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Lumifer comments on Open Thread August 31 - September 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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No.
Could you explain why you see it this way? Our wealth is partly based on exploitation. Wouldn't it be fair to fix the damage we've done to exploited people? This could perhaps be also justified in terms of utilitarianism, as fairness might bring people closer together which prevents wars.
Not to any significant extent. Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history. In addition, I doubt most western-colonized countries were made substantially worse off compared to non-colonized countries, since the Europeans introduced some level of infrastructure, medicine, etc.
First of all, who is this "we" you speak of? More importantly, there are a few "control-group" countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don't seem better off than their neighbors. Unlike most African countries, which abolished slavery when the Europeans took control, Ethiopia banned slavery only in 1942--under pressure from the British, who were a bit embarrassed to be allied with a slave state.
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
There is also Japan, which was better off than its neighbors. In 1905 Japan was strong enough to win a war against Russia.
Because the people directly responsible for the colonization profited, even if their nation as a whole did not. To go back further in history, the general of a roman legion often came home from a campaign fabulously wealthy, while the people back home saw far less of the plunder. And asking modern italians to pay spain for what ceasar looted is kind of absurd
Is that true? I can think of examples, like Cecil Rhodes arranging for the British Empire to pay for the Boer Wars for his personal enrichment, but is that typical? The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch. I think the question at hand is the 19th century, when European states claimed vast swaths of land.
(I don't like the comparison to Caesar. I believe that he paid to outfit his army, so the Romans as a whole made a profit, in contrast to knb's claim about European colonialism, which I believe is correct.)
Yeah, the 'light touch' thing is just not true. For all the history Moldbug reads, nRxs seem pretty unaware of the nightmare true corporate governance was historically.
Compared to what?
A light touch compared to 19th century state colonialism, which is the context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
Light touch indeed. They fucked it up so badly, the Crown had to come in and take over directly.
Eh... the story preceding that rebellion argues, if anything, that the Company tried too hard to bend to local practices, and the British public was outraged that "Clemency Canning" didn't want to come down like a hammer on the natives.
Because conquering new lands helps spread the meme that one should conquer as much as one can.
That is a very good question on which books have been written. Some of this was about religion and prestige, and competition with others. Some of it was various sovereigns being convinced to fund dubious (in retrospect) ventures by good marketing.
We have our biases and our cultural zeitgeist, and folks in the past had theirs. After the Otman Turks conquered Constantinople and killed off the Roman empire for good, the Portuguise started looking for an alternative route to do spice trading (and also look for Prester John, the mythical Christian king in the east). "We are looking for spices and Christians" was the motto.
The English had complicated reasons to start colonizing that were not all about money. A lot of the times it felt like colonial things happened for complex reasons (e.g. having to do w/ what was happening w/ Christianity at the time), and the Crown tried to find ways to make money off it.
It was the case that at some point the sugar trade became very valuable (e.g. to Napoleon the tiny sugar-producing possessions of France were worth much more than the entirety of Louisiana), but this happened much later -- there wasn't a "master imperialist plan" at all.
Money is not the only motivator. Power is another one.
I don't see any basis for this claim. More explicitly, I don't see any reasonable and consistent legal/moral theory which would justify such a claim. Note that I do not consider the popular "deep pockets" legal theory to be reasonable.