Quotes About Colonization

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the "waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

As the "waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community.

Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation's founders.

That a small fraction of colonists survived the first twenty years of settlement came as no surprise back home—nor did London's elite much care. The investment was not in people, whose already unrefined habits declined over time, whose rudeness magnified in relation to their brutal encounters with Indians.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony

He imagined the Indians as useful allies in fulfilling English aspirations, possible trading partners, and subordinate, to be sure, but above all a natural resource to be exploited for the greater good.

Profit-seeking planters and industrious husbandmen, on the other hand, were needed to cultivate the ground for its riches, and in doing so impose a firm hand.7 This powerful conception of land use would play a key role in future categorizations of race and class on the experimental continent.

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.

The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.

we have been civilizing the Filipinos up to the point where they are unanimous only on one thing, namely, that they want us to leave."12

Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle … The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed.

Space is going to be the greatest genetic quality filter since the dark ages.

Port Central had become a sophisticated prison for its inmates, while the natives roamed a whole world.

All life "colonizes." Everything that lives aspires to live infinitely. Nothing spontaneously limits itself. No harmony is the result of mutual respect or reciprocal restraint; harmony stems from hostile interventions and the temporary balance of forces.

West," I said bitterly. "That's where they're doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!" He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately.

What a great language I have, it's a fine language we inherited from the fierce Conquistadors…. They carried everything off and left us everything…. They left us the words.

Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe.

Whatever market for manufactured goods emerged in colonial and dependent countries did not become the "eternal market" of these countries. Thrown wide open by colonization and by unequal treaties, it became an appendage of the "internal market" of Western capitalism.