Fieldhouse - part II

I accidentally posted a reply to Haideh (instead of creating my own post) - sorry, learning the ropes, but truly slowly.

In the second part of his book, Fieldhouse is concerned with explaining the character of the government of colonial empires and its impacts on Third World Development. Most prominent feature – imperial rule was “external to each colony” (71). Major consequences of colonialism: the colonized lost their freedom of choice (one can argue it was more than ‘choice’); and, the colonized did not have united national consciousness. If the latter is the absolute fact, it means that the colonizers did not know how to deal with tribes, ethnic groups, religious factions, or whoever they encountered once they colonized the lands. There were no western-style governments and the disconnect created was not only the ignorance but the unpreparedness of the colonizers and the sheer scope of what they had to deal with in an unfamiliar territory. What the author sees as the three main shortcomings of the colonial state (1. it never connected to or understood the needs of the colonized; 2. it had split loyalties between the metropolis and the colony; and, 3. it did not have the legitimacy since it did not have the “voluntary support” of the colonized; p. 89-90) would not only contribute to the future resistance and eventual decolonization, but it also shows the lack of vision for the future on the colonizers’ part as they did not foresee these shortfalls as something that would cause the demise of that form of exploitative/territorial imperialism. What is valuable in this part II of Fieldhouse’s work are the author’s explanations of different imperial economic systems (British, French, and others). The British system can be summarized as follows: the economy of the empires was supported by the producers in the colonies through the bulk-buying and marketing-board systems, the latter which became corrupt because of local politicians’ need for greed. The French imperial economic policy had a once-sided protectionist policy: French goods entered most of the colonies duty free but foreign goods paid “the same duties as if entering France” and not all colonial exports entered France duty free (sugar as an example since competing with France’s sugar beet production). Fieldhouse does not interpret the system of surprix in connection to its incorporation into the economic structure of EEC after 1958. He also introduces the Stabex system after 1975 as if his audience members are all economics experts. Another feature of colonialism which further embedded colonies into the imperial economy was the currency, especially the ability of the currency to connect the colonies with the global world system. In this second part of the book, Fieldhouse’s original concept of optimists and pessimists is neglected as he does not show its relation to the elaborate economic discourse he presented.