By Mark F. Proudman
Originally published in the print edition, Winter 2025, pp. 3-8.
"DECOLONIAL" IS A new word that has started to appear in Twitter bios and other advertising. It is a neologism invented, as neologisms are, to say what many have to say, but lacked a word for. It says that the existing world is “colonial” and therefore bad, and implies that a better world would be “decolonial,” or “decolonized.” Canada was of course decolonized in the old sense by the Statute of Westminster of 1931, but that is not what the ideologues of the present day mean by the word.
By “colonial,” the neologists mean our Western and Anglo-American roots, and by “decolonial” or “decolonization,” they mean a process or state of deracination, which is to say removal from those roots. The neologism speaks of a collapse of cultural self-confidence, and the novelty of the word is evidence of the recent and rapid character of the collapse.
Nor is “decolonial” alone: universities and other bureaucracies write of their ambitions to “indigenize” and regret their uninvited presence here on “Turtle Island.” Not so long ago, decolonization meant pulling down the Union Jack in fly-blown bits of Africa, and granting self-government to the natives; today, it means something deeper and darker. The earlier meaning imagined that the local government would be based on Westminster or other Western models, and was rooted in the presumption that those models and the civilization that created them were valuable, even paradigmatic. That automatic premise is precisely what the current generation of decolonizers wishes to remove.
“Settler” has followed a trajectory similar to “colonial”: in the 19th century, colonies were seen as areas of settlement, reflecting the healthy expansion of a vital nation. Canada was a colony, and that was a good thing, implying youth, vigour, and expansion. Similarly, settlers were hardy people who broke the soil and lived in sod huts, not racist thieves. When my family moved to Saskatoon in the 1970s, my father had a government form entitled “Settler’s Effects,” and he thought that vastly amusing, as we were moving into a suburban bungalow, not building a sod hut. I imagine that form has now been renamed, along with so many other things. One day, when the iconoclasts have finished with Dundas Street, someone will rename the Canadian “Imperial” Bank of Commerce.
Neologisms, be they new coinages or semantic shifts — in other words, reassignments of meaning and connotation — speak of a need to say new things. There was a time when the superiority of Western civilization was a commonplace. The opposite belief is now compulsory in many circles, including circles of power, and just as importantly circles of hegemonic opinion formation. Western civilization has become a litany of horrors, though bigger words are often used. Dissent from the new orthodoxy is bigoted, or at a minimum, ignorant. The cultural self-confidence in which the earlier positive account of Western civilization was rooted is seen as a sign of racism or “white supremacy,” the worst words in the hegemonic vocabulary, also words that have undergone congruent and polemical redefinitions. “Decolonization” and its synonyms have become terms for a compulsory reformation of ideas and moral sensibilities; in more recent language, they are the vocabulary of reeducation.
The history of the past 500 years is the history of Western expansion, and more recently, of Western retreat. The collapse of cultural self-confidence inscribed in and amplified by the neologisms of decolonization is evidence of that recent decline, and arguably – if one attributes causal importance to ideas – an important part of it. The same is true of the histories we write and propound through the educational system; certainly, the progressives who dominate those institutions believe that. Rise and decline are the central facts of modern history, and how we historicize them is itself a function of our place on that arc of rise and decline.
AT THE BEGINNING of the 20th century, the Western powers occupied 85% of the earth’s surface, and it was earnestly debated when or whether China, the largest remaining unoccupied territory, would be partitioned. By the late 20th century, the West had contracted to its old homelands of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon settler states. But Western expansion left its mark everywhere it went, and even where it didn’t go, it invited imitation. Even the announced enemies of the West employed Western ideologies of nationalism and Marxism.
This is widely agreed upon, though its interpretation has been contested. Broadly, there are two types of history available, which I shall call Whig and Marxist: The Whigs paint a history of progress, the Marxists of exploitation. Codicils, footnotes and flank-covering aside, the Whigs approve of Western civilization; the Marxists deplore it. The victory of the latter explains the hegemony of those who vaunt their “decolonial” credentials. Almost no one, the present writer aside, thinks of themselves as a Whig, leaving the name open to reappropriation. There are self-proclaimed Marxists, and many more progressives (under various labels, from “woke” to “post-modernist” to “critical” theorists of many kinds) whose ideology derives from Marxism and shares with it the habit of understanding history as conflict between exploiter and exploited. Marxist history began with self-aware Marxists, but its influence is felt much more widely, and “Marxist” is a recognizable name for those under its influence.
