Decolonizing Politics by Robbie Shilliam

Author:Robbie Shilliam [Shilliam, Robbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Contrast the provincial and limited “perception of sense” – what you know is only what you immediately feel – to the universal and expansive “conclusions of science” – what you feel can be generalized to explain all the phenomena of the world. There is a sense, here, that one path of improvement is definitely more superior (and efficacious) than others: the path forged by Europeans in the making of commercial society.

Ferguson argued that the generalization of knowledge, which enabled a superior kind of improvement, required a specific division of labor. Within this division, each individual had to perform a different task whether that be farming, science, or philosophizing etc. That meant that no one individual could provide all the needs of their subsistence; each was dependent on the work of the other. This inter-dependency of needs was met through the market mechanism: we all come with different things to sell, and the principles of demand and supply assure the satiation of our needs without recourse to stealing etc. For Ferguson, as for so many of the Scottish philosophers, commercial society had a pacifying and civilizing effect on a divided and wretched humanity.

Here’s that colonial paradox at work again, right? Ferguson typified the human condition as the use of reason to improve nature. He accepted that different human groups would improve their surroundings in different ways. The type of improvement was not morally significant neither was its efficacy, only the fact that humans undertook improvement. At the same time, though, Ferguson identified a particular path of improvement through which God’s grace was amplified and channeled. That path was taken by Europeans who used their reason to evolve commercial society.

With Las Casas we saw that a seeming paradox of comparison was resolved with a project of religious conversion and conquest. What project did Ferguson propose to resolve the paradox? To be honest, he never directly told us, although it is possible to infer his driving interest from the context within which he wrote his history of civil society as a subject of Britain.

Britain was a polity formed in 1707 by two countries, England and Scotland, both of which harbored colonial aspirations. Ferguson’s life spanned the high point of Britain’s first empire, comprised of Ireland and the North American and Caribbean colonies. More importantly, he wrote his Essay against the backdrop of a world war (the Seven Years War 1756–1763) between the British and French, wherein indigenous peoples were on both sides in the conflicts that took place in the north east of the American continent. While Ferguson’s political position on the War focused on the desirability of creating militias in Scotland to defend against a possible French invasion, I want to suggest that this national zeal also shaped his discussion on the improvement of indigenous peoples.

Ferguson seems to have been concerned both for the loyalty of indigenous peoples to the British and the possibility of their radicalization against the British by the French. Ferguson chided those who might wish to accelerate the

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