In Defense of German Colonialism

In Defense of German Colonialism by Bruce Gilley

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/colonialism-reconsidered-188fcd7fe0ce

This is not the time to write an apology for colonialism. Western cultural elites have decided that colonialism is the worst phenomenon in human history. In this book, author Bruce Gilley explores the anti-colonialist narrative by examining German colonialism. If there is one nation tainted in the popular mind with every evil done in the name of racism, that nation would be Germany.
So, how does Gilley do? Extremely well. Gilley's presentation is eye-opening. After forty years of focusing exclusively on West's crimes - real or imagined - it is a ray of sunlight to see the other side of the ledger. 

Colonialism was part of the Western liberal agenda and the Enlightenment project. That project includes Voltaire lampooning superstition in the name of reason or the philosophes promoting new ways of doing things that improved hygiene and life options. The Enlightenment made a virtue out of innovation and progress against the tired hand of tradition. We cheer for the philosophes in their battle against superstition, even if it is a form of colonialism of the urban elite against the rural classes. This raises the question of why progress is good for the European peasantry but not for peasants in Africa or Asia.

Colonialism deserves fair consideration. We have to consider the entire record. I'm going to skim some of the hight points of Gilley's book with an emphasis on the points he makes to establish a balance in the lived reality of European colonialism.

One of the facts that anti-colonialists suppress is that colonialism saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of natives. AS Gilley points out, “Without doubt, Germany's greatest humanitarian contribution to Africa during its colonial period was the discovery of a cure for sleeping sickness.” Before German colonialism, hundreds of thousands of Africans would die of sleeping sickness each year. An outbreak from 1901–07 killed between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people in British Uganda, and two million people succumbed in all of East Africa in 1903 alone. The colonial powers put together expeditions and policies that were unheard of previously to save natives. Gilley explains:

Between 1901 and 1913, fifteen medical-research missions came to Africa to study sleeping sickness. Under the International Sleeping Sickness Commission convened by colonial powers, German scientists under Koch identified the tsetse fly as the carrier of the disease. Next came methods to identify and isolate patients and to eliminate the tsetse fly's habitat. Germany and Britain agreed in 1908 to prevent infected Africans from crossing borders, and in 1911 they signed a cooperative agreement to combat sleeping sickness in West Africa. The Germans got results: in German East Africa between 1908 and 1911, 62 percent of the four thousand cases treated whose outcomes were known were healed using palliative drugs, a worthy achievement against a disease whose mortality rate was 80–90 percent. (p. 122.)

In 1910, Dr. Robert Koch discovered a cure for sleeping sickness, incidentally inventing “chemotherapy.” Koch also taught natives to use the resin of a native tree to caulk their boats. Previously, natives risked their lives to crocodile attacks while journeying across Lake Victory in fragile boats. 

Koch noticed an absence of innovation as a feature of all premodern societies that acted on tradition alone. The West brought the idea of innovation and experimentation to native cultures.
Koch also found a cure for rinderpest, a cattle disease that destroyed native populations dependent on cattle for food.

In 1896–97, a rinderpest epidemic struck the Herero and Nama region's cattle. The German administration drew a quarantine line dividing Hereroland from the northerly section of Ovamboland and built a 550-kilometer string of monitoring stations. Without German settlers to provide employment and food, a large part of the Herero population would have died of starvation and malnutrition. Certainly, the Nama and other groups would not have set up soup kitchens. South Africa's white-owned diamond companies paid for Robert Koch (then a little-known German scientist) to visit, and he quickly discovered an effective cattle vaccine that won him a Nobel prize in 1905.16 Veterinarians assigned to the German military garrison managed to vaccinate most of the Nama and settler herds because they were geographically concentrated. The Herero herds, by contrast, were greater in number and widely dispersed. Half of their cattle succumbed. (p. 46.)
Colonialism brought economic benefits to the colonized:

Islands offer an almost perfect natural experiment in colonialism's economic effects because their discovery by Europeans was sufficiently random. As a result, they should not have been affected by the “pull” factors that made some places easier to colonize than others. In a 2009 study of the effects of colonialism on the income levels of people on eighty-one islands, two Dartmouth College economists found “a robust positive relationship between colonial tenure and modern outcomes.”27 Bermuda and Guam are better off than Papua New Guinea and Fiji because they were colonized for longer. That helps explain why the biggest countries with limited or no formal colonial periods (especially China, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Thailand, and Nepal) or whose colonial experiences ended before the modern colonial era (Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti) are hardly compelling as evidence that not being colonized was a boon. The people of “liberated” Haiti began fleeing to the colonial Bahamas or to the slave-owning and later-segregated American South almost as soon as they were “free” from the white man. One can applaud their sense of irony. (p. 17.) 

Colonialism brought political benefits to colonized people:

Colonialism also enhanced later political freedoms. To be colonized in the nineteenth–twentieth-century era was to have much better prospects for democratic government, according to a statistical study of 143 colonial episodes by the Swedish economist Ola Olsson in 2009.30 Since Germany's colonies were short-lived, sparse in number, and later folded into British and French colonies, Olsson's research could not identify the precise democratic contribution of German colonialism. However, what explained the democratic legacies of colonialism, he argued, was not particular national strategies but the more common European principles of free trade, humanitarianism, property rights, the rule of law, native uplift, and constraints on political executives, factors certainly present in the German colonies: “All this strongly suggests to us that colonization during the imperialist era, regardless of the nationality of the colonizer or the particular circumstances in the colonies, should be more conducive to current levels of democracy than colonialism under mercantilism.”31 The Danish political scientist Jacob Hariri, meanwhile, found in a study of 111 countries that those not colonized because of the existence of strong premodern state, or only symbolically ruled by Europeans piggybacking on traditional institutions, were more likely to be saddled with a dysfunctional state and political system later on. (p. 18–19.)

Gilley points out that Germany could not have ruled without the willing cooperation of the natives:
In 1904, the entire colonial government of German East Africa - a sprawling territory three times larger than Germany proper and populated by nearly eight million people - consisted of just 280 whites and 50 native civil servants.54 There were an additional 300 German or European soldiers. By 1913, the combined government and military staff of Germans totaled just 737.55 Native elites ran the colony, operating out of thirty government/military bomani.56 In population terms, the numbers are similar to what they would be if New Jersey was run by 320 civil servants (New Jersey had 432,000 state and local employees in 2019). By 1914, the number of German and European soldiers had decreased to 200, alongside 2,500 enlisted native soldiers (askari). (p. 76–77.)

Slavery was endemic to Africa. Germany was committed to the anti-slavery program of the Enlightenment and successfully ended slavery in its territories:

Anti-slavery policies, which had been a key factor in the decision to formally take over the colony, slowly eroded the power of local slaving interests. But there were some unforeseen difficulties. As early as 1891, the then governor Julius von Soden remarked that one of the main obstacles to abolition was that slaves would rather remain in their current state than become “free laborers” on a plantation, where they would have to work harder.32 The German diplomat Heinrich Brode noted that slaves were considered part of the family in most instances and given only light work while “domestic servants at home appear much greater slaves than the natives who bear this name.”33 Therefore, German policy adopted a gradualist approach, eradicating slavery with a combination of incentives and economic development. In 1904, a new colonial policy stated that all children born to slaves from 1906 on were to be regarded as free. Moreover, between 1891 and 1912, 52,000 slaves were freed by legal, social, and financial means.34 Through these efforts, coupled with the growth of the capitalist economy that made it more profitable to hire labor, the roughly one million slaves in the area at the time of German colonization in 1890 fell to two hundred thousand by 1914 and would disappear entirely by the 1920s. (p. 68–69.)

Germany also engaged in helpful social work that makes no sense if Germany was purely about racist exploitation. In public education, Germany taught the natives in Swahili:

Perhaps the most important development was the Africanization of the government through Swahili-language schools that trained native colonial administrators. By 1910, there were 3,494 elementary and 681 middle- and upper-school students in the state schools, compared to only 1,196 in the mission schools. Roughly 6,100 in total passed through the state schools from 1902 to 1914. In neighboring British Kenya and Uganda, by contrast, there were still no state schools. “The Germans have accomplished marvels,” a British report on the colony's education concluded in 1924.27 (p. 67.) 

Germany came into the colonial game late. Germany had colonies in Togo, Tanzania, Southwest Africa (Namibia), and German Samoa. German colonization inspired great loyalty among the natives, who often fought for the Germans or went into exile when Germany lost its colonies.
The “Herrero Genocide” is a potential black mark on Germany's cultural legacy. Gilley denies that a genocide occurred. The Herrero were part of the Bantu expansion that wiped out the indigenous Khoisan tribes. In fights for territory, the Nama had massacred a fifth of the Herero population in 1850. In turn, the Herero replaced and enslaved other tribes. In 1904, after being allied with the Germans, the Herero decided to include the Germans in Namibia's tradition of genocide with the slogan “kill all Germans” as Herero began to kill German settlers. Berlin sent in Lothar von Trotha to suppress the Herero.

Gilley writes:

By the time the rebellions ended in 1906, the officially enumerated Herero population in the colony had fallen by 75 percent from eighty thousand to twenty thousand. The officially enumerated population of the Nama had fallen by half from twenty thousand to ten thousand. In addition to 150 murdered settlers, the Germans counted their losses at 1,400 dead and another 1,000 wounded or missing. (p. 52.)

This is impressive, but the problem is that populations in the area that were not at war also saw their numbers fall by similar amounts. The explanations for these population declines included migration away from the conflict zone, falls in female fertility, increased mortality because of the disruptions of the conflict, epidemics, food supply disruption, and problems with taking a census.
The disappearance of thirty thousand from the census rolls does not explain why those people disappeared.

Gilley argues that Germany's colonial project enhanced German democracy at home. The Reichstag was given a great deal of control over the colonial project. The colonial establishment was home to German liberals.

Gilley also argues that the seizure of the colonies led to Germany's embrace of National Socialism. The Nazis were anti-colonialists. They did not believe that Germany should go to places far removed from Germany to bring progress to other races. Nazi anti-colonialism.[1] Hitler wanted a free hand in Europe. He rejected Chamberlain's offer to return Cameroon and East Africa to Germany. The Nazis forged alliances with other anti-colonial race chauvinists in Inda, Africa, and the Middle East. As Gilley points out:

Parochialism, racism, and illiberalism were after all the natural positions for all anti-colonialists. Hitler referred to nationalists in India like Gandhi as his “natural allies.” (P. 204.) This anti-colonialist alliance had its most enduring impact in the Middle East where Arab political parties were based on fascism and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a devotee of Hitler.

Gilley points out that the anti-colonialists drawn to Hitler were like many later anti-colonialists. The extent of their anti-colonial agenda was “handing over power from reforming, liberal, colonial systems to reactionary fascist ones where they would receive the salutes from the podium.” (p. 213.)

This was a surface skim of the book. Gilley offers details and data that balance the ledger against the prevailing narrative of oppression and racism. He is also an engaging writer. The Leftwing narrative is a moralistic, Manichaean morality play, and Gilley is frustrated with the shallow lies that pass for history. His take-downs of the “narrative” is very engaging.

Footnotes:

[1] The Nazi program of Lebensraum was not colonialism. The Nazis intended to conquer territories for German expansion. Populations in those territories would be exterminated or turned into slaves. Although Leftists want to equate liberal colonialism with Nazi expansion, they are different.