From the Company to Corporate control. Colonialism continues.

From the Company to the contemporary Corporate is one long journey . It is a journey  without the  break that "Post Colonialism' would suggest. It is the journey of  continued colonial control. The American  AFRICOM is just  the new guise of 19th century division of Africa by the Europeans . 

Nothing has changed. 

“The conquest of earth, which mostly means the taking away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” Joseph Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness. “What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...”

With the help of the Idea, the ugly facts of conquest can be tucked away from sight. We encountered this recently during the Iraq War. While the American invasion and occupation consumed more than 100,000 Iraqi lives, the ideologues implored us to keep our eyes on the supposed benefit. Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, encouraged the American establishment to perform its imperial role, drawing its attention to the record of the British Empire and extolling it for bestowing the gift of progress to the colonies. Christopher Hitchens, an erstwhile radical and raconteur, was also seduced by the Idea. He cosied up to American neocon ideologues and policy makers and offered full-throated support for the invasion. Not that George Bush and Dick Cheney needed encouragement in bludgeoning Baghdad. The “War on Terror” had already prepared the ground for a trumped-up case against Saddam Hussein. Critics charged that no “unselfish belief” stood behind the war. The US dressed up the war in lofty language to conceal something altogether crass—reiteration of American hegemony, control of the Iraqi oilfields, and removal of a counterforce to Israel. But that is precisely the point; what redeemed these vulgar motives and the carnage of the invasion in the eyes of the neocon ideologues was the goal of asserting the power and values of a US-led Western coalition. So much so that they were prepared to—and did—massage intelligence reports and lie to the UN. The “War on Terror” was a cynical ploy because the invaders knew, thanks to the anti-colonial legacy and anti-war mobilisation, that outright conquest without justification was not an option. The Idea was crucial.

By now we are accustomed to—and able to see through—imperial smokescreens and self-delusions that serve to obfuscate the motives behind invasions and conquests. Even if some try to persuade us that colonialism was not always oppressive, the ugly facts of alien rule are well established by historical research. So much so that few historians consider it necessary to pay further attention to the actual record of annexations and their justifications. Discussions on the topic produce weary impatience. Don’t we know this already? Colonialism is a thing of the past, it’s history; the world has moved on.

But what if the world has not moved on? During the past few decades scholars and intellectuals like Edward Said and Ashis Nandy have argued that colonialism did not end with its formal abolition. The era of European domination has left lasting ideologies and systems of power. To understand our present, we need to return to the colonial past. This is not in order to reiterate the facts about European oppression, but to ask how conquest and its justifications gave rise to ideas and forms of rule that are still with us.

The late 19th-century “scramble for Africa” derived legitimacy from the political theory of norms and exceptions developed in the course of the British conquest of India. The European nations that met in Berlin in 1884-85 to carve up Africa amongst themselves believed that it, like the Indian subcontinent, could be subject to a deviation from the norm because it did not meet the established standards of development and good government. Therefore, the European sovereign nations were entitled to deny self-government to Africa. You did not have to be a supporter of imperial ideology to endorse colonial rule as long as you subscribed to the theory of comparative world government. The rule of the advanced over backward nations was not really imperialism but a sort of tutelage to bring the deviant up to scratch: An unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.



Where The Black Hole of Empire does succeed is in offering a bold interpretation of colonialism’s history. The book is addressed primarily to scholars of modern empires and states. But that is no reason why it should not be part of a wider conversation. Nor should we consider it a disqualification that the cosy intellectual clubs in the West are unlikely to authenticate arguments like Chatterjee’s in their discussions of empire and its continuing legacy. The price of admittance there is to check such radically critical readings of empire at the gate. This is regrettable, for the book shows that colonialism cannot be viewed only as the deplorable past; its ideology and practices endure and continue to shape our present. With masterful synthesis, it shows that the process of justifying acts of conquest produced enduring political theories of empire and the modern state. So much so that in a world without colonies, the right to declare an exception is still an imperial right. Great powers can still march into sovereign territories, claiming an exceptional right to intervene. We still live in a world where the exercise of power over others is redeemed by the Idea.


http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/return-black-hole

                                                          Black hole. Calcutta.