Quotes About Colonialism

so much gold reached Europe from India and America that burghers grew richer and richer as knights and landowners grew poorer and poorer.

Are Indians cowards? No, but they are bad starters and occasionally jib. Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it.

Nothing enrages Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community. Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated.

I am out here to work, mind, to hold this wretched country by force. I'm not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I'm just a servant of the Government; it's the profession you wanted me to choose myself, and that's that. We're not pleasant in India, and we don't intend to be pleasant. We've something more important to do.

They knew that Jamaica produced sugar, rum and bananas, that Nigeria produced cocoa, and that British Guiana had large natural resources; but these names, though as familiar as the products with which they were associated, were of places far away, and no one seemed really interested in knowing anything about the peoples who lived there or their struggles towards political and economic betterment.

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!

savages. Dirty savages.

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.

Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

My family belonged to a very particular formation - middle-class and coloured, not black. That meant it had a closer connection to the plantocracy than many other people did. So I didn't feel like an ordinary black Jamaican boy.

India was formed on the idea 'Let's get the British out.'

And, as to her papa, there is nothing so grand in being an Indian officer.

You thought I was a native! You dared! You don't know anything about natives! They are not people—they're servants who must salaam to you. You know nothing about India. You know nothing about anything!

She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.

If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.

The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.

There can never be a single, satisfactory comprehensive account of the 'history of the British empire.'

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.

the unfamiliar appearance of the people, "of a tawny complexion," so unlike the Portuguese experience of Africans; the men variously shaved or heavily bearded; the women, "as a rule, short and ugly

Colonialists respect nothing. They would take creatures royal in their primitive beauty, serene in their ignorance, and noble in their qaked simplicity, and would twist them out of shape, distort their minds, contaminate them with their own ideologies and abstractions.

The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.