Colonial Era Quotes

From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -

The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate to today's postcolonial era.

Her long life spanned American history from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War, and she died as the last remaining widow of a Founding Father.

In light of recent events—genocide in East Africa, the collapse of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third world—some might argue that the moment of truth has already passed, that Césaire and Fanon’s predictions proved false. We’re facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism, where descriptions of violence and instability draw on the very colonial language of “barbarism” and “backwardness” that Césaire critiques in these pages. But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters,

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything-each eaxchange, connection, conflict-was translated into the language of black and white. [...] Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constitute a homogenous, cohesive force. [...] Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another's cities. It was revelation, a surprise, a shock.

India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredit by opposing counsel. Many rapes were never reported as a result of the humiliation to which this system subjected the victims.

National interest can also be an excuse to clamp draconian colonial-era rules on those trying to bring in transparency. In

Imperialism is a relationship between capitalism and its setting, central to which is an imposition of a regime upon the setting that entails income deflation as a means of preventing the threat of increasing supply price. No matter what happens to the bourgeoisies of the South or the workers of the North, this relationship, which existed in the colonial era, persists to this day and the system cannot do without it.

From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.

Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society. N

Lincoln too considered secession the “essence of anarchy.” He branded state sovereignty a “sophism.” “The Union is older than any of the States,” Lincoln asserted, “and, in fact, it created them as States.” The Declaration of Independence transformed the “United Colonies” into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any “free and independent States.

Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores… Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control.

Debtors and idlers abounded in the colonial era, but failing in business was not so calamitous as falling from grace... In Early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year 1800. By then, ‘failure’ meant an entrepreneurial failure.

The older sisters all had tacky taste: brocade curtains and brightly painted accent walls, mimicking the tropical colonial style of the country they’d left behind and the era in which they’d left it. Camila didn’t need textile reminders of home. She’d arrived like a bird that was molting.

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect.

Caracas era todavía una población remota de la provincia colonial; fea, triste, chata, pero las tardes del Ávila era desgarradoras en la nostalgia.

...the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier...All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go shopping.

With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

The dynamics of the global distribution of capital are at once economic, political, and military. This was already the case in the colonial era, when the great powers of the day, Britain and France foremost among them, were quick to roll out the cannon to protect their investments. Clearly, the same will be true in the twenty-first century, in a tense new global political configuration whose contours are difficult to predict in advance.

flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

Apesar de não ser noite de lua, havia um romântico romance no casarão colonial. Ela sorria e baixava os olhos, por vezes piscava com um olho porque pensava que isto era namorar. E seu coração batia rápido quando o olhava. Não sabia que isso era amor.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . . [F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . . In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . . The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . . The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . . They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . . Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . . Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.

Half of India’s revenues went out of India, mainly to England. Indian taxes paid not only for the British Indian Army in India, which was ostensibly maintaining India’s security, but also for a wide variety of foreign colonial expeditions in furtherance of the greater glory of the British empire, from Burma to Mesopotamia. In 1922, for instance, 64 per cent of the total revenue of the Government of India was devoted to paying for British Indian troops despatched abroad. No other army in the world, as Durant observed at the time, consumed so large a proportion of public revenues.

The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and woven at home while their men tilled the fields; suddenly both were affected, and if weather or drought reduced their agricultural work, there was no back-up source of income from cloth. Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.

In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East—the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism—were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon.

The Belgian period was the beginning of the most successful era in the history of the Congo. It was the only period in which it had an effective police force and army. The country was being run orderly, was relatively incorrupt and capable of maintaining internal order and of protecting its sovereignty. Only then, under the Belgians, was that the case.

From the colonial era to the Trump era, the “They Keep Coming” immigration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonize immigrants and lobby for immigration restriction. It has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and exploitation. At the same time, it has promoted a false and incomplete narrative of how immigration works. No part of the myth is actually true. Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses. Only by fully understanding the origins, endurance, and contemporary relevance of the “They Keep Coming” myth can we begin to dismantle it and the xenophobia and racism that it fuels.

