The answer, which is surely obvious to a person of your intellect, is that people wish to disentangle themselves from the institutions which gave rise to colonialism in the first place and have perpetuated it in indirect fashion, eg by the reification of private property and the legal infrastructure surrounding its disposition.
That sounds bananas to me, and I've literally never met a Bangladeshi (at least one whose ever lived in Bangladesh) express a view like that. The institutions and laws we inherited from the British are one of the few functioning parts of Bangladesh. When my parents were growing up, school instruction was still in English. That's proven to be a huge leg up in the global economy. And culturally, my mom still cherishes the education she received in classic American, British, and Russian literature.
What would you be left with if you "disentangled" Bangladesh from the "institutions" and "legal infrastructure" of British colonialism? What's left wouldn't be a society fit for modern people. And what's so good about what was there before the British, anyway? The Mughals were colonizers too. I have a Muslim last name despite being born thousands of miles away from the Middle East. How far back do we have to go?
> Decolonization, as we call it, is rather a modern phenomenon that has been bubbling up since the late twentieth century. There are calls for decolonizing everything, art history included.
> In the postcolonial condition, the main challenge was to break this cycle or to create a process to rectify these influences. Indeed, such influences either denounced or distorted the precolonial ideas and elements of the society and culture. To many, this is what decolonization is, looking back to precolonial ideas.
> But, where to start? To reshape the curriculum of art education, the first thing needed is literature for the students. The problem is that formal art education was institutionalized here during the British period.
As a citizen of Tunisia, a former French colony, I’m going to have to wholeheartedly disagree with you on this :)
Firstly, your experience does not automatically discount the experiences of countless people from the many European colonial projects. Statistically speaking, the fact that you’ve never met a Bangladeshi who disagrees with you tells me more about the company you keep than what Bangladeshis think about colonialism in general.
Secondly, disconnecting from colonialism is a logical continuation of independence, and a form of building a country’s identity. Yes, colonial powers did some good things, but everything they did was ultimately for the benefit of them and the citizens they forced on us. I assure you: had it not made economic sense, they would have burnt everything down when they left. If you do some basic research, you’ll find that many African colonies got the bare minimum of development required to extract resources, simply because the colonizers did not intend their citizens to relocate long term.
Finally, eschewing the colonial past does not mean that you need to throw everything out. Rather, you take control over the narrative: (1) take what benefits you, (2) be proud of your heritage, especially that which your colonizer tried to suppress, (3) throw out the nonsense, and most importantly, (4) explicitly condemn the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by your occupiers. Forgetting and forgiving is not how you build an independent nation; seeking truth and justice is.
And before that it was controlled by the Ottomans, Muslims, Byzantine Romans, Vandals, Romans, Phoenicians and Berbers. (I may have left some groups out).
Many of these invaders had themselves been previously colonised from elsewhere.
It often seems to me that it’s only the last one or two groups that are demonised, and the atrocities perpetrated by previous generations of colonists are forgotten by those who would construct a new national myth.
Well, that’s not really surprising, is it? The more recent the colonizer, the larger the impact felt by the average citizen.
Besides, I think invaders only got more “organized” as time progressed. Brutality and domination are shared across time periods, but the more subtle techniques, such as cultural genocide and historical revisionism, only became effective tools in the invader’s toolbelt relatively recently.
More crucially, thanks to various technological advancements, modern European colonizers were able to steal resources at a scale never before seen in the history of this planet.
As a citizen of Morocco, another former French colony, this is pretty absurd. Under the Ottomans, the Caliphates, Rome, and under Berber rule (which is pretty much 99% of people), the Average Tunisian was was more or less equal to anyone else. The land was integrated, and so on
You seem to be missing the distinction between invasion, colonisation, and imperialism. Out of all of those you listed, only one group colonized (read: Settled) Tunisia, which are the Berbers. The others simply invaded. Which, under the feudal system, was not that big of a deal for the average person, and Tunisia was kept to a pretty high degree of development, with an economy focused on trade and production.
This is completely different to Imperial economies based around resource extractions, where you are treated as inherently lesser to the citizen from the Métropole, where people are kept poor on purpose, and where industrial scale massacres were often commited, nowhere even near the scale of anything that came before.
