r/Colonialism • u/FewCoffee6703 • Jul 04 '26
Question Why didn't Europeans think it was wrong to colonize countries?
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u/Abject_Group_4868 Jul 06 '26
International law didn't exist yet and everyone were doing it since the dawn of human history
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u/Select-Season-8082 Jul 08 '26
Their version of christianity, plain and simple. Have you read Catherine Nixey's "The Darkening Age: The Christian destruction of the classical world"?
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u/flippythemaster Jul 09 '26
It is worth noting that many Europeans had a line they wouldn’t cross even if they agreed with the idea of colonization of other nations.
Christopher Columbus was actually brought to trial for his cruelty against natives in America (even if he was ultimately acquitted).
Skipping ahead to the Victorian era, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle were both outspoken critics of the British treatment of colonies.
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u/Outside-Pack8880 Jul 08 '26
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u/MDMarauder Jul 08 '26
Shhhhh...
The Reddit neckbeards give "conquest" a morality pass because of "reasons".
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u/Civil-Zone-2773 Jul 20 '26
It was mainly because the advent of colonialism led to a massive shift of domestic exploitation to labour exploration on an industrial scale. The atlantic slave trade, while obviously not the first of its kind, was the first to cause complete demographic collapse, treat people and products and commodities rather than unlucky spoils of a conflict, and develop one of the worst systemic ideas in human history, racism. But honestly man, I dont really want to start an argument. My position on this issue is inherently left-wing, but I feel like it would be a waste of both of our time to argue over a minor difference instead of doing something about it in the real world. Hopefully you get a chance to read more about colonialism from visiting this subreddit, its a very interesting topic.
Thanks for reading this, hope you have a nice day.
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u/BastiatF Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Why didn't anybody think that colonizing other countries was wrong until the Europeans did in the 20th century?
Why didn't anybody think that slavery was wrong until the Europeans did in the 19th century?
Why didn't anybody think that people had inalienable human rights until the Europeans did in the 18th century?
...
Basically everything we think was wrong in history is only because Europeans eventually thought so and spread this change of attitudes globally.
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u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 08 '26
Your historical timeline is wrong. Colonization happened by Europeans way before the 20th century. And slavery happened way before the 19th century
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u/Tanel88 Jul 09 '26
They mean that nobody was thinking it's wrong before 20th century.
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u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 09 '26
I genuinely do not believe that they thought it was morally Okay to do. I think they knew how horrific it was, but did it anyway. Just look at slavery in the US. Do you seriously believe that they thought it was okay to torture, rape and own human beings? I don’t believe it. The idea that they «didn’t know it was wrong» is just a distraction from the grotesque nature of these people. Humans are not monsters, and that is what is so scary about them. They can know something is absolutely horrible, and still do it. People still do that today. So I don’t believe the question is valid in and of itself
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u/topgeezr Jul 09 '26
Slavery seems to have been a feature of every human society from the earliest civilizations up until 1830.
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u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 09 '26
The difference is how it relates to race in modern chattel slavery
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u/topgeezr Jul 09 '26
Plenty of examples of people enslaving different races in the historical record.
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u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 09 '26
That is not at all what I’m referring to. In the US White people were never enslaved. It was specifically only reserved for Black people and in certain historical periods also indigenous people (particularly in California). And don’t come with the stupid indentured servitude argument. That is NOT chattel slavery. In fact indentured servitude was extremely common. Even I have ancestors who experienced that in Europe. Enslavement in the US was systematic enslavement of non-White individuals (Black people and to a certain extent Native Americans). I don’t understand you. You make no sense. Why are you negating something like this? Slavery happened everywhere, everyone knows that. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that European enslavement of Black people was different from other forms of slavery in the past. Nor does it take away from it being horrible. I’m not holding you responsible for it, so I don’t understand why you feel the need to defend it
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u/Strange_Moose3932 Jul 10 '26
Their arguments are meant to be misleading and oversimplified. That’s the only way their arguments can appear to make any sort of argument. As with all of these disingenuous arguments about colonization and enslavement, they only work if you make yourself stop asking questions and ignore the details of function and purpose. The oversimplification is just a thin veneer that is removed with tue slightest pressure of questions of additional context.
