Quotes About Colonialism

What honour is left to us?' asked a Mughal official, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, 'an empire within an empire', with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East.

Little wonder that the British were soon being reviled in the Surat streets 'with the names of Ban-chude* and Betty-chude† which my modest language will not interpret'.

in total around £1,238,575 was given by Mir Jafar to the Company and its servants, which included at least £170,000 personally for Clive. In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as 'political gifts'. Clive himself estimated the total payments as closer to 'three million sterling'.

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?

Royal Adventurers into Africa

United States had committed a "number of sins" in prerevolutionary Cuba, including turning the island into "the whorehouse of the U.S.

The first colonial leaders, however, would have none of this. Most of them were military men, trained in the Irish wars. Whatever they thought of the Indian way of life, they never failed to regard the Indians themselves as peoples fated for conquest. As a counterweight to that relative handful of writers who were praising the native peoples and their governments, these British equivalents of the conquistadors viewed

In short, [Native Americans] say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin.

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it.

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man's 'living in the way of money'.38

One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.

Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that 'when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists' increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals', while this 'Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization'.28

This is a den of the worst kind of slave-traders; those whom I met in Urungu and Itawa were gentlemen slavers: the Ujiji slavers, like the Kilwa and Portuguese, are the vilest of the vile. It is not a trade, but a system of consecutive murders; they go to plunder and kidnap, and every trading trip is nothing but a foray. Moen

Men are worse than beasts of prey, if indeed it is lawful to call Zanzibar slaves men. It is monstrous injustice to compare free Africans living under their own chiefs and laws, and cultivating their own free lands, with what slaves afterwards become at Zanzibar and elsewhere.

I overhear the Manyuema telling each other that I am the "good one." I have no slaves, and I owe this character to the propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves. I

No objection would be made to teaching the natives of the country to read their own languages in the Roman character. No Arab has ever attempted to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish.

11th March, 1871.—I had a long, fierce oration from Amur, in which I was told again and again that I should be killed and eaten—the people wanted a "white one" to eat! I needed 200 guns; and "must not go to die." I told him that I was thankful for advice, if given by one who had knowledge, but his vehement threats were dreams of one who had never gone anywhere, but sent his slaves to kill people. He was only frightening my people, and doing me an injury.

If there be a God, I think he would like me to paint Africa British-Red as possible.

Africa is God's country, and He can have it.

Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God.

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

Because I am an African I reserve the right to say that Africa does not exist simply to make people in this country [the UK], or anywhere else in the developed world, feel good about themselves.