How should we think about Queen Elizabeth and past empires?

Mark Milke, The Western Standard, September 24, 2022

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II after 70 years on the throne and as head of state for the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other nations with historic ties to Great Britain, the late monarch was generally celebrated for her service to her country and those of others.

However, predictable anti-colonial sentiment arose and was tagged to Elizabeth II. Some of it was vitriolic.

Professor Uju Anya, of Carnegie Mellon University, tweeted she wished the Queen “excruciating” pain in dying. The linguist academic declared Great Britain’s legacy to be that of a “a thieving, raping, genocidal empire.”

One South African writer, Sipho Hlongwane, argued while colonialism was history in the West, “in our countries, it is now” — in other words, poor outcomes today are the fault of past colonialists today.

Time magazine journalist Anisha Kohli argued, “The legacy of colonization has been well documented and often included slavery and the forced movement of people, brutal suppression, and the extraction of resources at the expense of local economies.”

The widely watched funeral for the late monarch might temporarily dampen such extreme sentiments, but the simplistic claims will persist because they originate in a lack of informed history and perspective. It is overdue to dissect such claims because they often show up in academia, the media, politics, and of course on social media. It is useful to think through the charges because it gets to the heart of how we should think about history and the empires, nations, and leaders therein.

Not all empires were created alike

Elizabeth was, obviously, a figurehead without political power for the United Kingdom and other nations that still retain a link to the British monarchy. She had no say over past British imperial policy. As an empire, the British empire was nearly extinct anyway by the time she was crowned in 1952.

Regardless of her non-responsibility for the British Empire, the reflexive mistake critics of past empires make is the same one extreme patriots often make about their own “tribe” — “my country, right or wrong!” except in reverse: Any foreigner and their kin who ever ruled over “my” nation must have been wholly harmful. There’s not much nuance there.

It's folly and simplistic to look back at the British empire and pronounce all its activities undesirable at best, or genocidal at worse, or the opposite — all benign. That sentiment skips over differences between empires and selected beneficial reforms within some empires. Such distinctions matter.

The German Nazis and the Soviet Empire were indeed properly described as genocidal, including against their own peoples, i.e., the Holocaust and Holodomor respectively.

Selected other empires in history such as the French, Spanish or Portuguese empires can best be described as anything but a light touch. All three indeed practiced what is best described as “extraction imperialism.” Think of Spanish colonialists and the pursuit of gold as one example.

Other empires in history have promoted lousy economic systems. The French empire was mercantilist and protectionist which slowed growth in its colonies and also made corruption more and not less likely. (The more the state is involved in economic decision-making, the more avenues exist for corruption.)

Such practices were in contrast to the mostly free-trading British version over the centuries. The pro-capitalist policies of the latter are why many countries in the Anglosphere or under British rule thrived in comparison when others failed.

Here, consider the work of the late British economist Angus Maddison who traced the development of world economies since AD 1000. The short version of Maddison's OECD-published findings is the wider adoption of free trade (one aspect of Adam Smith’s economic thinking and the Anglosphere’s capitalism) was first beneficial to Western Europe, then the Americas and, more recently in the postwar world, East Asia.

To wit, while the British are occasionally accused of having prospered from Spanish-style extraction colonialism — Maddison himself did not deny some colonial exploitation — he did argue “oversimplified explanations … exaggerate the role of British commercial policy” in nations such as India, for example.

More broadly, Maddison’s work found the British and territories they ruled generally prospered due to institutional reforms such as the rule of law, independent courts, free trade and also investments in infrastructure (India's railways, for example) and education. It's why during the colonial heyday, per-capita income rose in India, and the rest of Asia (minus China) and Africa in real terms, by more than one-quarter between 1870 and 1913, until the First World War ended such economic growth for everyone.

Some empires — the British — changed the world for the better

Empires are made up of men and women who are imperfect, by definition. Thus, no one should be surprised then an imperial power like Great Britain, didn’t always “get it right.”

What should be added to our collective memory on such matters is whether such empires or the people within them left a generally free, more flourishing world in their wake.

Here, consider a consequential, positive aspect to past British imperialism: That empire’s embrace of abolitionism of slavery as state policy, first at home in the early 19th century and then across its colonies as of 1833 and then anywhere its navy encountered the scourge of human trafficking on the high seas for the rest of that century.

Also, consider what royal commentator Hilary Fordwich pointed out recently to CNN’s Don Lemon, who asked her why the British and King Charles are not paying reparations for slavery? Fordwich said one should ask why modern-day African leaders don’t pose that question to themselves, given their ancestors started the “supply chain” of slavery and continued doing so, while 2,000 British naval men died in British efforts to stamp out slavery worldwide.

This imperial virtue is why writers such TIME’s Anisha Kohli are wrong to blame past empires for slavery as if they invented the practice instead of crediting the British in particular for leading the charge against slavery because slavery was mostly assumed “normal” worldwide in much of human history. (There were some exceptions including among the Stoics and also early Christians.) No empire until the British version, actively suppressed the trade in human flesh. And they often did so over the objections of indigenous leaders in traditional societies in Africa, or in pre-Confederation Canada.

What’s remarkable then, is the exception to the historical rule — the British abolitionist efforts, and not the rule itself — slavery. 

Indigenous rulers are not necessarily any better or worse than foreigners.

Which leads to another failed problem of analysis for reflexive anti-colonial critics: The tendency of tribalists to assume at-home rule is always best.

Not always.

