This post on colonialism depicted in genre fiction originally appeared on Aliette de Bodard’s personal blog on September 18th.
So this is only half a rant, because to properly do this I would need to document (a lot), and to reread stuff (a lot, too). But I’ve been simultaneously reading some genre books, and researching the French colonization of Vietnam in the 19th Century (and the history of SE Asia in that time period; aka researching book 2, the sequel to The House of Shattered Wings), and the contrast is… stark.
Let me put it bluntly. A lot of depictions out there miss the mark by a rather large margin. The things I see a lot: our hero(es) fighting and overthrowing the colonial system. Our hero(es), whether colonist or colonised, being almost exempt of colonial prejudice. Clean, simple fights for independence where the people rise against their oppressors and become democratic and free.
See, the thing with colonialism; the thing that made it so scary and so heartbreaking and so anger-inducing… is that it was pervasive. I’m not saying people didn’t fight against it, but that those that did were a minuscule proportion of the population (and you’ll find that even the people fighting against colonialism had some pretty hair-raising prejudices, too).
The truth is, the vast majority of people in the colonizer nations saw it as natural. As the proper, God-given order of things. France (a democracy at the time, let me just remind you of this) massively voted in favor of intervention in Annam, because it would make ordinary citizens’ lives better; because it would enrich the country, and it’s very clear from reading period texts that no one saw any problem with that, across all social classes. In fact, lower social classes saw the colonies as a place you could go to in order to make your fortune; where even a poor person could live in luxury with native workers at their beck and call. And the people who were “progressive”? They saw the colonised as children—as immature people who needed to be educated and taught “civilization”; protected from themselves against their will (as opposed to people who just wanted to dominate and plunder).
The scarier thing? People in the colonized countries thought it was the natural order of things, too—that they had to modernize in order to compete, to become more Western because the West was so clearly intrinsically superior. They massively sent their children to Western schools—to London, Paris—to be educated as a mark of privilege. Some countries, like Japan or Thailand, managed to modernise and retain national independence and some measure of culture. Others… had less success.
Yes, there was military superiority. But the reason it went on for so long? Is because there was a complete and utter certainty that the colonizers were right. That the colonies were owed to them; that the riches of other countries were theirs for the taking. And other people at the colonizer nation took in those riches and benefitted from them and thought it was due to them, too. (And yeah, there was terrible oppression going on in colonizer nations, too. Intersectionality—things are complicated, but again, it was an attitude of all social classes. There was no solidarity of, say, the French working class with the Indochinese. They thought the Indochinese were scary foreigners who stole their jobs and spoke a funny language.)
Read period pieces. Read Agatha Christie. Read Maurice Leblanc. Or any other writers. The Empire is the background. Racial prejudice is casual, omnipresent.
Also, another reason why colonialism worked? It’s not only military superiority. And it’s not trade (“the French in Vietnam” version of this didn’t focus much on trade, at least at first). It’s “divide to reign” tactics where existing cracks (or new ones) between social and ethnic groups were exploited to make a new society. A society that’s busy tearing itself apart has no time for organized resistance. It means that not everyone is oppressed equally (this is why I have little time for utterly oppressive evil empires. If everyone is miserable and oppressed and with no hopes whatsoever for the future, the government isn’t going to last for long). It means people are treated very differently depending on where they come from and where they live: colonies aren’t nations, but a hodgepodge of different political systems on a “whatever works” and “let’s keep them weak” set of principles (just see the rather stark differences between Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina in the 19th/early 20th Century). It also means that there are side benefits for everyone, too (which in no way compensate for the other, horrendous costs, of course): social advances and health advances and science advances, all brought to, say, the population of Annam as a way to demonstrate that the imperial government didn’t have their best interests at heart, but that the colonizers did.
And when push comes to shove… when all of this complex equilibrium finally disintegrates—well, it’s going to be messy. There will be blood. There will be violence. There will be massacres and purges. I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen, or that revolutions shouldn’t ever take place, but there is always a price to pay. There is always a fight for which faction will rule the country, or what the country will even look like–where the capital will be, who will be in government, what languages will be spoken, whose culture will come to shape everything from administration to the history that is taught. And this isn’t just wars of independence: the repercussions linger on for decades after that. The Nigerian Civil War, the Rwandan genocide, the Vietnamese/American war… I can go on, and on. It’s almost textbook.