More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement—sovereignty and complete control of Palestine. With Britain’s unstinting support, these aims suddenly became plausible. Some leading British politicians extended backing to Zionism that went well beyond the carefully phrased text of the declaration. At a dinner at Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill—assured Weizmann that by the term “Jewish national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it.25

Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland.42 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it.

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.

Despite all technical change in the advanced countries, to this day India, with a much smaller cultivated area than the US, produces annually a larger total tonnage of cereals, root crops, oil crops, sugar crops, fruits and vegetables. The precise figures are 858 million tonnes in India and 676 million tonnes in the US in 2007, the latest year for which the data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is available. As for China, its even more intensive cultivation, developed over centuries, and consequent high land productivity were legendary; Britain’s agricultural yields at that time, properly measured over the same production period, were pathetic in comparison. By 2007 China produced 1,308 million tonnes from an area substantially less than that of India and of the US.

A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run. "The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater. "What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked. "Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now." "But . . . where are the oceans?" "There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry." "Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?" "The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth." "But--" "Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?" "Isn't it?" "Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.

When we hear radical stories of long-distance dispersal, it is all too easy to place a human mindset onto the events, and it is worth spending a moment to address this. There is a temptation to describe these rodents and monkeys as hopeful adventurers, with a narrative of pioneering spirit and survival against the odds in an unknown and inhospitable land, an inappropriate framing that owes much to the era of colonialism. Where an animal or plant from one part of the world appears in another, some might use the language of invasion, of a native ecosystem despoiled and rendered lesser by newcomers. Frequently, this is an appeal to nostalgia, to the landscape known in childhood, contrasted with the altered, often depleted world of today. It brings with it an implication that what was was right and what is is wrong.

It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.

Uma geração atrás, o número cada vez menor de nascimentos de crianças vivas entre os herero era um assunto de grande interesse para os médicos de toda a África meridional. Os brancos preocupavam-se, de tal modo como se o gado estivesse atacado de peste bovina. Uma coisa desagradável, ver a população subjugada diminuindo daquele jeito anos após ano. O que é uma colônia sem seus nativos de pele escura? Que graça tem, se todos eles vão morrer? Apenas uma ampla extensão de deserto, sem criadas, sem trabalhadores rurais, sem operários para a construção civil e as minas - peraí, um minuto, é ele sim, Karl Marx, aquele velho racista manhoso, escapulindo de fininho, com os dentes trincados, sobrancelhas arqueadas, tentando fazer de conta que é só uma questão de Mão-de-Obra Barata e Mercados Internacionais... Ah, não. Uma colônia é muito mais que isso. A colônia é a latrina da alma européia, onde o sujeito pode baixar as calças e relaxar, gozando o cheiro de sua própria merda. Onde ele pode agarrar sua presa esguia rugindo com todas as forças sempre que lhe der na veneta, e beber-lhe o sangue com prazer incontido. Não é? Onde ele pode chafurdar, em pleno cio, e entregar-se a uma maciez, uma escuridão receptiva de braços e pernas, cabelos tão encarapinhados quanto os pêlos de sua própria genitália proibida. Onde a papoula, o cânhamo e a coca crescem luxuriantes, verdejantes, e não com a cores e o estilo da morte, como a cravagem e o agárico, as pragas e os fungos nativos da Europa. A Europa cristã sempre foi morte, Karl, morte e repressão. Lá fora, nas colônias, pode-se viver a vida, dedicar-se à vida e à sensualidade em todas as suas formas, sem prejudicar em nada a Metrópole, nada que suje aquelas catedrais, estátuas de mármore branco, pensamentos nobres... As notícias nunca chegam lá. Os silêncios aqui são tão amplos que absorvem todos os comportamentos, por mais sujos e animalescos que sejam...

At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.

Oil “Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku’s oil,” told comrade Vladimir Lenin. One of the plans was to drain the Caspian Sea: “Is it possible? Can you drain the Caspian Sea?” said the powerful Stalin. It was more an order than a question.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Azerbaijan - Oil Country). Mafia “With his wife Victoria, they reigned here for nineteen years. This period Georgians called ironically the Victorian Era, and his wife got the name Queen Victoria. Victoria created the system when all was for sale: state documents ten times the price; 5,000 roubles to enter the Communist party; 50,000 for the judge job, … “ (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Gruzia - Where Soviet Mafia Was Born). Smoking “Smoking breaks in the USSR were long and often—and became an official excuse not to work, causing huge damage to the already failing state economy. But on the other hand, with zero unemployment and prison terms, if you are not on a payroll, the state could not provide enough work for everybody. People had to show up every day in the workplace. Boredom from nothing-to-do turned into massive laziness and Soviet workers spent long hours in the smoke rooms. For some, it was a place to relax, for others, to provoke a frank conversation—because … Well, let’s talk about it later.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Litva - Friends and Rebels). God “The bus was driving slowly, just forty km an hour on the slippery winter road. Outside was a spectacular view of the Caucasus mountains. Here and there appeared churches: nearby and far away, but always on the top of the hill: “Closer to God, as high as possible,” crossed His mind. The bus stopped with a creaking sound, and He slowly got off: “For me, Khor Virap Monastery will be the resting place: from the Soviet life … from the communist lies … I shall spend here the rest of my life. And from here … I shall go to eternity …” these were His last thoughts before He entered the monastery gate. He was dead tired from all that happened, walking uphill closer to God.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Armenia - Road in the First Christian State).

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

Americans have found it particularly difficult to come to terms with our “slave origins,” perhaps because the national history of the United States makes it easy to forget that the thirteen mainland colonies were only a part of the larger trading network of the British Empire, and the northern states all abolished slavery within two decades of the American Revolution. But in the colonial era, slavery was legal in all parts of British America, and it was economically significant even in many areas that later became free states. Slave labor was used successfully in such

Solo crescendo aveva capito che la fede di Sir William era qualcosa che si stagliava al di sopra delle confessioni e allo stesso tempo le attraversava tutte. Nella sua valle c'era posto per chiunque. Il re d'Inghilterra e il papa erano molto lontani, e il Padrone della Vita adorato dai Mohawk non era indegno d'essere chiamato Dio, anche se ci si rivolgeva a lui in modi selvatici e pittoreschi. Fin da piccolo Peter sapeva che non tutte le cerimonie nella foresta erano indiane. La notte di San Giovanni, nel fitto della boscaglia, si accendevano piccoli fuochi e si parlava gaelico, celebrando messe che la luce del giorno avrebbe proibito. I profughi scozzesi e i coloni irlandesi di suo padre s'intendevano con dialetti antichi come le rocce. La Lingua della Notte. Sir William la usava quando voleva dirgli qualcosa di intimo, che gli altri non dovevano cogliere. - È la lingua della fede, del sangue e della guerra, - diceva. - Non la si parla per caso. L'inglese invece serviva a comandare, a scrivere e a capirsi da un capo all'altro della valle. A Philadelphia gli avevano insegnato anche il francese, la lingua del nemico. Ma era il mohawk l'idioma che preferiva. Il mohawk odorava di rum e di pellicce. Era la lingua del commercio e della caccia; dei concili e della diplomazia. Ma prima di tutto, per lui, quella delle ninne nanne.

For twelve years Nazi Germany inflicted horrors upon European Jews. And Germany paid. It paid Jews individually. It paid the state of Israel. For two and a half centuries, Europe and America inflicted unimaginable horrors upon Africa and its people. Europe not only paid nothing to Africa in compensation, but followed the slave trade with the remapping of Africa for further European economic exploitation. (European governments have yet even to accede to Africa's request for the return of Africa's art treasures looted along with its natural resources during the century-long colonial era.)

More than a few historians have suggested that heavy drinking in colonial times (and well into the nineteenth century) occurred, at least in part, because water supplies were unreliable and could, in some cases, cause disease. Food supplies—often not properly refrigerated in an era when an icehouse was considered “high tech”—were similarly suspect.

Yet while it may be true that religious zeal can inspire armies better than most secular incentives, there was another great awakening that occurred before and during the Revolutionary era that also played a role. The other great awakening was a reevaluation of the merits of doubt. Often unspoken, religious skepticism in the colonial era was taboo even among professed radicals. Yet the spiritual awakenings of the middle of the eighteenth century signaled a transformation of “unbelief” from presumed moral failing to a reasonable theological and political position.

Demoraria tempo para Tiago Penha perceber que era filho de uma Nação sem Estado e de um Estado sem Nação, filho de um empreendimento marítimo colonial tão corajoso quanto patético no limite da sua implosão.

Jonathan Edwards, the colonial-era theologian of Massachusetts, said God has called His people to be “distinguishingly happy.

The Canadian government’s point of view was set in the imperial/colonial era. Our dominant mythologies were shaped in the same era. All our governments – federal and provincial – must simply let go of their paternalistic mindset. Aboriginals are not wards of the state. They don’t need charity. They want the power that our own history says is theirs by right. And that power contains economic solutions. What this means is that our governments should stop wasting our money fighting to maintain systems of injustice. What they need to do is digest reality and embrace reconciliation, which, as Taiaiake Alfred says, begins with restitution. This is more than good intentions. It involves a shift in power and in economic wealth. That shift in economic wealth is the solution to Aboriginal poverty.

Estamos frente a un nuevo tipo de capitalismo caliente, psicotrópico y punk. Estas trasformaciones recientes apuntan hacia la articulación de un conjunto de nuevos dispositivos microprostéticos de control de la subjetividad con nuevas plataformas técnicas biomoleculares y mediáticas. La nueva «economía-mundo» no funciona sin el despliegue simultáneo e interconectado de la producción de cientos de toneladas de esteroides sintéticos, sin la difusión global de imágenes pornográficas, sin la elaboración de nuevas variedades psicotrópicas sintéticas legales e ilegales (Lexomil, Special K, Viagra, speed, cristal, Prozac, éxtasis, popper, heroína, Omeoprazol, etc.), sin la extensión a la totalidad del planeta de una forma de arquitectura urbana difusa en la que megaciudades miseria se codean con nudos de alta concentración de capital, sin el tratamiento informático de signos y de transmisión numérica de comunicación. Estos son solo algunos de los índices de aparición de un régimen postindustrial, global y mediático que llamaré a partir de ahora, tomando como referencia los procesos de gobierno biomolecular (fármaco-) y semiótico-técnico (-porno) de la subjetividad sexual, de los que la pildora y Playboy son paradigmáticos, «farmacopornográfico». Si bien sus líneas de fuerzas hunden sus raíces en la sociedad científica y colonial del siglo XIX, sus vectores económicos no se harán visibles hasta el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ocultos en principio bajo la apariencia de la economía fordista y quedando expuestos únicamente tras el progresivo desmoronamiento de esta en los años setenta. Durante el siglo XX, período en el que se lleva a cabo la materialización farmacopornográfica, la psicología, la sexología, la endocrinología han establecido su autoridad material transformando los conceptos de psiquismo, de libido, de conciencia, de feminidad y masculinidad, de heterosexualidad y homosexualidad en realidades tangibles, en sustancias químicas, en moléculas comercializables, en cuerpos, en biotipos humanos, en bienes de intercambio gestionables por las multinacionales farmacéuticas. Si la ciencia ha alcanzado el lugar hegemónico que ocupa como discurso y como práctica en nuestra cultura, es precisamente gracias a lo que Ian Hacking, Steve Woolgar y Bruno Latour llaman su «autoridad material», es decir, su capacidad para inventar y producir artefactos vivos. Por eso la ciencia es la nueva religión de la modernidad. Porque tiene la capacidad de crear, y no simplemente de describir, la realidad. El éxito de la tecnociencia contemporánea es transformar nuestra depresión en Prozac, nuestra masculinidad en testosterona, nuestra erección en Viagra, nuestra fertilidad/ esterilidad en püdora, nuestro sida en triterapia. Sin que sea posible saber quién viene antes, si la depresión o el Prozac, si el Viagra o la erección, si la testosterona o la masculinidad, si la píldora o la maternidad, si la triterapia o el sida. Esta producción en auto-feedback es la propia del poder farmacopornográfico.

