It's the chieftainship, stupid [revised]

The Government goes to Waitangi this week expecting to be challenged on water, on Ihumatao, and on Whanau Ora. That is to say, they expect tribal leaders to challenge them on the issues of tribal control of water, the tribal control of land, and the direction of government welfare payments and welfare services through Maori tribal hands.

Ever wondered why, in a world that's said to be about individuals and individual achievement, we still seem to have government support of a tribal system?

What happened?

Thousand of years ago Polynesian voyagers set out into the vast blue seas to explore and occupy the South-eastern Pacific. Several eventually discovered and settled in New Zealand. And then for just over five-hundred years, isolated from the rest of the world, they developed their own culture. They became Maori.

So in that great migration "out of Africa," New Zealand was the world's last great land-mass to be settled by human beings. And then almost the last to be brought back into the worldwide division-of-labour.

This should be something to celebrate, no? Yet if the headlines are to be believed, the descendants of these former adventurers see their own great conquest as creeping tribal capture of the government chequebook.

Tribal life

Those early New Zealanders were welcomed into the worldwide division-of-labour by whalers, sealers, timber-traders and assorted wanderers and adventurers who offered Maori things for their labour they's never seen before. And in return for tools, technology and new foods, they sold trees and flax and kumara, and crewed ships, built houses and travelled the world.


The treaty signed at Waitangi by tribal chiefs and a recently-arrived Royal Naval captain promised all these New Zealanders their own Emancipation Proclamation, and held out hope of liberating tribal serfs from tribalism. Instead, 180 years later, here we are barrelling down a path back to tribalism. Something Elizabeth Rata has called neo-tribalism: the intentional production of a neo-tribal elite who are busily "marching through the institutions," in which they play "a decisive and self-interested role in controlling shifts in the interpretation of the treaty of Waitangi." [1]

The result: the empowerment of a neo-tribal elite, in which tribal leaders have the upper hand again. And instead of the hope and optimism of those early adventurers, the predominant emotions now are shame and guilt -- shame as a necessary precursor to this tribal shakedown.

Something clearly went wrong.

One reason is the way that treaty was written: hastily. It was written in just a few days by folk wholly unqualified to write a thing that some erroneously call the country's "founding document." It's not that, and never has been. And nor does it contain enough to merit that description.

But what it does have is the material which the neotribalists have been able to exploit. One of which is the problem of 'chieftainship.'

The problem of chieftainship

The problem is this: that instead of the treaty being written to protect individual Maori, it promised instead to placate tribal chiefs. It's right there in the wording and in all the arguments today about rangatiratanga. It's understandable. After all, it was their signatures the British Colonial Office was after before allowing colonisation here to receive their imprimatur. "Alive to the record of native extinction that had come with settlement in Tasmania and the Caribbean, and was threatened in Australia," the treaty's aim was to "recognise the rights of the Maori as subject in the agreement, with rights and interests to protect." [2] But in placating those chiefs of the 1840s, instead of promoting individualism and recognising real individual rights, the document has helped promote the neotribalism of today.

It's been argued -- and I've been one of those doing the arguing -- that the Treaty of Waitangi liberates individual Maori. It should have done -- it should have treated all Maori as individuals instead of as members of a tribe. But it really does nothing of the sort except by implication.

Instead, as written, it cemented in and buttressed the tribal leadership and communal structures that already existed here -- encouraging the survival of this wreck of a system until it morphing, as it has today, into this mongrelised sub-group of pseudo-aristocracy: of Neotribal Cronyism.

The problem was there from the start. Maori in 1840 paid more attention to oral discussion than to written documents, and there's enough evidence to suggest those wily old chiefs knew what they were talking about;  what they discussed and what was read to them in 1840 was this [3]:
The treaty's preamble states the "concern to protect the chiefs and the subtribes of New Zealand" and the "desire to preserve their chieftainship." Nothing in that to promote or protect individualism. Everything to preserve "chieftainship" and to protect the chiefs in their rule.

