"the remnants of colonialism" include the ability to participate in world markets which create markets for local products. If Kenyans grew coffee (ignoring the fact that Kenyans growing coffee was itself a remnant of colonialism) just for the Kenyan market, the coffee sector in Kenya would be a tiny part of the local economy.
The reason New York City is the biggest city in the US is because when the Erie Canal was built, the agricultural riches of the Midwest had a route to world markets. Where you have a major seaport, you also need major banks and major insurance companies to smooth out the financial needs of traders and shippers, providing the funds right away back to the farmers, instead of them waiting till the voyages were complete. (without the Erie Canal, New Orleans would have become the largest city in the US)
Yes, there is a lot of money in trading, banking, etc. At every step of the transaction pyramid, a %age is added to the price, and the %age fees charged on that go up accordingly. But that measures the true value of the product at each stage; if you have a cheaper way of getting the same product to the same stage cheaper, the (supposed) riches will be yours.
The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
It is not pleasant to think about it in these terms; but it does seem like some of the greatest improvements in general human welfare have their roots in relatively ungenerous undertakings by methodical, reasonable, self-interested actors. The Romans roads and the Pax Romana, and the profound legacy of Roman law, were not the result of a benevolent desire to help everyone in the world and save them from evil.
> the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
Can you provide some examples and resources to back up this hard truth?
Population sizes are one way to get an intuition for the extent of the change. There was considerable improvement in agricultural productivity over the last 400 years.
Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life. For example, I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators. About 12% of the world's households have cars. These and many other material benefits are possessed by regular people today but would have been out of reach 400 years ago to any member of the European nobility or, as Adam Smith puts it, "...an African king, the master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.". (In his time, Smith was commenting on how remarkable it was that an English workman could have pots and pans made of metal and a window made of glass.)
> Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life.
But all these things were invented after colonialism of most colonial countries.
And they are prevalent in uncolonized countries in roughly the same ratios as colonized countries. Arguably the uncolonized (China being the main one) have more than the colonized (India being the main one)
When exactly did colonialism end, in your view? The British Empire was pretty substantial until the forties. The refrigerator and automobile were both invented well before that.
It is not strictly correct to say China was uncolonized. I suppose parts of it were not.
Global trade has, indeed, brought everything everywhere; but the present operation of global trade -- the norms used, the international bodies involved, even the weights and measures -- are all the result of power projection by western, colonial powers and prudent adaptation by other countries. Even China's legal system is an adaptation of a western legal system (the civil law). The prevalence of certain institutions is something we take for granted today but does have its roots in colonialism.
While civil institutions were spread to colonies by colonialism, they were adopted by uncolonized countries also. Countries can adopt beneficial things without being taken over and having their resources and wealth extracted.
The same way Americans adopted civil rights from countries which had them earlier on. Europeans who banned slavery earlier than Americans did not need to invade America and extract its resources to bring them out of being a slave-owning polity.
This year's Nobel economics prize was for this topic. Although, they did sort of just give it to Acemoglu because he's so productive you can't not give it to him.
> So, if the paper has so many problems, why did it prove so influential? First, because it utilized cutting-edge techniques at the time (instrumental variables was a new thing back in the 2000s), and because it used novel datasets and clever inference to answer a big-picture question. While “the conditions of colonization determined the institutional quality of colonies” is not a new idea (in fact, Marxist Karl Kautsky came up with a similar idea in 1907), treating it in a formal and empiric manner like this was fairly novel in the 2000s.
So it seems like the answer is not resoundingly clear at all, but the novel methods and analysis was worth the prize, not the perceived veracity of the claims.
Anyways, the topic is about how colonial powers set up institutions in colonized countries, and different types of institutions lead to different types of economic outcomes (inclusive vs extractive). But consider China and India. The former has no colonial institutions, having never been colonized. But both are growing at similar places with similar GDP growth rates (China being slightly ahead). So the idea that only a colonial power could build such institutions, thus all the negatives are outweighed. I don't buy that at this moment. I'm open to learning more though.
> The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
It has a lot to do with the unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations and a handful of successful colonized ones. The majority of former-colony states are still struggling, most with the luxuries, many with the essentials, a few with even managing a stable state.
