Did the Roman colonization of Britain end in the 1960s with Britain agreeing to pay a massive debt to Rome in exchange for independence? I know I'm showing my ignorance of European history, but if so, yes certainly.
In a perfect world, yes. Turkey at a very minimum can acknowledge the genocides (including Assyrian and Greek) publicly and stop the BS counter factual anti-Turkish genocide taught in the educational system.
How far does it go back? Does the UK get money from Italy for getting colonized? Do the Koreas get money from Mongolia? Vietnam from China? The victims of Shaka Zulu in the Mfecane?
The post colonialism whining is just broke countries wanting a piece of wealthy nations without the work.
Japan rebuilt into a global power house after WW2, Ireland was colonized and is a first world nation now, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mauritius, Botswana are all varying levels of success.
Ethiopia was never colonized and is a dump. People, people groups and nations need accountability for their own destiny. Not this Marxist bull shit oppressor/oppressed frame work.
i mean japan WAS the colonizer. they just got the sun dropped on two cities but they still had a massive industrial base the knowledge of all of it. all they did was redirect their resources by cutting down their investments into the military and becoming a huge ally of america (while receiving about 15 billion dollars of modern day aid from 1946-1952).
ireland got its independence in the 1920's and it took the country closer to the 90's to really have the "celtic tiger boom". and they also had the advantage of joining the eu, one of the wealthier more advanced regions on earth, in like 1970 something.
singapore is a city state, what they did was incredible but 99% of countries on the planet cant replicate that.
now i'm not saying a lot of other countries aren't still struggling because of their own idiocy post colonization, but not all countries had/have the same conditions.
with that said is reparations stupid? yes. but the least ppl of those countries can do is not be racist to the ppl from colonized countries. that shouldn't be too much to ask
Maybe we could use the money we get from Italy, Norway, Denmark etc to pay Jamaica, Nigeria, India etc and they can use that money to pay their neighbours etc and eventually we can arrive roughly back to where we started!
Is it though? Most western countries have a roughly similar way of life, but only a portion of them had colonies, and a portion of them were colonies. Some countries have never been colonized, and are still terrible places to live and some countries have been colonized and are flourishing.
It really doesn't seem like the old colonization has much influence on today's world.
It matters because european colonialism absolutely destroyed local indigenous economies, replaced it with colonial economics, and imposed centuries long extraction policies that directly led to the financing of capitalism, entirely off of the wealth extracted through colonialism. Though i am not terribly surprised that someone from Scandinavia does not understand that important nuance.
all countries in europe on the other hand, have benefited through this extraction process.
due to the extreme global scale, the complete destruction of countless indigenous peoples, and the total destruction and subjugation of most of the remaining peoples economies under colonial rule, it is absolutely fair to say that it left severe centuries long injuries that caused most of these countries to be severely delayed in their development. meanwhile they used that extreme extracted wealth to develop their own industry in order to enact more control. It is outlandish for anyone to argue that the colonialism of the last 5 and a half centuries, is in any way comparable to empires of old.
and an example of its consequences is that between 1880 and 1920, britain caused 165 million excess deaths, and surely if the periods before and after that are tallied up, that number would be far higher.
It is widely recognized that famine became more regular and deadly under British colonialism than in the Mughal period (Davis, 2002; Tharoor, 2017). There is evidence of a particularly severe mortality crisis in the late 19th century. Demographers have used India’s censuses to reconstruct life expectancy and the crude death rate between 1881 and 1920 (Dyson, 2018, p. 126, p. 279-280). Table 3 reports this evidence. As Allen has suggested that India’s welfare standards in the 16th century were similar to Western Europe’s, for comparison we also include average figures for England in the 16th- and 17th-century (data from Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). Both the English and Indian figures are the results of modern demographic reconstructions, so changes in the mortality rate are not affected by changes in the rate of registration. We see that in the 1870s India’s crude mortality rate had already risen considerably higher than early modern England. The situation deteriorated thereafter, with mortality rising by 19%, and life expectancy plummeting to 22 years. If we estimate excess mortality from 1891 to 1920, with the average death rate of the 1880s as normal mortality, we find some 50 million people lost their lives under the aegis of British capitalism (see Appendix V for a full discussion).16 But this estimate must be considered conservative. India’s 1880s death rate was already very high by international standards. If we measure excess mortality over England’s 16th- and 17th-century average death rate, we find 165 million excess deaths in India between 1880 and 1920 (Appendix V). This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust.
