Quotes About Colonialism

Cutting losses was the watchword, as was throwing responsibility onto the shoulders of Indians. 'You asked us to quit. We will oblige. Now it's up to you.' The argument was irrefutable, but it was not as if earlier Indian demands had always been met.

Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, Pashtuns and Gurkhas joined the British in the slaughter

400 mutineers were hanged simultaneously, while British officers seated beneath sipped whiskies and sodas and regimental bands played.

Rule Punjab and the rest of India as a superior race, dismissing any notion of equality between rulers and subjects

Hindu-Muslim clashes occurred in the 1880s and 1890s in the towns of Multan, Isa Khel (Mianwali district), Dera Ghazi Khan, Delhi, Rohtak and Ludhiana.

Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it was called, contains no Muslim name and only one Sikh name, that of Bhagat Singh.

White Punjabis like Nicholson often took a close and continuing interest in a servant or subordinate, but other 'subjects' were usually ignored and no 'subject' was seen as an equal.

Nicholson never brooked the faintest show of insolence towards an officer of the ruling race.

Lawrence's 'spirit', his biographer argues, 'was imperial, not provincial'.

Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims mainly, but also Dogras and Gurkhas, had enlisted on the Empire's behalf.)

In some villages near Allahabad, British soldiers killed aged men, women and children for alleged association with the rebels. Many were simply 'burnt to death'.

Sikh rajas of Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Kaithal—allies of the British even during the Anglo-Sikh wars—they required little persuasion.

Blood on India's streets was not what the Raj desired, yet Hindu-Muslim disputes were preferable to India-England ones.

The British had four distinct armies in India. The smallest consisted of the purely British 'Queen's Regiments'. The other three were the racially mixed 'presidency' armies

In the 1840s, these three armies contained around 40,000 whites and 250,000 Indians. No white served under an Indian, and the highest paid Indian earned less than the lowest paid Briton.

the speed with which the British left after announcing Independence and Partition may have been, in his words, 'the most contemptible single act in the annals of the Empire' (p 77).

Maharani Jindan evidently approached the British with the suggestion that 'they may destroy the [kingdom's] army' and take the boy-king under their protection.

the Empire had enabled Sayyid Ahmed's ideological successors to walk off with the prize of a separate Muslim electorate in India as a whole.

Churchill's keenness on dividing India, his instruction to Viceroy Wavell in 1945 that he should not leave India before splitting it into 'into Pakistan, Hindustan, Princestan etc.'

Thus Punjabi became the 'Sikh' language, Urdu the 'Muslim' language, and Hindi the 'Hindu' language. Language was uprooted from ground-level and tied to religion rather than to the varied people who spoke it, or the tract where it was spoken.

Ramachandra Guha

By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand-year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes.

The founders of Brown University, Nicholas and Joseph Brown, got their wealth by manufacturing and selling slave ships and investing in the slave trade. –The Black Holocaust for Beginners, S. E. Anderson

Americans in the 1770s were sharply divided according to religion, national origin, location, and even language. Scots Irish Presbyterians in North Carolina, English American Anglicans in Virginia, Dutch and German Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Scottish Highlander Catholics in New York, native-born Congregationalists in Massachusetts—each group had its own culture, its own beliefs, its own set of interests.