate submission to God, because even if I believed in a monotheistic deity, I'm still just not very submissive.)
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I think I freed the brackets.
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The Abadan oil refinery in Iran was run by Brits, not by local Iranians. (Iranians were only allowed into the lowest-status menial jobs there.) The owners (the UK government owned 51% of the company) refused to allow locals into managerial positions.
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But then, it was assigned reading for an Islamic history course, so I suppose that must count for something.
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What has to be remembered is that the Islamic world was seriously into the imperial business until a very late stage in its struggle with the West. The Ottomans were still powerful enough to besiege Vienna in the 1680s, for example, and the Ottoman and Arab world were taking slaves from East and Central Africa well into the Nineteenth Century - some would say later - on a scale that rivalled the worst excesses of the West. The Ottoman imperial possessions included states like most of former Yugoslavia which experienced and continue to experience very similar post-imperial problems to those experienced by the victims of other European colonialisms.
Like Spain, the Ottoman empire (which for most of its history was very much envisaged by most of its ruling class and its citizens as armed Islam) went into the imperial colonialist enterprise early and was unlucky enough to lose in competition with more successful predators. This makes the experience of the Mediterranean and Levantine Islamic world radically different from that of the Muslims of India and South East Asia, and Western North Africa, who were undoubtedly victimized by Western European colonialism. Colonialism only got a grip on the Arab world in the years 1918-1950, which is to say at a point when it was not able to impose its will as thoroughly as it had earlier. Turkey and Saudi Arabia escaped entirely; Egypt retained large parts of its autonomy save for the Canal Zone; and so on.
Colonialism was a great crime; the Islamic part of the world was not its principal victim.
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That legacy extends East into central Asia and India, as well.
This does not detract from your point-- just sayin'.
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I was reminded strongly that one theory of the basis of the caste system in India-- based on at least some archaeological evidence-- is as a reaction to the peoples of the region having access to cheap menial labor from other, more primitive peoples only a short distance away. I don't think the concept of racial superiority is unique to Europe.
What probably was unique was not just the gulf of technological and societal advancement, but that the peak of technology at the time was able to effect such deep changes across such vast areas over such comparatively short periods of time. Ancient Chinese belief that the outer barbarians were subhuman doesn't mean much if they couldn't project enough power to master (say) the entire Asian landmass and transform it in the course of a hundred years or so... and they obviously couldn't. But combine racial superiority theories with efficient modern state governments, logistic supply chains, gunpowder weapons, etc-- and in North America, at least, hit when the local populations are at their own historical weak point-- and you've got something much vaster in its effects.
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* I preface this by saying when I refer to "nations" here, it's more a collected group of people who form a community in a certain place, usually of a single ethnicity, just because the idea of nationality as we know it today didn't really exist then.
** I also preface this by saying that I use many examples from Japan and China. This is not because I think they were most affected or hurt by colonization (quite obviously they got off fairly well, comparatively), but because it's what I'm most familiar with because I was really interested in the early twentieth century in Asia.
This is also an uneducated guess, so take with the normal grain of salt! But Armstrong's points on modernity + colonization make sense to me as well. From the very little I remember about anti-colonialist and nationalist movements in various colonized nations, there was often rhetoric about not needing modernization, as it was often associated with colonization, or attempts to modernize without westernizing (see: Meiji Japan, which is the example I know best, though it isn't a great example of colonization, since Japan did it without really being colonized).
And almost all rhetoric I've read on colonization by the colonizers have emphasized how much the colonized have gained because they were so backwards/primitive/tribal/uneducated/blah before said colonizers came in like heroes. It's probably really hard to separate that rhetoric even from studies on colonialism and post-colonialism today. To take Japan and China as examples again (see above caveat), even now, I feel like there's a lot of writing on how the Asian or Eastern ways of thinking/learning/doing business are somehow intrinsically inferior to the Western ways. See articles on Japanese schools and examination hell and memorization, or on business, or etc.
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colonialisms