Colonialism Effects Quotes

Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.

Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.

The English treatment of the Irish was appalling. It was absolutely appalling.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.

Everything bad about France was transferred to Quebec.

This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist - chauvinist - when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound.

I wish the Indians had newspapers of their own. If they had, you would have horrible pictures of the cold-blooded murders of inoffensive Indians.

I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children's faith & winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding & blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

See them coming into our towns with their rum! See them offering it to us with persuasive kindness. Hear them cry, “Drink! Drink!” and when we are drunk, and act like the crazed, behold these good white, these man of a benevolent race, standing by, laughing among themselves, and saying, “Oh, what fools! What great fools the Shawanese are!” But who made them fools? Who are the cause of their madness?

In the early colonial period the commerce of Mexico was monopolized by Spain, and this has been the explanation given by most writers for the backwardness of Mexico. They do not seem to know that England monopolized the commerce of her American colonies more strictly than ever Spain did hers. The problem, therefore, is to explain why, as soon as the English colonies were independent, they began sending their ships all over the world, while Mexico could not find any better use for her independence than closing the country to foreign trade by a prohibitive tariff.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

There's a belief that since Africa got a raw deal from the colonial West, then the Chinese must be Africa's best friend. But the evidence doesn't show that, and the main criticism is that they are building infrastructure in exchange for Africa's resources in deals that are structured to favor China.

Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. The white man's God cannot love his red children or he would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help.