The hard truth is the people in the developed world have only had it as good as they do because so many in the developing one have gone without to a frankly criminal degree for far too long. And they continue to be exploited. If you don't believe me look the shipbreaking yards where barefoot Bangladeshi work with plasma cutters to hack up ships beached there, or the electronic scrap heaps where people set fire to piles of e-waste to salvage the metals within, on and on. There are hundreds if not thousands of these examples where the West continues dominating the global south in clear, unmistakable ways, and precious few where the relationship goes the other way.
As someone who has written extensively on this topic, both on the internet and not, it is frankly just offensive to see this viewpoint shared as though it's serious. Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial. To the colonized it represents an entire category of scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies to this day, and many simply as a gigantic, unforgettable one across their collective souls.
As far as I understand it, pretty much every part of the world is wealthier, with larger populations, better medical care, more plentiful food, better tools, &c, &c. Even places that are very poor -- many of the developing countries, for example -- have considerably more resources than they did in times past.
One way to gain an intuition for the extent of the change is to consider population sizes. India in 1600 had about a tenth of its present population. To have a population so much larger, agricultural productivity in India, as well as in the rest of the world, had to increase a great deal in the intervening years.
Another way is to consider the spread of various conveniencies of life -- refrigerators, motor bikes, microwaves, automobiles -- and affordances they enable. Relatively few people in Bangladesh own motor vehicles, but many of them find work in commercial enterprises that are only possible because of the way that commercial trucks open up the interior to world markets. Something like 12% of the world's population has cars today, and that number is steadily increasing. I am not totally certain of this figure, but I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators.
The benefits of modernization are spread very unevenly amongst the world's peoples today (and we must acknowledge that another example I offered, of the Pax Romana, conferred many advantages specifically to the Romans) but it is hard to argue that there has not been a tremendous benefit worldwide as a result of changes brought about mostly by colonial powers over the last 400 years or so. The thing to consider is not what life in Bangladesh is like, relative to life in the Denmark (or the UK, &c), but what life in Bangladesh was like 400 years ago.
The Europeans do not have it as good as they do -- and, more generally, the world is not so much better off materially -- as a result of simply transferring well-being from one place to another. There were no automobiles, refrigerators, &c, to steal from other countries 400 years. The path to modernity involved real changes in human productivity that allowed for a genuine net benefit.
> scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies
Can you identify some of the most significant negative consequences of colonization that remain today? Things that wouldn't have happened if those people had engaged in global trade themselves while still being self-governing. As I understood it, the legacies were mostly good - especially government institutions and united nationhood instead of separate enemy tribes.
Poverty isn't necessarily exploitation. The situation of Bangladesh would not be improved if every wealthier nation was suddenly sucked into the sea. In fact, the situation of Bangladesh would become considerably worse.
Bangladesh has grown rapidly by selling clothing to rich countries, and through the work of NGOs. Supposing we put a forcible stop to this "exploitation" by placing sanctions on Bangladesh, so no one can trade with it, and kicking out all of the NGOs. Bangladesh becomes much poorer.
>Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial.
According to an old European history textbook I read: Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net. Supposedly the Brits did colonialism first, and other European countries followed in Britain's footsteps because "that's what an industrialized nation does".
Do you believe Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes economic sense? I don't think that's what motivates him.
The invention of the map might be the deadliest invention in history. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could momentarily color a small additional part of their map with their nation's color."
>unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations
Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
The top 10 per capita wealthiest countries in Europe, from Wikipedia, are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, Belgium, Austria.
The top 10 largest European colonial empires, based on my skim, belonged to: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.
> Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net.
Yes, colonialism was not profitable. They did it because we hadn't invented modernity yet so we didn't know how to be profitable.
One reason "Britain" (the UK) exists is that Scotland tried to get into colonialism, bankrupted themselves, and had to sell themselves to England.
Generally speaking, getting a lot of resources is actually bad for your economy because it outstrips your ability to develop value-added businesses and institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
> Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
You're arguing with a Maoist (or someone who's been listening to them.) One thing about these people is that they believe Finland and Ireland are colonizers, because they just think all European countries are the same.
My favorite thing on the internet is when people confidently state what other people's opinions are and are wrong.
