Some pros and cons of colonialism
To be fair, our life under the British was not harsh, unlike the Japanese military occupation of World War II. Malaya was developing, although Britain’s needs and wishes were paramount. There were educational and employment opportunities. The hard work and the company paid off. I received an excellent education, superior to what my children and their children received in post-war Australia.
What bothered was that atmospheric overlap of not being politically free and being socially and culturally denigrated. We felt that being poorly governed by our own people was preferable to being offered a better government under foreign lords. That surely is a very human attribute. No one likes to have their country under foreign control and brainwashed. We also knew very well that Nehru (the man who became the first prime minister of independent India) had been imprisoned simply for seeking the independence of the people from him. He was not a terrorist.
At the end of World War II, we Malays were told that it would be 25 years before we were ready to rule ourselves. Instead, the British left after about nine years. They were not expelled like the Dutch, French and other European ‘powers’. However, Hong Kong was denied proper exposure to Western democratic structures almost to the date of its handover to China in the 1990s.
A terrible legacy of colonialism was the destruction of long-lasting and viable local industries, especially in India and Egypt. That’s what Nehru said. These were replaced by companies that imported British manufactured goods, as well as supplied the materials that Britain needed; especially opium, which was carefully fed to the people of China. Another terrible legacy of European colonialism: new nations created by the colonizers, in Asia and Africa in particular, drawing lines on the map to achieve a balance of power between them or to cause conflicts between local tribes forever. Look at Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The local tribes were divided in this process, resulting in perennial wars between these artificial nations; while nations typically reflect the integrity of tribes bound by blood, culture, and geography.
History shows that the peoples of Asia had been governing themselves well long before the Europeans; that 500 years ago the Chinese people were the most technologically advanced people in the world; that the Indians had been the greatest traders in the world, extracting vast quantities of gold from the Roman Empire for the finest cloth; that village-level democracy in India was commonplace more than 1,000 years ago; that philosophy and mathematics were so advanced in Asia that Europe was able to acquire them through the Arabs and the Moors; that urban planning in the Indus Valley Civilization of more than 2000 years ago set the standard for more recent cities in other parts of the world; and that Persia, India, and China had been producing high-quality art centuries before other cultures could.
However, colonial-era racism was not as brutal and anti-Christian as it is said to have been practiced in the US until relatively recent times. Today in Singapore, while a few locals remain that recall the arrogance of the European colonizers, there are many white people who work without any special benefits. In my country of birth (now Malaysia and Singapore), multi-ethnic populations are governed by their own leaders. Despite some serious complaints about the affirmative action policy favoring Malaysian Malays being maintained well past its expiration date, there is social and cultural integration, with publicly evident mutual community respect. In fact, a unified people can be achieved from ethnocultural diversity, without one being subservient to the other.
In this successful government of the former colonial territories, an essential prop is a valuable heritage of Great Britain: a very valuable concept of justice, law and order; as in Australia, more law than justice. (Note QC Geoffrey Robertson’s ‘The Justice Game’.) The other great benefit of British colonialism is the (now universal) English language, the language of the Malaysian courts as well. A thousand years from now, archaeologists may begin to believe that the Malay Peninsula had also been home to the English.
Therefore, there were benefits of some value to colonialism. It is easier to recognize this in today’s environment of relative freedom. Naturally, since change is inevitable, the structures and practices of inherited Western democracy began to change to follow traditional governance values, reflecting the communalism of Asian cultures. However, as long as the former colonial territories remain capitalist in this revised framework of governance, the neo-colonizers of the mainstream West will no doubt continue to agree.
Freedom can never be absolute.