Debates about western civilisation and colonialism often fail because they demand a single verdict, when history can carry achievement and injustice at the same time.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott recently urged Australians to preserve and celebrate western civilisation rather than be ashamed of it. Many friends who lean politically to the left hear little more than a defence of empire. Others hear an affirmation of liberty, scientific inquiry and democratic government. Listening to both, I sometimes feel they are arguing across rather than with one another.
Those debates remind me of the years I spent researching Britain’s railways in colonial Ghana for my doctoral thesis. I began with assumptions of my own. As an African, I expected to uncover another story of colonial exploitation. I certainly did. But I also found something that made the history far more complicated than I had anticipated. My research did not make me admire empire. Neither did it allow me simply to condemn it. Instead, it forced me to ask a more difficult question: can two uncomfortable truths exist at the same time?
The first is one many critics of empire understandably hesitate to acknowledge. Britain’s Industrial Revolution transformed the human condition in ways unprecedented in history. Steam power, steel production, railways, mechanised manufacturing, modern engineering and scientific institutions dramatically expanded what human societies could produce and achieve. Advances in medicine, sanitation and communications eventually spread far beyond Britain itself. Technologies first developed in Britain became part of humanity’s common inheritance. They shaped industrialisation across Europe, North America, Japan, China, India, Australia and, eventually, Africa.
Technology, however, carries no moral compass. The steam engine powered factories before it powered warships. Railways transported coal before they transported armies. Scientific knowledge enlarged human possibility, but it did not determine how those possibilities would be used. The same engineering genius that transformed Britain could be organised very differently elsewhere.
That became the second truth my research uncovered. In colonial Ghana, railways were not primarily built to industrialise the colony. They were designed to extract its wealth. When the railway finally reached Kumasi in 1901, it carried neither cocoa farmers nor eager passengers. It carried British troops. The Ashanti kingdom was subdued, the Asantehene arrested and exiled: the railway became an instrument not merely of transport but of conquest. The locomotive that symbolised progress in Britain became part of an imperial machinery in West Africa.
The pattern repeated itself in less dramatic but equally revealing ways. One of the most remarkable discoveries in the colonial archives concerned what officials called the Road Gap Policy. During the 1920s, Ghanaian cocoa farmers built their own motor roads and began transporting produce by truck. Lorries proved faster and cheaper than the railway. Rather than encourage this local innovation, the colonial administration literally dug trenches across roads running too close to the railway, forcing traffic back onto the state-owned line. Farmers responded ingeniously, head-loading cocoa across the trenches before reloading it onto waiting trucks. It was an extraordinary spectacle: engineering brilliance protected from competition by deliberately obstructing another form of progress.
The railway was not the only example. My research also uncovered a striking difference in colonial policy that few Australians know about. White settler colonies, including Australia, were allowed to tax companies operating within their borders and use that revenue to build schools, infrastructure and public institutions for their own populations. By contrast, in West Africa’s Gold Coast British firms were largely shielded from equivalent local taxation, allowing profits to flow back to Britain rather than strengthening the colony’s own capacity to invest and industrialise. The issue, again, was not the absence of modern institutions but who was permitted to benefit from them.
The deeper tragedy, then, was not that Africa lacked access to modern technology. It was that Africans were rarely given the opportunity to shape its development on their own terms. We inherited the machinery but not the means to master, adapt or direct it. We inherited the tracks, but not the train of transformation.
The mistake, it seems to me, is not that one side celebrates western civilisation while the other condemns empire. It is assuming only one story can be true.
Those who celebrate western civilisation are right to remind us that the Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered the course of human history. Without steam power, modern engineering and scientific inquiry, the modern world would be almost unimaginable.
But not every railway served the same purpose. In Britain, railways largely accelerated industrialisation. In colonial Africa, they largely accelerated extraction. The same technology that expanded prosperity in one place reinforced dependence in another.
Equally, those who see empire only through the lens of exploitation leave something important unexplained. If these technologies were merely instruments of oppression, why did independent countries such as Japan, India and, later, China devote such effort to mastering, improving and adapting them?
The problem was never the steam engine or the railway itself. The deeper questions were who controlled these technologies, who benefited from them, who could tax the wealth they generated, who acquired the knowledge to improve them and who remained suppliers of raw materials while importing finished goods. Those strike me as more fruitful questions than whether railways were inherently good or bad.
Looking back, the greatest gift my doctoral research gave me was not a settled opinion about empire but a different habit of mind. Admiration and condemnation are both easy. Understanding is harder. Britain produced extraordinary innovations that transformed the human condition. It also organised one of history’s most sophisticated extractive systems. Neither truth cancels the other. Ignoring either leaves us with a poorer understanding of both the past and the present.
Perhaps that is why today’s arguments about western civilisation so often leave us dissatisfied. One side fears that acknowledging empire diminishes genuine human achievement. The other fears that acknowledging achievement excuses injustice. Both concerns are understandable. Yet history asks something more demanding of us. It asks whether we possess the intellectual humility to hold competing truths together.
My doctoral research taught me that the same railway could carry both prosperity and conquest, just as the same institutions could either build a nation or drain it. Perhaps history itself works the same way. The question is not which truth we choose, but whether we are willing to let each truth interrupt the certainty of the other.
Komla Tsey
Komla Tsey is a Ghanaian–Australian writer, retired Professor of Education for Social Sustainability, and part-time Professorial Research Fellow at the Jawun Research Institute, Central Queensland University. His writing explores education, democratic culture, identity, Indigenous empowerment, colonial legacies and the moral certainties that shape public life. His forthcoming memoir, Botoku Child, traces a journey from a small village in Ghana to universities and communities across the world, examining how inherited beliefs, curiosity and lived experience shape both personal lives and democratic societies.