The narrative of (modern) colonialism radically overstates the benefits for the colonizers and radically underestimates the benefits for the colonized. Which is a reverse of the older narrative.

If you set aside feelings, which admittedly run extremely high on this subject for many reasons, a far more ambiguous picture emerges of the net cost and net benefits for everyone concerned.

There’s always plenty to be upset about in history. Even in European history, the Britons didn’t love the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons, and the Anglo-Saxons didn’t love the Normans, and the Scottish didn’t love the English, and the English didn’t love the Norsemen, and the Americans didn’t love the British, and none of them loved the Irish, and all of them found plenty of reasons to resent and fight one another over their respective incursions.

But judging the outcomes of history in a moral or adjudicatory sense, from the position of later time, is a bit more complex. Its also a lot harder to say what “would have been” if things had been different, when that simply isn’t what the historical process gave us. Choices may be moral or immoral, fair or unfair, wise or unwise. But history simply is. It’s more like biology; it’s a natural process of growth and failure and birth and death and challenge and adaptation. And although we can make specific choices, we cannot choose the past nor predict much about the future.

European colonies were as much a symptom of power and advancement as a cause of it. The countries in question didn’t know they would succeed, or that other nations and people wouldn’t. They were doing what everyone was doing and had been doing for all time. Sometimes that results in a major empire being established, and sometimes it doesn’t. And it wasn’t at all obvious that European nations were destined to achieve global dominance. That’s just how things turned out.

However much everyone at the time likely believed that they had a special destiny to succeed, which everyone involved did, and not just the various European powers, the future remained uncertain and still managed to surprise everyone. It’s only with the benefit of time that we can look back on what happened as a kind of necessary destiny.

Colonialism was often a particularly uncertain endeavor, and came with immense costs, as all empires eventually learn, from ancient times through to the present. The net financial benefit of European colonization was often so tenuous that it was hard to justify the cost of maintaining them to the home countries without the persuasive influence of special-interest groups, including groups whose interests had no obvious extractive benefit for the home country.

England fought to keep America, which was an unpopular decision even among many Britons, and the battle was more about the pride of the king and the symbolic significance of British unity than it was about maintaining the wealth of England through control over her colonies. Nor did the wealth of England cease to exist after the loss of its largest and most important colonies. And afterward England was willing to give up its other colonies with very little fuss, creating an easier pathway to independence, especially once it was clear that it wasn’t worth the cost materially of fighting to keep them, nor did losing them seriously affect broader English economic interests in the short or long run.

The other European powers ended up behaving similarly. Far from retaining their status as dominant powers, the most openly extractive European countries, such a Spain, enjoyed no lasting legacy of success, wealth, or innovation. For all that they took from the new world, they derived no long-lasting benefits, and Spain remains one of the least developed and most indebted of the major European nations. Meanwhile, those English colonies that avoided slavery the most and kept to themselves the most and most readily had more positive relations with the native peoples in North America, such as the Puritans and Quakers, were the most powerful and successful.

Abolitionist Britain, far from being impoverished by eliminating the slave trade in its provinces, had the wealth and resources and power to wage a worldwide economic and military campaign against the global slave trade. And the Puritan and Quaker north of the United States, far from being disadvantaged by rejecting slavery, had the power and money and influence to wage war against the slave-holding South. They even had excess resources available afterward in the absence of slavery to rebuild the South and make massive efforts toward educating and equipping the former slave population. None of that makes any sense whatsoever under the traditional colonialial arguments that are popular today that ascribe the success of European powers to extractive colonial practices and the success of America to slavery. The opposite is very nearly true. Those approaches were definitive of rhe least stable and effective approaches to long-term success.

These popular political arguments are similar to those that ascribe degeneration in the black family structure to the legacy of slavery, while being completely unable to explain the fact that the phenomenon actually decreases with proximity to slavery and increases with distance from it. That is like arguing that a causal relationship is stronger the less connected an effect is to the phenomenon that produced it. It sounds like a good story, the data just doesn’t back it up.

If brutality and slavery and plunder were such effective strategies for colonialism, then Spain should have been the most successful and should still be rich and powerful and culturally dominant today, and England should have been impoverished by abolition, the European powers should have fought to retain every colony, the Puritans and Quakers should have been economic failures, and the South should have won the Civil War.

None of this means that colonialism doesn’t and didn’t include all kinds of terrible things. But it changes how we should view the results. In the ecosystem of history, imperial expansion is a fact of the natural evolution of tribes and nations. Groups that can expand, do. Expansion is a symptom of capability, not a cause. And that’s as true for Europeans as it is for Native American tribes and nations, African nations, Asian powers, and everyone else.

The fact that Europe succeeded so exceptionally in that moment in time was never an obvious or predestined fact. Nor was Europe’s success built on colonization per se, colonization was a symptom of European capability. And that led to a positive feedback loop as European opportunity expanded in keeping with its reach.

The messiness and violence of conflict and imperialism makes many winners and losers and demands both capitulation and response. As often happens, conquered peoples gained access to information and technologies they lacked before, and many people benefited from the uniformity of legal structures. Middle men groups often follow empires around, because it’s far easier to operate a business under one set of rules than it is to operate across multiple jurisdictions. And that opens up new markets and new goods to a wider variety of people. And empires often overreach themselves, or accidentally create, through enabling access to new knowledge and technologies, the very enemies that will overthrow and supplant them.

History is complicated, and it happens to us all. We might criticize the Roman invasion of Briton as a decision, but without it and without further invasions of Anglo Saxon and Norman, there would be no England. Without England colonizing the new world there would be no America, without America defeating England there would be no America to save England during the world wars. And that is just the smallest of the many branches emanating from one country.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on England’s role in fighting the global slave trade, establishing colonies like Hong Kong, its role in the Napoleonic and world wars, its wars with Spain, and its role in the industrial revolution. They all happened, and the world is what it is because of them. And neither they nor their outcomes were known or planned in any sense that matches up with what we know today from our position in the future they created.

Colonialism isn’t a unique or particularly European phenomenon. It’s a part of history and the natural process of humanity. It’s there to be studied and understood, it’s decisions appreciated and criticized and learned from. But the conditions under which they occurred were far different from how they appear looking back at them from a comfortable distance. And in fact they were not so different from the sort of uncertainty and struggle and conviction and hazard we face today. For better or worse, we live in the world that history made. And we make the world that history will look back on, with the benefit of hindsight that we now lack. Will we be judged any less harshly for our ignorance and mistakes and good and bad intentions?

How to view history is a difficult question that people like Thomas Sowell and Niall Ferguson and David Hackett Fischer have addressed in far greater depth and with more wisdom than myself. I think the best way to view history is as if you were part of it. As if you could have been the one living in that time and place and making those same decisions and living those same lives.

Achieving that kind of transplantation is the challenge of the historical student, and it’s not an easy one. We view the past so differently from how we view the future and present, because it is known and fixed. When you can learn to see yourself in the people of another time, you can learn to see them in you. You begin to see how you are making the same choices and following the same ambitions, fears, struggles, and passions in your own moment in history. And maybe that grants you a tiny sliver of wisdom to see how to live more wisely in the present.

For all that we know of history now, we address it with such a detached and unsympathetic and temporally fixed and prejudiced eye, seperating ourselves so clearly from the past in our safety as moderns, as a different sort of people with an insight and wisdom they lack that is actually nothing more than the universal and eternal benefit of arriving after its all over, that we may actually be far less able to learn the lessons of history than people far less structurally advantaged than ourselves in past ages. They, at least, didn’t seperate themselves so and believed that they had a debt to and continuity with the past, that there was something shared with and something to learn from the example of the people of the past, not merely from post hoc criticism of them. We will all make our own successes and mistakes, and we will all one day be judged for them by later generations.

That is why it is so important to get our relationship to the past right. We cannot pass on our moment or our particular temporal perspective about the past or future. That is unique and particular to us and our moment in the time and life of humanity. We can only pass on our relationship to times ahead and times behind. That is the example we set that will last and be used on us when we pass out of our moment.

That relationship, at the moment, does not have the hallmarks or tenor of a good or balanced or complex one. We live in the eternal moment of our own strength and vision noon, secure in our place in the light and the work we can do and the plans we have laid, never realizing that our sun must one day also set and our night must settle upon us and our work be done. Our children may care for our plans and perspectives and intentions and efforts, and they may not. They may have their own and may despise and criticize and dispose of us just as we despised and criticized and disposed of our antecedents. That attitude, that relationship, will be the thing we have truly taught them and passed on.

That doesn’t mean that we view the past uncritically, only that we should view it as if it could have been us, and perhaps that will allow us to view ourselves more wisely and critically too.