Quotes About Imperialism

You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its administration was fair and just. He

Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.

the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." And

Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): "Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot. . . . "Signed The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.

The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:   Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

British territory did cover nearly a quarter of the earth.

And finally Money noted that the huge Dutch profits from Java depended on forced labor.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

For him, colonies existed for one purpose: to make him and his country rich. "Belgium doesn't exploit the world," he complained to one of his advisers. "It's a taste we have got to make her learn.

But those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

In its sensational heyday, British imperialism offered the vulgar conceit of racial superiority. Its American counterpart, triumphant in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, had a similar appeal. Sprayed by the same effusions, influential Canadians espoused a flattering "imperial nationalism." If, as British and American imperialists insisted, northern races easily dominated those in warmer climates, who were more northerly than Canadians?

one-quarter of the world's land surface changed hands between 1876 and 1915,

The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They're categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be.

The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia.

Having seen it," Rudyard Kipling wrote, "I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.