The West is the Best - 3- What about slavery and colonialism?
The West did not invent slavery, it abolished it.
Western countries have achieved unprecedented prosperity. Many people think that this wealth is based on slavery and exploitation of non-Western countries. They assume that 'we' have become rich by plundering poor countries and therefore consider it our duty to provide development aid and pay compensation for the suffering inflicted.
However, this version of history is rather misleading. It is true that western countries have explored and partly 'conquered' the world since the 15th century. And it is also true that in doing so, they were guilty of large-scale slave trade and slavery. But the West did not have a monopoly on evil while the rest of the world was peaceful and noble.
Nor is it true that the West became rich thanks to colonialism and slavery. You can also look at it the other way round: because Western countries were richer and more advanced, they could dominate other countries. However, this domination is not where Western prosperity came from. It may even have cost the West more than it gained.
We would like to adjust the image of Western 'exploitation' on the basis of five propositions.
1. Slavery is not a Western invention
Slavery is a horrific, degrading phenomenon. There can be no doubt about that. But the painful truth is that slavery has been everywhere and everywhere throughout human history.
Historian James C. Scott, in his book Against the Grain - A Deep History of the Earliest States, writes about the origins of the first states: 'For the first states, slavery was an essential way of maximising production and skimming off surplus production. It is almost impossible to overstate the centrality of serfdom to state development ... Around 1800, three quarters of the world's population lived in serfdom. In South-East Asia, all the early states were slave states and slave-trading states - the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in South-East Asia was, until the late 19th century, slaves.'
Slavery was also widespread within Africa. 'The number of slaves within Africa was greater than the number exported,' writes American historian Thomas Sowell in his book Conquests and Cultures. History has forgotten them. Sowell describes in detail the horrors that accompanied the slave trade in the Arab world. The reason why there is no large black minority living there now, unlike in America, is because slaves could not reproduce there, that is how badly they were treated.
2. The West abolished slavery
The West may have been guilty of slavery and the slave trade like the rest of the world - but it was the 'capitalist' West that abolished slavery. You rarely hear the anti-Western critics talk about that.
The abolition of the slave trade was largely the result of a deliberate, decades-long battle of ideas waged by a combination of classical-liberal thinkers and religiously inspired activists, the Quakers, in England. The well-known free-marketeers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Cobden and Bright, were principled opponents of slavery, and also of colonialism, which they saw as a form of protectionism (trade monopolies) and unwanted state intervention.
Adam Smith, the patriarch of the free market, wrote as early as the 18th century in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (somewhat freely translated): 'Every Negro from the coast of Africa possesses more generosity than his wicked master can even imagine'. He called slaves 'heroes' and slave owners 'trash' and 'wretches'.
The role of the Quakers should not go unmentioned either. In 1783, they set up the first committee to combat slavery. Under their influence, Antislavery Societies were formed all over England. This eventually led to the British Parliament passing a law in 1807 banning the slave trade on British ships.
In the decades that followed, the British government took the lead in stopping the international slave trade. The Royal Navy was at the forefront of this battle. In 1833, the British Parliament banned slavery in the colonies - but not yet in India, where slavery had become so entrenched in society over the centuries that abolition proved impossible for a long time. (See Jim Powell, Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery).
Undoubtedly, economic factors also played a role in the abolition of slavery. The complex industrial society that emerged in the West did not need slaves, but independent thinking workers.
3. Western prosperity is not due to slavery and colonialism
It seems obvious that countries become richer from slavery and colonialism. At the end of the 19th century, European countries fought each other in their quest for colonial power. But did they gain economically? Or was it a political struggle?
Thomas Sowell, in Conquests and Cultures, concludes that slavery did not bring economic prosperity. The North of the United States, where there was no slavery, was richer than the South. A country that probably absorbed the largest number of slaves in history is Brazil, but when Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, it was still a backwater. The Arab world was riddled with slavery, but only became rich when oil was discovered - by Western companies.
Nor was Western prosperity based o/n plundering raw materials from poor countries. Throughout the centuries, by far the most trade in the West was between Western countries. Africa was not a major destination for European investments or exports,' writes Sowell. Africa was somewhat more important as a source of imports, but these came from a limited number of places, such as the South African gold and diamond mines and the cocoa and palm oil regions. In total, Britain got 7% of its imports from Africa.'
