Can "The Goods" Justify Empire?

I should be grateful for the British empire. Not only am I, as the child of former British colonials, bred to like Ovaltine and black currant jelly at teatime, without a doubt I owe the British empire my very life. Without the existence of the imperial outpost of Hong Kong, my grandparents would not have found safe haven from war-torn China, my parents would not have gone to America, and I would never be here at Harvard.

But wait—the telling of this story makes a number of assumptions. In playing counterfactual history this way, we link a sequence of events without establishing their necessary connections. And, no matter how grateful I may be for the opportunities that the British empire afforded, I cannot say that it justifies the imperial project.

At a recent history conference entitled “Empire and Imperial Control in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Niall Ferguson, who will join Harvard’s history department in July, made a number of points. In his keynote address he reiterated his most recent thesis: the United States is an empire in denial, and this denial is at the root of its failures. In the plenary session, he took his argument further: Empire “delivers the goods”—economic growth rests on the kinds of institutions that empire makes possible. Ferguson’s current work includes the calculation of investments made in the British empire, investments that would have been inaccessible to those countries not under the British crown. Ferguson points out that there is a striking similarity between what institutions and indicators current economists require as prerequisites to growth and the priorities of the past British empire. From here we are forced down a slippery slope: The colonial projects of the 19th century may not have been entirely good, but they were—on the balance—positive, and thus can be taken as models for American imperial aspirations.

For a number of reasons, Ferguson’s theory is problematic. Firstly, empire=economic development does not translate into empire=good. Economics is a useful tool, but it has no inherent value system. Economics could be used to justify any number of systems that today give us pause: apologists for empire, slaveholders in the old South, indeed even present-day authoritarian regimes tell us that the material well-being of their “subjects” are far better under their respective regimes than they would otherwise have been.

Secondly, likening American “empire” to the British empire is a tenuous analogy at best. A good historian cannot place one historical template over another without qualification, least of all over the present day. The United States cannot be so blatantly an empire precisely because it isn’t the 19th century anymore—like it or not, world opinion is now more powerful, self-determination and nationalism are movements to be contended with, and there is at least a rhetoric of democracy that is to be upheld. Ferguson’s likening of US empire to British empire is ahistorical; we cannot justify America acting as an empire based on a world system that no longer exists. This would be in itself a kind of denial.

Finally, the game of counterfactual history is dangerous. That colonial subjects could not have themselves come out of poverty and established democracies not only assumes that these were the intentions of empire, it denies any agency to the populations of the colonies. Number-crunching may show that empire was necessary for infusions of capital, but it is far from sufficient in showing how benighted the world would have been if no one had taken up the white man’s burden.

What is most disquieting about Ferguson’s assertions is that they ignore human desires that go beyond the material; life and liberty come before property. The danger of the oversimplified economic argument is that it reduces human life and labor to commodities. Empire brings wealth—but to whom, and how is it shared? What is the “value” of wealth if it is not gotten in a free society? Can we jettison freedom and equality, old-fashioned virtues as they are? What aspects of humanity get shoved aside in the pursuit of empire? History is important because it shows that society cannot be reduced to those terms; history is not—as Ferguson suggested—reducible to a “balance sheet.” Mao Zedong has been reevaluated as 70 percent good and 30 percent bad; the Chinese man on the street will tell you that he was “still a great person.” We may laugh at this naiveté, but this is not much different from whitewashing the “bad” of empire with the “good” of empire, or conflating “the goods” with “good.” Suggesting that empire is appropriate today is to perpetuate this same myth of imperialism. History is too complex, and basic tenets of human dignity too important, for a good historian to be reduced to that.

Denise Ho is a first-year doctoral candidate in history.