Striking Back at Ferguson’s Empire

Via MaxSpeak, Vivek Chibber provides a long-necessary demolition of Niall Ferguson. Sawicky highlights the first part of Chibber’s argument, pointing out the ridiculousness of Ferguson’s claims about the “good government” allegedly provided by the British Empire in India. The second part of the argument, which addresses Ferguson’s claim that the failure of decolonization in many states was the result of empire not going far enough, is also worth attending to. As Chibber notes, the “Don’t look at empire, it didn’t do it” part of Ferguson’s argument is equally wrong:

Postcolonial pathologies were a natural consequence of normal colonial rule.Ferguson’s inability to understand this is striking. And it is what lurks behind the remarkable sleight of hand that he performs in his political analysis: colonial rule gets all the credit for the things that went right but none of the blame for the disasters it left behind. Having elevated imperial history to the mythical realm of good governance, Ferguson eliminates the predictable violence of colonialism as well as any structural relation between British rule and the postcolonial order. If there was violence, repression, underdevelopment, tribal and communal statecraft, it was a product of “sins of omission”—as he pleasingly puts it—a result of the British falling short of their own noble ideals.

This, of course, is something that many proponents of the Iraq war on democratiziation grounds manifestly fail to grasp. Chibber points out the state/society angle; colonial powers almost always have to rule by strengthening the power of local rulers, in ways that almost always have illiberal and anti-democratic consequences. In addition, he also notes the obvious problems of nationalism, which are particularly relevant. Imposing formal democratic institutions through occupation is not merely ineffective and produces many awful side effects, but is generally actually counterproductive. Associating liberal democratic institutions with the American occupation is in most cases a terrible strategy for democracy promotion, because it allows antiliberal forces to march under the more attractive banner of anti-Americanism.