Impacts of Colonialism – A Research Survey
Intro
- long-term effects of social-evolutionary development levels on the modem /postcolonial economy and society
- Kerbo (2005) argued that the colonial experiences did negate the evolutionary advantages of some Asian
countries, stressing specifically the importance of the presence or lack of infrastructure development during
colonialism.
- History of the capitalist world-economy is a history of colonialism; “control it politically in order to exploit it
economically” (plantations)
- Interested in the impact of European, American, and Japanese colonialism; Schoenberg (1980) identified this as
the second wave of colonial expansion (mid-19th and mid-20th century)
- Colonial economic development; penetration of Western commodities, organization, and control ushered in the
era of the export economy, during which colonialism reached its peak.
- 83 countries of Africa and Asia, which contained around 90% of the population under colonial rule in 1920.
- Modern colonialism developed by the European powers, stronger economic and transformatory power and
broader impact and its role in shaping the world before the 20th century.
- Semi-colonialism: indirect rule with little interference in internal affairs
- Direct rule: strong interference in internal affairs
Measuring the Length of Colonial Domination
- An occupation of an isolated area is not considered as onset colonialism.
- To be considered as an onset colonialism, political control must be established in a colony.
- Malay Peninsula is onset colonialized by Portuguese in 1511
- Length of colonial domination is related to some economic and social indicators of colonial transformation.
- A longer colonial period means more colonial violence, more investment in infrastructure, more plantations,
more work immigration, and more religious conversions.
- Longest years colonized: Mozambique (470), Malaysia (452), Equatorial Guinea (461), Angola (402), Philippines
(381), Guinea-Bissau (358), Somalia (357), Indonesia (343), South Africa (342)
- Shortest years colonized: Mongolia (0), Saudi Arabia (12), Syria (28), Jordan (38), Afghanistan (39), Libya (40)
- Semicolonized: China, Japan, Thailand, Turkey
Political Impact of Colonialism
- Political centralization of territories having no central government
- Lange (2004), analyzing the variation in British colonialism , argues that direct rule provided an administrative
structure based on formal rules and had a centralized legal-administrative structure with a formal chain of
command
- British colonial rule depended on customary legal institutions for the regulation of social relations
- ''the colonial state in indirectly ruled colonies lacked the capabilities to implement policy outside of the capital
city and often had no option for pursuing policy other than coercion " (Lange 2004: 907).
- Transfer of power was more orderly in British than in other colonies.
- Legal systems established in British colonies are based on common law, which allows less state intervention than
the French legal system established in other colonies. In between the two are the German, Scandinavian, and
Socialist legal systems.
- Most problematic legacies of colonial domination resulted from the instrumentalization of ethnolinguistic
and/or religious cleavages.
- The British in particular "specialized in cultivating certain populations as military allies" (Trocki 1999: 88): Their
Indian army was clearly segregated on the basis of religion and caste membership.
- Ethno-religious minorities also filled the lower ranks of the French colonial army in Syria (Thobie et al. 1990:
204).
- Groups allied with the colonialists were given privileged access to education and therefore to the administration;
others were disadvantaged, neglected, or punished for being unruly
- In Egypt, the British privileged Syrian Christian middlemen (Reid 1998: 238). (polarization)
- In Southeast Asia , Chinese and Indians were generally seen by the colonial powers as better suited to trading
and work on plantations than indigenous groups such as the Malays.
- Chinese operated as tax-farming entrepreneurs and compradores, collecting and managing goods and
businesses for colonial financial and agency institutions and importers and exporters.
The Economic Impact of Colonialism
- Economic impact of colonialism are the 'drain of wealth,' expropriation (mainly of land), the control over
production and trade, the exploitation of natural resources, and the improvement of infrastructure.
- Case of Britain and India:
o By the last quarter of the nineteenth century India was the largest purchaser of British exports, a major
employer of British civil servants at high salaries, the provider of half of the Empire's military might, all
paid for from local revenues, and a significant recipient of British capital. (Tomlinson 1993: 13)
o So-called "Home Charges," the official transfers of funds by the colonial government to Britain between
1858 and 1947, consisted mainly of debt service, pensions, India Office expenses in Britain, purchases of
military items and railway equipment.
o For the 1930s, Maddison estimates these home charges in the range of £40 to £50 million a year, and "if
these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising income
levels".
o Direct exploitation also included taxes, tariffs, restrictions on trade and foreign investment , forced labor,
and even enslavement of the indigenous population.