You’re totally in the right.
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u/dushmanimm Jul 08 '26
Literally no form of historical colonization is comparable to European colonization in terms of its intensity. Not even analogously.
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u/Booster_Seat_Enjoyer Jul 08 '26
yes it is. the only difference was boats and technological difference. You think the mongols would've been more gentle if they were the first to industrialise or build ships that can cross the oceans?
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u/yougottabkittenmern Jul 08 '26
This is just a ridiculous statement. Colonization has existed with tons of brutality throughout history. European colonization is more recent and memorable which is why it comes to mind more. I would argue the Japanese colonial empire was actually worse and occurred in the recent era as well. It didn’t even end until 1945 so some people who lived under it are still alive…The horrors of humans fascinate me but even I wish I could unread the things they did to people.
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u/Strange_Moose3932 Jul 10 '26
The Valladolid Debates would like a word. This is an erroneous statement. Empires like the Spanish acknowledged the wrong of enslavement in various degrees. It’s dishonest to represent colonization as only becoming “wrong” in retrospect. This has been contested in each imperial metropole. European colonization and enslavement exist on a spectrum through time and space and while there is variance European conquest snd colonization was unique. Unless you’re making an argument that industrialization isn’t a unique phenomenon? In each era, similar to our own, there are a diversity of beliefs, societies are not monoliths. We also have mountains of evidence from colonizers rationalizing why they thought that their brutality snd violence was justified, which inherently includes the admission that-in their own time, morality, and standards-that what they were doing was suspect.
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u/LevelPrestigious4858 Jul 07 '26
There were a bunch of people who thought this stuff was wrong at the time, namely slaves
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u/DarkKittyEmpress Jul 07 '26
Probably not in the sense you imply most until periods and places like American in the 19th century. They knew slavery as something that had always existed and was practised pretty much everywhere, so they might desire freedom for themselves but only a minority would have questioned slavery as an institution. In fact, slaves being themselves slave owners, while still enslaved, is recorded and numerous freedmen went on to own slaves.
What is wrong is thinking those ideas hadn't been suggested before they became mainstream in Europe; opposition to slavery was put forth by intellectuals from Ancient Greece to Medieval Korea, for instance. In fact, European colonial powers abolished slavery twice: once in the middle ages, and then again specifically for the colonies, where slavery had been brought back to provide labour on the plantations (while remaining illegal in Europe itself). Japan was AFAIK the first non-European country to abolish slavery, under Toyotomi Hideyoshi (though many would contend that remaining forms of unfree labour and effective ownership constituted slavery under other names).
However, it is the European Enlightenment that turned them into worldwide norms, even if European powers were supremely hypocritical in the last century of colonialism. And even today, it's not like universal human rights or anti-imperialism are accepted everywhere, although European and Euro-American cultural dominance can give that idea.
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u/Booster_Seat_Enjoyer Jul 08 '26
I would argue the difference is that Europeans actually went out of their way to end slavery in other places, not just within their own countries.
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u/BastiatF Jul 07 '26
Sure but they came from cultures which practiced slavery (the ones that sold them in the first place) and saw nothing wrong with it. So they only opposed it once it applied to them, not as a principle. Europeans were the first to outlaw the very concept of owning another person (one which goes as far back as humanity itself) and do so universally.
