Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism is the academic movement that reads Western scholarship, literature, and institutions as instruments of imperial power whose effects persist after formal empire ended. Beginning from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), it holds that the West’s knowledge of the non-Western world was constructed to dominate it.¹ The conservative critique is that the discipline substitutes indictment for history: it flattens the enormous variety of imperial experience into a single moral verdict, exempts non-Western empires from the same scrutiny, and trains students to repudiate the civilisation whose universities they occupy.

Conservatives do not dispute that empire involved conquest, exploitation, and violence. They dispute a method that treats every Western text as evidence for a predetermined conclusion, and a politics that converts the mixed ledger of empire into a permanent claim against the present.

Key Takeaways

• The founding text is Said’s Orientalism (1978), which argued that Western study of the East was a discourse of power; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) supplied the movement’s revolutionary genealogy.
• Conservative critics charge the discipline with unfalsifiable method — hostile readings confirm the thesis, sympathetic readings confirm it more subtly — and with selective outrage that ignores Ottoman, Mughal, and Soviet empires.
• Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) restated the case for weighing empire’s record — slavery’s abolition, common law, railways, famine and massacre — item by item rather than wholesale.
• The 2017 withdrawal of Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism” after threats to the journal became the standard conservative exhibit for the discipline’s enforcement of orthodoxy.

History And Context

The movement’s intellectual pedigree runs through the anti-colonial revolutions. Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born psychiatrist serving the Algerian FLN, argued in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that colonialism was a system of violence that deformed coloniser and colonised alike.² Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor of literature at Columbia, transposed the indictment into cultural analysis: Orientalism (1978) contended that generations of Western scholars, novelists, and administrators had produced an “Orient” that was exotic, passive, and fit for rule.¹ Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha extended the framework through the 1980s, and by the 1990s postcolonial studies was an established department-level presence across the English-speaking humanities.

Resistance arrived early. The historian Bernard Lewis answered Said in a celebrated 1982 exchange, arguing that Orientalism misrepresented the scholarly tradition it condemned and ignored the philologists whose work did not fit the thesis. Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West (2007) catalogued the book’s factual errors and charged Said with denying the West credit for the self-criticism that made anti-imperialism possible in the first place.³ In 2017, the Third World Quarterly withdrew Bruce Gilley’s peer-reviewed article “The Case for Colonialism” after petitions and credible threats of violence against the editor — for conservatives, a demonstration that the field polices conclusions rather than arguments. Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), itself briefly cancelled by its original publisher, carried the revisionist case to a general readership.⁴

The Conservative Position

The first objection is method. A discipline in which imperial administrators’ racism proves the thesis, and imperial administrators’ scholarship proves the thesis operates more insidiously, has no test it can fail. Conservatives hold that history must weigh particulars: the Royal Navy’s decades-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade after 1807 belongs in the same ledger as the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and a method that can only read the first as a mask for the second is not scholarship but prosecution.

Second, selectivity. Empire is among the most universal of human institutions — Ottoman, Mughal, Qing, Aztec, Songhai, Soviet — yet the discipline’s energy falls almost entirely on the maritime empires of Western Europe. The conservative inference is that the real subject is not empire but the West.

Third, consequences. Roger Scruton described the posture as a “culture of repudiation”: institutions teaching each generation that its inheritance — common law, parliamentary government, scientific method — is contaminated at the root. Conservatives argue that free institutions do not survive indefinitely on borrowed loyalty, and that gratitude and criticism are compatible; repudiation and citizenship, over time, are not.

Differing Positions

Postcolonial scholars answer that the critique attacks a caricature. The harms in question are documented, not imagined: the Congo Free State’s rubber terror, recurrent famines in British India, punitive expeditions, and the legal subordination of subject populations. The discipline’s purpose, they argue, is not to indict the present but to recover perspectives that imperial archives silenced, and its attention falls on Western empires because those empires built the world’s current distribution of wealth, borders, and languages. As for the mixed ledger, they reply that benefits delivered without consent at gunpoint cannot retroactively license domination — a principle conservatives themselves apply to every other coercive utopia. On this view, postcolonialism is simply history told from the receiving end. The conservative rejoinder is that history told from any single end, with its verdict fixed in advance, stops being history at all.

References

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).
2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961).
3. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Prometheus Books, 2007).
4. Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023).