Quotes About Colonialism

A common saying among European soldiers facing African enemies was, 'Come what may, we have machine guns, and they don't.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations.

The European empires believed that in order to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects. British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography.

What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.

British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography.

How many Indians today would want to call a vote to divest themselves of democracy, English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket and tea on the grounds that they are imperial legacies? And if they did, wouldn't the very act of calling a vote to decide the issue demonstrate their debt to their former overlords?

Do pogardy dla wierzÄ…cego dochodzi pogarda dla dzikusa. (...) Oto co myÅ›lÄ… te nasze trze?we umysÅ'y! Po co oÅ›wieca? tubylca? Po co pozbawia? go korzeni, oferujÄ…c mu ateizm? Có? by na tym zyskaÅ' w tym wrogim Å›rodowisku? W rzeczywistoÅ›ci uwa?ajÄ…, ?e to normalne, gdy modli siÄ™ Afrykanin, lecz irytujÄ…ce, gdy robi to Europejczyk, poniewa? ich zdaniem Europejczyk jest lepszy od Afrykanina.

These Filipinos will be your worst enemies if you commit the imprudence of attacking the Spaniards without the necessary preparation.

You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot.

Page 120: The only point I wish to highlight here is that there are important links between colonialism and the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities. Not only were the colonialists themselves market-dominant minorities, but colonial divide-and-conquer policies favored certain groups over others, exacerbating ethnic wealth imbalances and fomenting group tensions

The fact that the Irish embraced the potato only helped convince the English that it was a lowly food fit only for a peasant. Nonetheless

Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe.

The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.

Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country.

Colonialism was not just an economic and political system, it was also a cultural system. Loyalty to empire was created through language, as well as through the church and the school. Both of these institutions taught the superiority of Europeans, their beliefs and their culture, and the inferiority of Africans, and, for that matter, of all non-British peoples

Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

England and France were rivals, not only on the continent, but in the West Indies, in India, and in Europe.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

There's a belief that since Africa got a raw deal from the colonial West, then the Chinese must be Africa's best friend. But the evidence doesn't show that, and the main criticism is that they are building infrastructure in exchange for Africa's resources in deals that are structured to favor China.

In 1920, the West ruled huge amounts of the world.

Everything that the West is today is predominantly because of Africa.

The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel's colonialism rather than Iran's nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

The idea that Arabia is best run by Arabs is no more palatable to Western leaders today than it was to Napoleon or Churchill.