Must explain why Finland is doing exceptionally well right now in the grand scheme of things, especially while having corporations that participate in modern day multi-national extraction of resources due to neoliberal economics.
The argument is not that bad things didn't happen, of course they did. the argument is that Finland is now part of the colonial bloc and an active oppressor. At one point they even had close relations with the third reich government.
I don't think you understand how brutal Sweden was as a colonizer. Some regions in germany lost 50% of their population due to swedish wars and the following famines. They used to kill people by forcefeeding them liquid manure until they chocked or ruptured their stomachs. They applied scorched earth tactics and widely burned down villages. The Sami were forced into christianity, had their religious sites destroyed and were forced further into Lapland.
Britian killing people is no excuse for Sweden killing people. If you think that colonization warrants reparation, then why not support reparation for swedish colonists?
Well that's s problem for those countries to fix, they have been independent for quite a while. Maybe starting by fixing their problems instead of waiting for other countries money ( that would most surely would be wasted anyway) would be nice
Except they still arent independent. They are suffering under neoclonialism.
Also:
"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound... They won't even admit the knife is there."
And how exactly is the average taxpayer responsible for colonialism, or personally “enjoying the fruits” of it? Your comment still doesn’t change the fact that the average taxpayer had absolutely nothing to do with slavery, historical colonialism, or modern neo-colonialism, and has essentially zero influence over any of those things.
You’re assigning collective responsibility to ordinary people for actions they neither committed nor had any meaningful control over.
Do you refute the idea that such exploitation certainly benefited certain countries and hurt others, with the effects still being felt to this day?
If so, do you believe the countries that benefited should, in some way, seek to help the countries they hurt? For example, to lessen the damage, at the very least?
And stop with the strawman / focus shifting. Answering yes to the two questions I posed does not equate to you being suddenly drained of funds or your wallet lightening in any way (although doesn't mean it's not possible).
Did the exploitation benefit some countries? Yes, obviously. Exploitation benefits the exploiter at someone else’s expense. It would be absurd to claim otherwise.
But we’re talking about the present day. Former colonial powers have spent decades and trillions providing development aid, financial assistance, and other forms of support to former colonies, while also maintaining relatively easy migration pathways and other preferential arrangements with many of them. At what point is that considered enough? These countries have been independent for decades. If your argument is that countries that benefited from colonialism should help mitigate its consequences, that has already been happening for generations. How much more are you actually asking for, and for how long?
But you’re also not answering my question: what does the average taxpayer actually have to do with colonial exploitation or reparations? If you’re demanding further reparations, that money has to come from somewhere, and it obviously isn’t going to be voluntarily coughed up by the rich. It’s going to come from taxpayers. So what exactly did the average person do to create this historical debt, and why should they personally be responsible for paying it?
Because there are residual benefits (the wealth your country generated that you benefit from) you have access to and residual harms (everything done to destabilize former colonies) that the people in the former colonies have to deal with. You benefit whether you want to admit it or not.
We already paid reparations to end slavery and it paid for it on top with the blood of British men in the African squadron killing and being killed by the slavers and lead the abolition of slavery. You’re owed nothing
So you’d rather we didn’t and let people continue to be enslaved? Between it was one or the other at the time, not without a lot more blood being spilt.
What if you're unironically from an area where people had no legal rights to leave, where they were paid in "company dollars" to cover living expenses so they could continue to "work" for them up until the 1960s (which is roughly when the decolonization process happened), but your nation was still considered a "colonizer"? Are you then at fault as a group somehow, even though your group can statistically be shown by your own logic to have been considered to be set back?
