I try to understand what colonialism and imperialism have done to the world. These days, it’s mostly understood as something bad, and politicians condemn it in many polished speeches, speeches that are carefully checked by a room full of lawyers, afraid as they are that their words can be misunderstood as an admittance of guild. The problem is that in the 16th and 17th centuries, the intentions might have been good, trading with the locals on whatever strange coast you found them, but the many differences in customs made it often easy for the Europeans to take advantage and slowly take over their society. The result is, hundreds of years later, that we have taken away the chance of these societies to find their own way into the future. 

I thought about this when I heard a story yesterday from someone who heard that same story from his grandfather. It goes about their forefather’s village somewhere in Indonesia, around the time that the first Dutch merchant/war ships arrived. The people on that Island were Muslims, and it was customary to give land to visitors if they wanted to stay, so they gave some land to the Dutch, and they gave more and more… He also describes that there were already vast commercial contacts with Japan, China, India, and the Arabic world. These contacts existed already for hundreds of years, and there were no monopolies; there was, more or less, free trade. This all changed in the next centuries, and part of the Dutch golden age was possible because the Dutch divided and conquered huge parts of Indonesia, and most of the trade was monopolized by the Dutch. 

There are many reasons why there are poor and wealthy countries, and the literature about it goes from left to right with no consensus in the middle. The former colonies were not as technically advanced as the European countries, but their moral systems might have been more mature because of longer, uninterrupted growth. We will never know how these former colonies would have developed if the Europeans hadn’t interfered. There was violence in ancient times and through the ages till now. The Indonesian archipelago was littered with small kingdoms that also fought with each other and tried to steal each other’s land, but we have to remember that we think with Western minds, and for centuries, we have learned, we have been told, that the people who don’t live as we do are barbarians and are less than us. We cannot trust our forefather’s stories, we also have to learn the stories from the people that already lived there. It will take a lot of effort to shake off these prejudices and see ancient and unknown civilizations with the same eyes as we do our own, not good or bad but full of people who, for more than 40000 years, already knew what was good and bad, and they often knew that better than we know that now. 

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe

I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world
Soekarno

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place