The following article in the Guardian is the best that I ever have read concerning reparation and human dignity:
Colonialism
is one of those things you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company
– at least not north of the Mediterranean. Most people feel
uncomfortable about it, and would rather pretend it didn’t happen.
In fact, that appears to be the official position. In the mainstream
narrative of international development peddled by institutions from the
World Bank to the UK’s Department of International Development, the
history of colonialism is routinely erased. According to the official
story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal
problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and
upheld the right values and policies. And because the west happens to
be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to
give “aid” to the rest – just a little something to help them along.
If colonialism is ever acknowledged, it’s to say that it was not a
crime, but rather a benefit to the colonised – a leg up the development
ladder.
But the historical record tells a very different story, and that
opens up difficult questions about another topic that Europeans prefer
to avoid: reparations. No matter how much they try, however, this topic
resurfaces over and over again. Recently, after a debate at the Oxford
Union, Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s powerful case for reparations went viral, attracting more than 3 million views on YouTube. Clearly the issue is hitting a nerve.
The reparations debate is threatening because it completely upends
the usual narrative of development. It suggests that poverty in the
global south is not a natural phenomenon, but has been actively created.
And it casts western countries in the role not of benefactors, but of
plunderers.
When it comes to the colonial legacy, some of the facts are almost too shocking to comprehend. When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in
1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100
million indigenous people. By the mid 1600s, their population was
slashed to about 3.5 million. The vast majority succumbed to foreign
disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death
after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times
over.
What were the Europeans after? Silver was a big part of it. Between
1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting
to three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early
1800s, a total of 100m kg
of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped
into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the
industrial revolution. To get a sense for the scale of this wealth,
consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in
1800 at 5% interest – the historical average – it would amount to
£110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.
Europeans slaked their need for labour in the colonies – in the mines
and on the plantations – not only by enslaving indigenous Americans but
also by shipping slaves across the Atlantic from Africa. Up to 15
million of them. In the North American colonies alone, Europeans
extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour
from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum
wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97trn – more than
the entire global GDP.
Right now, 14 Caribbean nations are in the process of suing Britain
for slavery reparations. They point out that when Britain abolished
slavery in 1834 it compensated not the slaves but rather the owners of slaves, to the tune of £20m, the equivalent of £200bn today. Perhaps they will demand reparations equivalent to this figure, but it is conservative: it reflects only the price
of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced
during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the
hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries
before 1834.
These numbers tell only a small part of the story, but they do help
us imagine the scale of the value that flowed from the Americas and
Africa into European coffers after 1492.
Then there is India. When the British seized control of India, they
completely reorganised the agricultural system, destroying traditional
subsistence practices to make way for cash crops for export to Europe.
As a result of British interventions, up to 29 million Indians died of famine during the last few decades of the 19th
century in what historian Mike Davis calls the “late Victorian
holocaust”. Laid head to foot, their corpses would stretch the length of
England 85 times over. And this happened while India was exporting an unprecedented amount of food, up to 10m tonnes per year.
British colonisers also set out to transform India into a captive
market for British goods. To do that, they had to destroy India’s
impressive indigenous industries. Before the British arrived, India
commanded 27% of the world economy, according to economist Angus Maddison. By the time they left, India’s share had been cut to just 3%.
The same thing happened to China. After the Opium Wars, when Britain
invaded China and forced open its borders to British goods on unequal
terms, China’s share of the world economy dwindled from 35% to an
all-time low of 7%.
Meanwhile, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20% to
60% during the colonial period. Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The
colonies developed Europe.
And we haven’t even begun to touch the scramble for Africa. In the
Congo, to cite just one brief example, as historian Adam Hochschild
recounts in his haunting book King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s lust for
ivory and rubber killed some 10 million Congolese
– roughly half the country’s population. The wealth gleaned from that
plunder was siphoned back to Belgium to fund beautiful stately
architecture and impressive public works, including arches and parks and
railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels
today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.
We could go on. It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes,
but it is much more than that. These snippets hint at the contours of a
world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich
a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority.
This history makes the narrative of international development seem a bit absurd, and even outright false. Frankie Boyle got it right:
“Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he
can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself.
Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his
great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your
gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”
We can’t put a price on the suffering wrought by colonialism. And
there is not enough money in the world to compensate for the damage it
inflicted. We can, however, stop talking about charity, and instead
acknowledge the debt that the west owes to the rest of the world. Even
more importantly, we can work to quash the colonial instinct whenever it
rears its ugly head, as it is doing right now in the form of land grabs, illicit financial extraction, and unfair trade deals.
Shashi Tharoor argued for a reparations payment of only £1 – a token
acknowledgement of historical fact. That might not do much to assuage
the continued suffering
of those whose countries have been ravaged by the colonial encounter.
But at least it would set the story straight, and put us on a path
towards rebalancing the global economy.
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