• In Clause 1 the chiefs grant the Queen complete governorship -- kawanatanga katoa -- over these islands. Non-chiefs, i.e., individual Maori, are neither asked nor recognised. Because they are not part of this agreement. 
• In Clause 2 it's there again: protecting chiefs in their land, forests and fisheries. Specifically, protecting "the chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship [their tino rangatiratanga]" over all their various treasures -- while prohibiting their sale to anyone but the government. (Note that this does not protect or recognise full ownership or real property rights except by implication: after all, Maori of 1840 had no such concept, except perhaps for small personal possessions; no words for "owner," so difficult for a translator to find one. But they could express ownership for these small things at least -- the preposition na for example (or sometimes no), meaning 'belonging to.' [4] But this was not used. Instead, the agreement promised to protect only the unqualified exercise of chieftainship, something not available to "all the people of New Zealand," even if they do get a mention, but only to those of that status. Only chiefs. 
• Clause 3, however, does promise to "protect all the ordinary people of New Zealand," and to "give them" the "same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England." Not recognise rights, which is how it should have been written, but give them, which makes them a political gift -- the gift of those who do exercise sovereignty by this treaty: the governor and the chiefs. So by then, the damage is done -- and those with "a decisive and self-interested role in controlling shifts in the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi" are now able to interpret this not as a promise of individual rights (since earlier clauses and the preamble take precedence), but instead as the chiefs essentially holding the rights of their people in trust, with the governor "being or becoming a 'father' for the Māori people." And "this attitude has been held towards the person of the Crown down to the present day, shaping (according to the self-interested neotribalists who now interpret these things) "the continued expectations and commitments entailed in the Treaty." [2] 

It's evident from documents of the time that the Colonial Office in London had not intended to lock Maori up into that pre-existing tribal structure. Their intention was, as that last clause almost says, to recognise the same rights in every Maori as were enjoyed by all British citizens. But the treaty's wording and practice has essentially limited those rights while elevating chiefly status. It's the chieftainship, stupid. In other words: the problem is failing to properly recognise and to protect individual rights -- and instead to protect and nurture the status of those tribal leaders.

Is it any wonder today's tribal leaders favour the perpetuation of the tribal structure? Any surprise that the feudal structure continues? Or that today's neotribalists wish to continue benefiting from their feudal privileges of the past? With the government as "father" and taxpayer as today's serf ...

Poor drafting, poor treatment

Without a doubt, government and settlers often treated Maori poorly in those early days. But the biggest structural harm was the failure to properly recognise them as individuals instead of as part of a tribe. By treating all Maori as part of a collective, there were few chances offered to change this trajectory. The poor draftsmanship of this treaty is reflected in the poor treatment of Maori in those early days.

As a rights-respecting commentator says of the treatment of native Americans in the United States of America, "it could have been done in a more rational way, a much more rights-respecting way, and in a way that would have led to a lot less violence at the end of the day." (Later quotes are from this same source.) It could have been done here in a way that recognised Maori as individuals, with individual lives, rights and choices. But for the most part, it didn't.

Yes, colonisation here was far less violent here than in Australia, or in the Americas. And thank goodness for that: It was still not entirely peaceful, but in the Americas and Australia it was savage -- particularly if you think of how the British treated the Aboriginals in Tasmania, or the Spaniards treated the natives of South America. And in the case of America itself, "the American government made treaties with the Indians and then reneged on them whenever it was convenient to do so." [5]

Not so much here, at least. The treaty signed here was offered with the best of intentions, but the poorest of drafting. It barely lived up to the intention, and the neotribalists now exploit the drafting.

But the biggest mistake, the biggest ongoing tragedy -- there, as here -- is that the respective governments did not treat either Indians or Maori as individuals possessing rights. They treated them instead just as members of a tribe. Of a collective. Not as individuals with their own individual rights demanding recognition and protection, but as members of a tribe whose chief no longer held the power fo life and death, but still held the power of property, and of making choices for them all.

