Thread by @yungneocon

I don’t think people understand just how truly common it was for colonialism & imperialism to be not only *justified* on humanitarian & legal terms but actually sincerely pursued with that in mind and as its model. Logics of race, humanitarianism & int’l law are deeply connected

For ex, by the late 1700s, but especially early 1800s for the next 100 plus years, the British regularly instituted colonial & imperial policies meant to control settlers, ‘protect natives’, honor treaties, & prevent slavery (w coolie labor & then prevent coolie labor w borders)

Fiji, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, South Africa, Malaysia, Burma, Bengal, and others are all examples where the British used these logics

The first true immigration & border laws were instituted in the Anglo settler colonies, they concerned race, labor, disability, gender, religion, politics, and so on.

On top of the obvious racist & eugenic reasons of protecting white racial stock and all that poppycock (they correctly saw Italians as a threat but radially excluded Chinese, Jewish, Romani, Black, etc people) they often used the following logics:

1. Migrants who come and aren’t white & able bodied will be impoverished
2. The able bodied will be exploited in slave like conditions
3. Migration hurts the natives
4. violates native treaties
5. violates foreign treaties

This wasn’t *just* bad faith. In many cases, for example, the capitalist elite wanted more easy immigration but liberal humanitarians and legalists organized against it on the premise of it being exploitation

The first bans on Chinese immigration were conducted with cooperation of the Chinese state who were worried about emigration of skilled laborers, snd so the bans of immigration were bound by mutual treaty !

These settler colonial immigration laws were then exported wholesale and adopted by nearly every kind of state, whether postcolonial or colonial, imperial or anti imperial, capitalist or socialist, old or new, etc.

The wording was hardly even changed. Sometimes they just subbed out a word for another. In other cases the legislation was identical. Nearly every state in the Americas instituted racialized immigration laws, even for example Haiti.

The British repeatedly staged raids in Africa to stop the slave trade, and did so even with the cooperation of local leaders who had asked for intercession (whether these leaders had any legitimate local sovereignty is another issue)

The British were okay with Liberia, which everyone saw as an attempt to extend US influence, because they thought that a state of former slaves as settlers would more effectively & directly help regulate the slave trade & bring ‘civilization’ to the natives

A common left wing narrative is that the partition of India came out of nowhere and was an artificial British severing of a pre colonial idyll. Now while the borders were arbitrary, the demand itself originated among the more extreme Muslim & Hindu nationalists.

Now, some apologists for imperialism would try to use this fact to explain away the horrors but that doesn’t really work, because the kind of nationalism in question, while localized, Was itself an imperialist import

In one of Joseph Massad’s better essays ‘Against Self Determination’ he argues that ‘the self determination of nations’ is ultimately itself a colonial & imperial concept, largely unconnected with local sovereignty

Because nations came to be considered the writ for independence & legitimacy, even in the anti colonial context, this meant those not so constituted as a nation in the European mode weren’t considered ready for independence. The results were predictable