In chapter 6 of his genre-defining study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the Guyanese revolutionary and historian Walter Rodney mounted a searing assault on the view that, on the whole, the continent of Africa had benefited from colonial rule. He took aim specifically at the tendency among Europe’s “bourgeois writers” to insist that “it is necessary to draw up a balance sheet of colonialism. On that balance sheet, they place both the credits and the debits, and quite often conclude that the good outweighed the bad. Rodney’s own analysis, by contrast, showed that the age of colonialism had not developed Africa but set it back, that any infrastructures it had erected and capital it had injected were introduced not for the benefit of Africans but to facilitate “more efficient exploitation in the long run.” The bourgeois defense of colonialism, in his view, was as intellectually corrupt as it was economically crass.
In a brief further reading section of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney listed a handful of existing studies on colonial history. Among them was Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan’s 1967 book, Burden of Empire, a text that Rodney’s notes described as a “colonialist interpretation” of history that exemplified precisely the kind of bourgeois ideology his analysis took to task. A blunt exercise in colonial apologetics, Gann and Duignan’s book was part of a larger school of historiography that, in an earlier text, Rodney had described as “redolent with bourgeois and colonialist assumptions, confusion and deceit.” What defined this school of thought was that it sought to secure the morality of Europe’s colonial project in Africa on the terrain of history, arguing that, from a strictly historical perspective, colonialism had succeeded at lifting the continent out of a state of primitive savagery. This line of argument both drew on and further contributed to a corpus of “myths about the African past” that configured European colonialism as a noble project of development, a vehicle of progress, and precolonial Africa as a “barbarous” continent incapable of self-directed enlightenment or historical progress. This is why, for Rodney, the historiography of Africa both before and during colonialism was a key battlefield in the struggle for Black liberation.
Gann and Duignan, too, viewed the historiography of colonialism as a battlefield. Expressly pitched as a counterpoint to the prevailing anti-colonial literature, Burden of Empire took itself to be swimming against the intellectual tide, which was dominated by a “generation who romanticize the African past, ignore its cruelties and shortcomings, and heap their disapproval on white colonizers alone.” And, for its authors, Rodney’s work exemplified this dominant view. “The story of colonialism was,” they wrote elsewhere, “the tale of How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Our own conclusions are at variance with this interpretation.” Self-declared “defenders of European colonialism,” Gann and Duignan’s view was that white settlers in Africa had worked wonders to develop the continent not just economically but infrastructurally, culturally, and socially too. And, reaching for the balance-sheet metaphor that Rodney so despised, they concluded that “the imperial system stands out as one of the most powerful engines for cultural diffusion in the history of Africa; its credit balance by far outweighs its debit account.”
Crucial for the purposes of this book is that Gann and Duignan represented not just bourgeois but also, more specifically, neoliberal historiography. By the time they published Burden of Empire, both men were based at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, a highly influential neoliberal think tank that figures prominently in the remainder of this book. Duignan also joined the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1982, a few years after having presented a paper at its 1978 annual meeting in Hong Kong (then still a British colony). In that paper, entitled “Colonialism: An Appraisal,” Duignan rehearsed Burden of Empire’s key argument, concluding that in Africa the colonizers “drew even the most barbarous of people into civilization.” Theirs was a neoliberal imperialism, then, an apologetics that was oriented around neoliberal principles even as it, in turn, informed the way the neoliberal movement thought about colonial history.
To be sure, Gann and Duignan were by no means the first neoliberals to formulate an apology for European colonialism, nor were they the architects of neoliberal imperialism. Many first-generation neoliberals, including Peter Bauer, S. Herbert Frankel, and Frederic Benham, had close relationships with the British Colonial Office and were, as such, professionally and intellectually beholden to empire. What is more, as many of its critics have observed, from the moment of its birth in the interwar period, the neoliberal movement was deeply suspicious of the ongoing process of decolonization, which seemed to them as grave a threat to the prospects of global capitalism as the rise of Keynesian collectivism and the welfare state in the Western world. The neoliberals, as Arun Kundnani observes, “saw organized labor in the West and anticolonial nationalism elsewhere as equivalent and related threats.” From a neoliberal perspective, the threat of decolonization was particularly acute in the context of Cold War hostilities, which carried with them the prospect of a Soviet-led anti-capitalist alliance. For all of these reasons, the problem of anti-colonialism loomed large over the early neoliberal movement, which expended much time and energy thinking through colonialism’s past and present and, indeed, its future.
Published in 1972, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa offers an eloquent critique that dismantles arguments surrounding the so-called benefits of colonialism.
What was distinctive about Gann and Duignan’s intervention, then, was its positioning as a historical defense of empire. If first-generation neoliberals like Bauer, Frankel, and Benham were colonial economists thinking through empire from the inside, Gann and Duignan did not start their careers until after the Second World War, when the anti-colonial movement had gained much momentum, and were thus forced to engage with the colonial period as a historical problem, through the lens of its archives. Drawing on reams of archival material that had become available as part of empire’s dismantling, they put together a rigorous, systematic, and empirically dense apology for white settlers in Africa. The resulting framework was well positioned to fill a persistent gap in neoliberal thought. Although it had always identified historiography as a key battleground in the intellectual war against socialism, for the first decades of its existence the neoliberal movement was dominated by economists and philosophers, who for the most part were not equipped to provide historical evidence for their Eurocentric arguments about Western genius or the deep-rooted defects barring non-Western cultures from genuine progress.
The neoliberals were well aware of this gap. Bauer, for instance, knew that his conception of underdevelopment was in need of historical evidence. “Knowledge of history is indispensable for an understanding of the economic landscape of most of the underdeveloped world.” This principle flowed directly from Bauer’s theoretical framework, which was rooted in the view that cultural obstacles to development are the products of centuries-old traditions of belief. For Bauer, the term underdevelopment may name a condition in the present, but its cultural roots lie in the past. And therefore a holistic understanding of its causes required, in his view, “interdisciplinary cooperation, especially between anthropologists, economists and historians.” To illustrate his point, Bauer drew on his own experience in African colonial economics. “For instance,” he wrote, “the economic development of major parts of Africa since the 1880s, their problems and prospects, cannot be properly assessed without knowledge of the extremely primitive, indeed barbarous, conditions in sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century.” This, however, marked the limits of his own expertise:
I do not know the historical or biological factors behind racial differences in economic performance.
Enter Gann and Duignan. Close collaborators of Bauer, whose writings inspired much of their work and who read a draft version of Burden of Empire, Gann and Duignan were well placed to furnish the neoliberal conception of underdevelopment with historical content. At once a paean to white European settlers and a portrait of the “savage” conditions that prevailed in precolonial Africa, their historical work supplied neoliberal reason with a pseudo-empirical basis for its theory of (under)development even as it offered a robust means to dispel Western guilt over its colonial past.
Lars Cornelissen is Academic Coordinator at the Independent Social Research Foundation and Lecturer in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Neoliberalism and Race (2025). His book can be ordered here.