FWIW, Mao had some good ideas, and some crazy ones. Like most historical figures, really, but even then I wouldn't take being called a Maoist an insult. That said, no proper leftist of any stripe would call Ireland a colonizer nation. They may have attempted it, but the subsequent ratfucking on the part of Great Britain ever since then and their continued existence inside the geopolitical abusive relationship that is the United Kingdom brings them far closer, ethically, to the Congo than to Britain. Lest we forget fun times like the Great Famine, or as the Irish call it, "that time Britain took all the fucking food." Or, more accurately the landlords did, the handling of which is one of Mao's better ideas.
Yay - I can't wait for Pax Sinica to do away with the inefficiencies of democracy if it means more suffering humans will be uplifted. A brief period of reeducation is worth the amazing infrastructure and getting things done. The end will justify the means, right? /s
There's something unsettling about the might makes right amd post-hoc justifications dor colonialism. Especially considering the colonialists did not have those "noble" goals in mind. No one lauds Google the way they laud the British empire, yet the same exploitation vs. public benefit arguments apply.
No one is saying it is right; but we shouldn't draw the wrong lessons from the Roman Empire or many other cases of institutional development. Being brutal and taking from others is not something that distinguished the Romans from other people (nor did it distinguish the colonial Europeans).
To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality. The Roman roads were genuinely of value to peoples besides the Romans. Perhaps the Chinese, to, will create institutions and a scope of activity that is of value to peoples outside of China. Probably not in Asia...
> To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality.
At no point did I dismiss the knowledge-transfer as being of no benefit. The point I was making is that it is very easy to be on a high horse and say "It was worth it" when you were not on the sharp end of the stick. By reframing the set-up with China as the imperial power, I hope to show the readers that the cost of "upliftment" might be something the unwilling subjects may consider culturally valuable (like democracy)[1]. Such one-dimensional analysis is intellectually lazy.
1. Imperialism has been dissected many times over the centuries, in fiction and otherwise, but it bears repeating.
> Is it really arguing in good faith to put hypotheticals side by side, on an equal footing, with evidence?
Is it arguing in good faith to consider other perspectives outside of our own? Yes it is, and I consider the reverse to be in bad faith.
While I don't fully agree with Kant, I find the Universability of an approach to be a good filter for identifying not-okay actions that are justified by the perpetrators - sometimes me (a.k.a. the Silver Rule: "Don't do to unto others what you don't want to be done unto you")
My high school history teacher would share historical accounts and encourage us to analyze the authors motivations and biases.
Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.
> Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.
That's a poor justification for it, though, and I don't want to live in a society that goes out of its way to view itself as Hobbesian.
You have to work with the world as it is, not as you'd wish it to work (especially that it likely couldn't possibly work that way anyway). "State of nature" sucks, because nature sucks. All the nice and good things come from building systems, social or otherwise, on top of the natural state of things - systems that work with our natural inclinations, instead of pretending they don't exist.
Right but nature doesn't suck. You make humans sound incapable of cooperation when this evidently isn't true. In this world uncooperative behavior is mostly a choice. Particularly in the west.
> To the extent humans fail at cooperation, that's nature at work. When we cooperate, we defy nature.
Well that seems a little silly, no? Humans are social creatures; cooperation is just as natural as any other human behavior (including fallibility). It seems almost a little christian in its doomful profession that humans are only our worst attributes.
Peace and love is all well and good until your crops have failed for the third year in a row. Your food stores are empty. You killed and ate all of the livestock last season because there was nothing left to feed them. There's nothing wild to hunt. Your village has resorted to eating anything it can scavenge, even if it's inedible or even poisonous. People are gnawing on their fingers.
And it's like this for your village and your neighboring village and their neighboring village and so on.
Tell me about it when your neighboring villages' adult men are charging down the hill at you, filthy, starving, crazed and screaming at the top of their lungs, axes in hand.
Surviving industrial level mass-enslavement is now considered the winning side of colonialism or you still don't consider native Americans and African descendants as people?
When colonizers first arrived in the Americas, ritualistic human sacrifice was common practice and contact between different tribes meant violence and death.
Also the African slave trade largely existed off the back of tribes conquering each other and selling the losers into slavery, which is also commonly how slavery works back into antiquity. The alternative to being sold into slavery is that they kill you.
