The colonial legacy of underdevelopment and the question of reparation
Due to the severity of the legacy of colonialism, many postcolonial states have called on their former colonisers to issue reparations, to make up for past injustices and atrocities
Late last month, Portugal's government issued a statement saying that it would not pay any reparations for atrocities committed during transatlantic slavery and the colonial era.
The statement came after the country's President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said earlier that Portugal could use several methods to pay reparations, such as cancelling the debt of former colonies and providing financing.
The statements triggered a new spate of debate on the question of reparations for colonial exploitation and the many crimes against humanity perpetrated by the former colonial powers.
Earlier in 2015, Oxford Union, a debating society in the city of Oxford, England, held a debate on whether Britain owes reparations to its former colonies. Speakers included Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor, whose argument in support of the motion garnered widespread applause in many post-colonial states, as well as among those with a similar view.
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Due to the severity of these legacies of colonialism, many postcolonial states have called on their former colonisers to issue reparations in order to make up for past injustices and atrocities.
Many former colonial powers, however, have challenged the legality of such demands, arguing that they cannot be held accountable for the actions taken by people in power before their lifetime, or that reparations would do little to solve the problems faced by postcolonial states today.
Of course, colonialism, practised from the early 16th century to the latter half of the 20th century, has had long-lasting impacts on both the colonisers and the colonised. Most colonisers are now industrially developed with high per capita income, while most post-colonial states are still struggling to alleviate poverty and catch up with the developed world.
The underdevelopment of Africa is a prime example of how colonialism led the resource-rich continent to its current state, as illustrated famously in 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney.
In the book, Rodney showed that African underdevelopment is not a natural progression of its pre-existing economy and social systems; rather, it is a direct product of Europe's slave trade and plunder of the continent's natural resources, which in turn paved the foundation of the development of Europe.
From the 15th to the 19th centuries, six million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic by Portuguese vessels and sold into slavery, primarily in Brazil.
The Portuguese and Belgian colonial regimes were the most brazen in directly rounding up Africans to go and work for private capitalists.
Slavery continued throughout the European Middle Ages and acted as a direct block to the normal evolution of African society and its production systems. Slave trades removed millions of youth and young adults who would have played their part in innovativeness and inventiveness, which became common in Europe at a later stage.
Those young Africans who lived in areas badly hit by slave-capture remained preoccupied with their freedom rather than with improvements in production.
The mining of minerals such as gold, diamonds, manganese, (at a later stage) uranium, etc. left scars in the ground, and the industrial agricultural production left African soils impoverished, while in Europe, agricultural and mineral imports built a massive industrial complex.
Gold and silver, mined by Africans from their own soil, played a crucial role in meeting the need for coins in the expanding money economy of Western Europe. African gold has helped the Portuguese finance more adventures and explorations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia ever since the 15th century.
African gold also helped Amsterdam become the financial capital of Europe in that period, and the English made a new gold coin out of gold imported from an area called Guinea, located on the coast of West Africa in 1663, which they called the 'Guinea'.
Throughout the period from the 17th to the 19th centuries, the exploitation of African resources and African labour continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Western Europe. As a result, shipping, insurance, industrial agriculture, technology, and the manufacture of machinery grew extensively in Europe.
Basically, Africa's exploitation sped up Europe's technological development. For example, the evolution of European shipbuilding from the 16th century to the 19th century was a direct consequence of their monopoly of sea commerce in that period.
Africa still remains a cheap source of raw materials and other goods for Europe.
The case of the colonisation of India is rather intriguing.
Shashi Tharoor's 'Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India' shows that at the beginning of the 18th century, India's share of the world economy was 23%, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to less than 4%.
The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India, he argued.
By the end of the 19th century, India was Britain's biggest cash cow, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports, and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants—all at India's own expense.
"We literally paid for our own oppression," Tharoor wrote in a piece for the BBC.
Thus, Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the de-industrialization of India—the destruction of Indian textiles and their replacement by manufacturing in England, using Indian raw materials, and exporting the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, he continued.
The handloom weavers of Bengal had produced and exported some of the world's most desirable fabrics, especially cheap but fine muslins, some as light as "woven air.".
Britain's response was to cut off the thumbs of Bangali weavers, break their looms, and impose duties and tariffs on Indian cloth while flooding India and the world with cheaper fabric from the new satanic steam mills of Britain.
Weavers became beggars, manufacturing collapsed, and the population of Dhaka, which was once the great centre of muslin production, fell by 90%.
"So instead of a great exporter of finished products, India became an importer of British ones, while its share of world exports fell from 27% to 2%," Tharoor wrote.
As a result, the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, since "free democracies don't let their people starve to death."
Some four million Bangalis died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 after Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and European stockpiles.
"The starvation of underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks," Tharoor said in his book.
When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Mr. Churchill's only response was to ask peevishly, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" Tharoor wrote.
Also, India contributed more soldiers to British forces fighting the First World War than Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa combined. Despite suffering recession, poverty, and an influenza epidemic, India's contributions in cash and material amount to £8bn ($12bn) in today's money.
Two and a half million Indians also fought for British forces in the Second World War, by the end of which £1.25bn of Britain's total £3bn war debt was owed to India, which was merely the tip of the iceberg, that was colonial exploitation. It still hasn't been paid.
The list goes on.
A report by the Brattle Group, a US-based consulting company, suggests that the UK alone owes $24 trillion to its 14 former colonies. Among other European nations, Spain owes $17 trillion, France $9 trillion, and the Netherlands $4.8 trillion to their respective former colonies.
The numbers are way larger than the current size of their respective GDPs, which stands at $1 to 3 trillion.
Although Britain has not expressed any intention to offer an apology or reparation to its former colonies, in 2021, Germany officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide for atrocities committed between 1904 and 1908 and agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn in aid.
The Namibian government dubbed it "the first step" in the right direction and said it was the "basis for the second step, which is an apology, to be followed by reparations."
In the same year, France repatriated 26 pilfered artworks to Benin. French colonial soldiers seized these artworks in 1892.
France has returned several other stolen goods to its former colonies in Africa and is committed to continuing to do so. The process, of course, has been too slow and limited in scope.
An estimation by the French government audit found that the country's museums held 90,000 objects looted from Africa alone.
The sheer scale of exploitation and looting, as well as the atrocities committed, makes it hard for the former colonial states to issue reparations even if they wanted to.
To Shahi Tharoor, of course, the quantum of reparations that they should pay is not very important.
He says two hundred years of injustice cannot be compensated for with any specific amount.
"I, for one, would be happy to accept a symbolic pound a year for the next two hundred years, as a token of apology," Tharoor wrote.
