Quotes About Imperialism

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

as of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a larger number of Indians in uniform. In 1911, there were 164,000 Britons living in India (of whom 66,000 were in the army and police and just 4,000 in civil government). By 1931, this had gone up to just 168,000 (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people.

So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

Britain is no longer 'Thatcherite', though in the aftermath of 'Brexit', it may even be worse. The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater.

The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

Empire was in many ways the vehicle for the extension of British social structures to the colonies they conquered.

There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.

The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.

The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.

And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.

The British in India were never more than 0.05  per  cent of the population.

When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants

But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions.

control. The people's character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England's greatness and 'mission' in the world… As Pankaj Mishra has observed: European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which

had exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to Company shareholders, dividends to railway investors or pensions to retired officials, made up a loss of £30 million a year.

Agricultural taxes amounted at a minimum to half the gross produce and often more, leaving the cultivator less food than he needed to support himself and his family; British estimates conceded that taxation was two or three times higher than it had ever been under non-British rule, and unarguably higher than in any other country in the world.

it has a quality other countries call cultural imperialism, which, we have found, means a tasty culture that other peoples readily enjoy, an infective culture, if you will, from which ideas and usages spread quickly.

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

As we begin our study of Genesis 1 then, we must be aware of the danger that lurks when we impose our own cultural ideas on the text without thinking. The Bible's message must not be subjected to cultural imperialism. Its message transcends the culture in which it originated, but the form in which the message was imbedded was fully permeated by the ancient culture. This was God's design and we ignore it at our peril.

This northerly route of east–west transit and trade, extending from the Panjab and the upper Indus to Bihar and the lower Ganga, now became as much the main axis of Aryanisation as it would subsequently of Buddhist proselytisation and even Magadhan imperialism. It was known as the Uttarapatha, the Northern Route, as distinct from the Daksinapatha (whence the term 'Deccan') or Southern Route.

A mole is a deep penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism.