Under Foreign Flags: The glories and agonies of colonialism

The question of colonialism has come up again: How did it fare? What were its advantages and disadvantages? And is there a role for it in the future, or now?

The European colonial empires endured half a millennium, embraced a huge variety of forms, and produced results ranging from excellent to disastrous. At the better end of the spectrum were colonies in which the indigenous inhabitants were effectively replaced and the territory became a racial and cultural clone of the mother country. Such were the first, the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic colonies of Madeira, the Canaries, and the Azores. Iberian colonies in Central and South America, all of which got independence early in the 19th century (Cuba excepted), have had mixed fortunes. Brazil, the best endowed by nature, with a mixed-race population second only in variety to the United States, has been disappointing its admirers and boosters for over a century. Argentina, the world's eighth richest country in the 1930s, was wrecked by Peronism and has been economically and politically unstable for half a century. Cuba, once the second richest in Latin America as a U.S. appendage, is now, after 40 years of Communism, the poorest. The richest Latino state today is Chile, thanks to the Pinochet dictatorship, which followed Chicago-school economic policies, and itself reflects the substantial German, French, Scots, and English elements in the population. A separate group is formed by black former slave colonies, mainly British, in the Caribbean-Atlantic area. The most successful is Bermuda, with a 50 percent white, 50 percent non- white mix; also successful are Trinidad, with a large Indian element, which produced the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature, V. S. Naipaul, and black tourist centers like the Bahamas and Barbados.

The most successful colonies in the Americas were the Thirteen States set up by Britain from the early 17th century, which achieved independence as the United States in the 1780s. They enjoyed a measure of constitutional self-government and economic freedom from the start, but their subsequent enormous wealth was the result of three factors: 1) access to almost unlimited quantities of good land on easy terms; 2) a free-market legal structure created by the outstanding early-19th- century chief justice John Marshall; and 3) unlimited immigration until the second decade of the 20th century. But the roots of all three were planted in the colonial period. Moreover, the U.S.A. was only the outstanding example of a group of white, English-speaking colonies which include Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. All four have developed successful democracies and retain the rule of law, and all are high on the list of the world's richest states. South Africa might have joined this group, and indeed developed the world's most advanced mining industry. But it attracted more immigrants from black Africa than from white Europe, and now hovers uneasily between the First and Third worlds, with a sinking currency and an uncertain future.

In Asia, colonies divide into three groups. First are the Siberian and Central Asian colonies of Russia, acquired from the 16th century onwards. These must be judged failures, from an economic, constitutional, and cultural point of view. Joined to them is the Chinese colony of Tibet, another failure and a tragedy too. In all, natural resources have been inefficiently extracted or squandered, and permanent ecological damage inflicted on an enormous scale.

A second group constituted the British Indian empire, into which Portuguese, Dutch, and French enclaves in the Indian subcontinent (Pondicherry, Goa, etc.) were incorporated. Broken up, unwisely, in 1947-8, this group has met mixed fortunes. Moslem Pakistan split again into Pakistan proper and Bangladesh, and both remain extremely poor and politically fragile. Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) has seemingly insuperable racial problems, and Burma has reverted to its pre-colonial past as a military despotism. On the other hand, India, now with over a billion inhabitants, has managed to preserve its British inheritance as the world's largest democracy, where the rule of law is still upheld. China, which was an economic (not a political) colony of the European powers, plus the United States, in the 19th century, lacks both democracy and the rule of law, but currently has the world's largest growth rate. But this is a temporary or transient phase, likely to end either in democratization or economic recession. The likelihood is that, by the end of the 21st century, India will be the larger power, both economically and demographically.

There is a third group of states, effectively created from nothing by the colonizing process. The outstanding examples are Singapore and Hong Kong, which suggest that Chinese communities can prosper exceedingly when they enjoy the rule of law and economic freedom (Hong Kong's future now being subsumed in that of China). Their example has been followed successfully by South Korea (once a Japanese colony) and, to a lesser degree, by the former Dutch and British colonies of Southeast Asia, led by Indonesia and Malaysia, the former American colony of the Philippines, and Thailand, a British economic colony. The former French colony of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) is slowly emerging from a disastrous war with growing success, thanks to the colonial infrastructure. But it is still true that Asians flourish better as immigrants than as natives. Witness the success of the Chinese in Canada, and the Vietnamese and South Koreans in the United States.