How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (61 page)

There were substantial differences in how various European nations treated their colonies. No colony was mistreated as badly as the Belgian Congo.
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Initially the Congo was the personal possession of King Leopold II, who sent in military forces that imposed a brutal, murderous regime on the population, forcing the men to work deep in the jungle to tap wild rubber trees, and mutilating and killing those who complained. In 1904 the British consul Roger Casement issued a report estimating that several million Africans had perished, many from starvation as the forced labor had prevented the locals from farming. Prompted by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, an international commission investigated conditions in the Congo and confirmed that crimes against humanity were routinely taking place. The Belgian government took over the Congo from the king. But dreadful abuses continued. In 1960 the Congo gained its independence from Belgium, but sad to say, self-rule did not bring a better life to the people—a series of African tyrants have enriched themselves and imposed harsh repression.

At the other end of the spectrum were the British colonies. Granted, the British sometimes were oppressive and ruthless, but they also were concerned to improve the circumstances of their colonial subjects. This sense of obligation was expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase “the white man’s burden.” Today that phrase is uniformly condemned as unmitigated racism, and without a doubt it reflected the routine racism of the day. But for many British civil servants as well as missionaries serving abroad, it also reflected their conviction that those enjoying the benefits of modernity had an obligation to share it with those less fortunate.

Interestingly enough, two of the darkest blots on the British colonial record involve the brutal mistreatment of
white
subjects. The first occurred with the potato famine in Ireland (1845–51), when the Irish starved while the English landlords obeyed the Corn Laws and exported grain to England. The second happened in South Africa, where the British conducted a long and bloody war (1899–1902) against Dutch settlers to take over the Boer republics. In most other incidents involving British colonial military forces, they protected not only British interests but also colonial subjects. For example, the 1885 Mahdi Revolt in the Sudan took the city of Khartoum and was responsible for the death of the famous British general Charles “Chinese” Gordon; the British response relieved substantial numbers of Egyptian and Sudanese residents from the threat of massacre.

The most admirable aspects of British colonialism involved the immense efforts devoted to education and health.
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Colonial administrators and the educators they hired were responsible for some of these achievements.
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But just as important were the thousands of missionaries (Americans as well as British) who flocked to the colonies.

Missionary Effects

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they “imposed modernity” on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to “native peoples,” the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West. This “cultural imperialism” is defined as imposing Western tastes, beliefs, and practices upon non-Western cultures. Admittedly, the English may have committed an abomination when they converted so many colonials to the game of cricket, and the worldwide popularity of Coca-Cola may not have made the world a better place. But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused widows to be burned to death, tied to their husbands’ funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on grounds of
their
adultery. It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy and that slavery should be tolerated if it is in accord with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high infant-mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was “imposed,” both by missionaries and by other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering.
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Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial
and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa.
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But perhaps the best approach to assessing missionary effects is to follow the biblical injunction (Matthew 7:16) to know them by their fruits. Data show that Christian missionaries’ efforts from a century ago or more are still bearing fruit today.

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world.
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That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product (GDP) and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study ever has been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting. Woodberry was required to turn over his entire database to editors of the
American Political Science Review
, who subjected it to extensive, independent reanalysis. But after this vetting, the editors were satisfied that the robust statistical results were correct; in fact, they gave Woodberry considerably more space than the usual maximum to present his findings in detail.

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The local schools and colleges they established had a profound impact on these societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anticolonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England—among them Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, who led the Mau Mau Rebellion and ended up as the first president of independent Kenya.

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western
nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals.
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To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries. These efforts made a great difference in places that otherwise would have lacked access to modern medicine. And the benefits have lived on.

Once again, it is research by Robert Woodberry that reveals the long-term influence.
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His study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation’s infant-mortality rate in 2000—an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation’s life expectancy in 2000.

If these effects constitute “cultural imperialism,” so be it.