To some extent, each administration from Jefferson onward had replaced officeholders, but the tradition had persisted from the colonial era that only bad behavior, and certainly not political affiliation, merited removal from office. Adams, much to Clay’s chagrin, had resisted removing even open turncoats, such as McLean. In that respect, the advent of Jackson’s presidency did mark an acute change. Jackson claimed he was cleansing corruption, but some of the rogues he rewarded hardly provided convincing proof of his regard for honest government. Old Hickory’s spontaneous inclination to punish opponents and Van Buren’s appreciation for the power of patronage helped to magnify as well as systemize the Spoils System. McLean

Why not simply embrace the reality of the Aboriginal comeback? Why not accept that these court victories contain the elements for resolving the problem of Aboriginal poverty by creating the basis for Aboriginal power, which is in part economic power? We are dealing with a point-of-view problem. The Canadian government’s point of view was set in the imperial/colonial era. Our dominant mythologies were shaped in the same era. All our governments – federal and provincial – must simply let go of their paternalistic mindset. Aboriginals are not wards of the state. They don’t need charity. They want the power that our own history says is theirs by right. And

The Inquisition eventually came to an end by the late seventeenth century, closing a sad period in European history, an era during which it is estimated some five hundred thousand people were executed throughout Europe. But in England and the colonies, contrary to common belief, not one accused witch was burned at the stake.

The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.

The study of African coastal communities such as Ouidah also has a relevance for the currently fashionable project of ‘Atlantic history’, i.e. the attempt to treat the Atlantic as a historical unit, stressing interactions among the various states and communities that participated in the construction and operation of the trans-Atlantic trading system.18 Although proponents of Atlantic history have tended to concentrate on links between Europe and the Americas, it needs to be recognized that African societies were also active participants in the making of the Atlantic world.19 If there was an ‘Atlantic community’, the African coastal towns which served as embarkation points for the trans-Atlantic slave trade were part of it, their commercial and ruling elites being involved in political, social and cultural networks, as well as purely business linkages, which spanned the ocean.20 The study of such African towns, moreover, adds an important comparative dimension to our understanding of the growth and functioning of port cities in the Atlantic world in the era of the slave trade, since previous studies of Atlantic port towns in this period have concentrated on ports in the Americas.21 But such American ports were European colonial creations, which functioned as enclaves or centres of European power, a model that is not applicable to Atlantic ports in Africa, which remained under indigenous sovereignty (apart from the exceptional case of Luanda in Angola, which uniquely had already become a Portuguese colony in the sixteenth century).

Pundits tend to write off political paranoia as a feature of the fringe, a disorder that occasionally flares up until the sober center can put out the flames. They’re wrong. The fear of conspiracies has been a potent force across the political spectrum, from the colonial era to the present, in the establishment as well as at the extremes. Conspiracy theories played major roles in conflicts from the Indian wars of the seventeenth century to the labor battles of the Gilded Age, from the Civil War to the Cold War, from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. They have flourished not just in times of great division but in eras of relative comity. They have been popular not just with dissenters and nonconformists but with individuals and institutions at the center of power. They are not simply a colorful historical byway. They are at the country’s core.