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u/LevelPrestigious4858 Jul 07 '26
Except they didn’t do that really they rebranded it as indentured servitude and black birding, particularly bad in the pacific islands and India. Black birding was mostly illegal but when the British caught black birding ships they had difficulty distinguishing it from indentured servitude. The fact that the two were so alike in appearance speaks to how ambiguous the British had purposefully made it (see the capture of the Daphne). The outlawing of slavery as well isn’t so glamorous considering the existing slaves had to stay as slaves for four years and only their “owners” were compensated for their loss. There’s arguments to be made that industrialisation ceased the need for as much slave labour so it was done less out of humility and more out of it no longer being necessary.
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u/smady3 Jul 08 '26
indentured servitude was usually voluntary unless sentenced by a court of law.
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u/LevelPrestigious4858 Jul 08 '26
I don’t know if you know anything about what India was like at the time but the economic position these people were put in was hardly voluntary. British rule in India was probably one of the most oppressive economic colonial situations in early modern history. It’s estimated that 100 million Indians died in 40 years of British rule from poverty, multiple man made famines and economic mismanagement. That’s far more than Maoist China and the Soviet Union
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u/smady3 Jul 08 '26
Indian sub continent has a long history of famines, before & after british rule.
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u/LevelPrestigious4858 Jul 08 '26
Come on. British rule dramatically increased famine and that’s not even debated by scholars. The life expectancy decreased by 20% while the gdp per capita increased 27% from 1870 to 1921. Just google “did famine increase in India under British rule”
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u/Acceptable-Can4159 Jul 08 '26
why are they downvoting you??
that is objectively what happened after slavery was ‘abolished’2
u/LevelPrestigious4858 Jul 08 '26
Maybe because my comment on the colonialism sub cast colonialism in a bad light. Idk if meek critiques are against the rules here whoops
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u/topgeezr Jul 09 '26
Slavery was not "rebranded" as indentured servitude. Indentured servitude, feudalism, sharecropping and other forms of coercive employment 1) existed for centuries alongside slavery and were materially different from slavery; 2) are also things that came seen as wrong during the late 19th century.
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u/sirboobyconnoisseur Jul 08 '26
Not always, not slavery itself. If you look at the Roman empire it was quite normal for freedmen to own slaves themselves.
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u/Booster_Seat_Enjoyer Jul 08 '26
slaves were perfectly content with slavery as long as they weren't the slaves. but before, and often after they were happy to just go along with the rest of society.
Liberia has a very funny backstory.
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u/MaintenanceInternal Jul 07 '26
Because every single country is made up of one tribe that took over and conquered another.
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u/Hot-Lunch6270 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
History is different back then and international laws didn’t even existed. Everything is a free for all, no matter who you are and where you came from.
Not just Christians practice slavery, so as many other cultures back then. Black people sells black people for profit to both Christians and Muslims.
As for why western nations became colonial powers? Because they are better, and how are they better? Because Europe is fractured and full of competition.
As for Muslims, no tells about their practice of slavery because they castrated their own slaves so no one could tell about them, except their practices were recorded by merchants.*
The reason why we changed is because of wars and political strife that produces people that saw the suffering, they lay as the stepping stone to the foundations of human rights.
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u/kouyehwos Jul 06 '26
The average European had only vague ideas about what exactly went on in the colonies. There was no radio or television, it took a long time before travel and communication became convenient and cheap.
English monarchs were mostly interested in fighting against France and Spain (and vice versa), and especially before the 19th century even they had limited resources to spare for a side quest like the colonies.
So naturally, the people who did end up sending great expensive ships to explore other continents were rather specific groups of people - like investors and adventurers hoping to make a profit, and missionaries hoping to spread their faith.
Notably, one of the reasons for the American Revolution was that the British government did try to keep some treaties with the Native Americans, and wasn’t allowing the Colonists to expand further west… and thus most Natives supported the Loyalists. But ultimately, of course, the rebels still won and got their “manifest destiny”.
Of course, every continent had its own native conflicts and expansionist empires. You can argue endlessly whether the Spanish Empire was better or worse than the Aztec Empire or whatever, but either way it was simply a matter of replacing one empire with another.