At one time, the standard history of Western civilization traced its progress (and progress it was in this narrative) from the Greeks and Romans, through the Renaissance and Reformation, to the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the 18th century. It normally ended somewhere around the Allied victory in the Second World War, with perhaps a nod to the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. Academics mock introductory “History 200” courses that take students “from Plato to NATO” over the course of an academic year, but the alternative to students who know about Plato and NATO is not students who read Gibbon or von Ranke, and Plato and NATO are things everyone should know about, so there is a case for covering the basics.
The alternative to the Whig interpretation of the history of Western civilization is the Marxist interpretation: the rise of the West becomes the rise of capitalism, rather than of civilization; its motives were morally infamous, its results deeply unjust. Many of the same facts are passed in review — the exploration of oceans, the settlement of continents, the overthrow of kings, the development of technology — but the moral polarity is reversed, and the Whig narrative of enterprise and advance becomes a story of iniquity and greed. The histories of the massively learned and unrepentant Communist Eric Hobsbawm moved into the academy with an ease that reflected the overlapping character of Whig and Marxist history, and also the advantage conferred on Marxists by a motivating sense of moral purpose shared by the lecturers who assign readings.
The Marxist version of history has its roots in critiques of the colonial empires of the late 19th century age of high imperialism. These criticisms were first framed by British liberals, but most famously expressed by Lenin, who explained the First World War as a war for the profits of empire. This conclusion is easy to dispute, but many found it convincing, and it served the purposes of third-world revolutionaries and their academic fellow travelers. The idea that the West is the exploiter of the global South, that the West is rich because the South is poor, with its corollary that the West is evil and brown people good, became vastly influential, so influential that it has become enculturated and shows up in compulsory neologisms.
FOR MARXISTS, THIS account of modern history also had the welcome side effect of explaining why the workers of the West have failed to become revolutionary, and have persisted in ignoring Marx’s prescriptions for the better part of two centuries. For academic Marxists, it allowed the struggle to continue from the convenience of the common room and the lecture hall, combining the pleasures of opposition with the funding of the taxpayer.
The Marxist account of modern history finds its most sophisticated articulation in the world systems theory of scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers and allies. Wallerstein taught at McGill and Columbia and produced an immensely learned series on the history of the global economy from the 15th century age of discovery forward. Beginning with the explorations of the Portuguese, he traces the development of world systems of trade forward from the extractive gold-based empire of the Spanish, through the mercantile empire of the Dutch East India Company, to the British and French empires, and the eventual British victory in the wars of the long 18th century that ended in 1815. This is where his history breaks down, the final volume on the 19th century appearing much later and saying very little about either economics or the age of high imperialism dominated by the British Empire, the age that was the object of the original Marxist critique of empire.
But scholarly dispute ignores the larger point that the Marxist scheme has been expanded to include centuries well outside Marx’s focus on 19th-century industrial capitalism, and also to include continents that were something of an aside to that original focus. World systems theory finds a wider popular expression in best-selling histories of the 1491 variety, which paint a positive if not idyllic view of the Americas before European contact, and also in the works of popular historians such as Howard Zinn. Zinn sees the United States as the product of five hundred years of exploitation and theft, and has found a substantial market for this narrative. It is a picture that was once oppositional, and perhaps even daring, but that has become not merely hegemonic, but mandatory. Try refusing a land acknowledgement.
Obviously, an interpretation of history does not become hegemonic, let alone compulsory, because a learned professor produces a densely footnoted tome. But the professor tells a story for which there is a constituency, and does so at a high intellectual level and with the expected scholarly apparatus, certifying and credentializing the morality tale baked into the narrative. The learned tomes find an audience, if not of primary readers then of people who read reviews, or perhaps just see the titles and hear them discussed in respectful tones. The more demotic epigones of the world systems theorists may not even have heard of them, let alone read their works, but take from the prevailing winds the gist of the moral narrative they already believe. Quantity has a quality all its own, said Trotsky, and quantity of discourse does its work.
