Is Europe Redeemable?

I want this blog article to be different. I am not going to be supporting my arguments with a host of different sources from journal articles or academic papers. I want to do what Césaire does, I want to tell a story. 

The central claim in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is that Colonization in its essence was the story of a civilization which “…finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic companies.” Essentially, the European Colonizers are a group of Empires competing with each other with the world as their playground. Behind this need to acquire and consolidate their wealth was an inherent greed that seemed to throw away any regard or consideration for humanity. I am not going to address the specifics of how colonialism damaged most civilizations it came into contact with, Césaire does a far better job than I can manage. But I want you to keep his analysis of the inherent evil and dead conscience of the Colonial enterprise in mind as I make the argument for Europe’s redemption. 

Why do I think Europe is redeemable? Essentially, the colonial enterprise is nothing new or different to the Empires of the past. Why do I say this? Before the Europeans came to be the dominant force in the world, there were vast Kingdoms present all over the world. The Ottomans, who originated from what is now Turkey but ruled most of North Africa, the Middle East, all the way towards Persia on the East. It is not difficult to argue that most of the communities that came under the direct control of the Ottoman Empire were economically exploited (at sword-point?) and targeted. The Mughal Empire in India started when a Mongol Prince Babur arrives in India from Samarkand and beats Ibrahim Lodhi at the battle of Panipat. At its core, an outsider started a dynasty with the collaboration of certain elites from India managed to rule a vast stretch of land. His grandson Akbar’s land reforms, in fact, are not very dissimilar in their nature to the way the Colonial powers worked. The elites from among the Indians were appointed wazirs of jagirs and had to regularly give a fixed tax-rate to the government for owning that land. So, from his capital in Agra, he administered and reigned over most of the Indian territory. The Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and Timur Lane before then were not exactly the most benevolent Empire either, they were famous for the mountains of decapitated heads they left in their wake. Go a while before that and you have the Khilafat as a dominant organization with Mecca initially, and then Baghdad as its center. Look at the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Spanish Empire in its initial stages. Go back to the Roman Empire in the past, the slave empires in India. So many different empires, all have one thing in common. The subjugation of any group of peoples by another because they simply can. This is usually done through a superior military force or military technology. 

All I want to argue is, there was a pattern to Empire-making and resource-stealing. Groups that developed better military strategies and deadlier weapons usually ended up dominating over weaker, or less-prepared groups. What is unfortunate here is the sheer coincidence of the European powers going through the industrial revolution at around the same time that they were consolidating their Empires. They had more advanced weapons and were looking to exploit resources. Their pursuit of resources abroad was not unheard of, their oppression of the peoples they conquered was not uncharacteristic of conquests in general. 

Oh, but they contributed to slavery. Yes, they did. But, they did not go to Africa kidnapping entire communities, okay they did that, but not usually. In fact, most slaves were bought directly from African Kings or Kingdoms. Mauritania outlawed slavery in 1981 but it is still widely practiced there. That is just an interesting fact but getting back to the argument. Slavery existed before colonialism, in fact slavery was outlawed by the colonizers eventually but that is not the point. The oppressive system of buying and selling humans existed before the colonizers came in and participated in it. This does not absolve them of the blame but surely suggests that they were not necessarily the sole proponents of such a vicious ideology. Again, the reason it becomes such a big issue is the sheer scale of the colonial enterprise, the industrial revolution directly contributed to this mass trading because steam engines on ships meant faster travel, meaning more roundtrips, meaning more trade, meaning more money. More money, means more production, means more trade again. 

The redeemable qualities in my eyes have nothing to do with the train, or the telegram, or the telephone lines, or the democracy. All that technology seems like an eventual step the colonized nations could have taken on their own potentially. Or through contact could have gotten them eventually without the colonizer colonized relation. The real redeemable qualities of the European Colonizers come from the fact that at their core, in terms of the actions themselves, they were not very different from a lot of other Empires that have existed throughout history. Through the industrial revolution they were able to do this at a scale that was completely unimaginable in the past. Their involvement in slavery, in the subjugation of technologically handicapped (in comparison) peoples, the economic exploitation of foreign lands is all very common to the thought of Empire-building. It is very easy to sit today and lament the horrors that were caused by the Colonial Powers and every word that is said is true. But, put into context, their actions do not seem as horrible. 

The confusion also comes from the enlightenment era teachings that emphasized ideas of humanism and general principles of self-determination and liberty. However, those ideas were for the European people given the context of the break-up of monarchies towards a more democratic form of governance. An element that is missing from Césaire’s analysis on Europe is the movement around nationalism and the formation of national identities in Europe around that time. The French Empire taking steps to make their own people forget their languages and prioritize French over it to create a unique identity. These ideas of the national unity or Nitzche’s works on the “German” spirit allude to an inherent superiority by virtue of being connected to the land. The English were evil not just to the Indians, but also the Irish, and the Scots. They believed themselves to be superior to other white races, throw in the scientific racist research and the need to dominate the colonized nations with the push towards a nationalist identity, it was very unlikely that the humanism ideas would apply to people that were not from their empire.