Heart of Darkness: The novel as entry-point of Revision History PART 2

In the post-modern world it is not hard to find anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiment, in everything from street graffiti, to novels, to academic prose. In other words, there has been much written and said in past fifty or so years, in the Western world, which speaks to the injustice and even the horror of Western colonialism and the damage that it has done. 

Just a little over a hundred years ago, in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, the opposite would have been true.  Yes, there were people—philosophers, political scientists, poets, and even novelists—who were using the tools of their trade to speak out against colonialism.  Those who did were certainly in the minority, and even many of them spent the lion’s share of time speaking about how colonialism affected the colonizer rather than the colonized. 

In fact, most negative attitudes toward empire arose from their lack of profitability rather than moral censure.  For example, the Englishman Roger Coke asserted that English interests in Ireland were only serving to drain England.  William Petty complained about the treasury-draining impact of providing imperial defense for remote colonial outposts, arguing that their defense was too much of a financial burden and ultimately something that diminished national strength.  Classical Liberals like Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, wrote that Britain should liberate all of its colonies, concluding that the economic costs bore by the British people to defend the colonies greatly exceeded the benefits reaped by a select few mercantilists and industrialists.