Who Really Ended Colonialism?

“Not my King,” she said on King’s Birthday holiday weekend, and it reminded me that colonialism only ended because people stopped believing in it.

The absolute irony of saying that, by the way, in English, inside a country that only exists because of a monarchy and colonialism. The irony was not lost on the rest of the dinner. But there’s really no way of explaining history to a person who suffers from cultural self-doubt.

These ahistorical ideas about colonialism are a huge shame, because that era was unarguably the high point of Western society. The end of colonialism (and the takeover of all European colonies by the US, which is a story for another day) has been a disaster for the world. Most people can’t see this disaster because the TV tells them it’s a good thing. But we are living in the rubble of a much greater civilisation, and it shows.

It’s true that the Europeans invested enormous effort into their global exploration for reasons that varied as much as the nations that participated. However, it’s not true that Europeans sought to use colonialism to enrich themselves. Europe was already the wealthiest and most productive region long before the race for colonialism began. It was Europe’s wealth and technological advancement that allowed its nations to conduct those costly adventures in the first place.

Instead, a key thread of justification for colonialism was intra-European competition. It was fortunate that the Spanish discovered gold in Mexico (New Spain), but they also recognised that if they didn’t claim that gold and the land for Spain, then the French, Dutch, Portuguese or British would take it instead, which would diminish Spain’s political position in Europe.

In Bernal Díaz’s firsthand account of the Cortés expedition in Mexico, he notes that many of his fellow conquistadors were veterans of fighting in Italy and other parts of Europe. They were eager to conduct their adventure, acquire some wealth and return to those wars, because what truly mattered to them was who controlled Europe. Every piece of gold found by the explorers was subject to the Royal Fifth, by which 20% was earmarked for King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, so he could continue Spain’s ambitions on the continent.

Much later, the British and French also found themselves competing in their centuries-old rivalry – this time over New Zealand. This rivalry is the quiet backstory to the Treaty of Waitangi, which partially explains why it reads like such a rushed document.

A French whaling captain, Jean François Langlois, made a deal in 1838 with some Maori chiefs to buy land around Akaroa. He then returned to France to organise a colonising mission supported by the Nanto-Bordelaise Company and the French government. In August 1840, a group of French settlers arrived to found a colony.

But the British caught wind of this and knew what was coming next, because they were doing the same thing to the French elsewhere. They correctly predicted that a small number of French settlers would need private companies. Those companies would need a local government. And that local government would require a military. If this were allowed to happen, France’s interests in Europe might be influenced by its colonial interests, and it was entirely possible that France would use New Zealand to bully Britain.

So, the Crown hastily signed the Treaty of Waitangi in February 1840, and Governor Hobson declared full British sovereignty over both islands. By the time the French settlers arrived seven months later, they lacked the leverage to reverse this action, so the French government withdrew its support for the colonies in the South Island. In other words, the Treaty of Waitangi was the 19^th-century equivalent of a bulk CC’d email. No wonder it’s so weird.

Intra-European rivalries were the sources of colonialism from the beginning. The British historian James Anthony Froude travelled to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in 1885 to better understand this dynamic, hear about the desired futures of the settlers in their own words, and compare those sentiments to the attitudes of elites in London. In his book Oceana, Froude wrote that he was surprised by what he found.

The major impression he got from the Aussies and the Kiwis was their pride in being part of the British Empire. The settlers had a deep interest in British affairs and were actively keen to entrench Britain’s control over the new world. Both Australia and New Zealand were in the early stages of establishing a joint navy, on behalf of the Crown, that would govern the entire South Pacific, and possibly extend further into other European colonial territories. Very few people in the colonies were even thinking about independence.

Froude found this surprising, since many of the important people in London were growing tired of administering the colonies. Most of the British gentry wanted to cut them off since they were costing more to maintain than they were returning in wealth. Many of these people were themselves veterans of colonial administration. So, it was a shock for Froude to see how wealthy the colonies truly were. He wanted to explain this strange juxtaposition of attitudes.

Typically, the strategy of colonialism involved sending loyal subjects to key outposts in a conquered territory to establish cultural, economic and military footholds. Yet this strategy was always fraught. After all, sending strong people weakens your own lands, but sending weak people makes the new lands less productive. The Romans understood this dilemma, which is why they almost never practised colonisation. Roman civilisation moved only in the train of its armies, and its progress ended when its conquests stopped.

The British tried to solve this by sending their sub-elite into the colonies instead, what we would today anachronistically call the “bourgeois”: younger family branches, mercantile types, oppressed minorities and many criminals (as a kind of helot caste for the colony). This strategy worked because the impulse to leave ancestral land only emerges when the social mobility ladder has been kicked out from under you. The people who left for New Zealand were those who couldn’t advance in Europe.

Froude realised the strange attitude of anti-colonialism among Britain’s nobility boiled down to a class dynamic. They had cynically calculated that shipping off the rival sub-elite would reduce competition in Britain for their own aristocratic positions. And supporting the colonies would only empower the “wrong” types of people back home. Can’t have that. So, they ignored the colonies and often stoked the embers of independence within them. The idea was to eliminate your rivals and then prevent them from ever returning.

Another important dynamic is that early sub-elite colonists are both missionaries and soldiers, both aid workers and settlers, both bush doctors and traders. As colonialism advances, the missionaries rise in status and the settlers fall. Who ended up advocating for “independence” most fervently? The Christian missionaries. Froude saw how the clergy in New Zealand were getting lots of political support from London in their efforts to promote “independence.” It didn’t need to be this way. He knew it would be child’s play for London to tell the New Zealand clergy to emphasise “God and country” instead. But they chose to encourage anti-colonial sentiments instead.

The gentry back in Britain knew that the colonies contained the seeds of their own destruction. Self-doubt and self-criticism are traits inherent to the very class of people who settled New Zealand. As Froude showed, these people weren’t aristocrats. They were strivers, the sub-elites. The settlers came to the colonies in the hope of becoming aristocrats in the new world. But strivers always carry a whispering self-doubt.

Should we really be in the colonies? What did we ever do to deserve such vast tracts of land? Was it an accident that we have become a “somebody”? And what about all those noble savages we kicked off the land? How is it justified that we now own their property while they are subject to our laws? Do we have the right to rule?

That’s the most important question, and the settlers could never answer it in the affirmative because the sub-elite never felt they had the right to rule. The basic prerequisite for constructing any new society is that the people must have the Mandate of Heaven and know, not believe, that they have the right to rule. The Americans felt they had this right, and look what happened to them. But the New Zealanders and Australians never did.

Couple this self-doubt with the moral poking and prodding of a clergy, and the inevitable result was demoralisation leading to fuzzy pseudo-independence. The elites in London knew the settlers would make the decision for them. They knew only the colonists themselves could end colonialism. All the gentry had to do was wait for the self-doubt of the sub-elite to take over.

And they were correct. The descendants of those sub-elites now sit at dinner tables flagellating about the evils of colonialism, and saying adolescent things like, “Not my King.” This is exactly what the gentry predicted and wanted. Once a sub-elite, always a sub-elite. Better that these people are sent down in the Antipodes than to let them live next door.

Colonialism was extremely profitable for the European nations; don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t. But that’s not why it was pursued. The real motivations were the deep national and class rivalries. To that end, colonialism was remarkably successful. And it’s also no surprise that places like New Zealand, Canada and Australia are still such backwaters even in 2025.

We are the descendants of people who never felt they had the right to rule, and it shows.