Washington, DC, October 15, 2024 --  

Yes, abuse was rife during the colonial era. But justice must be sought for today and tomorrow -- not for centuries past.

Government offices and schools were closed on Indigenous Peoples day in America's imperial capital.  The holiday was formerly known solely as Columbus Day, a celebration of a Genoese man working for the Spanish Crown who unwittingly discovered the Americas and set off the Great Exchange.  This revolutionized the modern world by spreading people, diseases, precious metals and agricultural products around the globe.

The colonial era has gotten a bad wrap of late, and not just by the downgrade of Columbus' holiday.  

Mexico's new president reiterated her predecessor's demand for an apology from the king of Spain for the conquest of the Aztec Empire.¹  Britain's new Labor government gave up one of its last remaining colonies, the Chagos Islands, in return for a 100 year lease on its American-dominated Island base of Diego Garcia.²   

It is taken as a given that colonialism is a uniquely Western evil, and that we must atone for the crimes of the era.  But inso doing, critics for the era's excesses typically turn a blind eye to more contemporary evil.  Such evil is often on display by today's authoritarian giants like Russia and China.

The rise of China is lauded by Beijing as victory of anti-colonialism, a rightful restoration of East Asian power over the declining fortunes of the West.  Nonsense.  Beijing's militaristic  bullying near Taiwan and the Spratly Islands is reminiscent of Western behavior during the colonial era.  Its manufacturing and technical prowess is entirely based on copying the Western model, initially as a subcontractor.  Indeed, China owes its modern success to copying the West's behavior not fighting against it.

Internally China represses  "indigenous" populations of neighboring nations it occupies, throwing the Turkic Uighurs in reeducation camps and subjugating the  Tibetans with the omnipresent surveillance of the Han police state. And to be fair to China, its Russian neighbor does the same thing in occupied Ukraine.

This is how powerful nations have treated less powerful neighbors since the beginning of civilization. The Greeks conquered and colonized the Mediterranean and the Egyptian state before they were in turn conquered and colonized by the Romans. In Columbus' time, the Genoese were not yet considered Italians -- but Italian speakers of the day were the descendants of an admix of both colonizers and indigenous peoples including the Goths, the Celts, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Etruscans and countless others who came before.

The entire concept of an "indigenous" people is relative. All people on earth (even people living in today's East Africa where humans first evolved) are largely descendants of people who came from somewhere else, subjugating and mixing with the prior population many times over. When people speak in defense of the indigenous, they usually refer to cases where less powerful people are dominated by more powerful new arrivals.

But that isn't how it often works. In the colonial era, the new arrivals were often not powerful at all and did not even come voluntarily. Enslaved Africans taken to the Americas and imprisoned Brits taken to Australia are obvious examples. While Columbus is often seen as the oppressor, DNA evidence of his Jewish heritage suggests he probably descends from those involuntarily expelled from Israel. And given the brewing campaign agains Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, he and his compatriots of Sephardic Jewish ancestry had good reason to flee Europe for the Americas.

Today, much of the displacement of the indigenous is not by conquest, but by migration. Many people in today's Europe are now Muslim. Partly due to immigration, nearly 40 percent of residents of the United States are neither Native American nor White Europeans.³ Should the new arrivals, who are often able-bodied workers taking natives' jobs, be condemned? Populist parties might think so, but their members are probably not the kind of indigenous people that critics of colonialism have in mind.

We should all recognize that the abuses of the colonial era were wrong. It is always wrong for violent conquerers to subjugate the conquered. It is always wrong to enslave others. These kinds of wrongs have been going on for many thousands of years. Despite the fact that we generally think of the colonial era as over, similar abuses still happen today (less often by European powers than once before), and will undoubtedly happen in the future. Critics of injustice should focus their energy on fighting the abuses of today, not that of centuries past.

Related Web Columns:

Sorry About the Ancient Plunder, March 26, 2019

Notes:

1. Guardian, Mexico’s Snub to King Felipe Rekindles Colonialism Row With Spain, September 26, 2024

2. BBC, UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius, October 3, 2024

3. US Census Bureau, 2020 U.S. Population More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Than Measured in 2010, August 12, 2021