Colonialism, Exploitation and Independence

[EnglishEdward]

Multiple people in this thread have mentioned the post-independence ethnic conflicts in Africa.

Yes, there was also a civil war in the USA, and wars about the
territories controlled by the new states in South America and
wars in South Asia as India and Pakistan disputed their borders.

Interestingly enough there were few real wars about borders in Africa,
because one of the very sensible decisions the new leaders first
made was to live with and not to dispute their inherited boundaries.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

So, I understood Cloud's post largely saying the problems in modern Africa are due to colonialism (though I'm not sure where the 'easily lead to nuclear war' part came from). This is a sentiment I come across fairly frequently, where every problem up and down Africa gets blamed on "colonialism". I have intense dislike of that position as it basically reduces African elites to - at best- sad puppets of history trapped by those long dead.

African Elites are absolutely to blame as well, I don't want to give the impression that colonialism is the only reason for these countries long-standing issues, I just think we can't ignore or downplay the situation and circumstances in which a country is formed.

IRT "easily lead to nuclear war" I'm talking specifically about Pakistan and India.

You then replied to me, quoting your own post saying "The problems caused by the British didn't magically disappear with them. Something on that scale might takes centuries to be corrected." (I'm assuming you hold similar beliefs about French, Belgian, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.) I read that as basically the same as what Cloud was saying.

I mean I'm not wrong am i?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

It's very easy to play the victim card and blame colonisers that have left colonies over half a century ago then to take charge.
Heck Brazilian migrants are still very fond to this day to ask "Where's the gold?" in derogatory manner pointing fingers and blaming poor Portugal for their woes but the fact is that Portuguese rule was evicted over two centuries ago. The answer is "the gold is with your, very Brazilian, ancestors by this point" who kept stealing it from the people.
Historical set TV soap operas from Brazil still depict romantic sob stories of Brazilian lords and their slave intensive farms whilst Portugal abolished slavery in 1869.

Same in Spain. 'Where is the gold?' is the question-answer for every issue for some people in LATAM. Leaving apart that after 200 years it is a bit late to blame ex-metropolis, in fact 'the gold' (more accurately the silver since there was not much gold in America) is still in LATAM. Most of the resources Spain extracted (and Portugal I guess) were invested in building the cities, the roads, the universities, the institutions, in a word, the countries we currently know in LATAM. Spain only brought to Europe a fifth of the resources, known as "el Quinto Real".

Fortunately this vision (related with the black legend and promoted by the likes of Netherlands ,England, USA... Etc) is becoming questioned by a increasingly large portion of the population in both sides of the Atlantic (since it has influencef many people in Spain too), including prestigious American historians and intellectuals:

 

[danjuno]

I don't get this comment.
You calling me out on something?
Does calling it "post-independence ethnic conflicts" make the racism I mentioned go away?
Are you denying the racism I mentioned?
Are native Africans incapable of racism?
I don't get it? Is this a gotcha?

You said nobody was talking about systematic racism in Africa. I pointed out that people were indeed talking about ethnic conflict.

Would your preferred form of government solve any of the problems in Africa? Is Anarchy a form of government...I don't think so... it all boils down to might is right...so if you aren't Rambo how would anyone survive anarchy...these questions echoes in mind before I sleep. Your declaration of anarchism is living rent free in me...you might have won this one!

My political beliefs are not relevant to the conversation, so the fact they are "living rent free" in your mind is indeed a you problem. Especially since you can't seem to be bothered to look up the actual political definition of Anarchism.

 

[Ordnael]

You said nobody was talking about systematic racism in Africa. I pointed out that people were indeed talking about ethnic conflict.

There you go with that "ethnic conflict" again.
Can I say there are ethnic conflicts in the US or Europe?
Will you stop calling folks you don't agree with ists and instead call them participants of "ethnic conflict"?
Because I perceive that would be a more correct adjective than calling them ists. What we have happening in various EU countries are ethnic conflicts between nu colonisers and natives...ethnic conflicts I like the sound of that!

