Quotes About Colonialism

The attitude is summed up by a famous scene from the novel Memoir of a Bengal Lancer by Geoffrey Bampfylde, in which the young and naïve titular hero is shocked by Englishmen standing by and not acting while a Hindoo widow is hurled onto her husband's funeral pyre in the practice of suttee.[ 52] His more cynical flinty-eyed Irish sergeant advises him that "To be sure, sor, this would raise a few eyebrows on Hampstead Heath: but you're not on Hampstead Heath any more.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

Je préfère devenir aveugle, être brûlée dans un incendie ou mourir par petits morceaux que d'adresser la parole à ce bouc. Ce que j'ai fait à son Vendredi, je suis prête à le refaire. Ces gens-là ne sont ni des parents, ni des amis, ils sont prêts à lécher le derrière des toubabs pour avoir des médailles, tout le monde le sait. Ne pleure plus, lève-toi, on s'en va. Moi j'ai assez vu leurs figures!

And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms, they'd all go to hell. Africa has a new environmental issue now—landfills overflowing with unused condoms.

Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars.

When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people as well.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or 'the Wandering Jew'.

Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab...

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian. M.K. Gandhi, Defence in a trial for sedition, 1922

If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my feet.

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

The nineteenth-century German missionary Sigismund Koelle asked over 140 ex-slaves how they had been taken. Almost 20 percent of them told him that family or friends had given them up.

The first constitutional monarchy in the Muslim world was established in Tunis in 1861.

Great Britain, an island off the Dutch coast, which is responsible for the happiness of fully one-quarter of the human race. Per: Van Loon's Geography, Copy-write 1932. Garden City Publishing, Copy-write 1937; Page-216.

The fluctuations in tobacco caused the first conflict with England, brought on by the violence of the clergy, and paved the way for resistance.

But this was not enough to check the English. The French stronghold, owing largely to the efforts of Mr. Pitt and the British navy, was doomed, and the brave garrison, deserting their hopeless post, permitted Forbes to march in unmolested, and name his conquest Fort Pitt.

It may be possible to make the political history of every colony in turn picturesque and exciting;

The Western impression of Africa and Asia was that they were hazardous and uncivilized, full of gargantuan lizards, men with the heads of dogs, eels many hundreds of feet long, and creatures like the monoceros, which was alleged to have a stag's head, the body of a horse, and feet like an elephant's. The

I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it—a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike.