I'm not sure if this particular case has been mentioned on this thread before, but the outlines look interesting. One Dr. Bruce Gilley, of Portland State Uni, apparently submitted a paper to a scholarly journal,
The Third World Quarterly. It was bound to be contentious, as it argued that European colonialism was on balance beneficial. From the abstract:
For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.
The storm of protest, academic and otherwise, was only to be expected; lots of personal vilification, petitions, and attempts to end Gilley's career. What is particularly interesting, though, is the journal's stated reason for retracting the paper:
“Whilst the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.”
The Independent's coverage of this is interesting for its use of exclusively anti-colonial pictures, despite a balanced verbal account:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 96371.html
(The Indy always did seem to set more store by pictures than text...)
And David Reynolds is rather more partisan and trenchant:
http://politicallyincorrectdharma.blogs ... -mans.html