Except the middlemen in this case have continued through from the colonial period, with seemingly little competition since. And it's also mandated that you can sell only through the middlemen and not independently, and you start to wonder if they're just bribing politicians to keep the system rigged in their favour.
It may be surprising for you, but it's very rare for it to be legal.
It's also almost never persecuted either, for obvious reasons. But totalitarian governments are usually not confident enough to officialize their money-movements. They usually claim to fight corruption with all their might.
Do you think by "remnants of colonialism" the OP meant "capitalism"? It's plain to me that he did not. I read it as him meaning an extensive bureaucracy designed to control the subject population is still in place and causing the price of the good to rise while the actual people who produce and innovate the product are left out of sharing in the windfall.
You say colonialism opened up Kenya to the global market. But nearly every country in the world, the colonized and the uncolonized, is now part of the global market, so it is not true that Kenya would not be part of the global market today without it.
The global market we have today is the result of an ordering of things that is a remnant of colonialism -- I think that is what fsckboy is referring to. It could have happened another way; but the particular one we have happened this way.
The argument goes -- and I think there is a lot to this argument -- that using "remnants of colonialism" to refer only to, for example, an extensive bureaucracy that excludes people who produce much of its proceeds is misleading, because other extensive institutions that are also remnants of colonialism are an important part of commerce, law and order, and public welfare all over the world.
Why do you think there's a lot to this argument? Genuinely curious.
Who said police, courts, etc. are not remnants of colonialism? Also, what is the relevance of that to this discussion about coffee selling and the problems in the Kenyan coffee market?
You'd have to be foolish or blind to not see how the ditribution of wealth in our current world closely follows what it was under colonialism. Sorry, but colonialism was a net negative for Kenyans and many other.
Kenyans can't fight the "monopolies" and "cartels", indirectly funded by western actors to keep exploiting their cheap labor to cultivate coffee. The large coffee market you speak of is not elevating the average man, stuck in a lobor-intensive and severly underpaid activity, benefiting a global system of exploitation.
I agree in general, however when you actually interact with these places you soon realise that the markets are completely skewed by corrupt practices of various kinds (not just cash bribery). I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Kenya or anywhere else in East Africa but it’s obvious how things work after just a short time there.
What’s described in the article is a situation where the government has introduced export licensing and endorsed a coop system that effectively cements organizations in their current positions in the market.
It’s not just governments that do this, commercial interests do too by acting as gatekeepers.
I am by no means “putting capitalism in my gunsights” here - however it’s clear that one of the issues is corrupt and poor regulation. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be regulation, but that it should aim at stimulating a fair market where honest traders are able to transact freely and dishonesty is punished.
> The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".
The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)
[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.
These days anti-trust measures tend to be framed in terms of increasing competition rather than market freeness. Which does make some sense. Hard to argue with increasing competition unless you're Peter Thiel.
Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.
(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)
> I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice
I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreadin...
I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.
> Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's about making sure you can be competitive, and you as a particular business don't have an inherent right to be competitive. Instead it's a collective right to have access to competition.
A right to participate in a reasonable way does not go far enough in many markets.
Sure, but when the uber-wealthy capitalists make the laws, avoid paying the taxes that support the entire system, and then greedily take as much as possible for their own selves without regard to the well-being of the workers or the Earth, the parasite is overwhelming the host.
As always, compassion is the answer to all our problems, even the thorny one of finding out how to fairly reward those who innovate, while preventing them from devastating the Earth and her peoples while they do so.
And, above all, we must not let the wealthy and their attorneys make the effing laws or elect our leaders. That's always a nightmare receipe for a bad system, and here we are.
The reason New York City is the biggest city in the US is because when the Erie Canal was built, the agricultural riches of the Midwest had a route to world markets. Where you have a major seaport, you also need major banks and major insurance companies to smooth out the financial needs of traders and shippers, providing the funds right away back to the farmers, instead of them waiting till the voyages were complete. (without the Erie Canal, New Orleans would have become the largest city in the US)
Yes, there is a lot of money in trading, banking, etc. At every step of the transaction pyramid, a %age is added to the price, and the %age fees charged on that go up accordingly. But that measures the true value of the product at each stage; if you have a cheaper way of getting the same product to the same stage cheaper, the (supposed) riches will be yours.
The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.