And therefore [in the United States] all the deals, all the negotiations, were between the U.S. Government and a tribe -- a tribe who was fundamentally a collectivistic unit that was oppressing its individual members. And what the American government in my view should have done was in a sense annex the Indians into America, recognised their innate individual rights (the fact that every Indian like every human being on the planet has individual rights), protected those individual rights under the law, divvied up the property of the tribe among individuals (let American Indians own their own land, not just give it and have the tribes own reservations; the whole idea of reservations was a horrific idea).  They should have basically integrated Indians into American society: by treating them as individuals, by endorsing individualism among the Indians. And then, if the Indians then wanted to get together and live in a commune, then so be it.  But the American government's position should have been: "We are dealing with you as individuals. Here is your land; here is John Smith's land; here is somebody else's land... If you want to now unite those lands and do some collective-type stuff then that's your problem. But here's the benchmark: 'We're a country of individuals. That's the principle'."  And instead, they didn't do that. There was a lot of racism and there was a lot of just treating them as a collective and, as a consequence, slaughtering whole villages and so on.  Now, that is not to say that there weren't a lot of American Indians (and a lot of indigenous people around the Americas) who were very violent and needed to be dealt with violently. I'm not criticizing violence when it was motivated by self-defense.     I am however criticizing violence when it was not necessary for the defense of the European immigrants or settlers, and there was basically an attempt just to you know annihilate certain indigenous peoples.  And again that happened more in Latin America than it did in the United States America. But it happened here as well. So you know it's a tragic part of history and to some extent inevitable because it seems to happen whenever a kind of a civilization encounters barbaric tribes, barbaric peoples, that inevitably lands up in a physical violent struggle.     I think that particularly in the United States of America it could have been done in a more rational way, a much more rights-respecting way, and in a way that would have led to a lot less violence at the end of the day. [5]

Same here.

The tragedy is that in the United States, when the idea of individualism was in its ascendancy, Indians were treated as tribal because they were considered less than human. The results were often brutal. Yet as ideas changed, and Britons began to realise that non-Britons were human too -- as the anti-slavery movement won its battles and organisations like the Aboriginal Protection Society became influential -- by then the idea of individualism itself had become less powerful, and the impulse instead was to protect indigenous populations in their tribal structures. To protect them not as individuals but (in today's common phrase) as "members of their tribal community." The result was less immediate harm, but the cause of much long-term damage -- most especially the perpetuation of the tribal structure.

Could it all have been different? Yes. Yes, of course it could. But shaming today's New Zealanders by the actions of people in the past is not primarily about history -- the shaming of New Zealanders today is intended simply to precede and encourage their ongoing shakedown tomorrow. That's the effect of today's neotribalism: to put taxpayers on the hook for the perpetuation of this chiefly privilege.

In this new postmodern neo-tribal age, history doesn't provide lessons from the past so much as an arsenal full of weapons. The neotribalists, and their enablers, are happy to pick them up and use them.

NOTES: 
1. Elizabeth Rata, '‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi,' Sites (December 2005)
2. James Heartfield, The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 (London, 2011) p. 126
3. Te Tiriti: Translation of the te reo Māori text by Hugh Kawharu
4. Raymond Firth, Economics of the New Zealand Maori (Wellington 1972), pp. 338-366 passim
5. Yaron Brook, 'Q: To what extent was the European treatment of the indigenous peoples of America immoral?' www. Peikoff.Com (3 August 2015)

UPDATE:
Peter Winsley has a different view, arguing that "Article Two transfers Magna Carta and English common law property rights to Māori. "

These tino rangitaranga rights over land and other properties (taonga) were given explicitly to individuals and whanau as well as chiefs and tribes...
Treaty of Waitangi settlements have so far focused on iwi or hapu on the assumption that these collectives will act for all their members. What is lost sight of is that individuals are specifically mentioned in Treaty Article Two, yet Treaty settlements have not been made to individuals. In a future post, this issue will be discussed....

Mike Moore, 1949-2020

On Labour: "It was Nye Bevan ... who said that Labour used to be the cream of the working class. Now it is an intellectual spittoon for the middle class."
~ from his valedictory speech, 1999

"We're full now of people with [an] upper-class nature, [from] private schools, who now lecture to us [working-class people] about what we should do. I find that very funny."
    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

"How many of those people on Country Calendar do you think vote Labour now? ... Because we’re not seen to be on the side of those who are strivers. I do think we’ve got trouble.”

    ~ from the interview for The Ninth Floor

On leaving parliament: "My friends wanted the best for me, and my enemies wanted to see me go. For once, I was able to please everyone. At last, I enjoyed the total support of my party."

