Pre-colonialism

My ex-wife, who shall remain nameless, got a Ph.D. out of “postcolonialism.” I like to think of it as “free doctorates for people of the right skin colour.” A Korean woman of my acquaintance more or less admitted this to me: she said merrily she had copped a Master’s for no more than writing about her personal experiences as a Korean woman.

Of course, you have to have a Grievance. Not anything will do. In the early days of the movement, I recall hearing a Chinese family interviewed, and the best they could come up with was that they could not have a child with blond hair.

This will not do; for half the importance of having a Grievance is having somebody to blame. Nor can this be just anybody. Mao works, but only if you are Tibetan. If it is against Joseph Stalin, even if it is colonialism of the most classic sort, it does not count. Grievances against Turkey do not count.

This is largely because it is not enough to have a Grievance, if your skin is the wrong colour. So folks from Eastern Europe, who have genuinely been colonized quite recently, but who tend to be blonde, cannot have Grievances. Neither can the Irish, or Armenians, or Greeks, or Swabians, or Caucasians in Xinjiang. Unless they are gay. Chinese may have Grievances against those of skin tones lighter than theirs, but not against those with darker skins.

The premise here is that European colonization of the rest of the world last century was an aggression unprecedented in history. It was “cultural genocide”; it reduced non-Europeans to some strange subhuman state called a “subaltern.” And that it is something no Third World nation can have recovered from a mere fifty years or so since the Europeans left. Even though the majority of their population would by now have no personal experience of European colonization.

“Once you have been colonized, you can never go back to the situation before colonization,” my ex-wife once pointed out.

And right she is. Because for most of us, the time before colonization is lost in the prehistoric mists. It would be like trying to go back to the time before birth, or before the Fall of Man.

For it is not as if the Europeans invented empire. They were just more successful at it than most who came before.

It would be truer to say the Europeans invented the nation state, as an alternative model superseding empire.

Nor was racism, as Andrew Young once claimed, a European invention. It would be truer to say it was something the Europeans, with their Christian ideas of universal brotherhood, spread into other lands in an attempt to reduce

Let’s look at the history of Sri Lanka. After all, I was there recently, and it seems a fairly random example.

Depending how you define “colonization,” I count eleven colonizations in the recorded history of Sri Lanka before the first Europeans arrived. By this I mean successful military invasions, or large-scale immigrations, from other lands. First, by the Sinhalese, the current inhabitants, who arrived from North India in the last years BC and took the land from the previous inhabitants. Then they were invaded twice from South India in the second century, first from Chola, then from Tamil Nadu. South India invaded again in the fifth century. The Tamils invaded again in the ninth century. Chola invaded again in the tenth century; Sri Lanka became a province of the Chola Empire. Kalinga invaded from India in the thirteenth century. Malaya (present Malaysia) invaded in the thirteenth century. The Tamils invaded again; Arab settlers began arriving in large numbers in the fourteenth century. There are some suggestions of an invasion from China.

Sri Lanka in this is probably comparable to most other places in the world—even more secure than most, as an island, from invasion or migration.

And this does not count conquests and colonizations of one group by another within the island—more or less constant throughout its history.

Was the appearance of the Portuguese, in the sixteenth century, an event different in kind? Why?

Indeed, unlike most earlier groups, the Portuguese did not come firing guns and seeking conquest. They wanted only trade.

How did they come to be in charge of at least a part of the island? Not by conquest. They were appealed to to come in. And not just appealed to, but paid by the Sri Lankans to intervene. A local king guaranteed them cinnamon for protection from rival kingdoms. They were peacekeepers.

Should they, as merchants, have refused the bargain? Was it wrong to support an ally in need? No; it would have been immoral to refuse. It would have been like Britain refusing to support Czechoslovakia or Poland in WWII.

The local king then converted to Catholicism, and then chose to will his kingdom to the Portuguese king after his death. It does not seem that this involved any coercion; rather, it seems to have been his considered judgment that this was an opportunity for his people and his own heirs.

The Dutch followed. But again, by invitation only. Rival kingdoms appealed to them to balance the advantage their rivals had gained through alliance with the Portuguese. Again, they eagerly offered tribute. When the Portuguese were defeated, the Dutch chose to stay on, planting their own cinnamon near their naval stations to feed the established domestic demand.

The British? The Kandyan ruler they overthrew to take control of the island was not Sri Lankan, but Indian—a recent colonizer, no more indigenous than they were, ethnically speaking. And they too came in on petition from his rivals, and were paid with trade concessions for their troubles.

Their specific grounds for interfering were to protect human rights. Local history records that the foreign Kandyan king was a notable tyrant: abducting wives at will to feed his harem, seizing property without compensation, torturing and executing whole families on a whim. British intervention then was on a par with NATO intervention, say, in Kosovo, or UN intervention in Rwanda.

But was there racism?

Yes indeed. The Sinhalese referred to the tribal people already there as “yakshas,” or “rakshasas.” That is, “devils.” Or they called them “nagas,” “snakes.” Europeans never referred to the natives of the Americas or of Asia in such pejorative terms. The South Indians, similarly, declared Sri Lanka the “land of demons.” They apparently could not see a different ethnicity as human.

The intervention of the Europeans ended, or largely ended, this cycle of racism, empire, and invasion in the “Third World.” This was the importance of their seminal doctrines, of human equality, human rights, and the self-determination of peoples.

European empires are also exceptional for mostly dismantling voluntarily, their mission declared accomplished, rather than through being defeated militarily.

But no good turn ever goes unpunished.