The Fiction of Reciprocity in the Caribbean Colonies

The theory of "the fiction of reciprocity" interests me, because as a colonizing tool for the French, English, and other powers, I wonder if it's something that's still in avid use today - repackaged and renamed as "The Global Economy", "Global Village" - a still vibrantly used tool of globalization. The fiction of reciprocity is the idea that two parties, most commonly the colonizer and the colonized or the visiting foreigners and the native, indigenous inhabitants, enter into an exchange that's mutually beneficial - but the "fiction" is what's beneficial to the colonizer, and what's beneficial to the colonized.

To give it context, in Garraway's The Libertine Colony, "the fiction of reciprocity" was a "missionary method" used by the French on the "Caribs" in their colonizing efforts. They packaged their mission as one of salvation: they offered the saving faith of Christianity, lifting poor, unwitting savages from their heathenism, making them pure, holy, civilized - more worthy of assimilation into their culture. It was assumed that the natives would be so thankful for this gift - and their only worth was found in accepting this gift of faith, because not accepting this gift made them unworthy, even artificially classified as a separate race of Carib entirely** - that they would then reciprocate with the colonizers, and offer them the fruits of their lands, harvests, resources, culture - even the secrets of their language to missionaries striving to creative lexicons and dictionaries of the "Carib" language. (In essence, transcribing their culture for them and onto them, but that's a bit too large a thread for this question). In either case, a system was set up - the Christian faith that was "planted" by missionaries was due and fair exchange for the precious metals and crops extracted by the colonists for sale abroad (Garroway, 48).

It's interesting, because even a quick survey of colonial literature finds threads of this ideology everywhere. In Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe, a steadfastly colonial novel of the Empire, the savage adopted by Crusoe - "My Man" Friday - is so thankful for his newfound faith and salvation from cannibalism, he offers in exchange his fawning gratitude, servitude, the rest of his family, and several times proclaims his willingness to die for Crusoe's gift. In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel written by an author clearly disturbed by the colonial project, but who couldn't quite seem to imagine a world without Empire, colonization was a mission of mercy, a mission of civilization and evangelization.

There is a grand colonial assumption in "the fiction of reciprocity": that natives were eager for salvation, that they would accept the "gift" of faith unequivocally, and would then see it as only right that they reciprocate with their own gifts. It's a neat little system of rationalization that flips invader, conqueror, plunderer, colonizer to benefactor of spiritual gifts, simply receiving their just and fair compensation.

Question: Has the fiction of reciprocity survived to the modern age, living a healthy, hale life as a tool of globalization? Even in the face of collapsing tyrannies, social triumphs, societal advances, freedoms won - doesn't the ever expanding web of the Global Village and its power center, globalization, still utilize this same "fiction of reciprocity" in other nations today? How far have we really come - and has it been backward? (Perhaps I'm making too simple of a comparison)

** A neat trick I don't have a question for - early Caribs were artificially separated into two tribes, based on their reaction to early Spanish visitors: those who welcomed the Spanish and didn't fight them were arbitrarily nominated as part of a peaceful, nonaggressive tribe of Caribs; those who resisted were bracketed as war-like and violent. Memoirs - French ones, of course - went so far as to say the peaceful Caribs lived in fear of the warlike ones, so they were placed into a position of needing an outsider's protection. This distinction was also found in Crusoe, as Friday was a peaceful savage open to salvation, and others were not.