What do you do when your professor writes a book justifying European colonialism and wants to talk about it?
On Jeff Fynn-Paul’s plea to discuss his new publication
“America was not ‘stolen’ from the Indians but fairly purchased piece by piece in a thriving land market. Nor did European settlers cheat, steal, murder, rape or purposely infect them with smallpox to the extent that most people believe. No genocide occurred—either literal or cultural—and the decline of Native populations over time is not due to violence but to assimilation and natural demographic processes.”
It takes no historian to understand that these lines are problematic. There is probably no more white supremacist and capitalist moral justification of the colonization of native american land than ‘it’s fair because we bought it’. Labels such as colonialsm and genocide, under this perspective, are at best exaggerations, American lands were “fairly purchased piece by piece in a thriving land market”. These lines are from the Amazon description of a new book by Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul, our professor of Principle of Economics and Global Political Economy. In the book, Fynn-Paul provides a “balanced portrait of this complex historical process over 500 years”, contending that European colonialism is not a “tale of shameful sins and crimes against humanity.” He then responded to criticism by challenging everyone on Twitter to invite him “to a conference/debate at your uni, decide a topic, and let’s dispute this logically and scientifically.” Instead of inviting him to a debate, I want to invite my fellow students to discuss about how to deal with such an invitation in the first place. Should students, or other faculty members, have a panel discussion about whether America was stolen or not?
It is not my interest here to debunk Fynn-Paul’s interpretations of history from the point of view of historical data, as I am sure that more competent people are already on it, and as I have not read the book. For context, Thomas Lecaque of Foreign Policy, already criticized Fynn-Paul’s piece titled ‘The myth of the ‘stolen country’. In this article, Fynn-Paul questions the need to rewrite history “in a negative light” to address contemporary grievances and criticize what they perceive as a distorted view perpetuated by a minority of activists influenced by ‘Cultural Marxism.’ He presents different arguments to show such a negative representation of history, based on historical data. For instance, he argues, it is easy to blame English colonists. But “the reality is, if the English had not colonized, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonized, the Portuguese would have done it.” Lecaque frames Fynn-Paul’s argument that Europeans are not to be blamed for the death of Native Americans, and that American land was not ‘stolen’, as part of an “ongoing project of ‘white innocence’.” This denial of racism and colonial violence “becomes in itself racism and colonial violence.” Fynn-Paul also argues that “it is inevitable that a large proportion of New World inhabitants would have died within the first few decades after first contact”, which means that Europeans cannot be blamed for the result of such a natural process. European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in the Americas. Calling this a “natural demographic process” is not only naive, but also intrinsically racist and insensitive. This interpretation of colonialism, which shifts the historical blame from Europeans, is known as “the virgin soil thesis” and it was rejected by most historians in the last 20 years. As Paul Kelton confirms, quoted by Lacaque: “the ‘virgin soil’ thesis was not crafted as an apology for the colonizers, and it still has some utility in explaining how history has unfolded. It has, however, unfortunately hidden colonialism’s violence under a cloak of biological determinism.” Moreover, I would add that normalizing colonial land acquisition as a fair transaction between two equal entities disregards the unequal power relations between Europeans and indigenous people. It implies that those European colonizers had a right to ‘pressure’ indigenous people to sell their lands, and perpetuates those same assumptions about human nature that were behind the European colonial project. Lecaque continues by saying that Fynn-Paul’s framing of native americans as “Primitive farmers” is not simply historically inaccurate, but also shows that his “foundation is ideology, and the results are both offensive and laughable”. He mentions that the momentum of such interpretations of history, focused on a white-innocence approach, is facilitated by the push for “patriotic education” to “defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character”.
It is also not my aim to fall in the trap of Fynn-Paul’s self-branding as an outspoken historian who is challenging the hegemony of “woke” scholars. He describes himself as a martyr who is sacrificing his career for the sake of academic rigor: “I incur considerable personal and professional cost in order to come out of the closet as a (shock, horror) centrist, who believes that the left is currently rampaging out of control and must be stopped before it’s too late”.
Rather, I am writing these few paragraphs because Fynn-Paul is a professor within International Studies, a program which is founded on pluralism – the idea that studying global issues requires an understanding that goes beyond western-centric knowledge. Fynn-Paul’s interpretation of history has been debunked by the overwhelming majority of scholars that we have been reading throughout this bachelor, from Global History to area-specific classes. I agree with Dr. Fynn-Paul’s idea that history is nuanced, complex, and at times contradicting, meaning that we should avoid simplifying historical processes in short slogans or labels.
However, as International Studies students, even without reading the book, we ought to raise questions about Jeff Fynn-Paul’s plea to invite him for an academic debate about his thesis.
What is the point in focusing on such an interpretation of history? What is the implication of saying that the history of colonialism is not a “tale of shameful sins and crimes against humanity”? Is it possible to have an academic discussion without giving a platform to violent ideas? Would a discussion be beneficial, or would it just be a marketing opportunity for the book itself? What is the role of the IS board in this? This and other questions should be discussed by the students and staff who constitute this bachelor.
I agree with Lecaque when he says that “fighting back bad history that attempts to wash the blood from settler-colonial hands is not merely an academic pursuit but a moral imperative”. In this light this article urges the student body, as well as the academic staff and board to start a discussion about this sensitive topic.
By Anonymous
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Image from Unsplash.com
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