The social position of discourse also has its effect: people who imagine themselves sophisticated and progressive come to believe that Turtle Island has been a scene of colonial depredations serving the interests of capitalists and white people, and enjoy the pleasures of a frisson of oppositionalism, thinking themselves the undeceived, possessed of insights not available to the MAGA hordes. Just as plenty of people invoke their rights without having read Locke, most of those with decolonial verbiage in their bios haven’t heard of Wallerstein, and probably have not read much Marx. Influence does require study.
THE ATTRACTIONS AND also the advantages of the Marxist view of history are both analytical and social. They have been well summarized by Keith Thomas, a noted British historian who is not a Marxist, in the process of reviewing Wallerstein:
Selection requires an organizing principle and it is not clear what other organizing principle for handling history on this scale is currently available. Moreover Marxism, by teaching that the problems of the present can only be resolved by the study of the past, is almost the only modern social philosophy that provides the incentive for this kind of endeavour.
The organizing principle — the growth of the global economy — identified by Professor Thomas contains the two great analytical strengths of the Marxist master narrative: it has a global scope, and it quite rightly centres economic factors. The global scale of world systems theory is almost a relief from the opposing tendency (also coming from the left) to write histories of the proverbial more-and-more about less-and-less, a tendency particularly evident in narratives that focus on the minor and the identitarian in the attempt to construct importance where none exists. Whatever else one says about world systems theory, it is not inward-looking.
Just as one need not be a Marxist to see the advantages of scale, one need not be a Marxist to see the importance of economics, specifically of trade and production, to history. The economic focus of Marxist history brings to the foreground factors too often relegated in Whiggish accounts to an isolated chapter on the industrial revolution. And economic history has its polemical advantages too: it involves a lot of numbers, and this has a persuasive effect, looking systematic, even scientific. Readers come away with an impression of objectivity.
Marxism long claimed to be a science, a claim many found persuasive. To this claim, and in tension with it in a way not perceived by believers, Marxism adds an element of eschatological hope: it looks forward to a post-revolutionary society, in however distant a future, in which the conflicts and injustices of the present are resolved. It is this eschatology that makes Marxism a religion, fulfilling the psychic and social functions of a religion, notwithstanding its lack of a named god. As Professor Thomas observes, Marxism has a motivating power that directs attention to history. Believers believe that they are serving a larger moral purpose, and this is a drive that Whig history lacks, at least in its recent versions.
The term Whig history originally referred to the standard version of the history of England, in which the constitutional agenda of the Whig party was secured against the resistance of royalists and Tories, and duly celebrated by Whig historians. The emphasis was on the development of the Parliamentary constitution, primarily in the 17th century, in later versions continuing to the 20th. This was a history that began with an absolutist king and ended in constitutionalism or democracy: The role of Parliament was secured; the crown accepted a purely formal role; in time and via four or five reform bills, democracy evolved. The famous radical historian A.J.P. Taylor characterized it as a history of progress, ever onward, ever upward, concluding in the Labour government, the Labour government in question being that of Attlee rather than Starmer. Whig history was history with a progressive direction and a satisfactory conclusion, albeit an end reached at length and with enough fits and starts along the way to make the passage interesting.
The pattern of Whig constitutional history was one of advance, and was easily imported into other kinds of history, including intellectual history, religious history, and the history of science. Western civilization has unarguably produced the world’s leading intellectual and scientific improvements (indigenous knowledge to one side), and religious toleration is also a Western idea, if not one arrived at quickly or by any straight path. The story of advance, a story whose moral element is only emphasized by the travails of history, fits the story of American expansion quite well, as it fits the story of Canadian expansion equally well. It fits Canada’s political history just as easily, the advance from colony to nation echoing themes of constitutional growth in a democratic direction directly imported from the original Whigs, as the title of Arthur Lower’s once canonical Colony to Nation emphasizes. It is no stretch to apply the label of “Whig” to a history of the advance of Western civilization, the line from Plato to NATO trending upward on balance, however unsmooth a thousand years in the middle of it. The name implies the presumption of the satisfactory character of our present civilization, exactly the presumption denounced by the neologists with which I began.
Whig history has a connection to power. It names a kind of history in which the Whigs, the predecessors of the British Liberals, were the good guys and also, crucially, the winners. That easy elision of the winners with the good guys was its attraction and also arguably its flaw, a flaw more evident now that Western civilization is in decline, and seems not always to win. After Vietnam, Whiggery became more difficult.