On foreign investment: "The central purpose [of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment] is to ensure that foreign investors are not the subject of discriminatory or xenophobic behaviour on the part of governments in the host country... This is not a new wave of colonisation or the rise of corporatist world government. The Agreement is designed to PROTECT and ENCOURAGE foreign investment because it is such investment that has helped fuel global economic growth and the increasing globalisation of wealth... The MAI will be of the greatest long-term benefit to developing nations."

    ~ from his 1997 recommendation on the agreement to the Labour caucus 

On globalisation: "When the Berlin wall came down, when Nelson Mandela was freed, and when freedom has flourished elsewhere, the world celebrated. We celebrated the universal values of political and economic freedom. No one shouted, cursed and swore about the evils of globalization or common values then."

    ~ from a 2000 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On poverty: "Poor countries need to grow their way out of poverty. Trade is the key engine for growth... Open markets can play an important role in lifting billions of people out of abject poverty...

    "Liberalisation works. The multilateral trading system works. The last 50 years have seen unparalleled prosperity and growth and more has been done to address poverty in these last 50 years than in the previous 500."
    ~ from a 2001 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On freedom: "The more closed the economy, the more corrupt the practices.... We have learnt that freedom works, and as it grows, so do people’s living standards... "
    ~ from a 2002 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On peace and free trade: "Internationalism and globalisation will be to the 21st Century what Nationalism was to the 20th Century. Thus mankind has learnt the most profound lessons of this century from the great depression and the second world war."

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On Keynesianism: “The lesson of the last 25 years tells us that no individual country can anymore successfully prime an economic pump, even Mitterand discovered this in the 80s when, by priming the French pump, all he did was flood his country with imports from Italy and from Germany. He reversed that position."

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On protectionism: "The 1987 stock market crash was greater and deeper than the Wall Street crash of the 20s. But, the world did not plunge into lasting depressions. Leaders nerves held, there wasn’t an orgy of protectionism and tariff increases which exacerbated the 20s crash... We got through it, we have learnt.”

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On global institutions: "The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have unearned reputations born of the Cold War of being anti-poor, anti-developing countries. The opposite should be the truth. [But] no one believes that any more, except a few deranged misfits on the edges of obscure universities, people who tuck their shirts into their underpants, the remnants of pressure groups and a few geriatrics who claim that Marxism, like Christianity, has not been tried yet.”

    ~ from his 1998 book A Brief History of the Future: Citizenship of the Millennium

On betrayal: "In the end, it's the silence of your friends you remember, not the misdeeds of those who dislike you."

    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

On Moore: "Mike Moore was like the opposite of L&P: world-famous, just not in New Zealand."

    ~ attributed to Jane Clifton

Here's John Lennon:

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Holiday reading

All set for a summer of sound reading for the present project. You could just about write a book with all this at your fingertips ...

Enjoy your holidays!

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Bright Futures Depend on Radical Entrepreneurs, not Radical Politicians

The legacy of William Soltau Davidson's first profitable frozen meat shipment transformed
New Zealand more radically than anything any radical politician ever did.

Guest poster Maciek Chawolski reminds us that letting market chaos reign makes us and future generations richer and better off beyond our dreams.

Recently, a colleague disparaged my reliance on "market magic” over his activist preference to use the government and its tax power to impose changes to technology and society. He berated me for believing that entrepreneurs professionals are (and should be) at the forefront of changes that make lives better for fellow citizens. He derisively repeated the joke, how many capitalists does it take to change a light bulb None. If the government would just leave it alone, it would screw itself in.

What he fails to see is all the activity that happens when government does leave things alone: which is all the things that make us and future generations richer.

Market Chaos

Here is a little thought experiment to support my views: Imagine a hot July day in 1900. You are standing on a street corner in Auckland looking at horse manure-covered streets while flies are buzzing around your head and spreading various diseases. You are 60 years old, and you were born in 1840 in Western Europe to a father who was born in 1810. All your life, you lived in pre-modern, agrarian, and feudal societies. The technologies that surround you are primitive. The question is: What would have been the smartest and fastest way to get the society from 1900 to 2020 levels?