My political beliefs are not relevant to the conversation

But they are! I am a social-conservative. I believe in a welfare state that puts ahead those that contribute for it for generations, I don't believe that those coming for handouts should have a priority.
Our parliament is finally about to vote for a new immigration law more in line with the rest of the EU, and the party I voted for has fixated this phrase in the new law "none shall be given or try for nationality if he can't sustain himself"

Especially since you can't seem to be bothered to look up the actual political definition of Anarchism.

I give a diagonal read wiki's page for anarchism and there's violence...a lot of violence.

 

[danjuno]

There you go with that "ethnic conflict" again.
Can I say there are ethnic conflicts in the US or Europe?
Will you stop calling folks you don't agree with ists and instead call them participants of "ethnic conflict"?
Because I perceive that would be a more correct adjective than calling them ists. What we have happening in various EU countries are ethnic conflicts between nu colonisers and natives...ethnic conflicts I like the sound of that!

I don't see why you can't use both or why they'd be mutually exclusive.

 

[Lexicus]

Leaving apart that after 200 years it is a bit late to blame ex-metropolis, in fact 'the gold' (more accurately the silver since there was not much gold in America) is still in LATAM. Most of the resources Spain extracted (and Portugal I guess) were invested in building the cities, the roads, the universities, the institutions, in a word, the countries we currently know in LATAM. Spain only brought to Europe a fifth of the resources, known as "el Quinto Real".

It boggles the mind that you could seriously assert that the majority of the precious metals Spain mined in the New World stayed in the New World. It's true that only a fraction ended up in Europe, but the great majority ended up in China, exchanged mostly for goods like silks that appealed to European elites.

It is honestly incredibly depressing to see this kind of pro-imperialist nonsense being regurgitated by so many of our European posters.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Perhaps it's so persistent because there's some truth to it? In the case of Spain, do you think all those cities with Spanish names, full of Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical buildings, sprang up from the dust spontaneously like mushrooms?

Besides, the amount of resources Spain extracted back then with the technology of the time is tiny compared to the amount extracted after independence; in fact, it's not as if Spain deprived these countries of their mineral wealth (LOL):

six biggest exporters of silver in the world...

 

[Evie]

Of course, one can't help but note that the country that held the biggest silver mine of the Spanish colonial era is noticeably not in this top 6...

(Bolivia, Potosi).

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I cant help but answer that Bolivia is the seventh...

 

[choxorn]

The "we invested in infrastructure!" argument of course has plenty of problems- First and foremost, it's always making the rather questionable and patronizing assertion that the backwards, savage native people obviously could never have figured out how to build railroads or ports or schools without the technologically advanced colonizers doing it for them and taking over leadership and administration in the places they conquered. This is, of course, patently nonsense- there's tons of examples of non-Western peoples figuring out on their own advanced agriculture, engineering, math, astronomy, navigation, whatever else they needed for their societies to function, and also plenty of instances of them encountering Westerners, seeing the technology we'd come up with, deciding we'd had some good ideas, trading with us, and adapting our technology for their own needs, without needing to give up their independence to some enlightened imperialists to nobly lift them up.

But also, the infrastructure that the imperialists built tended to serve their own needs, not the needs of the people in the places they'd taken over- it was all focused on how to extract raw materials as efficiently as possible and how to train people to serve the needs of the colonial administration, which inevitably resulted in significant areas of the colonized region not actually getting much infrastructure outside of things like mines that were just designed to take whatever they had that the imperialists wanted, and resulted in whatever small benefits there were to the colonized people from all this infrastructure-building and investment getting concentrated in the hands of a few, into whatever small segment of the population the imperialists thought they could best work with, usually against everyone else.

And of course it's also all assuming that the West's way of living, our ideas of what a city or a trade network or an entire society should look like, is the only correct way to do things, as in the above comment about Latin American cities getting built by the Spanish to look like European cities. It's not like native peoples ever built anything like that on their own, right?

 

[Lexicus]

do you think all those cities with Spanish names, full of Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical buildings, sprang up from the dust like mushrooms?

