Violent Saviors, page 1
Copyright © 2025 by William Easterly
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 Our Conquest of Them for Their Own Good
PART I TWO KINDS OF PROGRESS Chapter 2 The Expert and the Economist
Chapter 3 The Demand for Dignity
PART II LIBERALS DOUBT EMPIRE, 1776–1865 Chapter 4 Smith and Allies Challenge the Slave Trade
Chapter 5 The West Invents the Rest
Chapter 6 Benjamin Constant Critiques Conquest
Chapter 7 The Civilizing Plan for the Creek Indians
Chapter 8 The Liberal Fight Against Indian Removal
Chapter 9 What Shall We Do for Black Progress?
Chapter 10 The Victory of the Man Without a Plan
PART III THE REGRESS OF LIBERTY, 1865–1945 Chapter 11 How Economists Forgot Consent
Chapter 12 America in the Philippines and the New Colonial Expansion
Chapter 13 Leopold’s Congo and the Revival of Benevolent Slavery
Chapter 14 Lenin vs. Wilson
Chapter 15 Reductio ad Hitlerum
PART IV THE AMBIVALENT ADVANCE OF FREEDOM, 1945–PRESENT Chapter 16 The Fall of Colonialism and the Invention of the Third World
Chapter 17 Vietnam and the Illiberal Development Mainstream
Chapter 18 Liberal Economists Strike Back
Chapter 19 The End of History?
Epilogue Development in Search of Dignity
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
Praise for Violent Saviors
To Noel and Anthony, in the hope they inherit a better world
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Preface
We know what is good for you better than you know yourself and we are going to make you do it.
—Liberal economist William Graham Sumner, 1899, in a speech protesting American colonization of the Philippines
In 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin expelled Ugandans of Asian origin from Uganda. Many became refugees in camps in Britain.
A twenty-six-year-old Ugandan refugee named Mahmood Mamdani described his experiences in one of the camps in London in a book published in 1973. The camp directors announced one day with thirteen hours’ notice that they were moving fifty refugees to another camp sixty miles from London. Some of those to be moved already had jobs in London. Mamdani and fellow refugees refused to move. They said in a petition to the camp authorities, “We protest at being treated as objects or, at best, as cattle.”
Managers of refugee camps don’t often have to contend with refugees who demand a voice in what happens to them. The Uganda Resettlement Board in Britain was unlucky in that one of the refugees—Mamdani—was a Harvard graduate student who had already been involved in the civil rights campaigns in America. He would go on to become a famous professor of government at Columbia and at Makerere University in Uganda. Mamdani was successful in getting press coverage of the refugee revolt.
There ensued a battle of wills between the board and the refugees. Mamdani realized that what angered the Uganda Resettlement Board was refugees wanting to run their own lives. As he said in his book the following year, “The crux of the matter was that we had refused to act as refugees, as helpless, well-behaved children, totally devoid of initiative, indiscriminately grateful for anything that may come their way.”
Mamdani acknowledged that material aid to the refugees had been generous, even including a Christmas turkey. But it was not enough to compensate them for not having a say in their own fate: “Circumstances deprived us of our possessions, but not yet of our self-respect. For that last possession, our humanity, we were willing to fight.”
In the end, the Resettlement Board moved some but left the most diehard protesters alone.1
To use the ponderous jargon of modern academics and economic development workers, Mamdani was expressing a demand for agency. Agency here roughly means the right to consent to your own progress, to simply have a voice in what affects you. It is the widespread desire of adults to not be treated as children. (Actually, my anecdotal experience as a father and grandfather makes me think that not even children like to be treated as children.)
Agency is often seen as a rather arcane concern for people experiencing extreme deprivation. Aid agencies make some effort to recognize agency by deploying even more ponderous jargon like empowerment, community-driven development, participatory development, partnerships for development, country-led development, and consultations with stakeholders and civil society. It is hard to see how the intended beneficiaries of aid really get a voice from all this. Most development debaters turn with relief away from such buzzwords to seek lower poverty rates or a higher number of Christmas turkeys.
But is material poverty relief a reliable indicator that people will be better off, if they have no agency to say so? Should poverty rates and GDP be the only measure of progress? Maybe GDP increases that happened through forced labor, forced resettlement, and violent land seizures in aid projects, as well as by supporting autocrats, jailing political protesters, shooting demonstrators, and intervening with the Western military, were not exactly equivalent to GDP increases that happen more consensually.