- Diamond (1988:7) emphasizes the establishment of monopolistic state control of cash crop production and
exportation, the mining of mineral s, and the development of infrastructure as the main impacts of colonialism.
- Mitchener and Weidenmier (2008); they argue that "empires increased trade by lowering transactions costs and
by establishing trade policies that promoted trade within empires. In particular, the use of a common language,
the establishment of currency unions, the monetizing of recently acquired colonies, preferential trade
arrangements, and customs unions help to account for the observed increase in trade associated with empire"\
- Belonging to an empire roughly doubled trade relative to those countries that were not part of an empire,
between 1870 and 1913.
- In their analysis, the positive impact that empire exerts on trade is sensitive to whether the metropole was
Britain, France, Germany, Spain, or the United States (competition among colonial powers)
- Plantation "owned by a legal entity or individual with substantial capital resources, the production techniques
are based on industrial processing machinery, and the labor force consists of wage laborers resident on the
estate"
- The development of a plantation economy required expropriation, which took place in different forms, implying
more or less displacement of indigenous population.
- In British-Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the plantation boom of the 'coffee era' (1830-1880) was enabled through a
combination of a special land-sales policy and financial control through banks and agency houses, based on
assumed ownership by the colonial government of all 'uncultivated land.' (exploitation)
- Many plantation owners used a long-term debt strategy to bind workers to their enterprise.
- "encapsulated in a colonial rhetoric of the nobility of peasant cultivators or, in the Philippines, the ideal of the
yeoman farmer "
- traders and/or state officials could gain huge rents by underpaying peasants for their produce.
- In the Belgian Congo, the collection of wild rubber on huge private concessions resulted in the depopulation of
entire villages and ''the perpetration of heinous crime s against humanity
- Railways also acted as instruments of imperial control, because the technology and much of the capital came
from the metropole country.
o military and strategic reasons behind certain railway projects; ensure British claims on eastern Sudan
against the progressing French.
o Indian nationalists argued that railways were an expensive military asset rather than an appropriate
piece of developmental infrastructure (argue that it is both)
o Fieldhouse attributes to the railway system in India "a huge impact on the Indian economy. It generated
an engineering industry that was to provide the basis for much of India's economic development and
created for the first time something approaching an integrated economy"
- In Southeast Asian archipelagos, investment in canals and irrigation systems were at least as important as
railways.
- Roads were also important for the exertion of colonial authority, bringing profound changes even to more
remote villages.
o (The building of canals and roads were mainly for trading or agricultural reasons)
- The control of mining was one of the key interests of colonial powers.
o One part of the West African Coastline was soon to be known as the "Gold Coast,
o However, was outranked by South Africa, where nearly half of the world's gold came, and almost all of
the diamonds.
The Social Impact of Colonialism
- Religion, education, and health.
- Many authors see the investment in the education and health sectors as the most positive impact of
colonialism.
- Colonial human capital' is the most important colonialism-related determinant of long-term growth in sub-
Sahara Africa.
- However, it has to be kept in mind that education under the colonial government was not primarily meant to
improve the knowledge of the indigenous population or to open the ways to European universities but to
recruit and to train clerks/officials for the administration.
- Education policies were guided by the practical needs of colonial society
o In Malaya, "it was considered unnecessary to offer higher levels since the government viewed education
as means of equipping the population with the tools appropriate for their assigned lot"
o Colonial schooling was "education for subordination , exploitation, the creation of mental confusion
and the development of underdevelopment.
o Independent schools were in many colonies forbidden or carefully observed in order to exclude the
development of a potentially anti-colonial elite.
o Trocki (1999: 88) argues that the impact of schools was "far-reaching, since it had the effect of creating
cultural allies for the colonial powers". There was virtually no other option for school graduates than to
work within a colonial structure
- "Cultural allies" were also the parts of the population that converted to the religion of the colonizers.