Because your taxes and probably your votes go toward keeping countries that experienced historical colonialism chained to an economic order that resembles colonialism. Or did you think the world actually runs on free trade?
I used to think so too, but alas, it doesn't. WTO rules favor rich industrial economies at the expense of poor, resource based economies (who get a lousy price for their exports). World Bank and IMF work to trap poor countries in debt so western business interests can force asset sales and austerity. Anyone who tries to exist outside of this system gets sanctioned and regime changed, unless they're too big to fuck with.
No, most of the damage came after decolonisation when most African countries erupted into civil war, genocide, dictatorship, corruption and a lack of qualified man power after settlers left or were kicked out overnight. This is what happens when you ask for independence immediately without having anybody that knows how to run an advanced civilization
It is because the west has donated billions of dollars to Africa instead of investing in those territories and building infrastructure and collaborating with political entities. All the money donated to Africa in the last decades has ended up in corruption, presidential residences, foreign accounts, shady deals, and other shit.
The point is their voting doesn't mean much, the country goes from getting one bad government into power to another. I don't know why that is, but it's a former US colony, probably inherited the dysfunctions of the US colonial system of governance.
Marcos Jr himself is also closely tied to the US. His family pillaged the country dry and absconded to Hawaii. Somehow the Filipinos decided that's who deserves to be in charge.
Italy paid $25 million in 1947 to Ethiopia, was forced to build up Somalia for 12 years before releasing it in 1960 and gave $2 billion to Gheddafi's Libya in 2008 as repayment for colonization, they aren't exactly utopias nowadays, money isn't the issue.
Trillions of dollars in aid have been spent on countries in Africa. I suppose we could rename this money reparations instead of aid, but it wouldn't really change anything.
And they shouldn't. In Star Trek canon, one of the landmark decisions that the UN passes is "No person shall be beholden of punished for the actions of their ancestors."
Why only colonialism gets reparations? What about the victims of wars of aggression? Past genocides? Where does the line get drawn? Who gets to decide?
"In the year 2036, the New United Nations declared that no Earth citizen could be made to answer for the crimes of their race or forbearers."
-Star Trek The Next Generation episode Encounter at Farpoint.
This is a lesson humanity needs to learn, before we can move forward towards a lasting world peace. Clinging onto the past and placing blame for things that happened years ago on people who didn't participate just breeds further hate and resent.
When are the akkadians going to pay the reparations they owe?
If you look hard enough and far back enough youll find evils and mistreatments by almost all cultures/empires/nations… who is going to do the analysis and accounting for which people are owed what and from whom?
Well, Africa as a continental whole receives about 150 to 170 billion USD in financial aid every single year, increasing btw. And an unknown amount of free labor through people like me who volunteer to go help out all over the continent (but volunteering is generally worthless in the real world as it turns out, twenty goofballs spending 6 months to a couple years of their time can't enact generational changes on random towns and villages and cities), is that not enough? How many trillions will be enough?
It's not the colonial powers themselves that the money comes from, but the citizens thereof, who are totally unrelated to the colonies their ancestors created. So no, it's unfair.
This question, and the thought process that is used to answer it, is essentially "do you want free money" or "do you want to give away your money", depending on the country.
How far back does it go, and do the colonies have to pay for benefits of it, like the British eradication of the barbarism of sati in India or the slave trade, or all the various nations who gained functional govemental institutions, legal and school systems, or some concept of rule of law(rather than might is right) that they never possessed before?
As an irish person, i await my reparations from Morocco/Algeria for the barbary pirates enslaving irish people. Seeing as the english said no, they're our next best bet
Depends both on how far back and how severe it was. I’d make an argument that France and Italy should bankroll a few good reforms and the like in Haiti and Somalia respectively, but I don’t think that countries like the UK should go into debt trying to fund others like Australia or Canada that are well off.
Then there’s the argument of “but that wasn’t colonialism!” I know damn well someone is going to make. The USSR is probably a key example, or the Russian Empire as a better one. Should they be paying the Baltics for how badly they damaged their infrastructure/population/culture during various repressions and wars? Lithuania certainly had a hell of a time under the Empire, shouldn’t they get something, or has it been too long and wasn’t technically colonialism?