You’re going to say it doesn’t matter—that Science Fiction and Fantasy needs to focus on the heroes, the extraordinary, the clean and easy revolution that we can get behind with no moral qualms. But see, the thing is…. by focusing on this, we perpetuate a great illusion, a great silence. We forget that empires like this only exist because of the consent of the majority. We forget that unequal systems only work because people are convinced everyone is in their proper place, and are convinced it’s their moral right to oppress others, or that being oppressed is inevitable; or, worse, that the oppressors are morally superior or more meritorious. Because we only talk about heroes, we like to think that, back then, we would be among them. And the truth is—most of us wouldn’t. Actually, most of us aren’t, today (to take just one example, we buy cheap clothes, cheap electronics made with labour in horrific conditions).
You know the scary truth about Evil Empires? We make them while being utterly convinced we’re in the right. We uphold them by acquiescing every day to decisions that make our lives better and richer, and forgetting how we impact other people’s lives. And we seldom—so so seldom—have the sheer, admirable, almost impossible courage to overthrow them; and to deal with the high, bloody and messy cost of doing so.
And in case you’re wondering: yup, of course I deal with some of that in my novel The House of Shattered Wings. My alternate, devastated France has had a colonial empire for a while, and it shows. Characters are affected by the colonial mindset, whether it’s those doing the colonising/benefitting from it (Selene, Madeleine), or those getting colonised (Philippe, Ngoc Bich). And yes, it makes for some thoughts in their heads that can be unpleasant and uncomfortable—but also, I think, to things that need to be shown.
Aliette de Bodard is a writer of fantasy and science fiction (and the very occasional horror piece). Aliette has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, a BSFA Award, as well as Writers of the Future. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards. Her new novel, The House of Shattered Wings, is available from Gollancz (UK/Commonwealth) and Roc (US). Read an excerpt here on Tor.com.
“You know the scary truth about Evil Empires? We make them while being utterly convinced we’re in the right.”
That’s how, to use a D&D phrase, Lawful Evil gets so much traction…
The colonialist mindset is just as entrenched and I sometimes think even harder to unpick in countries like my own (Jamaica), where the native population, along with their culture and language, was completely wiped out by successive waves of colonisers. Whichever deck of the ship you travelled on, the entire country is descended from transplanted people; and the culture and language of the enslaved incomers was stripped away from them. It’s almost impossible for us modern descendants of the plantation system to have a clear sense of an alternative cultural identity or value system to the colonial/ post-colonial, or to reject the appalling narratives we’ve inherited. It’s as you say Aliette: the normalisation of inequality by removing even the memory of anything else.
The romanticizing of “revolutions” is not just found in science fiction and fantasy. It’s also found in American political discussions on the far right and the far left. The messy parts of the American Revolution’s aftermath are not often discussed, such as the expulsion of tory sympathizers, etc. Add to that the complete lack of study of history outside the United States, and you miss the “Old Ruling Class – Injustice – Oppression – Revolution – New Ruling Class” cycle that France (as one example) went through for quite a while. In many ways, we were relatively lucky.
My concern for America is that both sides are regularly demonizing the other. When the other side is painted as Evil Incarnate, the justification for any option other than “Glorious Revolution” is hard to find. The end of the Roman Republic was presaged when (simplistically) assassination became the favored method of removing people from office. We haven’t gotten there yet, but I fear we are getting closer.
@Paul: *nod*
@stephanie: thank you so much for sharing. I’m glad it spoke to you. And yep, destruction of memory is a big problem.
@fcoulter: agreed. The “Evil Empire” as a justification for whatever “the good side” does really scares me.
Everyone thinks he or she is a hero. This applies to nations as well as individuals. It’s very rare (but unfortunately possible) to find someone doing evil just for the lulz. Everything is always justified somewhat in our heads and according to our social mores.
Thanks, this is a very thoughtful summary of the problem. Two questions came up, while I was reading it
First, have we really left the age of empires and colonization behind, and my answer is no. It is still here, by other names, and mostly by economical and cultural means. BTW, this reminded me of “The man from the high castle”, which I always read as a novel mostly about cultural influences – PKD just inverted the US-Japanese situation and the entire trade with cultural artifacts kept underlying this idea, at least to me.
Second, will the empire/colonization model continue to be applicable in the future, esp. on interplanetary and interstellar scale. I can see it may be working within a single stelar system, but not in the larger scale, because of the time dilation (I exclude here the problematic FTL because of the non-causality). So, despite some contrived models of _mundane_ interstellar empires (e.g. sleeping for centuries and living a for day, I can’t remember the name of the novel) I think this will be the real end of the empires. But perhaps, not of colonization.
I found myself asking, “Would Americans be comfortable with Iraqi fiction on the failing Revolution against the Evil Empire that committed the horrendous crimes at Fallujah – chemical weapons ie white phosphorus, used against civilians – and Abu Ghraib?” How comfortable are Americans with the Man in the Mirror?