- Missionary activities:
o European colonizers from the beginning in 15th century, and in many places their collaborators and
subjects accepted their religion as 'superior'
o the new religion demanded not only exclusivity and renouncement of traditional practices such as
ancestral worship and shamanistic health rituals as well as non-sedentary lifestyles, polygamy and open
promiscuity. (evident in the present day’s social norms and/or taboos)
o In Africa, there was more African control over missionary activities where missions were established
before colonial rule.
o The impact of missionary activities was big in areas which were not converted to one of the "high" or
scriptural religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc.) already, i.e. mainly areas in south of the Sahel belt
in Africa (with the exception of the East African coast), in Southeast Asia (in the Archipelago the
Philippine and some Indonesian islands
oMissionaries argued in favor of Christianity by referring to the superiority of European
oIn Islamic areas, colonial missionary activities were especially unsuccessful. If this has to do with
traditional animosities out of centuries-old religious competition or with the fact that apostasy is a crime
punishable by death in Islamic
o The Christian churches consist of foreign residents and of people belonging to families which were
never Moslem.
- Regarding health and life expectancy, colonialism had a mixed impact.
o medical centers were founded, typically with the purpose of lowering infant mortality and advancing
disease prevention and vaccination campaigns.
o "particularly interested in controlling, by medical research and eradication campaigns, the most
spectacular manifestation of ill-health , epidemic sicknesses (a colonial strategy; i.e case of bubonic
plague)
o For Southeast Asia, Elson (1999: 160) argues that it was the significant reduction of mortality, not an
increase of fertility, which led to a net population growth in colonial period.
o Urbanization and the work in mines, plantations and on the big infrastructure construction sites favored
the spread of diseases and increased dramatically the number of work-related accidents.
o In Africa, the establishment of plantation colonies had "a grossly disturbing effect on the African
nutritional economy" (De Castro 1952: 179). In certain areas colonialism led to a drastic population
decrease. In the Belgian Congo, the decrease was by 50 percent between 1879 and 1919; mainly due to
forced labor and the atrocities linked to it.
o Colonial investment in health facilities mainly benefited the colonialists, especially in settler colonies.
(They improved the health sector so that their colonies will have to depend on them to give them cure
but their economic activities forced on people also caused them diseases.)
Conclusion
- The huge variety and diversity of colonial experiences that we found described in the research literature (and
that we can confirm on the basis of our evaluation) is a challenge to all attempts at coding the factual impact of
colonialism and therefore its "legacy."
- Differences between the socio-economic development in colonized and non-colonized areas/countries. The (few)
non-colonized areas in Africa / Asia experienced less intensive modes of integration into the world economy, a
slower disruption and disintegration of the traditional social structures, all in all a slower pace of change
compared to colonial economies.
- The political impact of colonialism has been widest in sub-Saharan Africa, in areas where a lesser degree or the
absence of traditional state- and empire-building opened opportunities for significant political
transformations. (Political centralization)
- Many regions have been transformed through the development of plantations, mining booms and settler
economies, others have been tied to empires through colonial policies
- Other areas have remained untouched or only superficially changed through colonialism, such as neglected land-
locked regions in Africa as well as highly developed traditional economies in East or West Asia.
- All countries which experienced a profound colonially-induced social transformation through immigration,
proselytization and partition are located in Africa south of the Sahara. (The lasting impacts of colonialism may
be influenced by the existence of pre-colonial or traditional structure of a nation)
- One important determinant of the socio-economic development of Africa / Asia in the 19th-20th century, but
not the only one and in many cases not the most important one.
- On the Arab Peninsula, for instance, the decline of the demand for pearls in the 1920s and the large-scale
production of petroleum are considered to have changed societies much more than British indirect rule and
related investment, which was promoted by indigenous elites
- While for some areas, it is obvious that profound changes in economy and social structure can be traced back to
colonial measures, others remained almost untouched, sometimes even conserved. To deal with the impact of
colonialism by dummy variables ("colonized /not-colonized," French/British, etc.) is clearly inadequate.
