Details: A discussion on the aspects of colonialism, it's long and short-term effects on both the colonising and the colonised societies from the beginning of European interaction to eventual decolonisation and beyond.


My Position:

I would argue that, while carried out for amoral reasons and with violent measure, the overall effect of colonialism was positive upon the world in general, though acknowledging that it has had various negative effects on certain nations and societies in both the short and long term.

In short, colonialisation took a continent that, for the whole, had not advanced beyond the iron age, who's society was fundamentally that of a series of tribes with some degree of shared culture, and, in a space of under a century, turned these into modern societies. Roads, hospitals, schools, literacy, healthcare, medicine, philosophy - all of these were spread around the world as a byproduct, at times deliberate, at times accidental - of colonial exploration, exploitation and development. The modern world is, almost entirely, a product of colonialism and trade - these two being fundamentally interlinked. To exhaustively list the achievements and successes of colonial development would be nearly impossible, but I will lay out a few:

1. Peace. Once the European armies had crushed all before them, and killed a lot of people, many of whom were undoubtly innocent or simply trying to protect themselves, there was peace. The single, overarching authority of colonial power suppressed, for the most part, the frequent intercine conflicts ranging from tribal cattle raids in Kenya, to civil war in India, to wholesale genocide and ethnic cleansing in South Africa at the hands of the Zulu (to the point where, when the Afrikaaners arrived in the Transkei and Transvaal, a generation after the Zulu migrations, they found this rich and fertile land so devoid of inhabitants that they concluded it was given to them by God). Colonisation in many places happened because existing political structures were so fractured and fragmented by constant civil strife that they simply could not effectively resist the division and conquest of the land. Post-colonial history tends to, aside from the obvious insurrections, rebellions and other such conflicts, be mercifully free of the constant, draining toll of war, and provided for the institution (or re-institution) of the rule of law.

2. Commerce, trade, wealth and industrialisation. Colonialism was, arguably merely an extension of an aggressive trade policy by European nations seeking to secure both markets for their goods, and sources of raw materials. An obvious side-effect of this wealth-seeking was vast wealth-creation within certain nations. To extract the valuable resources and open up the potential markets of there (often horribly undeveloped) colonies, the Europeans were forced to construct roadways. To feed themselves and their workforce, they culled out large, productive commercial farms. To mine the minerals they found, they...well, built mines. To move their products to their home markets, they built ports.

In all these cases, they provided jobs, work, and opportunity for the local population where previously there had been only the life of a small-scale, peasant farmer and smallholder. This brought a vast increase in the quality of life and lifespan of the local population. No longer did the Tsetse fly ravage their cattle, no longer were there possessions limited to livestock, tools, pottery and cloth, but a vast array of new and quite interesting possessions were theirs, potentially.

3. The spread of ideas. This is an interesting one, for it represents the foundation of our society today. Without the rule of European governors and states - influenced by European philosophies - would there be any functioning, democratic governments today outside of Europe (or even within Europe)? Would India be the largest democracy in the world? Would South Africa have not recently elected it's third democratic leader since it's inception? Would the ideas of democratic government, of freedom, of personal responsibility, of choice and trade and all those produced by the enlightenment philosophers and beyond, have ever, ever been of sufficient importance to change the societies of the currently-developing world? It is doubtful. Colonisation, though inadvertently, and though it was, like all cultural shifts and changes, carried out for amoral motives and by violent means, created the world today. It made a better, richer world for innumerable people, and for the descendants for those people, and indeed for the descendants of ourselves it set the groundwork for a globalised, free world that we are (hopefully) progressing towards.