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.

Greenpeace - a bunch of western imperialists?

While it's generally frowned upon these days to attack the practices of non-western cultures, an exception is made for certain practices which clash with popular left-liberal viewpoints.

A case in point is the attitude of the liberal left to Japanese whaling. With the apparently well-funded Greenpeace, now engaged in sustained and strident expeditions to interfere with Japanese whaling expeditions, few people bother to ask whether such actions are culturally justified.

From an environmental perspective, it's clear that if there is little or no whaling, then the whale population will start to rebound, and this is already starting to occur with some of the smaller species of hunted whales such as the Minke.

A similar situation is occurring with seals, which in areas such as New Zealand and California have recovered to the point where they are becoming a serious nuisance to humans, and are wiping out inshore fish species along quite extensive stretches of coastline. One of the reasons why the seal population is now becoming a threat to other wildlife is because there are fewer natural predators like sharks to keep their numbers in check and left liberal environmentalists and animal rights activists are strongly opposed to the idea of controlled culling by humans.

Since there is no real environmental reason why the Japanese should not be able to hunt the most numerous species of whale, on a limited basis, then the strident opposition of groups like Greenpeace must be cultural/ ideological.

In the western mindset, particularly the mindset of the English-speaking West, certain intelligent mammal species, such as horses, dolphins and seals, have a high cultural status, which they don't necessarily have in most other cultures.

I guess I can see why westerners would want to protect animals which share certain similarities with humans, such as being relatively intelligent, but I don't understand why we show little consistency about which mammals should receive special status, and which should not. Pigs and cows are relatively intelligent, but are acceptable table fare, and relatively intelligent pest species in New Zealand, such as introduced possums, goats and deer can be more or less dispatched any way you like.

Increasingly, the almost human-like status of favoured animals like whales and seals seems more related to their aesthetic appeal or tourist value rather than any carefully thought set of ethical principles. The fact that western environmental activists believe this gives them the mandate to undertake a global crusade against whaling, smacks of serious cultural ignorance, if not down-right arrogance.

Groups like Greenpeace claim the vast majority of countries in the world are in favour of a ban on whaling, but many poor non-western countries such as Tonga, which are culturally in favour of whaling, support bans on whaling because they don't want to upset westerners who provide the lion's share of their tourism income.

If left liberals are going to criticize conservative westerners for wanting to protect their own cultures from multiculturalism, then perhaps they should stop and consider how their own globalist posturing impinges on the interests on those "colourful" foreign cultures they claim to have such empathy with.