1602: Joris van Spilbergen of the Dutch East India Company is greeted
by the emissaries of King Vimala Dharma Suriya of Kandy as he steps
ashore at Batticaloa. Painting at the Dutch Burgher Union, Colombo.
Over the past ten years or so, my principal occupation has been writing books and articles about recent Lankan history. When I say recent, I mean the last two hundred years – the British colonial period and the post-independence era. Some of the things I wrote were written for money, but since mid-2017 the focus of my attention has been a wholly personal project: a history of St Thomas’s College, highlighting the mutual influence between events and persons in school and national history. STC was – in its origins – highly Anglocentric as well as Anglican and Anglophone, so you can see how the subject of colonialism might keep coming up.
On this subject, my own feelings have always been conflicted. As a Lankan whose mother tongue is English and whose parents and grandparents were loyal imperial subjects in their time, I have a distinct affinity for Western – indeed, English – ideas and culture. My Thomian education did not seriously challenge this orientation but rather promoted it. As a result, I feel more comfortable and confident in the Western mental universe than in any ‘indigenous’ Lankan culture, including that of my nominal ethnic group, the Sinhalese. For all that, I love my country dearly and feel myself to be as wholly Lankan as any සිංහ ලේ-sporting three-wheeler driver. Nativism and communalism have been Lanka’s downfall, where acceptance of our colonial past and institutional continuity with the late British period might have saved us.
Thus do I confess my inevitable bias, knowing full well that on this subject, no Lankan can offer an unbiased opinion.
Yet despite these woggish tendencies of mine, I have never seriously questioned, in speech or writing, the fundamental assumption that colonialism was a great evil: a terrible infliction upon our country and people, destructive of our welfare, our national resources, our culture and customs, our natural and historical heritage, our confidence and our pride. Neither have I ever before questioned the judgement of historians far better qualified than I am with regard to the deleterious effects of imperial conquest and colonial rule on the peoples who suffered them.
Imagine, then, my astonishment, when I discovered ‘The Case for Colonialism’ by the political scientist Bruce Gilley, which proposes that colonialism was actually a great benefit to the people who suffered it, and could well be a solution to the governance and equity problems facing the developing world today. The article was originally submitted in 2018 to Third World Quarterly, a magazine that ‘publishes leading research in the field of international studies, examining issues, policy and development discourses that affect the Global South.’ Following peer review, TWQ accepted the article for publication, then withdrew it after fifteen members of the editorial board resigned and the publishers, Taylor & Francis, received death threats. The article was later published on line by an American conservative advocacy group, the National Association of Scholars. The above link is to the article as it appears on their website.
I read Gilley’s article with a strong sense of recognition. Many of his observations seemed to be borne out by my own experience as a post-colonial Lankan. They also seemed to confirm what I have learnt from my research into the history of Lanka during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colonial period saw our country make considerable progress with respect to general welfare, economic growth, institutional development, governance, law and order, tolerance and equality. Signs of regress in a number of these areas began to appear almost as soon we became a free country in 1948 – and in some cases, even earlier, with the advent of the State Council and universal franchise. As I write today, Sri Lanka appears to be trembling on the brink of democratic collapse and, quite possibly, state failure.
My studies have, of course, made me well aware of the evils of colonialism: in Ceylon, these included frequent episodes of hunger and even starvation in various parts of the country under colonial mismanagement; inadequate support for public health and education; the gearing of the national economy to foreign interests and the exclusion of natives from the most profitable enterprises; the environmental ruin wrought by industrial-scale monoculture, especially in the hill country, and of course the ever-present humiliation of foreign dominion. Yet even when these are accounted for, it is hard to deny that Lanka was, generally, a happier, better-ordered and certainly more peaceful place under British rule than it has since become. During the days when the colonial era was still accessible to living memory a large fraction of the populace continued to look back on it as a kind of Paradise lost, and might well have welcomed a return to it. I’m not sure this is still true today; but then, politicians and other interested parties have pumped so much anti-colonial propaganda into the media and the education system in the last sixty or seventy years that it would be astonishing if it was.
And of course we have made progress – in some areas. Lankan educational and public-health outcomes during the early post-colonial period were among the best in Asia, and we still retain some of the social capital generated during the first forty years or so of independence. Of course, our educational outcomes were among the best in Asia even during the colonial period, but one cannot deny that there was a continued, steady improvement in public services until at least the end of the Seventies. More recently, the country has enjoyed a long period of economic diversification and growth, occasionally comparable to the boom times of the colonial era. Efforts at poverty alleviation have also proved broadly successful, and the kind of grinding poverty that was once widespread throughout rural Lanka has now largely disappeared – from Sinhalese-majority regions, at least.
Yet, even with these achievements counted, it would be hard for anyone to argue that Lankans are happier today than we were on the eve of Independence. If that sounds like a fixed match, feel free to choose any other period during the post-Colebrooke British era and compare any period in our post-colonial history with that. The worst time of all was probably the early 1930s, when Lankans suffered the effects of the Great Depression, as well as a deadly malaria epidemic, food shortages and widespread unemployment, all at once. Or perhaps you would prefer to consider 1915, the year of the country’s first ethnic pogrom, which the British mishandled quite brutally. But were those times worse than the ones in which we are living today? Was 1915 worse than 1958 or 1983? Were the tribulations of the mid-Thirties worse than the self-inflicted economic devastation of the 1950s and 1970s, or the kleptocratic state of affairs that pertains today?
I don’t have answers to these questions. I leave them as an exercise for the reader. Certainly I don’t think Gilley’s call for a return to colonialism – voluntary, this time, rather than involuntary on the part of the colonized – is feasible. But his article is well worth reading, if only because it questions a proposition that has been conventional wisdom for decades, and which would-be tyrants, kleptocrats and communalist demagogues regularly use to justify their evil actions.