Colonialism and “Underdevelopment”

In 1902 the English economist J. A. Hobson published
Imperialism
, a book in which he charged that the industrial European nations looted their colonies by forcing them to sell their raw materials too cheaply and to buy manufactured goods at too high a price. In 1915 V. I. Lenin, soon to lead the Russian Revolution, essentially plagiarized Hobson’s book (including his statistics) for a book he titled
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
. Ever since, it has been an article of faith on the extreme Left that Western nations stole their wealth from the non-Western nations and, in doing so, prevented them from modernizing. This line has, of course, been popular in the less-developed nations. It tells them that their lack of progress is not their fault but is imposed upon them by the developed world.

Unfortunately, this claim also proved to be popular among Western social scientists. During the 1970s there arose a group of social scientists who identified themselves as “world systems” theorists. Led by Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and a cast of supporting players, world-systems theory was, for several decades, the prevailing view in academia, despite its obvious incompatibility with basic facts.

For example, echoing Hobson, world-systems theorists divide the world into poor nations that export raw materials and rich nations that
export manufactured goods, and they explain at length how this arrangement must keep poor nations poor. This claim is immediately challenged by the fact that Canada and the United States, two highly developed nations, export more raw foodstuffs than the rest of the world combined and that during its rapid period of industrialization during the nineteenth century, the United States exported huge amounts of raw cotton, tobacco, timber, fur, and coal. More damaging to this claim was a careful analysis of world trade statistics for fifty-nine nations that revealed no correlation between growth of per capita GDP and the proportion of a nation’s exports that are raw materials.
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World-systems proponents responded that increases in the GDP of less-developed nations benefited only the rich in those societies.
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That also turned out not to be so.
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The Oxford economic historian Patrick O’Brien offered perhaps the most devastating refutation of the world-systems perspective.
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Drawing on a large body of trade statistics going back to 1750, O’Brien demonstrated that the advanced nations could not have extracted their wealth from the poor nations because the volume of trade between them was trivial. The error of world-systems analysts, beginning with Hobson, is that they have focused on the obvious facts that some Europeans made fortunes from trade with the non-Western world and that some port cities also prospered, and from these points they generalized to the national economies. But this wealth was too little to have had a significant impact on national economies. Indeed, it is clear that during the Age of Imperialism European nations as a whole
lost
money on their colonies.
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The obvious exception is Spain, which enjoyed an era of great prosperity from importing gold and silver from its New World colonies. But this spurt of wealth had no long-term benefits, Spain having remained backward and poor. Nor did this “outflow” of precious metals have any significant impact on the economic development of Latin America.
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Another bizarre proposition of the world-systems school was Andre Gunder Frank’s claim that the greater the contact between a less-developed society and the industrial nations, the more retarded the less-developed society’s economic development.
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My colleague Arthur Stinchcomb often amused his graduate classes at Berkeley by pointing out that if this were true, then groups in Latin America that live farthest from the coast would be more economically developed than those on the coast—as clearly demonstrated by the Indians living far up the Amazon who have yet to have contact with anyone.

Of course, as is typical in such matters, a pile of negative evidence has not converted the world-systems proponents. But they lost much of their appeal when the demise of Soviet Union took them by surprise and deprived them of the exemplary society toward which they held that social change was inexorably moving. As Daniel Chirot noted, “Because world-system theory ultimately shut out those who did not agree with its political objectives, it lost a lot of its credibility.”
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Partial Modernity

Although modernity has spread around the globe, in many places what has arisen is not
Western
modernity. Instead, technological aspects of modernity have been grafted onto non-Western cultural systems that still lack many of the basic political and moral aspects of Western civilization. As Samuel P. Huntington noted so perceptively, many observers mistakenly see the worldwide popularity of Western consumer products such as Coke and Levi’s as reflecting the development of a “universal civilization.” But to do so “trivializes Western culture.”
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In Arab societies many people own cell phones and drive automobiles, and the armies have an abundance of modern weapons. But to the extent that this reflects modernity, it is modernity by purchase and import—these are not industrial societies. Nor are they modern in most other respects. There are no Arab democracies. Women have few rights, and religious intolerance is the rule.