What blind spots you thinking of? Can you elaborate?
I had an email discussion with him a few years back after he came out with his, to my mind, rather hyperbolic claim of 50M killed by “colonialists.”
He seems to have arrived at this number after reading about the well-known (to many) genocide in the Congo Free State, and then somehow extrapolating what happened there to all colonies.
Couple problems there.
The claim is made by him that many died in colonial forced labor. No doubt this is true. But the various kings and sultans who controlled these areas before the colonizers moved in were hardly averse to the use of forced labor. Seems to me that the appropriate number would not be those who died as a result of colonial forced labor, but rather the excess over previous governments or those that would have existed had the colonizers not moved in.
I also pointed out that he seemed to include deaths by “European” diseases (most of which are in origin either African or Asian). These deaths were not a consequence of colonialism, but rather of the merging of pathogen ecosystems, which would have happened from mere contact, if no colony had ever been set up. Also, for most of the colonial period nobody had a clue about what caused these diseases, much less how to prevent them.
Previous rulers of colonized areas had commonly engaged in warfare to the extent of their abilities, resulting in many deaths among their people. The colonizers stopped this. Surely the lives “saved” by these policies should have been credited against those debited against other colonial policies.
One of the few facts we have about colonization is that native populations almost uniformly exploded once the colony was in place. That’s hardly an indication of massive worsening of conditions.
RJ was very polite to me in our discussion, and agreed some of my contentions were valid. But he didn’t change his calculations.
Also, some of the numbers kicked around by RJ and others for Soviet democide just make no sense. The Soviet population, despite the purges, gulags and WWII, grew very nearly as fast as the American population from 1920 to 1950.
To me, that indicates the many tens of millions cited as murdered by some are likely to be hyperbolic to some extent.