Romans extracted tons of resources and used plenty of people as slaves. Arabs annihilated any culture that was there before and replaced it with islam and a lot of people died in ottoman invasions. What exactly did the French do to your country that was objectively so much worse than what any other invader before them did?
Rome did, but that was par for the course at the time, and Maghrebians were allowed to become full citizens to the point where many became Roman emperors.
The Ottoman invasions didn't actually do that much damage to the Maghreb. It's a place very far away from them. Ottoman conquests of the Maghreb had around 40 000 casualties, many of them not of Algerians but of Ottomans and French/Spanish soldiers.
As for the Caliphate, they certainly did not annihilate any culture before them, and it's incredible to equate culture with Religion. The dominant religions there at the time of their invasion were Christianism and Judaism, which were preserved for a long time and are barely different from Islam, and religion is a tiny aspect of Culture. Their impact on the common person is so small that during Islamic rule the vast majority of people didn't even speak Arabic.
What the French did that was objectively much worse was to create a system where the citizens of the Maghreb were to remain an inferior second class only useful insofar as resources can be stolen forever.
As for colonialism in general, which I should remind you is the point, it caused more deaths than WW2.
You have hand waved away 2 thousand years of conquests of Maghreb as minor infractions. I'm mean it went from carthaginians to romans, vandals, byzantium, arabs, turks. Changed religion, culture and languages several times. You can't seriously believe that this were non violent happy occurences. Before the french even came they already spoke a different language than their ancestors, they prayed to a different god than their ancestors and they had no control over their territories. They were second class citizens even before the french came. I understand how you feel about French occupation and consider it worse because it was not so long ago and is in the nation's living memory. Other colonializations were more complete and successful and therefore part of what Maghreb is today. But objectively they were at least as bad as the french occupation.
The Maghreb followed Abrahamic religion for 1600 years, more or less, actually. The god we prayed to didn't change from Rome, the Vandals, Byzantium, Arabs, and Turks.
The language didn't change either. Most people spoke Berber languages for 2000 years. Even now there are towns where you can't get by with Arabic well.
People of the Maghreb were not second class citizens under Rome. Neither were they under the millenia+ in some places of self-rule.
It's fine if you don't know the difference between pre-modern invasions and colonization, and it's fine if you don't really understand the history of the region, but by god don't use that to justify imperialism which killed tens of millions of people.
In any case, ask yourself this. Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers, nor were even allowed to vote? Ask yourself that, and you will understand the distinction between the two.
Not only that, but almost half of the Maghreb was never even invaded by the Ottomans, and even then it was De Jure, and not De Facto, mostly. Same for the Vandals and the Byzantines.
So no, your analysis is incorrect. Additionally, it's very well known that pre-modern war was much less bloody.
> Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers
Because more often than not the military decided who became princeps, and military advancement was more egalitarian.
I’d hazard a guess that if Rome had still been controlled by the senate the chances of advancement in Roman society would have been restricted to Italian born patricians.
>The Maghreb followed Abrahamic religion for 1600 years, more or less, actually. The god we prayed to didn't change from Rome, the Vandals, Byzantium, Arabs, and Turks.
Most European languages stem from the same base Indo Euroupean language. And a still a German can't understand a Frenchman or a Slav. Even though Islam has the same roots as christianity it is a totally different religion with an even more different set cultural norms.
>The language didn't change either. Most people spoke Berber languages for 2000 years. Even now there are towns where you can't get by with Arabic well.
I would say the arabic language, which is the dominant language of the area (72%), is quite different from the berber language(27%).
>It's fine if you don't know the difference between
pre-modern invasions and colonization, and it's fine if you don't really understand the history of the region, but by god don't use that to justify imperialism which killed tens of millions of people."
I'm disappointed and expected more from you than lowly accusations of me supporting colonialism.
>In any case, ask yourself this. Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers, nor were even allowed to vote? Ask yourself that, and you will understand the distinction between the two.
Septimius Severus was half Roman and half Punic, so not Berber. Also his successor, his son Caracalla has even less to do with the people of Northern Africa. By the time Severus became roman emperor, some parts of North Africa have been under the roman empire for 300 years. France has a lot of citizens of North African descent today who have the same rights as any other citizen with a different origin.
>Not only that, but almost half of the Maghreb was never even invaded by the Ottomans, and even then it was De Jure, and not De Facto, mostly. Same for the Vandals and the Byzantines.
