‘Violent Saviors’ Review: Offering Aid and Taking Power

For centuries, Western countries have used the extension of economic support to justify the imposition of control over poorer countries

Tunku Varadarajan reviews Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest by William Easterly. Excerpts:

"a truth that politicians, missionaries, philosophers and, above all, economists have grappled with (or evaded) since at least the start of the 17th century: that, to the poor, the “inequality of dignity” matters as much, if not more so, as the inequality of incomes."

"In other words, writes Mr. Easterly, the developers believed they had “the right to subjugate people as long as they benefited those people.”"

"This progress became the perfect alibi for the use of force and violence"

"these self-anointed ameliorators of savages (and of other people deemed inferior) saw the benefit they dispensed in only the narrowest material terms. Black American slaves, it was often said in defense of slavery, were better fed and housed than their unenslaved brethren in Africa. It was asserted, even, that American slaves enjoyed better living conditions than the backward English working classes."

"The apologists “failed to recognize Black people’s non-material need for dignity.” And this need could only be satisfied with equal political rights"

"counterblasts that came from many European skeptics of benevolent conquest, most notably Adam Smith (1723-90). The skeptics’ most important point, as Mr. Easterly distills into modern political language, is that “development without consent is not necessarily progress.” Smith’s alternative to conquest was commerce. He insisted that a “project of commerce”—in which there could be “a new set of exchanges” between Europe and America (and by extension anywhere else with commodities to offer)—was morally preferable to a “project of conquest.”"

"Smith is Mr. Easterly’s hero in this debate. Smith and his heirs—the economist-philosophers Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), Harriet Martineau (1802-76) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73), as well as such latter-day thinkers as Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Isaiah Berlin (1909-97), Milton Friedman (1912-2006) and P.T. Bauer (1915-2002)—held fast to the view that (relatively) equal rights in less-developed lands were not incompatible with advantageous commerce for the West. Another ally is the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was, Mr. Easterly writes, “the first major thinker in the West to see the violation of consent as a violation of dignity.” Like Smith, Kant identified commerce as the moral alternative to conquest and held that, in Mr. Easterly’s words, “the quest for respect would be as important as the quest to escape poverty.”"

"After World War II, “the new development mainstream”—which trained its attention on a succession of newly independent states in Africa and Asia—was, Mr. Easterly says, “a lot closer to Condorcet than to Adam Smith.” Aid became a bastion of paternalism or, as some came to see it, neocolonialism. In all of this, Mr. Easterly is firm in his belief that the way forward lies in a marriage of market economics and attention to self-respect."