China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to connect East Asia with Europe and Africa through a network of railroads, highways, ports, and airports traversing Central and Southeast Asia. Optimists see the exercise as bringing much needed infrastructure, development, capital, and eventually, prosperity to currently under-developed parts of the world. Pessimists point to resulting high levels of indebtedness, environmental unsustainability, and the potential for governance problems. Such perspectives ignore why these many of the areas the Belt and Road promises to link do not yet have the facilities that the mega project as promising. Lack of trying is not a reason.

The BRI will not have a tabula rasa. Efforts to construct routes across and around the Eurasian landmass as well as Africa had been a dream for many a colonial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Likewise, both superpowers and their major allies during the Cold War sought to bring development and connectivity to these very same regions. Associated with almost all these attempts were claims of particular virtue, be they capitalism and democracy, socialism, the White Man’s Burden, or the Mission Civilisatrice. Many ground to a halt if not for harsh environmental conditions, then local opposition, political unrest and upheaval, or even anti-colonial movements. This talk will examine the risks that these legacies pose to China’s BRI and wider ambitions, as well as the wider implications of such conditions.