William Easterly’s Violent Saviors is a libertarian tract on global economic development and political economy. But as its subtitle—The West’s Conquest of the Rest—demonstrates, this is a magical moment and angle for such a polemic. Easterly presents Violent Saviors as an economic history, but it is equally a work of intellectual history. Violent Saviors tells the story of bad ideas running amok, and the good ideas that warred with the bad.
Easterly, a professor at New York University, begins with European powers and their colonies and early imperial conquests, including the destruction or removal of local populations typically described as “savages” by the newcomers. The slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries looms prominently, as doesslavery after the Revolution and Jim Crow after the Civil War. He recounts the Belgian King Leopold’s atrocities in late-19th-century Congo as harrowingly as anyone ever has, as well as other bad scenes from the British Empire in India and the Caribbean. The American victory over Spain in 1898 yielded the spoils of the Philippines, which the United States proceeded to despoil. He also recounts the coercive depredations of Lenin and Stalin as they remade Russia into the Soviet Union, resulting in the death of tens of millions, including in the Holodomor, the vast Stalin-induced starvation in Ukraine. Hitler, for his part, saw the conquest of the lands of the inferior “race” of Slavs to the east as essential to German development, and of course, the Jews had to die. The Communist revolution in China led to still more scores of millions of deaths, which Mao Zedong regarded as an acceptable price for the modernization of China.
Easterly connects the dots of this history by citing the recurring justifications of the words of the perpetrators and conquerors, what he calls the “Development Right of Conquest.” The powerful and prosperous countries of Europe, eventually encompassing “the West,” with the United States in the lead, justified their expansionism either in the name of bringing development to the benighted locals or—if the benighted locals were unable or unwilling to advance—in the name of making better use of the land and resources of the territory in question. In all cases, the colonizers and conquerors proceeded entirely without the consent of local populations, especially over the question of whether they actually wished to develop. Often, these powers assigned themselves the role of civilizing the savages and spreading true religion. The same was true of the Soviet Union and China, which brought Communist ideology into the mix in pursuit of their own visions of progress. The Hitler regime proceeded on the basis of supposed Aryan racial superiority.
Human “agency” or “dignity” is precisely what those acting on the Development Right of Conquest denied to those in their way. Easterly notes that “extermination” used to have the additional meaning of “driving out.” This, the developers often did, though sometimes they resorted to enslavement (often rationalized as an improvement in the living conditions of those enslaved) or “extermination” in the modern sense of mass killing and genocide.
Easterly’s story is mostly one of bad actors. In the New World of North America, he starts with the Puritan John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before he set sail for America in 1630, he set forth his justification for those who questioned the righteousness of his plans. Easterly writes:
Winthrop argued that the conquerors [had] a right to the land because of their ability to improve it. Surely, God had not intended “a whole Continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement.” … The natives in New England had failed to fulfill God’s mission. “This savage people” did not develop the land or themselves. “They enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by.” … Winthrop in 1629 reassured his audience that the English seizure of Indian lands was actually beneficial for the Indians, because the English would teach them the arts of improvement….A fateful us and them had entered the lexicon of progress. The idea of “us” conquering “them” for their own good—the imaginative and fateful mixture of coercion, paternalism, and superiority—was destined for a momentous career for the next four centuries.
Violent Saviors does not lack for additional examples along Winthrop’s lines, and Easterly relishes skewering the purveyors.
But there are heroes as well. They are the economists and other thinkers who upheld the essential elements of freedom and consent at the heart of classical economic thinking, starting with Adam Smith. Voluntary consent, not coercion, should be the basis on which human beings interact with one another, in the marketplace and in all other respects.
To good effect, Easterly juxtaposes Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet, the 18th-century French philosophe for whom political and economic decision-making should be the province of experts. The expert governance for which he advocated was for the good of those governed, whether they liked it or not. Most of the major problem areas Easterly explores—colonialism, slavery, forced migration, etc.—also produced in opposition classically liberal thinkers in the mold of Smith. These figures were willing to cut against the grain of their times to deplore the deplorable, even if they often lost their arguments to contemporaneous forces of coercion. The liberals would be vindicated in time—through such developments as the end of slavery and Jim Crow, the extension of property and voting rights to women, and self-determination or national liberation for the colonized (though independence often served to usher in a new crew of oppressors).
The word “libertarian” appears only twice in Violent Saviors, and only once as a description of the school of thought that informs its perspective on historical events. Easterly prefers the term “liberal” for those heroically aligned in their time with his ideal of noncoercive policy action that accords with equal human dignity by putting freedom or liberty first. And indeed, the individuals he elevates warrant that label. But they are not alone, and unfortunately, this is where the book loses its way—and finds its odd congruence with the “presentism” of our times. With just a few grudging asides to the contrary, Easterly joins the mighty chorus of dismissal of the past and its people as morally and intellectually indefensible—because their views are so out of sync with the wiser opinions of today.
Now, to be fair, many of the popularly held opinions of today are indeed wiser than those of yesteryear. The argument in favor of slavery was just as bad when slavery was a matter of current controversy as it would be if you could find anyone propounding it today. One must note that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence. The fact that he didn’t personally exemplify the principles he espoused does not negate the validity of the principles, or their historical impact on the spread of liberty.
This is the general point that Easterly leaves out of Violent Saviors. If the only true liberals of the past were those whose views turned out to be sufficiently in accord with the views of the present, it’s hard to see how liberalism could have managed to attain its dominance in the modern world. Easterly in the end calls for a resolution of the “us-versus-them” problem through an expanding sense of “us.” That’s fine, but it ignores the extent to which the status of “us” has already expanded historically.
Perhaps Easterly’s answer as to why and how it expanded is that the truth of liberal principles, including those of neoclassical economics, is enduring. But to attain a purchase in the world, these principles must have a purchase on human beings—most of whom, like Jefferson, have additional and often contrary drivers behind the actions they take. Should Jefferson have abstained from the Louisiana Purchase because of its implications for Native Americans and the westward expansion of slavery? The implication of Easterly’s effort to put noncoercion first would seem to be yes. And indeed, in good libertarian fashion, he quotes John Quincy Adams on the foreign policy aims of the United States, which “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Easterly then cuffs Adams for staying silent on forced Indian migration, which demonstrates how he has established a purity test no politician in history has ever passed.
The past is monstrous yet great, harrowing yet inspiring. In no sense is it merely the motion of ideas—though ideas both good and bad have animated those who made history. To the extent there has been real-world “progress” in economics or politics—and there has been—it has never been unsullied by wickedness.
On the North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal lives a tribe of 400 to 500 indigenous people who have had next to no contact with the wider world. They are among a small number of isolated tribes that have no record of violence or conquest (though the Sentinelese do not take well to visitors and murdered a Christian missionary in 2018 who had the effrontery to step onto the sand of their beach). With such possible exceptions, all the rest of us are the sons and daughters of conquerors who extinguished the bloodlines of the conquered. No one has a rightful claim to a smug superiority to history.