What Next? Dept
Here’s a Slate article about some so-called new research that wonders whether imperialism wasn’t so bad for the colonies after all.
Feyrer and Sacedote’s key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births….And guess what? There’s a little hierarchy of colonisers in terms of their ‘beneficial impact’:So, what did the Europeans do right? The authors conclude that there’s no simple answer. The most plausible mechanisms include trade, education, and democratic government. When the study directly measures these factors, some of them help to explain income differences among islands—for example, the places that traded only basic agricultural products in colonial times now have lower living standards. But even after accounting for these concrete determinants, longer European colonization has some extra pro-growth effect. Exposure to European colonizers, it appears, benefits living standards for reasons apart from the direct effects of government, education, and markets.
the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.As for the conclusion of the Slate article -
There is no disputing that thousands died in the wake of European explorers’ discovery of the New World. That’s bad. But we can still give a small cheer for Columbus, because European colonization brought riches in its wake.- here’s one of the responses, from the Fray:
It’s like deciding to cheer the development of Hollywood because the Holocaust gave us all those nice Jewish-American directors.
what veritable crap is that! what about Africa?
actually its like celebrating Holocaust since it gave Hollywood its current income from brilliant jewish-american directors. Whatever.
Whoever is funding this kind of a research might as well try to see where these nations would have been if the europeans had left it alone.
The only good thing i see right now about British colonization of India, is that today i can tell them in their own language that they and these researchers can stop this BS
Comment by pv — October 23, 2006 @ 7:02 pm
I have heard similar arguments before. Even in academia. Even though post-colonial literature and theory is generally free of such nuttiness, every once in a while (particularly among American scholarship putside of post-clonial literature) this nonsense becomes popular primarily because they hold the current economic situation as more or less the status quo, and traces it back to the past.
Comment by Brazenhead — October 24, 2006 @ 8:38 am
I recommend those who support Feyrer and Sacedote’s argument to read Amiya Kumar Bagchi and what he writes about the impact of Colonialism on India and other Asian countries.
Comment by Uma Gowrishankar — October 25, 2006 @ 3:09 pm