What is really behind the West’s colonial nostalgia

There is concerted effort to rehabilitate the colonial past to usher in a new order.

For many years, the global “rules-based order” was presented as a benign system of global governance established by the West. True, its origins went back to the colonial world and many of its systems reflected colonial racial inequalities, but it was held up as the harbinger of global prosperity and order. In it, the West had magically transformed from a colonial villain to a saviour.

But for much of the Global South, the era looked very different. It was experienced as genocide, plunder and displacement. Across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, colonial administrations disrupted and suppressed local systems and industries, engineered cash-crop economies vulnerable to global price shocks, and redrew political authority to prioritise imperial control.