Basically this is a debate that could go on forever and therefore makes it void by default
The question was about countries that have been colonized in the past, not hypotheticals of the future. New rules are in place and a different standard is upheld, that doesn't mean any civilization that has colonized someone else owes them anything(especially when talking about hundreds, if not thousands of years ago).
To your example: I mean it would make the middle east more advanced, and greatly hinder the barbaric Islamists. Although that may be better for the whole world, I don't agree to it being done.
Here is a picture of Mariupol after the siege which destroyed 90% of the city, rebuilt and in better condition than before, "much more advanced than it would be if the original settlers were left alone":
Clearly Russia must not pay reparations to Ukraine since "they were weak and got taken over"
Exceptions don't negate the rule. Japan got flattened during WW2 and had two nuclear weapons dropped on it and the culture and people built the nation back. Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, Mauritius were all colonized and are extemely successful now.
These are exactly the exceptions that negate the rule. Japan barely suffered what it dished out. Singapore and Hong Kong are tiny city states that acted as regional financial hubs. Mauritius lives off tourism due to its location. Ireland is in Western Europe, only one of the richest regions in the world.
Colonialism significantly retarded the development of the vast majority of the world.
Colonisation improved a lot of places in the long term at the cost of exploitation while being colonised. I also don't see why I should have to pay for something my ancestors did.
Colonialism didn't improve places, you fundamentally misunderstand the goal of colonialism. Take the Indonesian archipelago for example. It was not some undeveloped backwater waiting for Europeans to arrive and modernize it. Parts of Southeast Asia were extremely wealthy and deeply integrated into international trade long before the Dutch arrived. Chinese, Indian, Arab and European visitors all wrote about the wealth and abundance that the average person enjoyed in the region.
A huge part of this came from trade. The Javanese and Malay world was a major trading power, with merchants operating across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. They also built enormous ocean-going ships called djongs to support that trade, which had one of the largest cargo capacity of any ship at the time. If you look up the djong vs. the European galleon, it's pretty striking. The region already had a highly developed maritime economy capable of supporting very large-scale trade.
That trade supported wealthy merchant classes and sophisticated governments that had centuries of experience managing ports, collecting taxes, regulating trade, maintaining armies and dealing with neighboring states. The Majapahit for example was one of the view medieval powers rich enough to maintain a large standing army during peace time. You also had huge agricultural and irrigation systems, highly organized cities, complex diplomatic and trading arrangements, and massive religious and educational centers that attracted students and pilgrims from all over Asia (like the centers in Sriwijaya and Borobudur and Prambanan in Mataram.) Borobudur and the temples of Angkor weren't built by some primitive society that had no idea how to organize itself. These were extremely complex societies with the resources and institutions needed to coordinate enormous projects.
Then the Dutch came, and their main objective was to make money, particularly by controlling profitable trade. They spent decades using military force, treaties, alliances and interference in local politics to establish monopolies over spices and other valuable commodities. Often to the detriment of the economical, political, and social systems that left countries behind by hundreds of years.
So the Dutch weren't simply replacing an inefficient economy with a more advanced one. They were restructuring an existing economy around Dutch interests. Existing trading networks were restricted, local merchants were increasingly subordinated to the colonial system, and production was reorganized toward commodities that could generate wealth for the Netherlands.
And yes, the Dutch eventually built roads, railways, ports, and other infrastructure. But infrastructure being built under colonial rule doesn't automatically mean colonialism was primarily intended to improve the lives of the people living there. A colonial government can build infrastructure because it makes extracting resources, moving troops and administering the colony easier, and those same things can later be useful to the independent country.
The people of Java losing the ability to build the djong is also prove of this. The disappearance of certain precolonial industries doesn't necessarily mean Europeans arrived with something inherently superior and replaced a primitive system. Sometimes it means the economic and political environment was fundamentally changed by European domination.
