IMPERIALISM

Keith Windschuttle
“The Burdens of Empire”
in Lengthened Shadows
Editors: Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004, 9

....Moreover, in the past decade, some good historians have made a number of important reevaluations of imperialism and have contributed to a greater maturity of discussion about the subject. The contribution of imperialism to advancing the human condition can now be acknowledged. It is not hard to argue that, throughout the course of human history, the absorption of many smaller communities by larger polities has been the major single force for the evolution and progress of human culture. Imperialism can be seen as the ultimate form of this process. The Romans, for example, gave the forest tribesmen they conquered in Gaul, Illyria, and Germania the gifts of literacy, books, and all that the Latin language opened up. Roman notions of law, property, and government were established where few existed before, as were the habits of living in towns and using coin for exchange. Along with this came Mediterranean tastes in food, drink, and clothing as well as new concepts and forms in architecture and artistic expression. Much the same can be said for the early emperors who united the people of China. In short, history shows imperialism, rather than being a force of oppression, has often been the engineer of civilization.

Moreover, far from being a major cause of racism and racial discrimination, imperialism has usually pushed in the opposite direction. Emperors who have governed diverse peoples have often found it in their own interests to ensure the protection and status of their different tribes and races, including those of racial minorities. In the mature Roman Empire, a non-Roman ethnic origin was no barrier even to ascending to the purple robe of Caesar. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs created a multiethnic society that guaranteed the civic, cultural, and property rights even of alien minority groups such as Galician Jews. Throughout history, it has been smaller, self-governed communities and nations, organized around kinship or ethnicity, which have most frequently regarded other tribes and peoples as sub-human, and therefore unfit to live.