Eminent scholars repeatedly make the logically contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough. - Bruce Gilley

Any claim about…the level of colonial violence, requires not just assumptions about the scale of violence that would have occurred absent colonial rule but also a careful measure of that violence relative to the population, security threat, and security resources in a given territory. One is hard-pressed, to take a prominent example, to find a single example of such care in measurement in the vast critical cholarship on the British counter-insurgency campaign against the Mau in Kenya from 1952 to 1960…At the very least, it is incumbent on scholars to show that the brutalities unleashed by the British in this campaign were not the likely result of a proportionate response given the context and scale of the threat. If this supposedly solid case is wobbly, what does it tell us about the lesser ‘violence’ often cited as invalidating colonialism?

Of course colonial governance can only return with the consent of the country in question. The nationalist leaders in developing countries are probably not eager to see this happen. But the people- given those decades of ‘anti-colonial disaster’- possibly are.

Belgium had no prior history in the slave trade, nor of African slaves. Léopold could fight against slavery without any hint of hypocrisy, even of the ahistorical type advanced by Hochschild. And it was slavery, not rubber operations, that contemporary observers viewed as the biggest threat to the people of the Congo.