The New Age of Empire by Kehinde Andrews

Author:Kehinde Andrews [ANDREWS, KEHINDE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

5

Dawn of a New Age

After the Second World War the initial version of Western imperialism could no longer continue to function in the same way it had during the previous centuries. Competition between European nation states vying to dominate the globe led to the loss of millions of lives and bankrupted these seats of empire. The great European powers simply no longer had the resources to directly control and maintain their colonies. Worse still, both World Wars were truly global and the natives who had fought in their millions for the mother countries were restless. They demanded freedom and had the experience of armed warfare to achieve it. The fifth Pan-African Congress, which brought together leaders of resistance movements across Africa and the diaspora took place in Manchester in 1945. For the first time in the movement’s forty-five year history the delegates from Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas proclaimed their demands for the full independence of Africa from European rule.

The writing was on the wall, and the empires that had defined the world were in danger of collapse. In fact, in the popular imagination this is exactly what is thought to have happened. Europe had to, either in response to armed resistance by the natives or through a supposedly benevolent process, eventually grant independence to its colonies. The old logic of racial domination melted away, leading to the globalized world we inhabit today.

Unfortunately, that version of history is an utter myth. Rather than marking the beginning of the end of Western imperialism, the Second World War instead led to a system update that changed the delivery of a racist, unjust social order, but maintained all of its logic. By rebooting the system it was able to continue, in many ways more successfully than in the first, outdated version. In the deluded world-view of historians like Niall Ferguson, the brutal forms of colonial oppression in the earlier version of Western imperialism did more good than harm, representing a sort of ‘liberal imperialism’ that brought light to the backward parts of the world.1 These arguments are distorted, dangerous and wrong-headed, as any reader of the previous chapters will understand. Inadvertently, however, Ferguson stumbles upon the perfect phrase to capture the updated form of the system that emerged after the Second World War: liberal imperialism. The current incarnation of Western empire is one that presents itself as working for the good of humanity, while maintaining the colonial logic upon which it was founded.

Before the Second World War had even ended, plans were being made to update the imperial system. After the carnage of the First World War and the subsequent Great Depression it was becoming clear that the system was unstable even prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. In order to move to a more sustainable system of imperialism the West realized that it had to go beyond the nation state-led format that had until this point been its dominant feature. Collaboration between Western powers was always a central feature of the emergence of the current racial order.

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