That aside, it became obvious to me watching the land of my birth, Papua New Guinea, becoming sidetracked in in-fighting after Independence 1975, that once the foreign boot is removed, the suppressed rivalries, etc, rise to the surface, and the fight starts over the spoils of independence, ie, Power.
And I did play a (very minor) part in redressing some of the colonial error wrongs in New Zealand, once I had realized that colonization was not at all pleasant to those on the receiving end. Maori protested endlessly to London about the violation of their (guaranteed) rights, but His Majesty’s Government in London was blind, and His Majesty’s Government in Wellington wanted their land.
Another thing to remember is the success of the post-Revolution or Post-Independence government in upholding matters like the Rule of Law and observing Human Rights, depends very much on the success of the colonial government in upholding and maintaining them itself. It’s inertia, a point the Strugatsky Brothers make rather well in Snail on a Slope, their satire on Khrushchev. I think South Africa, for example, could do better, but considering the vicious absurdity that they had to fight, it’s amazing that they’ve got so far already.
And the other thing to bear in mind is that being part of an empire – Evil or not – is just the default state for most of humanity for most of history. At least, for most of civilised humanity, “civilised” in the value-neutral sense of living in cities and having actual state structures – as opposed to those “uncivilised” (again, value neutral) humans living in little family groups or tribal groups. Take Indochina; before it was part of the French Empire, bits of it were part of the Chinese Empire and bits of it part of the Khmer Empire; before that you had the Hong Bang Empire and no doubt others too.
As soon as people settle down and start forming states, they seem to instinctively start poking at other states and trying to absorb them. Self-determination, the idea that actually each polity should decide on its own rulers, who should be the ultimate authority for that polity, is really a very new idea and still not very widespread.
And the other point about empires is that, for a lot of people a lot of the time, they worked. The very basic level of peace and personal safety is easy for us to ignore today. “What did the Romans ever do for us?” “….brought peace?” It was a lot nicer being a Briton under Roman rule than it was being a Briton in the century or two after the legions left.
And don’t forget that the Roman empire lasted for bloody ages. The Western Empire lasted from 753BC to 476AD, and the Eastern from 330AD to 1453AD. That’s over two thousand years between them of relative continuity.
To steal someone else’s delightful reference, the distance in time between the founding of Rome and the first Punic War is the same distance between Christopher Columbus and the election of Ronald Reagan. And the Western Empire lasted for all that time again before it even started to decline.
An evil empire can provide stability, and stability is what the average person on the street craves above all else.
To pull up a relevant quote from the Malazan series
‘Possession and control, the two are like insatiable hungers for some people. Oh, no doubt the Malazans have thought up countless justifications for their wars of expansion. It’s well known that Seven Cities was a rat’s warren of feuds and civil wars, leaving most of the population suffering and miserable and starving under the heels of fat warlords and corrupt priest-kings. And that, with the Malazan conquest, the thugs ended up spiked to the city walls or on the run. And the wilder tribes no longer sweep down out of the hills to deliver mayhem on their more civilized kin. And the tyranny of the priesthoods was shattered, putting an end to human sacrifice and extortion. And of course the merchants have never been richer, or safer on these roads. So, all in all, this land is rife for rebellion.”
Not to say mind you that the Roman system was always better than what it replaced. But the Evil Empire often can be read as a good Empire with bad PR. Anything other than a proper Lawful Evil empire would swiftly collapse under the weight of their own inertia.
Wow.
Congratulations on the great analysis!
This is a thing that has always bothered me regarding evil empires and which I’ve always liked in – from all places! – the Imperium of Man from Warhammer.
An evil Empire will rarely stand on the power of it’s armies alone. It requires people and at least a modicum of their support to work.
… which means that a country which says “we have no legacy of colonialism!” generally means “we assimilated, drove out or exterminated our imperial subjects so successfully that there is nothing left of them but ruins and relics in museums. Yay u
Manifest Destiny.
There’s a historical concept that has morphed into different names, but the ideas behind it are still the same.
@11: What country has said that? Every country I can think of has been touched by colonialism. Be it on the giving or the receiving end.
The only people who have not are the undiscovered tribes in the Amazon Basin. And even they are at risk as more of the Amazon is being harvested.
Two of my favorite books are A Rabble In Arms and Oliver Wiswell by the late Maine author Kenneth Roberts. They are well rooted in the actual history, and look at the American Revolution from both sides of the conflict, and it is eye opening to see the different viewpoints at play. As I read them, I realized that my understanding of that conflict, and indeed of all conflicts, was far too simplistic.