Historical Error Drives Today’s Ire Over ‘Colonization’
The descendants of the European settlers in North America do have much to regret. Yet no sane person disputes that the colonists brought a more advanced civilization to this continent.

With all the increasingly annoying bandying about of the word “colonization” and its variants, what the person uttering the word means has nothing to do with the customary definition: the setting up and administering of distant subsidiary communities. This concept arises from the deformed imagination of chronically disaffected elements that have returned it to the popular culture as a form of oppressive patronization, usually with racist implications.
Those who have reintroduced the word “colonization” misrepresent it as an act of racial degradation and oppression accentuated by corrupt avarice. Usually, at the back of much of this designation of a vast range of activity as colonization is the theory that the chief purpose of real historical colonization was the imposition of slavery.
Almost all of this is simply bunk. If there had been no colonization in North America, there would have been no quick movement to the early Iron Age from the Stone Age civilizations that greeted arriving Europeans from Columbus on.
Native North America was a civilization of people who were extremely skilled as woodsmen, canoeists, and nomadic hunters and freshwater fishermen. Yet they had no written language, they had not discovered the wheel, the great majority had no agriculture; they lived on fish and game, and the great majority had no permanent structures: they were nomadic peoples moving communities of tents all over most of the surface of what are now Canada and the United States, and in very frequent merciless war with each other, with no pusillanimous hand-wringing about the fate of women and children.
There have undoubtedly been many discreditable aspects to the history of the Europeans’ treatment of the indigenous people of North America and the succeeding United States and Canadian governments’ treatment of them. These have been vividly dramatized and sometimes spuriously exaggerated, but the descendants of the European settlers in North America do have much to regret. Yet no sane person disputes that the colonists brought a more advanced civilization to this continent.
There are those who, building upon the romanticization of the North American natives by such writers as Châteaubriand and James Fenimore Cooper, claim that as the life expectancy of North American Indians was approximately equal to that of Europeans, they were, though very different, comparable civilizations.
This is nonsense: they were comparable people as all peoples are comparable and none is superior or inferior, but civilizations gradually become more sophisticated and the arriving Europeans were representatives of the civilization of Shakespeare, Dante, Descartes, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, to mention only a few of the more prominent worthies. They were at least 5,000 years ahead of the North American Indians.
The most ambitious active colonization in all of history was the British Indian Empire that comprised the present countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. These nations had from 100 million to 450 million people in the time that the British governed them, and Britain never had more than 100,000 of its own citizens present in India. Yet they ruled for 250 years and gave to those countries the English language, the parliamentary system, and the Common Law.
The British left voluntarily and India, like almost 50 other countries that Britain formerly governed, remains today voluntarily a member of the Commonwealth of Nations formally presided over by the British monarch, and all have expressed their profound regrets at the death of the late Queen. It is a reasonable inference that if they were so exercised by colonialism, they would not have remained in an organization that is an evolved continuation of that colonial relationship.
Colonization in fact was undertaken in part for commercial reasons, and in part to spread Christianity amongst peoples who had had no exposure to it, but mainly it was people fleeing injustice to set up a more just society in another place. That was, in particular, the motivation of those who colonized and then immigrated in immense waves to the United States and Canada.
The overwhelming majority of them arrived with no particular preconceptions about or ambitions in respect of the native populations. They were seeking a better life for themselves. There were only about three million indigenous people in all of what are now the United States and Canada (with 370 million people), and there was, for a long time, plenty of room for everyone.
Not five percent of colonists had any ambition to colonize those in the new world where they came to settle. Slavery based on Africans bought from slave-vendors in Africa and shipped across the Atlantic became an important part of the economy of the Southern colonies and states of the United States, where they were more efficient and less costly to plantation owners in harvesting tropical crops, such as cotton.
This was an evil regime that was ended, as all the world knows, by only a terrible Civil War. The Spanish also enslaved many native South Americans, particularly in exploiting gold and silver resources. Slavery was thus a byproduct of colonization in much of Latin America and the Southern colonies and states of what became the United States, but it was rarely part of the motive in Europeans determining to become colonists and to resettle in the new world.
Slavery was shameful; it was conducted from the 17th to 19th centuries, but was abolished by Britain and France in 1833 and 1848, and in 1865 in the United States, long after slavery had dwindled to almost no one in the chief colonial empires.
What people now mean by the disparaging accusation of “colonization” is actually some act of real or imagined condescension to African-Americans and almost never has anything to do with colonization. It was undoubtedly an act of presumption for the Europeans to extend their authority over the Americas, Africa, Australasia, and almost all of Asia.
Yet just as a Darwinian process assures the survival of the fittest, there’s a somewhat similar competition between the advancement in different populations, of the intellectual and physical energy of civilization. It is often an abrasive and sometimes a tragic process, but it is the sole reliable engine of objective progress.
Rome, initially an agricultural marketing town like a miniature Fresno, California, gradually expanded to govern all Italy and then the entire shoreline of the Mediterranean and then all of Western and most of Central Europe, Turkey, the Middle East to Iran, Egypt, North Africa and the present Mauretania.
There were rebellions, but the empire was more governed by consent than by continuous oppression. The peoples of the Roman Empire, even after stubborn resistance, as the Gauls resisted Julius Caesar for almost a decade, came to appreciate living in civility in a society of laws with rising prosperity, declining violence, good roads, safe sea lanes, and the ability of prominent locals to become Roman senators.
Most of it began as colonization, but once colonized, the Gauls did not wish to revert to being Gauls; and this was more due to Julius Caesar, and the Romans, who largely converted barbarian Gaul to la douce France.
And when the whole structure came crashing down, it was only because an irresistible mass of desperate barbarians driven westwards by the Chinese descended from the Steppes of Central Asia in such numbers and with such ferocity that they could not be successfully resisted.
Yet in a comparatively short time, the barbarians were happily absorbed into the populations that they had inundated, rapidly converted to the virtues of Christianity, and eventually, as is so much complained of in North America at this time, became colonists themselves and departed across the Western Ocean.
Nine times out of ten that we now hear the word colonization, it is a misnomer, and is also probably defamatory, though the slander is somewhat mitigated by the near certainty that the people who utter it rarely have any idea what they are talking about.