New Zealand's "activist" Liberal Government of the 1890s to 1900s saw it as passing legislation -- passing labour laws, legalising unions, raising taxes and tariffs. Yet it was not these things that transformed the country in just over a century: it was the "unplanned chaos" of self-interested tinkerers and dreamers in the marketplace.

Consider how hard it would have been in 1900 to decide on the best future technologies and trajectories to get there. Back then, Auckland had only just welcomed its first car, a one-cylinder Star (it was "not anticipated that 'the fastest kind of motor car' will become common in the city"), and a case of plague is diagnosed. The first telegraph cable linking New Zealand to the world had only been installed two decades earlier, by the Eastern Extension Australia and China Telegraph Company, and the first trams of the Kelburn and Karori Tramway Company and Auckland Electric Tram Company began opening up city suburbs two years later. The first controlled little puddle jump flight in the country was four years out. Overseas, a tractor would be invented in 1904. Penicillin would happen in 1928. Something as simple as a shipping container would wait until 1956. The structure of atoms and DNA were still mysteries. (Rutherford would not "split the atom" until 1909.) There would be many decades until widespread water fluoridation. It would take the imaginations of many insightful people to build the future.

Fast-forward to 2020, and let’s repeat the same exercise. You are standing on that same street corner in Auckland with your smartphone and watching Uber and Amazon delivery trucks. You just checked on your house webcam because someone knocked on your door. A few minutes earlier, you spoke with your daughter who is studying in Europe ...

We can continue indefinitely listing the conveniences of our modern civilisation. If the trend continues, and at a vastly accelerated pace, another 120 years out, in 2140, our descendants will be living stepped-up lives very much different than the distance between 1900 and 2020. The same question stands: “what is the smartest and fastest way between 2020 and 2140 amazing future?”

When comparing 1900 to 2020, we recognise the enormity of revolutionary and transformative changes to everything around us that has gotten us here. For example, the heart treatments, kidney transplants, smartphones, modern aeroplanes, and inexhaustible entertainment options that are common today required numerous inventions over many decades to eventually enable today’s products and services. These inventions happened mostly by happenstance and a great deal of imagination—not as a result of conscious planning. It would have been a fantasy for someone in 1900 to draw a plan for the smartphone market release in 2007 and decide what should have been done in each decade between then and now and by whom to come up with a smartphone.

The Effects of Economic Freedom

Still not sure? Thirty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germany are still different. They are the same people, but the West has been much richer and better off due to economic freedoms.

Even technology predictions about short-term events are rarely accurate. Just ask people who recently shorted the Tesla stock waiting for it to collapse because they doubted the technology readiness. In late October, they must have felt silly when Tesla stock price shot up from $254 to $328 per share. Why do we expect an activist or a government planner to be more successful than people betting their own money?

The problem with my colleague is that he does not recognise how technologically primitive our world will be to those in 2140. He does not have skin the game. He is not investing his money and does not consider trade-offs and alternatives. His blind spot is that while the single-technology focus may accelerate it, it is impossible to correctly optimise the economy with thousands of products and services over even a few years.

Notice how many economic activities, investments, and trials happen out there. These are people who use their resources or for which they are responsible to investors at their risk. Some win, some fail—but they all learn. The "chaos" out there is entrepreneurs trying, and learning, and often succeeding -- sometimes spectacularly! However, it is unacceptable when the government taxes us so that unspecialised activists with no accountability decide which technologies should be funded. These people waste money on rear-view mirror ideas instead of building the future. They have good intentions and itch to do “something,” but the something they do is to destroy wealth.

In 2020, as was the case in 1900, there will be no virtual signposts for technologies to focus on, but there will be thousands of haphazard, "chaotic" and necessary discoveries that will happen in the meantime. From the perspective of 2140, what should professionals in 2020 be doing? Using their own (or investor) resources and relying on the chaos and unpredictability of the market to take us there. If we let activists take our money, we will end up much poorer and reach 2140 in 2240 instead.

Society is better off with visionaries and dreamers using their money to test and try whatever they fancy without any country plan whatsoever. Let the market chaos reign to make us and future generations richer and better off beyond our wildest dreams.

                                                                    * * * * *

 

Maciek Chwalowski is a Washington, DC-based international business consultant focused on improving performance outcomes. He is an adventurer and a world-traveller (126 countries visited). This post first appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education blog. It has been contextualised for New Zealand.

