The Colonialism of Human Rights

Ongoing Hypocrisies of Western Liberalism

Colin Samson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509530007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

Do so-called universal human rights apply to indigenous, formerly enslaved and colonized peoples? This trenchant book brings human rights into conversation with the histories and afterlives of Western colonialism and slavery. Colin Samson examines the paradox that the nations that credit themselves with formulating universal human rights were colonial powers, settler colonists and sponsors of enslavement. Samson points out that many liberal theorists supported colonialism and slavery, and how this illiberalism plays out today in selective, often racist processes of recognition and enforcement of human rights. To reveal the continuities between colonial histories and contemporary events, Samson connects British, French and Americancolonial theoriesand practice to the notion of non-universal human rights. Vivid illustrations and case studies of racial exceptions to human rights are drawn from the afterlives of the enslaved and colonized, as well as recent events such as American police killings of black people, the treatment of Algerian harkis in France, the Windrush scandal in Britain and the militarized suppression of the Standing Rock Water Protectors movement. Advocating for reparative justice and indigenizing law, Samson argues that such events are not a failure of liberalism so much as an inbuilt racial dynamic of it.

1
Non-universal Human Rights and Rightlessness

… the rights of man [are] narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.¹

Aimé Césaire

Racial Contracts

While white privilege is often about substantial social, political and economic advantages that white people in various societies are said to benefit from, and to which their identities are connected, it is made possible by multiple articulations of the basic inferiority of others. This may have to do with their ancestry, as in the case of my great-uncle’s remark at the expense of the black airman, or their basic unsuitability to make independent decisions over their own lands and affairs, as with the claim that African countries were ‘better-off’ under British rule. White privilege fits a view of the world as socially and culturally graded, where differences translate into exceptions to general principles, and where equal consideration or treatment of different types of person is always discretionary.

This discretion, coupled with selective outrage towards violation, is why Aimé Césaire bluntly described human rights as racist. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire observed that Europe’s wars which prompted the UDHR were only seen as a disgrace because the corpses were primarily white. No such extensions of soul searching or appeals to international regulation and human rights were made when the bodies were not white. Moreover, the mid-twentieth-century deliberations on the founding of the United Nations were not characterized by any sorrow over colonialism and slavery, but by an attempt to prolong the self-appointed civilizing mission of the British Empire. This was especially apparent in the views of the South African apartheid leader Jan Smuts, who took a prominent role in founding the UN, and believed that rights should match the evolutionary stage of different races.² Smuts drafted the Preamble to the UN Charter.

But how do rejections of the equality of human worth and dignity relate to the guarantees of equal human rights within liberal democracies? What happens when a hierarchically ordered expansionist culture, filtered through its extensions of colonialism and slavery, considers human rights? How are the precedents of slavery and colonialism relevant to a consideration of contemporary human rights? What happens when human rights are mapped onto national societies and a global order that contain massive inequalities and imbalances of power?

Universal human rights seemingly sit uncomfortably in a world of white privilege, and consequently, as Charles Mills points out, it is rare that legal and philosophic disquisitions on rights are brought into conversation with topics such as colonialism, slavery and racism.³ Meaningful dialogue about universal human rights today is therefore uneasy, and much of it currently revolves around outwardly raceless legal prose and official pronouncements. Western inheritances of Enlightenment thought, the principles of popular sovereignty emerging out of the American and French Revolutions, nineteenth-century liberalism, the 1948 UDHR and the various official proclamations of human rights since then are often taken as emblematic of some primordial quality of ‘civilized societies’. Consequently, it might be understandable that Europeans and Euro-Americans are proud of the principles of rights and democratic government that they believe they have inherited and disseminated because these emerged after long periods of sacrifice, war and social and intellectual struggle against class oppression and despotism in Europe. So powerful is this pride that abstract conceptions of rights within representative government are central to Europe’s political thinking. From the franchise to impartial social justice, freedom of expression to the right to the fundamentals of life, human rights are a key indicator of the inevitable movement of global history in Western thought.

This universalism does not mean that either the early theorists of rights or their colonizing compatriots acted without reference to cultural variation, but that universalizing occurred within a hegemonic process that delegitimizes other renderings of history and rights.⁴ Nevertheless, there were many times when colonial administrations had to tolerate, and even accept, traditional and customary laws⁵ – for example, when they were demographically outnumbered. In India, the British incorporated some indigenous norms within colonial administration, but ‘instead of abiding by the local definition, they redefined and invented customs and traditions as per Western ideologies and the aims of British imperialism’.⁶ Sen suggests that this was partly because Indian customs were more humane than British laws.

Their sense of cultural superiority largely meant that colonial agents who were adjudicating rights and responsibilities were often dismissive of rival values among those they administered. Although universalism is ostensibly raceless, Enlightenment philosophers of rights used race as an important category to differentiate human qualities along one universal continuum. Prominent, but not alone, among liberal thinkers is Immanuel Kant, who distinguished gradations of personhood and rights based on the premise of white superiority.⁷ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed his master–slave dialectic as the Atlantic slave trade and the rebellion of enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue (which became Haiti) were taking place. He made no reference to these events,⁸ possibly because of his evident contempt for Africans in Dialectics of History. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, which led to the first independent black republic, is largely ignored in scholarly accounts of the origins of human rights.⁹ Instead of being praised as an exemplar of universal values and the ‘Rights of Man’, Haiti quickly became indebted to its former enslavers, and had to pay huge financial compensation to France to obtain international recognition.¹⁰

Another Enlightenment figure, John Locke, was General Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations, which regulated British slave trading. He was also a shareholder in two slave-trading companies, including the Royal Africa Company at a time just before the massive expansion of British slave trading.¹¹ Locke’s idea of representative government through consent to the social contract did not encompass African people. In fact, he argued that slaves cannot be part of the social contract, and hence by default can legitimately be subject to absolute or arbitrary authority. The enslaved Africans that he had such an important role in administering go unmentioned in the ‘Of Slavery’ chapter of The Second Treatise on Government. In parallel, fellow liberal thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau made explicit that slavery could never be based on consent, the basis for all social contracts, but even he makes no reference to European enslavement of Africans in the ‘Of Slavery’ chapter of The Social Contract of 1791.¹² Likewise, other French philosophes were either indifferent to the enslavement of Africans or took many years to pronounce against it.¹³

Thus, it must be, as Mills argues through the concept of the racial contract,¹⁴ that race is a shaping constituent of Western liberal ideals, prominently including those involving rights as well as duties and government responsibilities. Mills’ racial contract is intended to critique and replace the social contract, the mythical transaction whereby individuals in a perilous, insecure ‘state of nature’ are asserted to forgo voluntarily natural rights to autonomy in return for protections and legal and police powers of the state. Under Locke’s social contract, the state is therefore legitimated by popular consent, thus establishing firm links between the state, rights and democracy. The social contract individuates people, removing them from formerly autonomous cultural communities that are depicted as primitive and lacking protections. Following Mills, we could say that if a real social contract were to exist, it would be an arrangement leading to racially differentiated relationships to the state, and, via colonialism and slavery, these would be cemented together through compulsion and violence.

An example in which particular attributions about specific groups get translated into structurally embedded denials of supposedly universal rights is contained in Locke’s ‘Of Property’.¹⁵ The outwardly secular Locke held that rights to property could only be claimed by farmers who worked as God intended. This seemingly random assumption meant, above all, labouring and improving the soil. Such a stipulation conveniently invalidated land rights for American Indians in North America since, in Locke’s erroneous view, Indians were simply wandering hunters. Their property was therefore vested only in t...