>So no, your analysis is incorrect. Additionally, it's very well known that pre-modern war was much less bloody.
Hacking somebody apart with a sword is not something I would call less bloody. You seem to be under impression that the rulers always changed peacefully without any wars, battles, destruction of cities, persecutions, etc. I'm sure that after 200 years of any new ruler things settled down and life when on, maybe even better that before, but before that things were pretty bad and ugly.
> Firstly, your experience does not automatically discount the experiences of countless people from the many European colonial projects.
I’m not discounting anything. But I’m skeptical that there are “countless” people who embrace decolonization of the kind which modern academics mean when they use the term. Note that @angibrowl talked about reforming institutions and legal systems and property rights, which is more aggressive than what you refer to below.
> Statistically speaking, the fact that you’ve never met a Bangladeshi who disagrees with you tells me more about the company you keep than what Bangladeshis think about colonialism in general.
They like the things that come along with having an Anglo legal system that makes it easy for people to invest in the country. They cite development, the economy, increased living standards, and improved law and order as reasons why they think the country is headed in the right direction. They have high approval rates for the media, parliament, and high court. Their list of top problems is corruption, drugs, unemployment, security, and education.
Reading local news, talking to family, and following politics suggests to me that the problems that people actually care about have little to do with colonial legacy. Indeed, the problem of corruption is widely recognized among Bangladeshis as a cultural shortcoming, not some externally imposed problem.
Now, Bangladesh is quite a nationalist country. The Bangla language movement was a more political force in the mid 20th century and was one of the drivers of independence. At some point, the medium of instruction was changed from English to Bangla at the primary and secondary level. But today, English is taught from the first grade—with the big debate being how to teach it, not how much influence it has on the culture.
> (1) take what benefits you, (2) be proud of your heritage, especially that which your colonizer tried to suppress, (3) throw out the nonsense, and most importantly, (4) explicitly condemn the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by your occupiers. Forgetting and forgiving is not how you build an independent nation; seeking truth and justice is.
I agree with the first three, and strongly disagree with the fourth, at least in the context of my experience. Britain is never going to write Bangladesh a big check. They are a shadow of their former selves and cannot do so anyway. So what’s the point in dwelling on the past? All it does is tint the policy choices you make going forward. How a country shapes it’s institutions, laws, and culture, should rest on what will make the people prosperous going forward. Fixating on what aspects of culture or what laws and institutions were inherited from the colonial power creates a strong impetus to change those things for the sake of asserting the country’s own identity. For example, the Bangladesh High Court still writes its decisions in English and routinely cites decisions of other Anglo courts. That’s a good thing! The Anglo legal system is one of (in my opinion, the) finest in the world and highly suited for participation in the global economy. What are we going to do, replace it with Sharia? That’s what some people want, and that’s the only real alternative.
This is my beef with the academic decolonization literature. It makes your political discourse backwards looking. The article posted above about prosecution of homosexuality is a great example. The article notes that the first ever such prosecutions have happened in 2017. And it blames Victorian legal codes that have been on the books since 1860. But that’s obviously absurd. If those laws have been on the books since 1860, why are they only being enforced now? That’s obviously not what changed. Looking backward and blaming Britain blinds the author to the much more recent trend of fundamentalist Islam being imported from the Middle East.
If you want to talk about how to improve LGBT rights in Bangladesh, is decolonization a useful framework? Should we look back to acceptance of hijra (transgender people) in pre-Islamic Bangladesh? No! When the Indian Supreme Court recently granted recognition to Hijra, it did so by reference to international human rights law, court cases in the UK and Australia, and surveys of legislation in western countries: https://www.lawyerscollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04....
> If you want to talk about how to improve LGBT rights in Bangladesh, is decolonization a useful framework.
Rhetorically, yes. Pointing out that a law certainly isn't something brought in to protect Bangladeshi values and culture, but a relic of the former colonial powers' values it's now extremely embarrassed by is a useful line of argument. Of course it would be wrong to assume that prejudice against LGBT people in Bangladesh stems primarily from fidelity to the values of Victorian Britons, but when you're arguing against people who insist that those arguing for greater tolerance are importing foreign values to replace what Bangladeshis have always believed, the actual historical context can help.