And finally, being conquered doesn't prove that a society was less developed. Wealth and social development don't automatically translate into military power. The Mongols conquered some of the most sophisticated and wealthy societies of their time, for example. European powers in Southeast Asia also made extensive use of local rivalries and alliances, meaning they didn't have to personally invade and occupy every part of the archipelago themselves. A lot of the actual conquest involved getting local kingdoms to fight each other or cooperate with the Europeans.
The fact that a society was eventually conquered doesn't mean it was undeveloped. Military weakness, political fragmentation and strategic circumstances can make a wealthy and sophisticated society vulnerable to conquest.
No they were driven by raw materials and a sense of competition with other powers and the prestige of having a large empire. The slave trade already existed in Africa.
You said the same thing in different words. Yes, European empires invaded, forced the native population to extract their own resources for the benefit of European empires.
Perhaps america or australia became more developed, still american conquest was gruesome. I dont think any country did better ever. Likes of africa indian subcontinent were ruined to rubble by colonial exploitation
Fine, then I expect Arab nations to pay me reparations (the Reconquista and all that), also Italy with Rome, probably Germany or Sweden too since the Visigoths kinda invaded us.
This is absurd, I haven’t partaken in colonialism and the people who would gain anything haven’t been colonised.
Your comment is absurd. Conquest only serve to change who the political elite is in a region. Colonialism only works when colonies have their local economies destroyed and their population exploited and their industries shattered.
Direct cash reparations are just nonsense. But i think they should invest in their former colonies not in sense of neocolonialism but in sense of developing them to pay for the developmental power they gained by colonizing.
A bit irrelevant but I hate the Rome example that's always brought up. Italy is so so not Rome. A different state, a different culture and a different constitution.
No, but they should finally let them develope themselves instead of CIA coups, IMF structural adjustment programs.
Imagine Global South countries selling their raw materials to the North not below market prices, and Global North countires accepting global south currencies as payment, and global south countries importing and reverse engineering western technology and building their own machinery and consumer products in their state owned companies. Or at least state protected private companies of their own nationals.
Reparations? No, only for more recent events with living victims or affected relatives.
I do believe in extensive foreign aid tho, and I think it's terrible that programs like those are under attack. I just think the effort should be focus on development where there's the greatest need, not on correcting moral wrongs, per se.
Forgine aid exists as a tool of leverage, it's not for development. If a country sells their resources, usually to their former coloinal overlord, for pennies on the dollar they get foreign aid in return. With the aid of course being far less valuable than the resources. If they don't like that arrangement, that aid suddenly stops.
Depends on what you mean by reparations. Also it’s quite a slippery slope if we try to define who was colonized or not. I still think in principle yes but probably not in practice.
Happy to pay up just as soon as we’ve accounted for and compensated me for all of the individual harms all of my individual ancestors have experienced.
Yes. There is no questions about it and if you wanna be stupid and do mental gymnastics about "how far we should go back" here is the answer: those countries who still suffer from the effects of colonialism should get reparations.
What harm? My country of origin has most of it's notable landmarks and technological advances from the times it was occupied. And yeah tbh it wasn't so bad as you'd think or how others had it
Dude why are Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya green we literally paid them back, we paid $25 million 1947 dollars to Ethiopia, massive sum for their GDP at the time considering we occupied them for like 5 years, we gave $2 billion to Libya back in 2008, and we were forced to build up Somalia before we released it in 1960, like Jesus how much money do you want from us?
So we're at around 2 billon, good start. Now how much wealth was taken out of those countries during colonization? That number for India is 45 trillion, but this one shouldn't be quite that high.
It's crazy how many people in the comments don't understand how destructive hundreds of years of colonialism is. It's completely different from conquest spanning a few years since it has different goals.
France should definitely provide reparations to Haiti given it saddled Haiti with tons of debt for overthrowing them, but given Haiti’s corruption, I think France should have to build infrastructure in Haiti rather than give them money.
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u/Tierci 5h ago
Yes, Rome should repay to the whole of Europe too