In “The Intimacies of Four Continents”, Lowe reads between the lines of Hegel, Marx, Mill, Du Bois, Miller, and the archives of the West India Company to see what is not being discussed – the effect of the progress of Western liberalism on indigenous and colonized people. She is advocating for using "the past conditional temporality" (what could have been) to think about the things that conventional historical methods and narratives omit, thus allowing Western liberalism to perpetrating violence on those whose stories have not been, and are not being, told.       

            Rousseau wrote “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society” (Rousseau 1754:207). Property ownership is the first necessary condition, and the fencing of formerly common lands was, in England, the thing that forced her inhabitants to cities and factory work. In Lowe's account of the settling of Hong Kong, the first imperative was to "appropriate land and displace residents" (p.120). It is not made clear where the "displaced residents" actually went, but no doubt many were later accused of vagrancy and given the option of signing up for indentured servitude in the Caribbean. Such displacement, along with the disruption of long-established social structures, so de-stabilized the colonized people that military action was required to keep the peace. Mill’s project of education was then supposed to prepare the poor barbarians for liberal self-governance.

The residue of this colonial activity worldwide is visible as the struggle of recently “independent nations” to establish themselves as peaceful and productive members of a ‘world community’ that is closely managed and controlled by Western powers.  The emergent practices within these former colonies are of no concern to world history textbooks, unless they interfere with Western trade or threaten Western dominance in some region.

            Western liberalism (which purports to be a philosophy emphasizing the liberty of the individual and equality of all men) relied, and relies, on the availability of human beings that can/will labor within an imbalanced exchange arrangement. If each worker really received the value of their work, there would be no profit. If there were no profit, there would be no corporation, and without corporations, what is Western liberalism? In U.S. primary schools, it is acceptable to teach that slavery is a sad and shameful part of our history, but it is not acceptable to make the connection between that slavery and the ability of the United States to emerge as a world power. It is not acceptable to follow the path U.S. industry has taken in order to maintain the requisite supply of cheap labor, on which it still relies.

            One need only turn on the news to see how willfully such negation is carried out. A recent revision of Advanced Placement history courses has caused one candidate for the Presidency to complain, "I think most people when they finish that course, they'd be ready to go sign up for ISIS...We have to stop this silliness crucifying ourselves." What is truly silly is to close one’s eyes to the ways in which Western trade policy affects the well-being of poor and indigenous people around the world, and then to pretend that such people “hate us for our freedoms.”