(^436) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
new nations saw these artificial boundaries as sacred, for fear of what
might replace them. Quite right: the record of territorial disputes in ex-
colonial areas shows much ado about litde and heavy penalties for both
winners and losers.^18
(4) The energy, resources, and potential goodwill of these successor
states have been depleted in the process of defining themselves. A very
few (the best example is Korea) already had something of a national or
ethnic identity at the time the colonial power took over, and could
build their resistance on it or pick it up again after the outsiders left.*
The others have suffered the instability and violence that accompany
uncertain identity and legitimacy, careening from coup to coup, from
one explosion to another.^19 Meanwhile the advanced industrial nations
have mouthed pieties, succored victims, propped up tyrannies, created
new victims, wrung their hands, generally botched every interven
tion—done good as well as bad and both at the same time, consoling
themselves the while with virtuous intentions, larger causes, and the
satisfaction that comes with moral superiority. (That is the point of
the exercise.) Pictures of starving and fly-specked children fill the pub
lic prints and the TV screen. The supply of charitable causes exceeds
the supply of funds. Litde goes beyond first aid.
(5) Let us try the counterfactual: the economically backward na
tions would have grown and progressed (in the sense of technique and
productivity) faster had they never known colonialism. The argument
pro rests on hypothesis: on the assumption that these subject peoples
would otherwise have been free of domestic as well as of foreign ex
ploitation; also able to learn and change. The argument con rests on
history: imperialism has not prevented a few colonies from developing
as autonomous centers and from learning and inventing the techniques
of an industrial economy.^20 Hence the British colonies in North Amer
ica, Finland as part of the Russian empire, Norway under Sweden,
Hong Kong under Britain. The first example of a non-Western nation
to do so, Japan, though remaining independent (no small matter), did
it under the tariff limits of an informal imperialism. But then again, as
everyone knows, Japan is special.
- In some instances, these subjugated peoples had built their own empires before the
white man came: the Aztecs and Incas of course; but also the Annamites in Indochina,
the Burmese in Burma; the Zulus in Africa; and so on. Freedom did not necessarily en
tail the restoration of equality. Equality had never existed, and new state structures
rested on old hierarchies.