Thinkers like Kant, Diderot and Rousseau have been unjustly smeared as apologists for empire.

This is an extract from Susan Neiman’s new book, Left Is Not Woke, published by Polity.

Too many who lean left today claim that the Enlightenment was the ideology of colonialism. Some academics, for instance, have claimed that it was a racist, colonial endeavour from the outset. That the Enlightenment needs to be ‘decolonised’. One piece in Harvard Magazine is even entitled ‘How the Enlightenment led to colonialism’.

Do those who make this claim imagine there was no colonialism before the Enlightenment? Presumably not, but it’s important to understand how something so false could come to seem true. (Raise a glass to the virtue of trying to understand those you disagree with.)

Let’s start with the fact that empires were not invented by the modern European nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations have colonised weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history; indeed, before there were nations in our modern sense at all. Greeks and Romans built empires, as did the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the Malians, the Khmer and the Mughals. Those empires operated with varying degrees of brutality and repression, but all of them were based on an equation of might and right, which amounts to no concept of right at all. All of them used their power to compel weaker groups to surrender resources, submit tribute, press soldiers into service for further imperial wars, and accept commands that overrode local custom and law. As far as we know, there was one thing they lacked: a guilty conscience.

Emperors who were particularly cruel might be criticised, though brutal practices in colonised lands were rarely attacked by those in the home states. Objections to Nero or Caesar usually focussed on their crimes against Romans. The 16th-century Dominican friar, Bartolomeo de las Casas, was an early exception. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies denounced the atrocities that the Spanish conquest visited on indigenous peoples. But Las Casas argued for a kinder, gentler form of colonisation, which included substituting African for South American slave labour. He never questioned the imperial project as a whole.

The Enlightenment did, however. Here is Kant’s stinging attack on colonialism:

‘Compare the inhospitable actions of the civilised and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc, were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilised intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing… [they] oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry.’ (1)

Though he was hardly a graceful writer, Kant was usually careful with words. He rarely used the word ‘evil’. Yet here, he is crystal clear: colonialism creates every kind of evil that affects humankind. And while he praises the wisdom of China and Japan in closing their doors to European invaders, his critique of colonialism is not confined to the conquest of ancient, sophisticated cultures. At a time when nascent colonial powers justified their seizure of indigenous territories in Africa and the Americas by claiming those lands were unoccupied, or their peoples uncivilised, Kant decried the injustice that ‘counted the inhabitants as nothing’.

Diderot went even further, arguing that indigenous peoples threatened by European colonisers would have reason, justice and humanity on their side if they simply killed the invaders like the wild beasts those intruders resembled. The Hottentots, he urged, should not be fooled by the false promises of the Dutch East Indian Company which had recently founded Cape Town.

‘Fly, Hottentots, fly!… Take up your axes, bend your bows, and send a shower of poisoned darts against these strangers. May there not be one of them remaining to convey to his country the news of their disaster.’ (2)

Update the weaponry and you would be forgiven for thinking you’d come upon a quote from Frantz Fanon. Nor is this passage unusual: Diderot, the 18th-century philosopher, called for anti-colonialist violence at least as often, and often more dramatically, than Fanon, the 20th-century psychiatrist.

Enlightenment critics of empire didn’t simply point out its cruelty. They also deconstructed the theories that sought to justify the theft of indigenous lands and resources. The most important of those theories was John Locke’s labour theory of property, which was used to argue that nomadic peoples had no claim to the lands on which they hunted and gathered. According to Locke, people only acquire property through agriculture, mixing their labour with the land they work and thereby obtaining ownership. Kant disagreed:

‘If those people are shepherds or hunters (like the Hottentots, the Tungusi, or most of the American Indian nations) who depend for their sustenance on vast open stretches of land, (foreign) settlement may not take place by force but only by contract, and indeed by contract that does not take advantage of the ignorance of those inhabitants with respect to ceding their lands.’ (3)

Here Kant not only undercut Locke’s theory of property, but also called out the shameless exploitation of peoples who, having no concept of private property in land, might cede the island of Manhattan for a handful of beads. Later critics dismissed this argument against settler colonialism as proof that Kant was unable to judge cultural or historical matters, since ‘primitive peoples’ lacked concepts of rights and were thus incapable of entering into treaties.

If the best of Enlightenment thinkers denounced the vast theft of lands that made up European empires, what did they make of the vast theft of peoples? Most were unequivocal in condemning slavery. Kant’s categorical imperative, which expresses the basic moral law, states that people should never be treated as means. This rules out slavery and other forms of oppression. These thinkers also lambasted European complicity in maintaining slavery, even by those who were not themselves slaveholders.

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