It is certainly not for me to tell you how to feel about your home country, but it is not that hard to imagine a version of the past with less colonialism and a better outcome. Consider only Thailand's example as something to think about.
"Disentangling" isn't about throwing things away and being left with nothing, it - I think - is about reevaluating what you have and what you would like through the careful consideration of the colonial legacy. The people with power in a society, even if they are not themselves "colonists" are often served well by the status quo, so a detached examination of these things is often challenging.
I think the waves and waves of "colonialism" are not really relevant to the discussion, the "modern" system of colonialism is a distinct thing, worthy of consideration in isolation and there might very well be some good to come of thinking about it. For me, I am a Canadian so I think of these things in terms of the indigenous peoples of Canada, who have had a lot of success in reclaiming something of an independent identity within Canada but still inside the larger social context. It is not a straightforward thing and it is more important to some people than to others, but it is interesting and has value nonetheless.
Exactly. Indigenous people in North America weren't just colonized, their cultures were systematically destroyed. Children were taken away on steamboats to boarding schools, forced into Christianity and beaten if they spoke their native languages. Now the languages are all almost completely dead and the cultures have suffered greatly. It was the explicit goal of the white governments to wipe out native cultures and forcibly assimilate them.
Decolonization is about recovering from that, not about eschewing cars for canoes.
OK, but so what? Bangladesh is not the ne plus ultra of formerly colonialized places. People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs. I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment. And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art) and https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/16/decolonising-queer-banglade... (on conceptions of propriety in sexual relations). Perhaps you would find it illuminating to assign yourself the exercise of writing a brief on the topic for an imaginary client whose views differed from your own.
> People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs.
Who are these people? Western academic journals and media amplify views that align with those of western academics, so it’s hard to gauge what ordinary people in other countries believe.
In my experience, apart from Britain and the US (alignment with the Anglo world), Bangladeshis look to ideas from the Middle East (alignment with the Muslim world) and socialism (alignment with the Soviet bloc). All of these are imported too. They were embraced not out of a desire to eliminate British influence, but out of the notion that those ideologies were the future. It’s like microkernels-socialism was seen as a scientific government of the future at the time. Today, the country is quite capitalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...
About two decades ago I read an article from a Middlebury professor advocating Bangladesh to ignore the World Bank embrace what today would be described as economic decolonization. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/alternative-pro.... (“But there is another way of looking at things, a Gorasin way, one developed closer to home, less despairing and less grandiose at the same time.”).
Luckily these ideas found no purchase, and Bangladesh’s economy grew by a factor of five since that article was published.
> I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
I prefer air conditioning and the rule of law and economic growth. Western culture, I find less relatable over time. Pets, I’ve always found odd. Pop culture attitudes towards marriage and babies and old age, young people talking back to their elders, etc. I find all that curiouser and curiouser as I get older.
> But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment.
Fair.
> And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art)
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
> Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet-philosopher of Bengal once said, “To taste the beauty of a Greek sculpture or an Italian Renaissance painting, one needs not to be a Greek or an Italian. A painting is actually a painting, not Indian, Ajantan, nothing.”
This article is extremely disingenuous. While British law may be the statutory basis for prosecuting homosexual behavior, that’s not the reason prosecutions are suddenly happening now. (“On Thursday, 18 May 2017, Bangladesh saw the arrests of men on the alleged basis of their homosexuality for the first time in its history.”). The law has been on the books since 1860. The British are long gone. What changed? Islam—another colonial import. Bangladesh has increasingly aligned itself with the broader Islamic world. When we left in 1989, headscarves were nowhere to be seen. Today they are quite common. The best thing that could happen for LGBT people in Bangladesh is westernization. It’s our western constitution, with due process rights and equality of all under the law, that offer the best hope of protection.
Those expressing a point of view you took issue with, whose point of view seems just as valid to me as yours.
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
Yes, but it goes on to explore other perspectives, and how art that Tagore appreciated alongside others has, in some contexts, been presented as objectively superior.
You can go on complaining about articles being disingenuous and so on (although I think you're choosing to miss the point it's making), but you started out by claiming that nobody in Bangladesh has any truck with such ideas and I'm pointing out that they are in fact being debated there as in other places, even though you may not approve or agree with many of the people articulating them.
Hardly. I'm just summarizing the view of some advocates of decolonization I've met. Liberalism itself is characterized by a high regard for property rights, and most of the decolonization advocates I've met would not characterize themselves as liberals.