Whig history has attracted many debunkers. The Whig Interpretation of History was published by the historian of science Herbert Butterfield in 1931, a date indicating that the debunkery has been around for a long time. Whig history stood a lot of debunking, perhaps because it had some merits. We in the West may be in retreat, but it remains the fact that the West has created the civilization in which human potential has flourished to the greatest extent. Whether we are winners, and what kind of history to write in the new circumstances of decline, make more difficult questions.
MARXIST THEORY TURNS the moral calculus around: the winners win not because they are the good guys, but because they are the bad guys. They are not heroes, but exploiters. They win because of their perfidy, and certainly not because they are in the right. I am of course describing the logic of a stereotype, not of serious Marxist history or historical philosophy, which contains an element of determinism in tension with moralizing conclusions. But it is the moralistic narrative that is widely understood and therefore politically effective, and that emerges from learned seminars to appear in the form of Globe and Mail editorials and parliamentary speeches, and also in the compulsory liturgies of land acknowledgements.
Whig history is the history of victories, produced by the victors. It is the mode of history produced by a society at its apogee, contemplating its successes. The current unattractiveness or even untenability of Whig history can be linked to the failures of our society and the decline of our civilization over the past generation. Certainly, any history of England can no longer be a history of unidirectional success, and the English themselves have thrown over large parts of a constitution that was within living memory universally vaunted, but now valued only by those called “far-right.” The inventors of Whig history have rejected it, their rejection being an epiphenomenal reflection of a deeper decline.
The rejection of Whiggery in the United States also reflects an apprehension of decline, perhaps more specifically a sense of moral confusion, unable to speak of success without embarrassment, racial issues obtruding prominently. But if Whig history is an artifact of power, Marxist history cannot be called an answer from below, as it is neither written nor consumed by the oppressed or the subaltern. It could perhaps be seen as the ideology of a rising and vindictive intelligentsia, claiming to write in the name of the oppressed. It is at best the history, perhaps just the ideology, of a future victory.
The integration of contraction into the large-scale historical narrative of Western expansion is a problem for both the Whigs and the Marxists. Some Whiggish accounts of imperial history tried to integrate colonial independence into an arc of progress from conquest or settlement to self-government, the old Cambridge History of the British Empire of the 1930s (a wonderful source of reliable information) being an example, but this finds little traction even for those cases where it might work (India and Canada would be arguable cases). For the Marxists, imperial retreat would appear as deserved and condign punishment. But any economistic treatment of the post-war era would have to account for the rise of the Gulf States and other oil producers, the recipients from the ostensible Western hegemon of the largest inter-civilizational transfer of wealth in the modern era, and arguably since the fall of Rome. That massive economic fact would not fit well with the moral hierarchy favoured by the left. Whether one begins with Whiggery or Marxism, the rise of the West is explicable, but its decline remains a bit of a pickle.
To come back to where once I started, some speculations ago, it is unlikely that we shall recover the cultural self-confidence that once spoke so easily of the West’s virtues, and that had no need for the neologisms of “decoloniality.” It would be a grand thing, or at any rate a return to sanity, were we able to observe that universities, like written language, parliaments and newspapers, were imported to this continent by Anglo-European colonists, and that it is nonsensical to decolonize institutions that are Western in their essence. The disdaining irony of Gibbon, himself the product of a brutally vital age, would find a large target, were our society capable of producing such a writer.
Our understanding of history invariably shapes the future, sometimes in unintended ways, but history or at any rate convincing history, cannot be written with too obvious a political aim, which would appear manipulative. The best we can do is accuracy, and we can and should argue that at bottom the Plato-to-NATO Whigs were right: we in the West have inherited a civilization more conducive to human flourishing than any other that has ever existed. We need to be able to state, sometimes even to celebrate, that fact, and to do so without concessions, while also reckoning with the more recent fact of decline, a decline evidenced by the cloud of critics and commentators now coining rebarbative neologisms in the service of a resentful ideology.
Mark F. Proudman has a D.Phil. in English history from the University of Oxford, and has worked in the defence and information systems industries for many years. He substacks at markfproudman.com and is on X (Twitter) @mfproudman
Originally published in the print edition, Winter 2025, pp. 3-8.