The great divergence 1. Some questions arise from why we need to study economic history: 'why are some countries rich and others poor?'/ 'why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England rather than France' 2. time span of history 1500-1800: the mercantilist era. The leading European countries sought to increase their trade by acquring colonies and using tariffs and war to prevent other countries from trading with them. European manufacturing was promoted at the expense of the colonies, but economic development, as such, was not the objective 19th century: Western Europe and the USA made economic development a priority and tried to achieve it with a standard set of four policies: creation of a unified national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building transportation infrastructure; the erection of an external tariff to protect their industries from British competition; the chartering of banks to stablise the currency and finance industrial investment; the establishment of mass education to upgrade the labour force. --> the government play a critical role in promoting economic. and we can get to know that European countries had used the tarrif protection to thrive their economic before. also by boosting the transportation infrastructure and education section, along with the function of bank, economic can proliferate 20th century: the policies above proved less effective in countries that had not yet developed. most new technology is not cost-effective in low-wage countries, but it is what they need in order to catch up to the West. Most countries have adopted modern technology to some degree, but not rapidly enough to overtake the rich countries. the coutries that have closed the gap with West have done so with Big Push that has used planning and investment coordination to jump ahead. --> that can explain the Mattew Effect: as the rich will be richer, poor will get poorer.

Hollingsworth turns out to be a single-minded manipulator who plans to take over the colony for his own purposes. He is, in short, much like a number of real-life figures who succeeded in exploiting the utopian idealism of the era, “men of iron masquerading in Arcadian costume,” as one commentator has called them. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that such men “have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot.” In a time when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the Hollingsworths of the world—and the Strangs—offered firmness and strength; in a time when “all fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away,” they offered a sense of connection; and in a time of “everlasting uncertainty,” they offered absolute confidence.

In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.

Against the backdrop of frequent and highly visible gubernatorial vetoes in the colonial era, the Constitution carefully specified the procedures to be followed whenever the president sought to negative a congressional bill. Yet the document failed to specify comparable procedures to be followed when judges sought to void Congress’s output—a small but telling sign that the Founders, with little actual experience with judicial review, did not anticipate that the judicial negative would one day surpass the executive negative as a check on Congress.

The very prominent images of the Javanese aristocratic daughter Kartini learning ‘liberation’ from her Dutch correspondent... began a discourse of ‘female liberation’ as a modern western import... The reality of the high colonial period was however closer to the reverse. Up until the nineteenth century the great majority of Southeast Asian women had more latitude and agency than their European (or Chinese or Indian) counterparts, and played economic roles equivalent to (though different from) those of men.

Fortunately, such political theorists as England’s Blackstone and France’s Montesquieu had worked out on paper a solution. The government should consist of branches, chosen in different manners at different times for different terms of office, which would check and balance each other and would all have to agree before a proposition became law. Foreign theory and also American experience as it came down from the colonial era urged an executive, a legislature made up of two houses, and a judiciary.

The colonial era of the British imperialism and the handover of power to the Northern Nigeria oligarchy was a replication of the same oppressed leadership which existed during the colonial period. Since then, Nigeria has not been fully an independent nation.

Although the American Revolution cannot exclusively claim to have put Enlightenment ideals into practice, it can claim to have been the first to try to do so. The prospect that a modern nation could be founded on a shared set of ideas, rather than a shared Volk, history, language, or religion (which America had none of), seemed too impossible to achieve and sustain for many observers at the time, including some of the American revolutionaries themselves. Thus, before waging a fearsome war over the future of the colonies, a dramatic intellectual transformation had to occur first. As John Adams later put it: “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”19 Enlightenment thinking circulated through all of the highways and byways of the transatlantic republic of letters, catalyzing a radically new view of a progressive universe, and with it, the prospect that the future of humankind could look better than its past. It was crucial to revolutionary-era literate Americans, but it required another intellectual concept to turn its ideals into an actual model of a government and its people. “Liberty” was the key term, but also a hazy one. It was the invocation of the word “republican” that helped give colonists’ angry grievances and vague aspirations their radical form. What they meant by “republican” seems straightforward by modern standards, even indubitable. But for that time, it seemed both outrageous and utopian: namely, a government for the res publica (literally a “public matter” or “public affair,” which in eighteenth-century political thought became identified as “the public good”). What kind of government fosters and defends a public good? The “republican” answer was a government that is run by its citizens rather than one headed by a hereditary king.