I don’t want to sound like I think all of academia is “liberal indoctrination.” (I have traditional engineers’ views on liberal arts majors, but that’s a separate issue.) But the liberal outlook is pervasive. Even when people are trying to be even handed, ideology just tends to give you different perspectives on the same facts, or makes it so you find different facts compelling. Let’s face it—you’re not going to have a robust discussion of religious freedom in your typical political science class, unless maybe if you invoke Muslims as the avatar for your argument.
I also don’t want to imply that o think liberals can’t be good scholars or do good research. But I think the overwhelming liberalness of academia, of the social sciences in particular, creates an echo chamber that makes people intellectually lazy.
To circle back to my colonialism example, there is a desperate need for political theory to help former colonies develop their societies and institutions. And the academic work in this area just isn’t helpful to anyone. Luckily nobody takes it seriously, and the actual work of developing post colonial societies has been ceded to economists and public health experts. But that’s sad. Academia used to matter in this area. The American framers relied heavily on the work of academic writers and philosophers in creating our system of government.
There are many good reasons to preserve institutions such as private property and the legal infrastructure surrounding its disposition. I imagine rayiner's father's question had those in mind.
This is a sort of standard reply that seems very clever but entirely misses the point. Colonialism or any other system of injustice has winners and losers, heck even "perfectly just" systems would have winners and losers. The winners are less motivated to change the system that might create different winners, even if those outcomes are "more just" or "just as fair" or completely arbitrary in the assignment of new winners and losers. This was the basis for a lot of the colonial systems in fact, the British intentionally aligned themselves with minorities in many places to ensure a reliable partner that both profited from the rule and depended on the British to maintain their status.
Is the great Chinese famine relevant to a discussion of colonialism? Not really! The Bengal Famine on the other hand, pretty relevant! It killed a good 10 million people. Look it up!
> Is the great Chinese famine relevant to a discussion of colonialism?
It is relevant insofar as it addresses the question of private property and its value as an institution, which is precisely what the chain of comments I replied to was discussing.
I'm not sure why you chose to take issue with my comment, but not those preceding comments.
> The Bengal Famine
Another illustrative example of a famine caused by State policies and lack of respect for people's private property: Japanese raids and destruction of merchant ships, government-ordered destruction of rice stocks, trade barriers, the "rice denial" and "boat denial" policies, refusal of imports, etc.
Strangely enough, western property rights turn out not to prevent famine at all, though I imagine the property owners suffer least in these situations.
Not sure what you mean by "western" property rights. I'll assume you meant private property rights.
> turn out not to prevent famine at all
They do prevent famine. They don't prevent all famine. To conflate the two, as you have done here, is dishonest.
Certainly private property rights cannot prevent every natural disaster—that's not "strange" at all—but lack of respect for them can certainly amplify the effect of natural disasters.
For example, regarding the Great Irish Famine [0]:
After the defeat of James II in 1690 a series of “penal laws” were passed by the Irish Parliament, dominated by the Protestant minority who had supported William III. The first, in 1695, took away the right of Catholics to bear arms. Another forbade Catholics to go overseas for education and prohibited them from teaching or running schools within Ireland. The most important however was the Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery (1704). This prevented Catholics from buying land or inheriting it from Protestants, or from leasing land for more than 31 years. At about this time the potato was introduced as a major crop. The combination of the legislation and the new crop was ultimately disastrous.
The penal laws, together with other legislation, created a set of powerful and perverse incentives. Because Catholic tenant farmers could not own land or hold it on anything but short-term leases, with little or no security of tenure, they had no incentive to improve their land or modernize agricultural practice. All the benefit would go to the hated alien class of Protestant landlords in higher rents or more expensive leases.
By 1841, 45 percent of all holdings were of less than five acres. The lack of capital and the restraints on the Catholic majority meant that Irish commerce and manufacturing did not develop, and by 1841, 5.5 million out of a population of over 8 million were totally dependent on agriculture. The final, extra twist was the impact of the Corn Laws, the system of protection for English agriculture set up in the early nineteenth century that prohibited the import of grain until prices reached a particular level. This had the effect of preserving the flawed Irish farming system.
I'm not sure if you read your second link, but it doesn't refer to any particular famine. You'll have to be more specific.
