The limitations of non-racist imperialism

Thanks to $10 Penguin Classics, I've just finished reading Niall Ferguson's controversial book Empire: How Britain made the modern world.

This work was regarded as controversial when it came out in 2003, because of Ferguson's positive assessment of British imperialism, which he believes had a beneficial impact on the countries that Britain colonised.

Unfortunately, he overlooks (or ignores) the point that the success of British imperialism depended on an assumption of racial superiority on the part of the British soldiers and officials who administrated the Empire.

This issue was picked up by Jared Taylor in an excellent review on the VDare site.

As Taylor points out, it simply isn't possible to run an empire without the ruling class believing it's racially superior to the people being ruled over. Hence when egalitarian ideology prevailed after WWII, the British quickly lost the will to keep their Empire together.

Admittedly, even if the British still had the will to keep the Empire together after the war, they would have struggled to do so. Following the Japanese defeats of British forces in South East Asia, British prestige was in tatters, and most of the populace in that part of the world no longer bought into the myth of white racial superiority.

Success in Burma later in the war couldn't make up for the calamitous defeats of European forces in Malaya and Indonesia.

African troops serving in the defeated French armed forces also came to the conclusion that Europeans weren't quite as competent and imposing as they appeared back in Africa.

Perhaps the closest thing to a viable form of non-racist imperialism was the mercantile imperialism adopted by northern European powers in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

In the 18th Century Britain, France and Holland didn't try to conquer large swaves of territory or impose their cultures on the locals, as they would go on to do in the 19th Century.
Instead, they established carefully located trading settlements such as Batavia and Cape Town, from which they could trade with the hinterland and exchange ideas and technology.

This wasn't practical in North America though, where the settlers had already established large colonies on their own initiative, and British attempts to discourage them from moving West of the Appalachian mountains ended in defeat for Britain in the War of Independence.

It would be an interesting to speculate what would have happened if the European powers had continued with the 18th Century model of pragmatic, piece-meal colonisation into the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Certainly the white position in South Africa would be a lot different. Instead of a few million marginalised whites inhabiting a large country populated mostly by Black natives and immigrants, the whites would probably be concentrated in small white majority states around the main trading ports like Capetown and Durban - arguably a more sustainable situation than the present one.