The case for ‘co-governance’ ...

"The case for ‘co-governance’ between the government and iwi is justified according to cultural recognition and social justice beliefs. However, that is to make a fundamental error, one that ignores the dangers of including ethnicity into the political arrangements of a democratic nation... there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two sociopolitical systems...
    "From the 1980s, the rather benign idea of recognising Maori culture in the wider society became a political biculturalism that has enabled a small but extremely influential group of retribalists to capture the moral high ground of social justice advocacy – but in their own interests.
    "(It shouldn’t be forgotten that the numbers of Maori in poverty has actually grown during the bicultural decades.) ...
    "Throughout these four decades of biculturalism the retribalists sit easily, even smugly, on the side of the righteous. They use a history, written by the Waitangi Tribunal in the interests of the submitters, to claim the inheritance of the past. The Treaty is the document of that inheritance.
    "The justification for this elite’s power is its claim to represent a tribal people – so such a people must be created and maintained – hence the aggressive retribalisation that we have seen in recent years ... It is no longer enough to be Maori; one must be tribal Maori...
    "One of the benefits of colonisation, and there are a number, is the destruction of tribalism. For slaves and lower caste people it was liberation. Of course the chiefly caste did not agree and today we see the resurgence of those who would be their inheritors. The new elite is a self-proclaimed aristocracy justifying their ambition in romantic appeals to an Arcadian past.
    "Tribalism must be destroyed for democracy to exist... The history of progress in the world is the history of detribalisation and the race or ethnic politics that goes with tribalised societies...
    "So the question for us is not why is the iwi elite using retribal strategies to gain increasing political power and economic wealth – any emerging elite that chances upon a direct and easy means to get its way will take it. The intriguing question is how has a population with 161 years of democracy under its belt allowed this to happen."
    ~ Dr. Elizabeth Rata, from her 2013 op-ed 'Democracy and Tribalism'
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Q: Who first discovered New Zealand?

"[In her book Two Worlds, Anne Salmond] claims that the Dutch were not the first to have discovered New Zealand. In one sense this is true. Polynesians had arrived long before Tasman and had what would be more correctly described as 'found' it. But whether 'found' or 'discovered,' there was a difference.
    "First, Europeans discovered the Maori; but the Maori did not find Europe, until the English showed it to them. Second, even if one speaks of a Polynesian discovery of New Zealand and supposes that the earliest navigators found their way back to where they had come from in order to bring in women and supplies, this knowledge was lost... long before Tasman's arrival.
    "The reason why one cannot say that they had discovered it is that they had no universal schema by which to describe and locate their discovery. The islands they had stumbled upon were, therefore, literally, found, but not discovered.
    "One might imagine that it is a mere quibble whether one calls the Polynesian landfalls a 'find' or a 'discovery.' But it is far from a mere quibble when one wants to understand the differences in the attitudes of the finders and of the discoverers. To the former this was a once-off experience, which did not alter their world-picture or their understanding of themselves; to the latter it was further proof that the earth was round, that its islands or continents were not yet all known but soon would be, and it was an exercise in seamanship, astronomy and geography because they were able to return to Europe and tell others about it. 'To discover' implies that one is able to put one's find on the map.
    "It is true that the Polynesian landings were an addition to knowledge; but a very small and very locally limited addition. The Tasman sightings filled in lacunae in a vast general picture of the world, which had nothing much to do with the strictly local cultural conditions in the Netherlands which had prompted Tasman to sail. Tasman enlarged the world and did not just add one more chant or ritual dance to the self-legitimising features of his own culture. He transcended it.
    "All the same, there is a telling contrast which Salmond not so much as mentions. Polynesian sailors were incredibly intrepid because they were prepared to sail into the unknown. European sailors were never intrepid. They hugged the coastlines and sailed out into the Atlantic only when they thought they 'knew' what they were up to. When Columbus' discovery, for example, did not live up to his bookish expectations, he refused to believe his eyes. Polynesian sailors, unhampered by books, were a great deal more enterprising and receptive of novelty. Salmond wipes out the differences and impoverishes the past."

~ Peter Munz, from his review 'The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress'
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'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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