V. COLONIALISM
A. The Colonial Encounter
More than two hundred years ago, colonialism was packaged and sold to the world as a benign, civilizing mission for the benefit of peoples of color in Africa, Latin America, North America, India, Australia, and Asia.116 Trade was a primary driving force of colonial expansion.117 Doctrines were written to provide trading companies like the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company quasi-sovereign rights over indigenous peoples. Company
113 *Id. *at 748.
114 Nathaniel Taplin, One Belt, One Road, and a Lot of Debt, WALL ST. J. (May 2, 2019, 5:33 AM), https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-belt-one-road-and-a-lotof-debt-11556789446; Helen Davidson, Warning Sounded Over China’s ‘Debtbook Diplomacy,’ GUARDIAN (May 15, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/warning-sounded-overchinas-debtbook-diplomacy.
115 Id.
116Obiajulu Nnamuchi, The Goose and the Gander: A Jurisprudential Defense of Medicalization of Female Genital Ritual, 17 MICH. ST. U.J. MED. & L. 197, 217 (2013).
117 Antony Anghie, Finding The Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law, 40 HARV. INT’L L.J. 1, 36 (1999).
charters provided the right to trade in specific areas and the ability to take certain political action, like coining money or starting a martial campaign against indigenous peoples.118 By the nineteenth century, European states assumed direct responsibility for colonial lands.119 For instance, in 1858, the British East India Company was dissolved to make way for British colonial rule. This change entailed a critical shift in the ideology justifying Empire in terms of commodities to a new, sterner language of order, hierarchy and governance. The new approach was articulated at the Berlin Conference,120 during 1884-85, when European colonial powers divided indigenous lands in Africa.121 Critically, too, the Berlin Conference acted as a pressure valve for inter-European rivalries; for example, African lands were exchanged and bartered to ease Continental politics.122
118 Id. at 37.
119 Id.
120 The Berlin Conference (1884-85) regulated colonial spheres of interest in parts of Africa. Representatives of Europe’s leading powers, as well as Turkey and the United States, convened the Berlin Conference to decide to whom Congo belonged and to formalize rules for future acquisition of African lands. The final act of the conference (Berlin Act) in 1885 excluded African input and became a foundation for European colonial expansion in Africa. In certain respects, the Berlin Act was limited: it did not apply to past occupations or to the interior of Africa and only in the reciprocal relations of the signatory states. In practice, however, the Berlin Act has much wider application as its terms represented an emerging consensus as to all territorial expansion regardless of location or parties involved. Ultimately, the Berlin Act led to a series of monopolistic possessions characterized by violence and coercion. For more indepth analysis, see Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Colonialism, Legal Borrowing, and Disruption in Africa, *113 AM. SOC’Y INT’L L. PROC. 66, 66 (2019); Matthew M. Ricciardi, *Title to the Aouzou Strip: A Legal and Historical Analysis, 17 YALE J. INT’L L. 301, 391 (1992).
121Anghie, supra note 117, at 37.
122 Guy Fiti Sinclair, “The Ghosts of Colonialism in Africa”: Silences and Shortcomings in the ICJS 2005 Armed Activities Decision, 14 ILSA J. INTL. & COMP. L. 121, 123 (2007) (“Amidst general concern that disputes over African territory might lead to conflict between the European powers, the Conference sought ‘to channel the scramble in Africa into pacific channels.’”).
B. The Creation of ‘Race’
Race is a social construct. Indeed, race operates solely as a social construct and was a critical method of defining ‘the other’ in colonial contexts.123 As notions of race are responsive to the needs of power elites, its social construction and concomitant expressions of racism alter from time and place. Writing in 1856, leading transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the significance of race as caste, a type of social predestination segregating the elect and non-elect: “race … puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe.”124 Over a century ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois studied the problem of the creation of ‘race.’ He was profoundly troubled race was getting substituted as a biological explanation for what he knew to be social and cultural differences amongst people.125 Mainstream science today wholeheartedly embraces W.E.B. Du Bois’ views.126 As one leading scientist of the human genome put it, “[t]he more we learn about humankind’s genetic differences … the more we see that they have almost nothing to do with what we call race.”127 As ‘race’ is a social construct, racism is born from social legacies of oppression.128 Further, ‘race’ was a useful concept to colonizers; it was a metric of differentiation.129Colonizers pointed to the differentiation to
123 Patrick Wolfe, Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race, 106 AM. HIST. REV. 866, 867 (2001).
124 Ta-Nehisi Coates, What We Mean When We Say Race Is a Social Construct, THE ATLANTIC (May 15, 2013), https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-wesay-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/.
