Before you ask, yes, this is how Kautilya and I spend our days. I originally planned to clean this up into a more polished post, but decided to just go with the original emails.
The catalyst for the discussion was the early April BBC News article entitled "Is Britain to blame for many of the world's problems?"
Kautilya:
For what it's worth, my perspective (largely informed by a very non-postmodern course of study followed by living in India) is that cultures have dominated each other throughout history-- indeed, it's one of the only constants of human civilization that we exploit. Given progress, it was inevitable that eventually some power would exert such influence across the entire globe. While acknowledging the myriad problems Imperialism caused, we can be thankful that it was acted out by the West. For all the horrors, atrocities, and legacies-- all of which are replicated at smaller scale across the globe and throughout time-- the West dominated the globe in a relatively progressive and positive manner. Particularly England. So the real question to me isn't "is Britain to blame for many of the world's problems," but "given that eventually some power would dominate the entire globe, how miserably did Britain do?" And of course the corollary, "how is the United States doing?"
Or, at the risk of getting too grand-historical, if we are to evaluate successive empires against the standard of their own power and their own times (as I propose here), rather than by absolute standards (as the two authors in the link do), then how do we assess the morality of the actions of the United States?
Stilicho:
I think I’m right there with you on this one. As you indicated, barring a parallel and relatively equal pace of technological advancement, the supremacy of more advanced nations/peoples over those who hadn’t developed was somewhat inevitable. And I agree that the West has perhaps better track record of balancing exploitation with somewhat enlightened progress than powers in other regions of the world; after all, the Roman Empire’s greatest impact wasn’t necessarily just in destroying cities and enslaving populations, but also-and more lastingly-in bringing technological advancement, infrastructure, laws, language to a vast swath of territory. Arguably, and correlation certainly doesn’t equal causation, that legacy (itself built on the colonizing impulses of the Greek city-states) laid the foundation for the technological leaps forward of Europe. Granted, there’s a PhD in proving or disproving that statement, but I think you get my point.
It might be a bit of a cop-out, but obviously the legacy of imperialism and colonialism is incredibly complex, and I have no doubt that living as a subjected person beneath a colonial administration was hardly pleasant. As a bit of an aside, I also think it is very important in this conversation to isolate the British, and to a much lesser extent the French, philosophy and practice of colonial rule, as it had a significant emphasis on not simply exploitation, but improvement in infrastructure, rule of law, education, etc (the whole “White Man’s Burden”). Certainly more than many Western powers – here’s looking at you Belgium, Italy, and Spain. It’s also important to take into account the historical context of the whole imperial enterprise. Obviously the atrocities committed by the Brits in India (Sepoy Rebellion 1857 on up) were terrible, but they were at a time when the British weren’t far removed from having committed the same riot-control, fire-on-the-crowd murder on their own people (Peterloo Massacre 1819). And given the wider global context of potential great power rulers at that time, my choice of colonial overlord would have been the British, hands-down.
This is getting a bit long and out-of-hand, but I’d almost argue that generally the British legacy of colonial rule from an institutional perspective is a positive one, while their mistakes were made during the process of decolonization (most notably the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India borders, African borders disregarding tribes, and failure to accommodate Jews and Palestinians). Yet the burden of those mistakes can almost equally be laid at the feet of the entire international system at the time, in which all countries failed to coordinate decolonization, refused to reevaluate antiquated colonial boundaries, and failed to fully adapt colonial institutions to the realities of independence. The pressure to “get out now” from both their domestic population and the colonial population was too great, and their resources much too constrained for those to have been realistic options. And failing to have addressed all of those things (and probably a myriad of others), I don’t see how any country, not just Britain, could have avoided “blame for many of the world’s problems.”
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