Some Pros and Cons of Colonialism

July 30, 2022 6:00 am

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Some Execs and Cons of Colonialism

To be honest, our lives beneath the British were not harsh, not like the Japanese army’s Occupation of World Battle Two. Malaya was being developed, though Britain’s wants and needs had been paramount. There have been instructional and employment alternatives. Laborious work and enterprise paid off. I obtained a wonderful schooling, superior to that supplied to my kids and their kids in post-war Australia.

What rankled was that atmospheric overlay of not being free politically, and being denigrated socially and culturally. We felt that being ruled badly by our folks was preferable to being supplied with higher governance beneath overseas overlords. That is a human attribute. Nobody likes to have his nation beneath overseas management and to be brainwashed. We had been additionally keenly conscious that Nehru (the person who rose to change into the primary prime minister of impartial India) had been jailed merely for looking for independence for his folks. He was no terrorist.

At the finish of the Second World Battle, we Malayans had been informed that it could be 25 years earlier than we’d be prepared to control ourselves. As an alternative, the British left after about 9 years. They haven’t pushed away just like the Dutch, French, and different European ‘powers.’ But, Hong Kong was denied sufficient publicity to Western democracy constructions nearly as much as the date of handover to China within the Nineties.

A horrible legacy of colonialism was the destruction of sturdy and viable native industries, particularly in India and Egypt. So stated Nehru. These had been changed by enterprises importing manufactured British items, in addition to supplying supplies wanted by Britain; particularly opium, which was studiously fed to the peoples of China. One other dreadful legacy of European colonialism: new nations created by the colonisers, in Asia and Africa particularly, by drawing strains on the map to attain a steadiness of energy between themselves or to trigger strife between native tribes forever. Have a look at Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Native tribes had been cut up on this course, leading to perennial wars between these synthetic nations; whereas nations usually mirror the integrity of tribes bonded by sanguinity, tradition and geography.

Historical past exhibits that the peoples of Asia had been governing themselves effectively, lengthy earlier than the Europeans did; that 500 years in the past the Chinese language folks had been probably the most technologically superior peoples on the planet; that the Indians had been the best merchants on the planet, pulling in huge quantities of gold from the Roman Empire for the best of materials; that village-level democracy in India was commonplace greater than 1,000 years in the past; that philosophy and arithmetic had been so superior in Asia that Europe was capable of purchase these by way of the Arabs and Moors; that city planning within the Indus Valley civilisation of greater than 2,000years in the past set the usual for more modern cities elsewhere on the planet; and that Persia, India and China had been producing prime quality artwork centuries earlier than different cultures had been capable of.

But, the racism of the colonial period was nowhere as brutal and un-Christian as reportedly practised within the USA till comparatively latest instances. Immediately, in Singapore, whereas there stay just a few native greybeards who bear in mind the conceitedness of the European colonisers, various white folks are working with no particular advantages. In my nation of beginning (now Malaysia and Singapore), multi-ethnic populations are ruled by their very own leaders. Regardless of some severe complaints concerning the affirmative motion coverage favouring the Malays of Malaysia being maintained well beyond its use-by date, there may be social, and a few cultural, integration, with mutual group respect publicly evident. A unified folk out of ethnocultural variety is certainly achievable, with none subservient to the opposite.

In this profitable governance of former colonial territories, an important underpinning is a worthwhile inheritance from Britain – a dearest idea of justice, legislation and order; as in Australia, extra legislation than justice. (Observe QC Geoffrey Robertson’s ‘The Justice Sport.’) The opposite nice profit from British colonialism is the (now common) English language – the language of Malaysia’s courts as effectively. A thousand years from now, archaeologists could start to imagine that the Malay Peninsula had additionally been the house of the English.

Thus, there have been advantages of some worth from colonialism. It’s simpler to recognise this within the present environment of relative freedom. Naturally, since change is inevitable, inherited Western democracy constructions and practices started to be amended to swimsuit conventional governance values, reflecting the communalism of the cultures of Asia. But, so long as the previous colonial territories stay capitalistic on this revised framework of governance, the neo-colonisers of the dominant West will little question stay acquiescent.

Freedom can by no means be absolute.

Source by Raja A Ratnam