Dr Bruce Gilley is professor of political science at Portland State University.
His research centres on comparative and international politics and public policy, and covers issues as diverse as democracy, climate change, political legitimacy, and international conflict.
Bruce faced the cancel-culture mob back in 2017, when a piece he wrote, for the journal Third World Quarterly, on the benefits of colonialism, was met with death threats and calls for his firing. The National Association Of Scholars promptly published the essay on its website.
My conversation with him was unbelievably fascinating, even covering what South Africa might have looked like were it not colonised. (Plot twist: it probably would have turned out to be a dictatorial dump.)
Here’s the takeaway. Colonialism wasn’t all bad.