125 Megan Gannon, Race is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue, SCI. AM. (Feb. 5, 2016), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-constructscientists-argue/.
126 Id.
127 Sharon Begley, Three Is Not Enough, NEWSWEEK (Feb. 12, 1995, 7:00 PM), https://www.newsweek.com/three-not-enough-184974.
128 Steven A. Ramirez & Neil G. Williams, *On the Permanence of Racial Injustice and the Possibility of Deracialization, *69 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 299, 309 (2018).
129 Natsu Taylor Saito, Tales of Color and Colonialism: Racial Realism and Settler Colonial Theory, 10 FLA. A & M U.L. REV. 1, 24 (2014).
support myriad horrors, including violent assimilation policies, socio-religious indoctrination, and the brutalization of indigenous bodies.130
C. Colonialism in Africa
The colonial state in Africa was extant less than a century in most cases.131Yet the effects of colonialism are lasting and profound, not least because the practice created arbitrary territorial boundaries while reordering political spaces, modes of economic production, and exploiting societal cleavages.132 According to historian Michael Crowder, the portrait of Africa painted by the colonial powers was one of a people who, on the eve of occupation, were politically decentralized, living in small enclaves, dominated by unscientific fears of the natural world, and living in perpetual fear of attack.133 Thus was born the fantasy that Africa required Europe to save it.134 The voracious rapidity of the so-called “Scramble for Africa” was astounding: in half a generation, Europe gained virtually an entire continent that included ten million square miles of new territory and 110 million subjects.135
Perhaps nowhere in Africa was the colonizer’s avarice on display more than the Congo. For most of the nineteenth century, Belgium’s Parliament remained indifferent to colonial enterprise.136 The Belgian royal family, however, relished colonial ambitions. Leopold I, father of the infamous Leopold II of the Congo, knowing outright conquest of Africa was impossible, set about purchasing
130 Id. at 20.
131 Tom Brower, *Reframing Kurtz’s Painting: Colonial Legacies and Minority Rights in Ethnically Divided Societies, *27 DUKE J. COMP. & INT’L L. 35, 50 (2016).
132 *Id. *
133 MICHAEL CROWDER, WEST AFRICA UNDER COLONIAL RULE 12 (Hutchinson 1968).
134 Id.
135 THOMAS PAKENHAM, THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA: WHITE MAN’S CONQUEST OF THE DARK CONTINENT FROM 1876 TO 1912, at xxi (Avon Books 1992).
136 MARTIN EWANS, EUROPEAN ATROCITY, AFRICAN CATASTROPHE: LEOPOLD II, THE CONGO FREE STATE AND ITS AFTERMATH 15 (Routledge 2015).
large swaths of territory.137 He had a good historical model in President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, accomplished scant decades earlier. Leopold I failed numerous times. He could not buy Guatemala, Crete, Fiji, the New Hebrides and even a part of Texas which the United States acquired after the Mexican-American War.138 When Leopold I died in 1865, Leopold II ascended the Belgian throne and continued his father’s work of empire.139 He was determined, as he put it, to get “a slice of this magnificent African cake.”140 Leopold II created ruses whole cloth to gin up support for his enterprise; for instance, he was the chief proprietor of an organization whose stated purpose was saving African souls from Islam.141 Highly regarded throughout Europe as the “philanthropic” monarch, he welcomed Christian missionaries to the Congo.142 His soldiers found acclaim in Continental newspapers; faded ink on brittle pages tell triumphal stories of troops battling local slavetraders bent on capturing fellow humans and reducing them to a price.143 Not to be outdone, Leopold II’s main agent, Henry Stanley, a notorious self-promoter in his own right, already famous for his apocryphal greeting, “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”144 depicted the Congo and its inhabitants as the backdrop for narratives of Whites bestowing ‘civilization’ and religion to the people of Africa.145 Leopold II first met Stanley in 1878 and in December of that year Stanley signed a 5-year contract to establish the Congo enterprise.146 Leopold II never visited the region that was his personal fief. The inaptly named Congo Free State was soon “awash in corpses.”147 It is estimated Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo reduced the
137 Joseph Blocher & Mitu Gulati, Transferable Sovereignty: Lessons from the History of the Congo Free State, 69 DUKE L.J. 1219, 1226 (2020).
138*Id. *at 1227.
139 Id.
140 ADAM HOCHSCHILD, KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR, AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA 58 (Houghton Mifflin 1998).
