EMPIRE AND AFTER^435
All of these trade effects depended on the nature of colonial rule.
Some masters were richer and more ambitious. The colonials typically
built useful things—roads, railroads, port facilities, buildings, water
supply, waste disposal units, and the like. They made the natives pay for
these improvements in labor and taxes, but they could have just kept
the money. Meanwhile the gain to natives was incidental, for such im
provements were made primarily for the ruling power and its com
mercial interests; after all, one had to make these distant places livable
and profitable, defend the frontiers, maintain order. It was nonetheless
gain. The same holds for health facilities, which initially served the
masters (note, however, that roads and clearances could help spread
disease). Yet motive matters less than consequences. No one can seg
regate the benefits of such efforts. Also, builders and doctors had their
own sense of duty to the larger society.
Would more of these facilities have been built if these countries had
been free? Under the precolonial regimes, unlikely. Even now, when
development has become a universal religion and business enterprise
stands ready to respond, public works in former colonies too often
disappoint. Worse, successor regimes have allowed the colonial legacy
to deteriorate. The great exceptions have been the postcolonial soci
eties of East and Southeast Asia: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. And,
of course, new technologies have made for inexorable improvement—
airports and air transport, for example.
In ex-colonies, however, such projects are often the conspicuous
consumption of rulers who prefer to spend (other people's money) for
new, rather than care for old. We are left with a succession of layers on
the middens and ruins of an earlier generation. The usual archeologi-
cal pattern of successive civilizations is now revived in the ill-prepared
societies of the twentieth century and will presumably be the delight
of future diggers. Among the future ruins: lavish hotels, already dis
placing caravanseries and the kind of inn that sets the stage for adven
ture novels and cinema. Today's business travelers and bureaucrats
expect one-class service around the globe; also CNN broadcasts and
Sky-News.
(3) The map of the colonial world was drawn by Europeans. The
boundaries did not reflect the realities of place and people. This was
particularly true of Africa (but India and Burma too), where tribes
were split and others joined (including the young tribe of white settlers
and immigrants), laying the basis for irredentism and strife. Freedom,
when it came, came to peoples ill-prepared to live together. And yet the