It is disturbing that modern development lacks a vision to decide whether violent development is a good or bad thing. It occurred to me that help might be available from four centuries of commentators on the development violence known as colonialism.
I have also been much influenced by colleagues from developing countries who related their experience with some development people telling them what was good for their countries without giving them a voice. As my Ghanaian colleague Yaw Nyarko shared in a comment on a preliminary draft of this book, he has often heard Western development people say, “Well, we should do those [development actions] to those Africans, and those Africans need this.” But Nyarko notes, “There are no Africans in the room. We haven’t asked those people.” In fact, Nyarko says, “We didn’t ask to be saved.” Throughout my career, I have heard similar comments from many of my colleagues, underscoring how condescension was as bad to them as material poverty.2 But these colleagues and I myself certainly do not reject development efforts altogether. The question is how to discriminate between good and bad development. I could look for possible answers in the long history of liberalism, the ideology defined by a love for the freedom to choose and an aversion to coercion and paternalism.
I was aware that liberal economists played a key role in this debate, as they offered consensual exchanges in the marketplace as one of the main ways that people realize agency in a mutually beneficial way. They saw that moral bans on coercion were necessary for trade to play this beneficial role.
I had not fully anticipated how central the demand for agency would be to the story from the beginning. For centuries liberal thinkers across the globe grappled with the demand for agency during the long history of colonialism, including American Indian removal, slavery, and the conquest of Asia and Africa. Liberals seldom used the modern word agency, but they used more evocative words such as consent, liberty, democracy, self-determination, voice, individual freedom, the consent of the governed, equal rights, and the right to choose. The liberals linked the demand for agency to other nonmaterial demands, like the demand for dignity and respect. Since agency is a modern word, I will usually use the word consent instead of agency throughout this history.
The value placed on material progress has always been and will always be widely shared, including by this author. The point is not to reject material values altogether. The point is that for four hundred years there has been something else besides a demand for material income—the demand for agency and dignity—and those voices also deserve to be heard. Throughout history, conquerors claimed to increase the material progress of colonial subjects while taking away their agency. But these claims have often been met by skepticism by liberals, not to mention by the colonial subjects themselves. Their simple point was that development without consent is not necessarily progress.
If there seems to be a selection bias in this history toward violence in development, it is because this is a history of violence in development. So this history is not representative of aid and development efforts in general. In this history, the liberals used the most extreme violations of consent as counterexamples to the assertion that material betterment was sufficient to show progress. But the liberal critique of violent development efforts does not aim to tarnish all development efforts. It seeks to eliminate the worst forms of violence, to make it more possible for development to be benevolent. The progress against coercion was as important as the progress against poverty to improved human well-being. Development could then wind up at today’s less extreme, even if still problematic, denial of agency.
Who was in the West and the Rest would be flexibly defined by self-labeled members of the former. It usually means Western Europe and its settler offshoots in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Sometimes it means only upper-class white males even within Western nations. The Rest is everybody else.
The indignant response to conquest in the name of progress by some people in the Rest and liberals in the West shows that agency, far from being a meaningless buzzword, has been at the heart of the development debate for four centuries. Mamdani’s revolt in the refugee camp had a lot to do with this history. As he said at the time, “The victors always seem to forget that the vanquished have a longer historical memory.”3
1
Our Conquest of Them for Their Own Good
A Native American man in what later became Massachusetts appealed to philanthropists in England in 1629: “Come over and help us.”
The Massachusetts Bay Colony featured this man on their seal after King Charles I granted them a charter to New England in 1629. The five-word appeal for help issues from his mouth. He is mostly naked and carrying a bow and arrow, fitting the image that the English had of American Indians. The native man points the arrow downward, signaling that the Indians peacefully welcomed the helpful settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Nobody knows the Indigenous man’s name or tribal affiliation or anything else about him, perhaps because he was entirely fictional.