141 *Id. *
142 *Id. *
143 Id.
144 See generally, Clare Pettitt, DR. LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME? MISSIONARIES, JOURNALISTS, EXPLORERS, AND EMPIRE (Harv. Univ. Press 2007).
145 Sinclair,* supra* note 122, at 124.
146 Ewans, supra note 136, at 57.
147 Hochschild, supra note 140, at 227.
region’s population by ten million people.148 It is an understatement to say that during its relatively brief existence between 1885 and 1908, the Belgian Congo was the situs of unspeakable horrors.
The breakup of indigenous societies under colonial rule was the subject of Chinua Achebe’s 1958 anti-colonial masterpiece Things Fall Apart. Achebe was writing, as he often expressed, against the Africa of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that classic work of colonial apologia.149 In a polemic against Conrad’s depiction of African peoples, Achebe commented on a few sentences from Heart of Darkness: “[t]his passage, which is Conrad at his best, or his worst, according to the reader’s predilection, goes on at some length … And then Conrad delivers the famous coup de grâce. Were these creatures really human?”150 Achebe’s Things Fall Apart *is a powerful counterpoint to *Heart of Darkness. At the novel’s end, the reader is left only with the erroneous, bereft musings of a middling colonial bureaucrat.151 The systemic iniquities described in Things
148 Sinclair, supra note 122, at 125.
149 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Achievement of Chinua Achebe, N.Y. REV. BOOKS (May 22, 2017), https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/22/theachievement-of-chinua-achebe/. The reduction of a human life to a commodity and a monetary sum is the essence of slavery. WALTER JOHNSON, SOUL BY SOUL: LIFE INSIDE THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVE MARKET 2 (1999). Lest anyone think slavery in the United States was confined to the antebellum South, the practice of slaveholding was widespread in New England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. JOANNE POPE MELISH, DISOWNING SLAVERY: GRADUAL EMANCIPATION AND ‘RACE’ IN NEW ENGLAND, 1780-1860 1-2 (1998). The traditional narrative of a “free white New England was a type of “amnesia meant to erase a more complicated, pernicious experience. Id. at xiii.
150 Appiah, supra note 149.
151 In writing about his Igbo homeland, Achebes Things Fall Apart accomplished what Conrad never could in providing a counterpoint to European colonialism and tragic farce. See generally, CHINUA ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART (Penguin Books 1958). Okonkwo’s suicide and erasure of his voice, and by extension, the complete society and culture of his people, is the more powerful for it: “In the many years in which [the Commissioner] had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things . . . [to avoid giving] the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book . . . The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.
Fall Apart meant that the transition from colony to successful nation-state has not been easy for many African countries. After brutalizing Africans and siphoning the land’s natural resources for decades, the various colonial powers granted independence to the scattered nations of Africa without preparing the new rulers to handle their devastated economies and various ethnic groups.152 In many instances, the departing colonial powers perpetuated their abuse of African resources through the imposition of constitutions which maintained the privileges of the immigrant European population at the expense of indigenous peoples.153 Apartheid South Africa is but a single example. Not surprisingly, a fair percentage of the post-colonial African leaders emulated the savagery of the colonizers and heaped misery, warfare, poverty, and hunger upon their own.154
D. Colonialism in Latin America
The nations comprising Latin America came into existence after the arrival of Europeans to the coastal region of eastern South America and the Caribbean Islands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.155 When considering the region’s history, it is important to “face east” and remember Latin America has a history that stretches back much further in time than the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese.156 These colonial societies quickly became rigidly hierarchical with severely constrained social mobility for indigenous peoples, peoples of mixed heritage, and persons of
There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.” See generally, id.
152Emmanuel O. Iheukwumere & Chukwuemeka A. Iheukwumere, Colonial Rapacity and Political Corruption: Roots of African Underdevelopment and Misery, 3 CHI.-KENT J. INT’L & COMP. L. 1, 2-3 (2003).
153 Id. at 3.
154 Id.
155 Yanira Reyes Gil, Critical Conversations on Nationalism, Self-Determination, Indigenous People, Globalization and Colonialism: Reflections on the South-North Exchange, 2004 & 2005, 17 FLA.J. INT’L L. [xiii], at xv (2005).
156 See generally DANIEL K. RICHTER, FACING EAST FROM INDIAN COUNTRY: A NATIVE HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICA (Harvard Univ. Press rev. ed. 2003).
