'The Case For Colonialism'

"When a more advanced society is given the opportunity to diffuse its economic, technological, administrative, and educational systems to a less advanced society that by and large welcomes its presence, the results are so obviously good compared to what would otherwise have happened in that society that the only interesting questions are how large the positive effects are... 

    "[Yet] for the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart  sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places."

~ Bruce Gilley, from his lecture 'The Case For Colonialism' [link to pdf here], and hist article 'The Case For Colonialism' [link to pdf here]

NOTES:

• link here to download lecture PDF from Researchgate
• link here to PDF of comprehensive bibliography: 'Contributions of Western Colonialism to Human Flourishing'
• link here to article 'The Case For Colonialism,' published June 2018 at the Academic Questions journal

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