Historian Paul Bairoch writes in Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (1995) that in the period 1800-1938 only 17% of Western exports went to the 'Third World' and only half of those to the colonies. And exports accounted for only 8-9% of the gross national product of Western countries. Bairoch also notes that countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany had higher economic growth rates than colonial powers such as France, England, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands, even though they had no colonies (or only late, as in the case of Belgium and Germany).
Nor was Europe dependent on raw materials from other parts of the world, as is often thought. Pioneering developments in energy (coal, the steam engine) and metallurgy (coke-fuelled blast furnaces) were largely independent of the Atlantic triangular trade,' writes historian David Landes. Until the late 1930s, Western countries produced more energy than they consumed, Bairoch writes.
One of the possible reasons why an industrial revolution took place in Europe was precisely the absence of slavery and the formation of an independent middle class, which, incidentally, began as early as the Middle Ages. In contrast, in the Roman Empire, writes historian Louis Rougier, 'slavery prevented the growth of a productive middle class.'
4. Poor countries are not poor because of slavery or colonialism, but because of dictatorship, corruption and socialism
Another wisdom you learn at school: by arbitrarily drawing borders, the colonial powers created artificial states that led to civil wars and oppression of minorities in the 'Third World'. While there is certainly truth in this, it is far from the whole story.
In this article, we will not discuss the situation in these countries before they were colonised by Western states, but there is no reason to assume that they were earthly paradises at the time. Development economist Peter Bauer also points out that some of the poorest countries in the world were never colonies, for example Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Liberia and Ethiopia (which was an Italian colony for only six years in its very long history).
More importantly, it is implausible to keep attributing the problems that exist in poor countries today to the colonial era, which is long gone. If non-Western countries and people are really so peaceful and honest, why are they unable to put their own house in order after 60 years?
The big problem of poor countries is not exploitation in the past, but notoriously corrupt governance in the present. Another cause of poverty in Africa is that in the post-colonial era, some 35 African states converted to socialism. Countries like Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Guinea were economically destroyed by socialist interventions and nationalisations. In many other countries, it was brutal dictators - Idi Amin, Kenneth Kaunda, Bokassa, Mobutu - who made economic progress impossible. As long as African countries do not break out of their spiral of corruption and state terror, they will remain poor.
Development aid does not help. On the contrary, it provides the corrupt elites with the means to maintain their power. At the end of the Cold War, Western countries had already transferred 2000 billion dollars in development aid, writes Tom Bethell. That money has disappeared into a bottomless pit. Quite recently, The Plunder Route to Panama (2017) described how African heads of state plunder their countries and syphon off tens of billions to tax havens elsewhere in the world. African countries, by the way, are generally rich in raw materials and agricultural land. Drought, 'climate change' and other climatic factors are not the real reasons for poverty in Africa.
5. Colonialism was not only negative
Of course, Western countries have often been guilty of atrocities and mass killings in developing countries. Think of the Belgian Congo, to name one notorious example, but the Dutch also have plenty of crimes on their conscience in Indonesia and other colonies.
Yet the legacy of colonialism is not all negative. American economists William Easterly and Ross Levine of the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded in a 2012 study that European colonisation had a 'net' positive effect on the economic development of countries. Other researchers state that colonisation has in many cases had positive effects on education, governance and civil rights.
Of course, this can be questioned in many ways and is certainly no justification for the oppression and colonisation of countries. The point is that the problems in developing countries cannot simply be attributed to the pernicious influence of Western countries.
The lessons
The Third World is not poor because of the West and the West is not rich at the expense of the Third World. Prosperity is not a zero-sum game with a fixed size where some always have to give in at the expense of others.
Prosperity in the West has been mainly due to the advance of individual rights, such as the right to private property, and the formation of a civil society to go with it. This made it possible for ordinary citizens to flourish and freely exchange ideas and goods for mutual benefit.
This is also the only way to achieve a better future for all. But are we in the West still aware of this? That is the subject of the fourth and final part of this series.
Co-authored with Karel Beckman