Civilizational Hierarchies and Colonialisms: On Colonies and Mandates as Distinct Modes of Hierarchical Governance

Colonialism is not all the same. While colonialism today is commonly seen to implicate the rule and exploitation of local communities by foreign powers based on the latter’s presumed civilizational superiority, colonial practices in history are as various as are the assumptions on which they ground. By comparing legal practices that have supported what, according to the common definition, are colonial arrangements in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this paper elaborates the argument that western rule and exploitation of local communities must not be conceived to have been founded solely on the presumption of a civilizational hierarchy between the west and the rest. Although such presumption has informed colonial practices also in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two colonial practices differ with regard to their conceptions of civilization and the modes of hierarchical governance these enabled and constrained. Compared to the colonial practice in the nineteenth century, the colonial practice in the early twentieth century did not ground solely in a presumption of a civilizational hierarchy between the west and the rest. Following a conception of civilization as developmental process, the achieved stages in which could go into reverse, in the early twentieth century the “civilized” became subjected to a mode of hierarchical governance in the name of civilization, which, in turn, affected colonial practice. At the same time, the conception opened for “backward people” the possibility to reverse their inferior positions and stages with the help of the “civilized”. Accordingly, while in the nineteenth century western powers did not conceive it problematic to claim other people and territories and to exploit them as they saw fit, in the early twentieth century this became increasingly inacceptable from the vantage point of civilization. This shift is manifest in the League of Nations’ Mandate System, which sought to prevent rivalries over the colonies that had ceased to belong to the Ottoman Empire and Germany due to their defeat in the war. In relation to these former colonies, the Mandate System aimed to internationalize and limit foreign rule, while it simultaneously attributed a duty to the “civilized” to assist them on their way into civilized modernity. As means to guarantee this, the Mandate System set up surveillance mechanisms, including the League’s Council, the Permanent Mandate Commission, and methods measuring the progress of mandates entrusted contractually to “civilized nations” by the League. A definition of colonialism as western rule and exploitation of local communities spurred solely by the former’s presumed civilizational superiority is unfit to grasp this historical shift in modes of hierarchical governance based on conceptions of civilization and their intersection with colonial practices. In order to understand colonial practices and the historical difference they have made, it is necessary to account for their configurations and driving forces, instead of reducing them to a mode of hierarchical governance that, supposedly, fits all. This is all the more necessary if we are to understand how colonial practices link with ideas of trusteeship and development aid, which, arguably, have taken their place.