The late University of Chicago philosophy professor, Allan Bloom, wrote in 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind, of how he often asked his students if they had been a British administrator in India, if they too would have banned the Indian practice of suttee — burning widows on their husband’s funeral pyres. Bloom recounted how students would answer the British should never have been in India in the first place. But that’s avoiding the issue. Bloom’s question implicitly included this observation: Not every detestable local practice, be it slavery or wife-burning, was rooted out by domestic leaders. On occasion, it was foreigners.

Further example: In late 18th-century Germany it was Napoleon who, in the German territories controlled by the French, removed anti-Jewish laws on the books, much to the chagrin of the local anti-Semites.

None of this is an argument for restarting imperialism or defending foreign rule in general, but to note we should refrain from dismissing all such empires such as those of the British as wholly evil or wholly good. On this point, the notion of national self-determination in isolation — a popular sentiment since Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points — can lead us down the garden path of thinking the ideal country in history or now is one where all matters are decided within one’s borders, with zero foreign influence.

But if you were Jewish in Germany in the 1930s, a minority Tutsi in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, an Indian woman whose husband died or an Untouchable before the British arrived on the subcontinent, or a slave in the Confederacy before the Union Army arrived, your domestic leaders were hardly your optimal rulers.

Further, any ruler can be considered “foreign” to one’s tribe depending on how narrowly one defines one’s allegiance and on what basis. Abraham Lincoln was an interfering northern foreigner from the perspective of the slave-holding South, but it was the Union and its leaders and military forces who had the moral high ground, not the southern locals fighting to retain slavery.

A free flourishing country should be the goal — and sometimes that requires outside help.

Moreover, the Wilson fantasy of complete national self-determination has always been problematic because any nation-state can break down into ever-smaller “bits” based on endless assertions to be distinct based on ethnicity, language, ethnicity, or race. Thus, the Basque region wants out of Spain, Quebec separatist wants out of Canada, some Scots would like to break up the United Kingdom and so forth.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with any cohort wanting independence. In reality, once that process starts, there’s no guarantee it will end peacefully or stop dividing. In Czechoslovakia in 1993, the Czechs and Slovaks split in what was called a “velvet” divorce and did so amicably. Other nation-states — Yugoslavia being the prime example —  busted up with a civil war and accompanying bloodshed.

To be sure, to reach a free, flourishing state may involve throwing off repressive rulers. The Americans did so in 1776 when they ejected King George III, who taxed American colonialists, but was not prepared to grant representation.

It may also involve overthrowing one’s own leader with the help of outsiders. This occurred when Allied forces won the war against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan and by so doing de facto overthrew the tyrant Hitler and the Imperial Japanese imperial war machine of the 1930s. Today, freedom in South Korea and Taiwan depends on American troops in the former since the Korean War and guarantees to the latter,. Without them, South Koreans might well have been ruled by the North Korean family tyranny at any point since the 1950s and Taiwan might long ago have been conquered by China.

The point: One’s own ethnic or national kin are not always preferable to foreigners so good/evil divides on that basis are simplistic. The more important project for any people is thus to figure out how to be free and flourish. That should be the goal, not merely exchanging foreign rule for an at-home domestic despot or for civil disorder.

Hong Kong: A colonial success story

The best example of the need for nuance and modesty when judging history is Hong Kong. It was governed by the British between 1841 and 1997. The territory’s rise during its colonial era is now legendary and well-known, but one statistical example makes the point. In 1950, Hong Kong’s per person GDP in constant dollars was $4,082 — lower than that of the UK at $11,061. However, by 1997 when Great Britain handed the territory back to China, per person GDP in Hong Kong stood at $33,386 — higher than the $29,260 for Great Britain — and almost eight times the $4,311 figure for China that year.

Should the British imperial presence in history be defended in select instances?

I was in Hong Kong in 2013 on business for a think tank to discuss economic freedom and whether it would stay strong in the territory. While there, I met multiple politicians, civil servants, and business people. Almost to a person, they said with Beijing already eroding the Hong Kong success story, there were three things they wanted to keep from the British colonial era: The rule of law including the British legal code, anti-corruption efforts and capitalism. Nine years later such hopes have been dashed.

Hong Kong is a good example of what happens when the reality of a repressive regime/empire arises, when a population is faced with a domestic, indigenous leader such as Xi Jinping who elevates a narrow nationalism over useful practices that allow for flourishing freedoms be they economic or personal liberties, now greatly restricted and repressed in China-ruled Hong Kong.

Unlike some Western academics who pour acid on those ideas and individuals in the Anglosphere who contributed to, or represent human freedom and flourishing over the last several centuries — perfection is not the proper standard, progress in freedom and flourishing is the ideal.

Hong Kongers grasp the value of their British inheritance. They do so precisely because Beijing’s rulers are antithetical to the interests and chosen values of Hong Kongers. It's why in 2019 when Hong Kong protesters rallied against even more interference from Beijing. They raised a British flag.

It's why another demonstrator scribbled Winston Churchill’s famous words of defiance on a protest poster, “We shall never surrender.” It is why after the death of Queen Elizabeth, Hong Kongers laid flowers outside the British consulate in what was described by the BBC as “perhaps the biggest display of affection for the late monarch seen outside the UK.”

In an age of reflexive anti-colonialism, one can be true to one’s heritage and yet adopt what’s valuable — freedom — and what works, including institutions such as the rule of law and independent courts, no matter who initially brought such practices to one’s ancestral homeland.

Or expressed another way: It is possible to take what’s best from foreigners, and leave the rest.

Mark Milke is the executive director of The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. His newest book is The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilization. @milkemark Image courtesy of Quora.