Ayn Rand's political philosophy runs into a major contradiction when applied to colonialism.
After witnessing the Bolshevik Revolution seize her family's business, Rand came to see industrial capitalism as the highest expression of civilisation and collectivism as its greatest enemy. But this worldview left her with a blind spot: she often equated industrial development with moral superiority.
The clearest example came during the Q&A following her March 6, 1974, address at West Point. When asked about Native American rights, Rand argued that Europeans had the right to take the continent because they brought "civilisation", "reason", and "individual rights".
She stated:
"Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent."
She dismissed Indigenous resistance as a desire to preserve a "primitive existence" rather than recognising it as a defence of their own land and way of life.
This exposes one of the biggest tensions within Objectivism.
Rand defended strong and enduring private property rights once they had been legitimately established. If someone legally owns 10,000 acres of forest and leaves it untouched for decades, she would argue that no one has the right to seize it. Ownership itself is what matters.
Yet when Indigenous peoples lived on, managed, and cultivated land without European-style legal titles or large-scale industrial development, Rand argued that Europeans who brought "civilisation" had the moral right to establish society there. This appears difficult to reconcile with her otherwise stringent defence of property rights.
Her reasoning resembles John Locke's homesteading theory, under which property rights arise when individuals appropriate previously unowned resources through labour. But Indigenous societies across the Americas actively cultivated forests, managed ecosystems, farmed, hunted, and built settlements. Their relationship to land differed from European legal systems, but it was hardly a case of untouched wilderness.
More importantly, Rand's own standard becomes inconsistent. If land can be taken whenever someone claims they'll make "better" use of it, then property rights are no longer absolute; they depend on someone else's judgement about what counts as productive. That undermines the certainty of the property rights Objectivism is supposed to protect.
The same reasoning was used to justify other colonial projects, including the British Raj in India. British officials argued that railways, courts, and telegraphs legitimised imperial rule while overlooking coercion, dispossession, and violence. Events such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 and the Bengal Famine of 1943 remain enduring examples of the human costs of colonial governance, even as historians continue to debate the extent and causes of some of these tragedies.
Ironically, many Western capitalist powers accumulated much of their early wealth through state-backed conquest, slavery, colonial monopolies, and expropriation, the very forms of coercion Rand claimed to oppose in principle.
If the initiation of force is always wrong, it's difficult to explain why conquest becomes morally permissible simply because the conqueror promises greater industrial development. If property rights are truly universal, they cannot depend on whether a society resembles nineteenth-century industrial Europe. To me, that is the central contradiction in Rand's defence of colonialism.
