Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

What is the legacy of imperialism in terms of ideas? The answer is complex and cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic development of former colonies in the modern world. For many years, following the Second World War, when decolonisation accelerated, imperialism carried much negative baggage: it was a byword for racism, economic exploitation, cultural arrogance on the part of the colonisers at the expense of the ‘other’, the colonised. A large part of the post-modern movement had as its aim the rehabilitation of former colonised cultures. The Indian Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has held professorships at Harvard and at Cambridge, reported that India has had far fewer famines since the British left.

Recently, however, a more textured picture has emerged. ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies . . . India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself . . . the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements [what Lawrence James calls the “unseen empire of money”] and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a network of global communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ Niall Ferguson has shown that, in 1913, at the height of empire, 63 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1996 only 28 per cent did. In 1913 some 25 per cent of the world stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20 per cent or less of US per capita GDP; by 1997 that had fallen to 5 per cent. In 1955, near the end of the colonial period, Zambia had a GDP that was a seventh that of Great Britain; in 2003, after some forty years of independence, it was a twenty-eighth. A recent survey of forty-nine countries showed that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French civil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors’. The vast majority of the common-law counties were once under British rule. The American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset showed that countries which were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving ‘enduring democratization’ after independence than those ruled by other countries. On the other hand, the effects of colonisation were more negative where the imperialists took over countries that were already urbanised, with their own sophisticated civilisations (India, China), where the colonisers were more interested in plunder than in building new institutions. Ferguson thinks this may well explain the ‘great divergence’ by which these latter two countries were reduced from being leading civilisations – perhaps as late as the sixteenth century – to relative poverty.

Imperialism, therefore, wasn’t just conquest. It was a form of international government, of globalisation, and it did not only benefit the ruling powers. The colonialists comprised not just Cecil Rhodes, but Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones.

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