Quotes About Colonialism

We (the British) invented bureaucracy. India just perfected it.

see how the white womens goin' look and hear how white womens laugh in the colonies. She think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don't know colour. Then Lilith wonder if she dreaming because dreaming is one thing God never allow negro to do.

No es lo mismo ser racista en blanco y negro —un inglés en la India, un belga en el Congo— que ser racista con tal despliegue de matices; se necesita mucha más atención, más mala leche, más interés en el asunto.

The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full-blood, and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half-blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks.

After my sister Sandra was born the doctors there per formed a hysterectomy on my mother, in fact sterilizing her without her permission, which was common at the time, and up to just a few years ago, so that it is hardly worth mentioning. In the opinion of some people, the fewer Indians there are, the better. As Colonel Chivington said to his soldiers: "Kill 'em all, big and small, nits make lice!

You must kill the Indian in order to save the man! " That was part of trying to escape the hard life. The missions, going to church, dressing and behaving like a wasi?un—that for her was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life, the white life with a white-painted cottage, and a carpet on the floor, a shiny car in the garage, and an industrious, necktie-wearing husband who was not a wino.

Parklands are often positioned as apolitical, as "common" or public land that somehow eludes examination amidst the grit of property markets and land-use battles, but it is critical to understand parks as a central feature of colonial land logics, as aggressively regulating and disciplining land and its occupations.

The food is awful," Jan wrote, "and cooked in such a way that no civilized white man can stand it for more than a week or two … Almost all the food is fried. They feed us fried green bananas, boiled rice, and foul-smelling salt fish. It rains so much that honest to goodness my hat is getting mouldy on my head… I haven't had on a pair of dry shoes in weeks.

The Chinese expected the white man to pay more for his burden because the British, the Pablo Escobar of imperialists, had forced them to buy opium from India in 1850 and had stolen Hong Kong.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India." Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill's ravings:

We say to the British government: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back.

En la época colonial sucedió lo mismo. Los leones me recuerdan a los soldados del ejército portugués. Habíamos fantaseado tanto con esos portugueses que se volvieron poderosos. Los portugueses no tenían fuerza para ganarnos. Por eso, hicieron que sus víctimas se matasen a sí mismas. Y nosotros, negros, aprendimos a odiarnos a nosotros mismos.

the English colonies in North America accounted for only a tiny fraction of the hideous traffic in human beings. David Brion Davis, in his magisterial 2006 history Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, concludes that colonial North America 'surprisingly received only 5 to 6 percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.' Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade calculates the percentage as slightly lower, at 4.4 percent.

Not all influences of colonialism were necessarily bad. Along with enslavement, subjugation, exploitation, loss of cultural heritage, and repression, colonists also brought modern scientific methods in fields such as medicine and agriculture. Note that this can be no apologia for colonialism, because these advances could have been gained without the societies' becoming colonised, as in Japan.

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

Yes. I know all about how the French burned my people alive in cauldrons of molasses. How they mutilated and tortured Haitian prisoners, digging pits on the beach and waiting for the tide to roll in so they would drown. In Port-au-Prince," I tell them, "the emperor's soldiers invited all mulâtres to a ball. Then at the stroke of midnight, he announced that the men would be put to death. They killed them right there, in front of their wives.

French Caribbean island of Martinique, a tiny territory less than one-fourth the size of Long Island, imported more slaves than all the U.S. states combined.

Satan's metaphysical existence can never be separated from the politics of domination, specifically colonialism. It provides vides the dominant culture with the ability to depict those whom they conquer, oppress, and repress as the Other.

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947.

He felt an overwhelming sense of brokenness in the people. The country had been under the colonial government for over two decades, and no one could see an end in sight. It felt like everyone had given up.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.

When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: "The French are all right in France." What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in the colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth.

Every country, in Africa, is crying for its own "independence".