Civilization: The West and the Rest

Ferguson identifies six features (“killer apps”) to which he credits the rise of the West since the 16th century. These features comprise competition and institutions that foster competitiveness, scientific advancement, private property along with the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. Yet the vehicle by which these features benefitted the West and were disseminated around the world was imperial expansion and conquest and settlement of colonies abroad. 

First, Ferguson argues that the West needed an imperial project to rise above “the Rest”:

Without the New World, it has been asserted, “Western Europe would have remained a small, backward region of Eurasia, dependent on the East for transfusions of technology, transmissions of culture, and transfers of wealth. Without American ‘ghost acre” and the African slaves who worked them, there could have been no ‘European Miracle,’ no Industrial Revolution (96).

Second, the author takes imperial expansion as part and parcel of perceived Western superiority, i.e., a positive force. He writes: “[T]here is no question that here, as elsewhere, Western empire brought real, measurable progress” and argues that it is in vogue to criticize colonialism without accounting for its benefits (172). Ferguson also suggests that not all European empires were created equal, and some were better than others. The benefits that colonialism brought to the colonized, in his view, ranged from infrastructure to the eradication of deadly diseases. Ferguson appears generally uninterested in the impact that European colonialism had on the colonized—or their agency and consent—only in the tangible benefits to the West.

Ferguson subscribes to the might-is-right type of thinking, suggesting that the West was successful because it dominated others. One example of this thinking is Ferguson’s commentary about 19th-century China. In China, colonialism (especially British and Japanese) between the middle of the 19th century and the 1949 Revolution is known as the Century of Humiliation. For example, the British drug trafficking of opium in China resulted in addiction among large segments of the population, socio-economic problems, and the Opium Wars. British control led to unequal treaties and the loss of Chinese territory. In contrast, the author assumes a celebratory tone at China’s defeat seemingly only interested in Britain’s rise:

The West’s ascendancy was confirmed in June 1842, when Royal Naval gunboats sailed up the Yangzi to the Grand Canal in retaliation for the destruction of opium stocks by a zealous Chinese official. China had to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, open five ports to British trade and cede the island of Hong Kong. It was ironic but appropriate that this first of the so-called “Unequal Treaties” was signed in Nanjing, at the Jinghai Temple—originally built in honour of Admiral Zheng He and Tianfei, the Goddess of the Sea, who had watched over him and his fleet more than four centuries before (47-48).

Occasionally, Ferguson mentions the detriments to Indigenous populations, for example, the death and disease brought to the Indigenous peoples of South America through Spanish colonization. His most significant exploration of the brutality of colonialism occurs in his chapter on medicine, in which he discusses in detail the horrors of African colonization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the so-called “Scramble for Africa” after the Berlin Conference (1884-1885). These horrors included forced labor, extermination, and the “racial-biological” research by eugenicist pseudo-scientists primarily from Germany.

However, when he does focus on the negative impact of Western imperialism, he deflects to France, Germany, and Belgium throughout the book, ignoring the impact of other colonial endeavors. In the case of India, for instance, Ferguson mentions that Britain destroyed India’s domestic textile trade but evades examining other detrimental aspects of British colonialism. Yet, as recently as 1943, the human-made Bengal famine led to millions of deaths. During the famine, Winston Churchill remarked that Indians “breed like rabbits,” and relief would be irrelevant (Herman, Arthur, Gandhi & Churchill The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, New York: Random House, 2008, p. 513).

To preempt legitimate criticisms of the European imperial project beyond his comfort level, the author presents a hyperbole:

[I]t is a truth almost universally acknowledged in the schools and colleges of the Western world that imperialism is the root cause of nearly every modern problem, from conflict in the Middle East to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—a convenient alibi for rapacious dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe (144).

Instead, it seems reasonable to examine all aspects of the European imperial project—from infrastructural development and medical advancements to the negative impact on the colonized—to develop a more accurate understanding of history.