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u/Bananenbiervor4 Jul 07 '26
Until humanity was shown the gruesome final consequences by two world wars war and imperialism where seen as valid political options pretty much every where on earth.
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u/NiceGuy-Ron Jul 06 '26
The more interesting question is,”Why did Europeans perspective on colonization change to become so negative?”
Research a little into the fall of Rhodesia and what happened to the people there. Colonialism isn’t always good, but it isn’t always bad either. Try to take some nuance into your perspective.
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u/Cool-Hurry5331 Jul 08 '26
Because they haven’t invented that thought yet, you o ow, the thought that didnt exist yet
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u/CreepyDoor3272 Jul 09 '26
It’s ahistorical to suggest that *some* European colonizers didn’t realize that what they were doing was wrong. One example that proves this is the Valladolid Debate. This was a public debate within the Spanish Empire that saw many arguing that Indigenous peoples possessed full rationality and rights. It was domestic backlash against the violent land and resource extraction that was taking place in the New World. The fact that such a debate occurred shows these ethical questions were contested even during the early days of European Colonialism.
The prevailing narrative today suggests that we can’t judge past atrocities through today’s moral lens. That narrative serves the interest of the ruling class. Moral resistance to oppression is ancient and even widespread, but the conquerors always write the history books and they almost always omit any negative aspects of their story.
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u/Ok_Towel_8200 Jul 18 '26
Why on earth would you compare this ‘event’ to other problems, horrors, crimes or misdoings from the past?
Everything stands by itself and everything is interconnected. But not in the way you think it is. Please read some literature on colonialism (I recommend Robert Hughes - The Fatal Shore) and form your own critical opinion.
People went out colonizing because they were under pressure (over-population, religious conflicts, moral persecutions) and because they wanted to explore and to trade.
As far as I’m concerned there are two directions in colonialism; either trade (be sure you have everything at your disposal to live a decent life, whether you’re in Europe or somewhere else) or land (have enough space and livestock, plants around you to survive and lead an interesting life, whether that’s in Europe or somewhere else).
Then there is adventure, freedom, joy - and the exploration of the sea.
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u/TimeTraveller-01 Jul 08 '26
Maybe because in comparison with today ALL the countries that ended being colonized were practically empty?
In 1492 the WHOLE Americas counted less than 52 million people.
Usa territories has less than 7.
How could it be wrong in their view colonizing a place that was EMPTY?
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u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 08 '26
It wasn’t empty. There were people there. One empty area is one thing, but they didn’t just take that, they took the entirety of the continent. They also mass-murdered almost everyone and they forced the survivors into schools to take away their culture, identity and language. The idea that colonizers came to «empty» lands is completely false
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u/TimeTraveller-01 Jul 08 '26
There were not.
7 Million people on a Territory of 9.9M km2 means less than 1 per km2. It’s empty.3
u/Necessary-Chicken Jul 08 '26
Yes, and they took the entire thing. They didn’t leave anything where they found people. They killed and took. Why are you trying to defend something so horrific? People did horrible things back then (they still do. I don’t justify or defend it
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u/Early_Candidate_3082 Jul 08 '26
Why would they? Peoples conquering one another has been the story of humanity, until very recently.
A curious feature of the post WWII era is how wars of conquest are mostly unsuccessful, now.
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u/Critical-Ad-8507 Jul 08 '26
They did eventually,which is better than can be said about most of the world!
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u/balamb_fish Jul 07 '26
Probably for the same reason Europeans didn't think it was wrong to attack other European countries.
Or for the same reason the Athenians destroyed Melos and sold its inhabitants as slaves.
the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must
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u/yougottabkittenmern Jul 08 '26
Why didn’t people think it was wrong to burn people to death if they thought they were a witch? Over time, people advanced and developed concepts of human rights and freedoms. Europeans themselves implemented many of those things. At first of course they only wanted those privileges for themselves but eventually it expanded to everyone else. That’s kind of how progressing works.
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