The sheer effrontery of this almost takes my breath away. We know exactly how those cities were built, because we have the testimonies of witnesses: by the forced labor of natives and African slaves, the former working under conditions which led to the depopulation of an entire continent within about three decades. Nazi-style cruelty and slaughter enacted against entirely defenseless peoples, on a continental scale. These posts you've made are morally equivalent to Holocaust denial and really underscore how the only reason you people care about Ukraine is because you (now) see Ukrainians as white.

Perhaps it's so persistent because there's some truth to it?

No, it's because you (collectively) have a guilty conscience - the same reason we have posters still denying Russian crimes in Ukraine, why American conservatives deny that slavery or segregation were so bad, and why antisemitic right-wingers around the world have been denying the Holocaust since it ended.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Do you know what the Spanish population in all the Americas in 1530 was of about 12000 people? Every guy should have been worse than Terminator to enslave and kill like 40 millions. Maybe some viruses had something to do?

Ranting without prioviding anything useful to the conversation. Do you always post like that?

 

[choxorn]

The sheer effrontery of this almost takes my breath away. We know exactly how those cities were built, because we have the testimonies of witnesses: by the forced labor of natives and African slaves, the former working under conditions which led to the depopulation of an entire continent within about three decades. Nazi-style cruelty and slaughter enacted against entirely defenseless peoples, on a continental scale.

Not to mention that several of those cities were built on and around the older ruins of indigenous cities that they'd destroyed.

Do you know what the Spanish population in all the Americas in 1530 was of about 12000 people? Every guy should have been worse than Terminator to enslave and kill like 40 millions. Maybe some viruses had something to do?

Ranting without prioviding anything useful to the conversation. Do you always post like that?

I don't really think "no, the colonizers didn't kill all that many natives, the smallpox they brought with them did it!" is that great of an argument for why imperialism wasn't actually that bad

 

[Evie]

Pretty much all modern non-nationalistic scholarship leans toward the viruses being deadly, but being be that apocalyptically destructive because the indigenous people were repeatedly put in position that left them extremely vulnerable to the viruses both as individuals and as a society via relocation, poor living conditions, physical exploitation, mistreatment, destruction of social structures, etc. The "The diseases did it and the colonizers did nothing to make it happen" view is just not very well supported anymore.

(That said, and for the same reason, "depopulated within thirty years" is also not really much supported anymore as I understand it - *some* areas were, the whole continent wasn't. It was a more protracted process, and far more related to the spread of colonialism. Which took far more than three decades to spread)

There is a black legend, but there's a white (or rose) one, too. One should be careful to avoid both extremes.

 

[Lexicus]

Do you know what the Spanish population in all the Americas in 1530 was of about 12000 people? Every guy should have been worse than Terminator to enslave and kill like 40 millions. Maybe some viruses had something to do?

Ranting without prioviding anything useful to the conversation. Do you always post like that?

Just to underscore the connection with Holocaust denial, the Einsatzgruppen numbered less than 5,000 yet murdered probably about two million people in a far shorter time. Were they all Terminators as well?

More seriously, we have the testimony of people who saw what happened.
I quote David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

Consider, for instance, how the gold and silver from the American mines were extracted. Mining operations began almost immediately upon the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtithin in 1521. While we are used to assuming that the Mexican population was devastated sim ply as an effect of newly introduced European diseases, contemporary observers felt that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives to work in the mines was at least equally responsible. In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov offers a compendium of some of the most chilling reports, mostly from Spanish priests and friars who, even when committed in principle to the belief that the extermination of the Indians was the judgment of God, could not disguise their horror at scenes of Spanish soldiers testing the blades of their weapons by eviscerating random passers-by, and tearing babies off their mother's backs to be eaten by dogs. Such acts might perhaps be written off as what one would expect when a collection of heavily armed men-many of violent criminal background-are given absolute impunity; but the reports from the mines imply something far more systematic. When Fray Toribio de Motolinia wrote of the ten plagues that he believed God had visited on the inhabitants of Mexico, he listed smallpox, war, famine, labor exactions, taxes (which caused many to sell their children to moneylenders, others to be tortured to death in cruel prisons), and the thousands who died in the building of the capital city. Above all, he insisted, were the uncountable numbers who died in the mines:

The eighth plague was the slaves whom the Spaniards made in order to put them to work in the mines. At first those who were already slaves of the Aztecs were taken; then those who had given evidence of insubordination; finally all those who could be caught. During the first years after the conquest, the slave traffic flourished, and slaves often changed master. They produced so many marks on their faces, in addition to the royal brand, that they had their faces covered with letters, for they bore the marks of all who had bought and sold them. The ninth plague was the service in the mines, to which the heavily laden Indians traveled sixty leagues or more to carry provisions . . . When their food gave out they died, either at the mines or on the road, for they had no money to buy food and there was no one to give it to them. Some reached horne in such a state that they died soon after. The bodies of those Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced such a stench that it caused a pestilence, especially at the mines of Oaxaca. For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that carne to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun."14​

Similar scenes were reported in Peru, where whole regions were depopulated by forced service in the mines, and Hispaniola, where the indigenous population was eradicated entirely.

Bold emphasis mine, to underscore the sheer evil of pointing to the construction of cities as evidence of the colonial overlords' beneficence.

Pretty much all modern non-nationalistic scholarship leans toward the viruses being deadly, but being be that apocalyptically destructive because the indigenous people were repeatedly put in position that left them extremely vulnerable to the viruses via relocation, poor living conditions, physical exploitation, mistreatment, destruction of social structures, etc. The "The diseases did it and the colonizers did nothing to make it happen" view is just not very well supported anymore.

While what Evie says is of course correct, even if we assume that disease killed over 90% of the natives, that still leaves millions to be worked to death and slaughtered outright.

The main problem with the Black Legend is not that Spain and Portugal did not commit horrific crimes on a massive scale in the New World and in the African slave trade, but that the Protestants were no better.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Pretty much all modern non-nationalistic scholarship leans toward the viruses being deadly, but being be that apocalyptically destructive because the indigenous people were repeatedly put in position that left them extremely vulnerable to the viruses both as individuals and as a society via relocation, poor living conditions, physical exploitation, mistreatment, destruction of social structures, etc. The "The diseases did it and the colonizers did nothing to make it happen" view is just not very well supported anymore.

Totally baseless. The viruses spread faster than conquistadors and did its thing even before Spaniards discovered a territory. Poor living conditions (that has nothing to do with getting smallpox btw) were already there.

Also did you know Spanish laws converted indigenous into Spanish subjects as soon as 1512?, with the same rights of their peninsular counterparts? of course there were lots abuses withou doubt, but nothing sytematic, and absolutely nothing do with that you have in mind. There were more abuses against the indigecous populations after the independence in fact (which was carried on basically by spaniards, btw). I think you guys are installed in a set of beliefs based in faith but without any factual base.

 

[Evie]

The viruses moved ahead of the conquest, yes. They did not depopulate all of the Americas ahead of colonization, no. That's the myth.

The largest part of the depopulation was afterward, from the combined effect of colonial actions AND the viruses. And note "colonial actions", not "conquistadors". Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, English, even French - the disruption they brought created fertile ground for the virus.

At least, that's what the latest scholarship says. And it says it of all colonizers, it does not single out Spain in that matter.

"Virus did it all" is pure colonial apologist nonsense at this point in historiography. Again, for all colonies.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

The viruses moved ahead of the conquest, yes. They did not depopulate all of the Americas ahead of colonization, no. That's the myth.

The largest part of the depopulation was afterward, from the combined effect of colonial actions AND the viruses. And note "colonial actions", not "conquistadors". Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, English, even French - the disruption they brought created fertile ground for the virus.

At least, that's what the latest scholarship says. And it says it of all colonizers, it does not single out Spain in that matter.

"Virus did it all" is pure colonial apologist nonsense at this point in historiography. Again, for all colonies.

I think you're mixing things here. There were more differences than similarities beetwen what happened in North America with what happened from Texas to Tierra del Fuego. You only have to look at the ethnic composition of the current population of the United States and compare it with Mexico, Peru, or any other Latin American country to see that things developed differently during the colonial era there.

 

[Lexicus]

The bodies of those Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced such a stench that it caused a pestilence, especially at the mines of Oaxaca. For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that carne to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun."14

nothing sytematic