African descent.157 Hector Meléndez, a scholar of Latin American history, locates the region’s colonial domination as a collective wound binding the region together while moving forward through time.158 Legal historian Francisco Valdés views the Spanish legacy in Latin America as causing the destruction of native civilizations and wholesale genocide.”159 Broadly constructed, there were three overarching stages or epochs of colonial enterprise: (1) 1500 – 1800, characterized by the transfer of wealth from indigenous societies to Europe; (2) 1800 – 1950, the continued impoverishment of the region albeit sometimes directed from inter-Latin power sources; and (3) 1950 – 1970, dubbed the “neocolonial period” and characterized by wealth transfer through local development and export-led industrialization strategies.160
During the early modern period, Latin American colonialism was rooted in the exploitation of the bountiful natural resources held by indigenous peoples and the imposition of Spanish-Portuguese centric values, culture, and religion.161 Violence was a constant feature of the experience.162 Laying the foundation for the so-called “Black Legend,” in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the West Indies, published in 1542, the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas said the following about atrocities the Spanish committed in Peru:
“After having killed not only all people of rank but almost all males capable of bearing arms, the Spaniards subjected the rest … [of the indigenous peoples] to devilish serfdom and exacted slaves as a
157 KENNETH J. ANDRIEN, THE HUMAN TRADITION IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 2-3 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2d ed. 2013).
158 Gil, supra *note 155, at xv; *see generally, HÉCTOR MELÉNDEZ, GRAMSCI EN LA DE DIEGO: TRES ENSAYOS SOBRE CULTURA NACIONAL, POSMODERNIDAD E IDEOLOGÍA (Ediciones La Sierra 1995)).
159 Gil, supra note 155, at xv.
160 Id. at xvi.
161 Yuri Mantilla, The Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the Andean Region, International Law, and Global Economic Integration, 43 SUFFOLK TRANSNAT’ L L. REV. 39, 41 (2020).
162 Id.
tribute . . . . Shiploads of which were sent to Peru to be sold. Beyond this [the Spaniards] committed so many murderous deeds and atrocities that an entire kingdom … which had been one of the most populous and fertile on earth was utterly destroyed.”163
The “Black Legend,” a tradition of anti-Spanish criticism, was popular among European powers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries not least as an ideological weapon in the struggle amongst European powers for colonial possessions.164 In response, Spanish colonial apologists fashioned a “White Legend,” whereby colonial violence was downplayed and a type of pax hispanica ended the supposed endemic warfare amongst indigenous groups.165
The U.S. issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. The doctrine held that the independent republics of the Americas would never be recolonized and remain free from European intervention.166 The doctrine’s stated purpose of noninterventionism was not intended and in fact did not apply to the U.S.167 The Monroe Doctrine was understood in Latin America as a type of “imperial edict” that had the twin effect of undermining the sovereignty and selfdetermination of Latin American nations.168 Unlike the European colonial experience in Africa, U.S. colonialism in Latin America was not a form of territorial acquisition as much as a particular form of socio-political domination.169 The arc of history shows the U.S. expanded its sphere of influence southwards and increasingly intervened in Latin America to advance, in part, its own commercial
163 Wolfgang Gabbert, The Longue Durée of Colonial Violence in Latin America, 37 HIST. SOC. RSCH./HISTORISCHE SOZIALFORSCHUNG (SPECIAL ISSUE) 254, 254 (2012).
164 Id. at 255.
165 *Id. *
166 Mohamed S. Helal, On Coercion in International Law, 52 N.Y.U. J. INT’L. L. & POL. 1, 50 (2019).
167 *Id. *
168 David Ryan, Colonialism and Hegemony in Latin America: An Introduction, 21 THE INT’L HIST. REV. 287, 287-88 (1999).
169 Id. at 288.
interests.170 These practices reached a crescendo during the Theodore Roosevelt Administration and his “big stick” approach to international politics, which granted the U.S. authority to exercise “international police power” in the Western Hemisphere. One unintended consequence of the “big stick” approach is that “many Latin American radicals and nationalists historically have looked upon the United States as their natural enemy.”171 This perspective, especially applied to the post-war inter-American relationship, views U.S. colonialism in Latin America in terms of unequal treaties, interventionist trade regimes, and overbearing diplomatic directives.172
Table of Contents
- I. INTRODUCTION
- II. CHINA IN CRISIS
- III. STATE-SPONSORED DOMESTIC TERROR
- IV. GREAT POWER COMPETITION
- V. COLONIALISM
- VI. CHINESE NEO-COLONIALISM
- VII. CONCLUSION - AMERICAN PROTEST, GLOBAL FREEDOM