The seal accurately reflects the ideas of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that began large-scale settlement in New England. In the winter of 1628–1629, Winthrop had sought to reassure would-be settlers about the noble mission of the colony. Before leaving England for New England, Winthrop set out to answer possible objections to the colony—of which a big one was that “we have no warrant to enter upon that land, which hath been so long possessed by others.”1
But Winthrop argued that the conquerors did have a right to the land because of their ability to improve it. Surely, God had not intended “a whole Continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement.” Instead, God had given man an improvement mission in the book of Genesis, namely to “increase and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.” The natives in New England had failed to fulfill God’s mission. “This savage people” did not develop the land or themselves: “They enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by.”
Winthrop expounded an idea of enormous importance for illiberal thought in the next four centuries. He argued it was lawful for the people who would improve the land, the English, to take the territory from those who had failed to improve it, the Indians, for the sake of global improvement. This book will call this idea the Development Right of Conquest. It confers the right to conquer lands on those who bring material progress to these lands.
But what about development for the Indians? Winthrop in 1629 reassured his audience that the English seizure of Indian land was actually beneficial for the Indians, because the English would teach them the arts of improvement. Although settlement would only leave the Indians part of their former lands, he said, they would “learn from us to improve a part to more use than before they could do the whole.” Such a knowledge transfer “will yield them more benefit than all that land which we have from them.” God wanted the English to offer religious as well as secular salvation to the Indians, because “the Gospel should be preached to all nations.” The Development Right of Conquest would often apply to people as well as land. The developers had the right to subjugate people as long as they benefited those people.2
But what did those to be saved think about this? Winthrop thought his offer of development was appealing enough that “we shall come in with the good leave of the natives.”3
However, Winthrop thought it was possible that the natives might not appreciate the Gospel: “We know not whether those Barbarians will receive it at first or no.” Just in case the natives did not agree to their own salvation, Winthrop planned to have an army. The colony’s soldiers would have enough guns and fortifications so that five hundred settlers could defeat three thousand Indians, Winthrop promised.4
A fateful us and them had entered the lexicon of progress. The idea of “us” conquering “them” for their own good—the imaginative and fateful mixture of coercion, paternalism, and superiority—was destined for a momentous career for the next four centuries. The West’s conquest of the Rest in the name of progress would spawn many competing notions of what progress really is.
The most drastic form of the Development Right of Conquest was the one that applied to the land rather than to people. Suppose the Indigenous people were unable or unwilling to develop, or maybe Western conquerors simply did not care about them. Then the conquerors could console themselves that they were still furthering global progress by making the conquered lands more productive. They could at least save the land if they could not save the people. They could then justify the replacement of the unprogressive people by progressive people in the name of progress.
In Winthrop there is an early sighting of the Western policy of population removal, which would fatefully develop over the next four centuries. What is today called ethnic cleansing went on to figure importantly in debates about progress—specifically on what to do with Indians and Black people inside Western societies.
Winthrop was willing to consider such population removal. In 1634, members of the Pequot tribe killed an English trader after he had taken two Pequots captive to be his guides. This eventually led to war between the English and the Pequots. The English had been asking the Pequots to accept white settlers along the Mystic River in Connecticut and the Pequots had said, No thanks. The Pequots apparently did not have as much demand for white saviors as they were supposed to. Whether the land wanted to be saved, it didn’t say.
The thirty thousand Pequots were a constraint to English expansion as one of the most powerful tribes in the area. However, a smallpox epidemic had already made them more vulnerable to conquest. Although the introduction of Europeans’ diseases to the Indians was not intentional or understood by John Winthrop, he saw the epidemic as a good thing: “God hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left voide of inhabitants.”5
The English enlisted the Narragansett and Mohegan Indians, enemies of the Pequots, to their side. The crucial battle that decided the war took place on May 26, 1637, at a Pequot fortified village named Mistick near the Mystic River. The English set fire to the fort. They and their Indian allies shot those fleeing the fire. Of the four hundred Pequots in the village, only five survived. John Winthrop noted that 150 of the slain were elderly men or women and children. Winthrop also notes that the English divided up Pequot women and children who survived the war among the Narragansetts, the Mohegans, other Indian allies, and English settlers. He also wrote that when Pequot captives escaped and then were recaptured, the English branded them on the shoulder. Winthrop himself took the wife of a Pequot chief named Mononotto as a servant. She had requested only of the whites that they not “abuse her body” or take away her children. Winthrop reassured a correspondent that “I have taken charge of her,” presumably nonabusively.6