In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.9

I imagined a ball, visitors coming in from all over England, or perhaps a house party. Most of my idea of old houses had come from Downtown Abbey, and I imagined women in delicate Edwardian dresses headed for dinner, ropes of pearls and rubies looped around their thin necks. As if to accommodate my vision, I opened one of the doors to find a peacock-themed room, redolent with the fading colonial era.

Our neighbor, Hugo du Toit, was a very handsome Afrikaner, who, with his two sisters, was a close friend of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and also a close friend of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924. He became a South African military leader during World War II. Although some accuse Smuts of having started apartheid, he later stood against it and was a force behind the founding of the United Nations. He is still considered one of the most eminent Afrikaners ever…. At his expansive farm house, Hugo had autographed photos of both men on his study wall. Parties were frequently held at my grandparents’ home and the thought of roasted turkeys and potatoes which Cherie had prepared, brings back warm memories of a delightful era, now lost forever.” The Colonial History of South Africa For many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them, as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English, the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899, costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty by signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902. Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued on for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party, was peacefully ousted when the African National Congress won a special national election. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.

Depois disto, a maior parte da agricultura africana não progrediu muito em comparação com as da Europa e da Ásia. E porque não? Uma teoria aponta para a carência de animais de tração com força para puxar arados. Argumenta-se que o clima e as doenças eram excessivos para que cavalos ou bois os aguentassem – não obstante parecerem hoje sobreviver, talvez mais bem protegidos pelo homem contra micróbios e predadores carnívoros. A maior parte de África foi deixada para o pastoreio, a pastagem e cultivo em pequena escala de tubérculos, que raramente produziam excedentes que chegassem para sociedades numerosas. Havia exceções. Uma era o Zimbabwe, uma civilização leste-africana que usava enormes blocos de pedra para as paredes dos palácios e cidades, no seu apogeu, entre 1250 e 1450. É provável que este povo viesse de Mapungubwe, um reino de criadores de gado e negociantes de ouro e marfim, situado na actual África do Sul, que já vivia em cidades com muros em pedra. O reino do Zimbabwe foi construído numa escala muito maior, na verdade, de tal dimensão que exploradores europeus posteriores se recusaram a acreditar que meros africanos pudessem haver sido os responsáveis. O Zimbabwe participara num próspero comércio costeiro, dominado pelo Islão, a religião e cultura que mais influenciou a África pré-colonial.

Em Paris, passeando de braço dado com uma noiva casual num outono tardio, quase não conseguia conceber felicidade mais pura que daquelas tardes douradas, com cheiro rústico das castanhas nos braseiros, os acordões sentimentais, os namorados insaciáveis que não acabavam de se beijar nunca na calçada dos cafés, mas mesmo assim dizia a si mesmo com a mão no coração que não se dispunha a trocar por tudo aquilo um único instante do seu Caribe em abril. Era ainda jovem demais para saber que a memória do coração elimina as más lembranças e enaltece as boas e que graça a esse artifício conseguimos suportar o passado. Mas quando voltou a ver do convés do navio o promontório branco do bairro colonial, os urubus imóveis nos telhados, a roupa dos pobres estendida a secar nas sacadas, compreendeu até que ponto tinha sido uma vítima fácil das burlas caritativas da saudade.

Since the colonial era, the governments of China and Burma/Myanmar have failed to provide consistent and tangible support to the Sino-Bumese, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is ‘based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with a vast army of spies and informers and agents provocateurs. Is this the atmosphere in which the more desirable virtues grow or democratic institutions flourish?’ Nehru went on to speak of ‘the crushing of human dignity and decency, the injuries to the soul as well as the body’ which ‘degrades those who use it as well as those who suffer from it’. These were hardly ways of instilling or promoting respect for democracy and its principles in India. This injury to India’s soul—the very basis of a nation’s self-respect—is what is always overlooked by apologists for colonialism.

The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in ‘criminal’ activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane.

Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many Indians. The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising ‘anti-Indian’ slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, and the filing of an FIR against Amnesty International in August 2016 on the same charges, would not have been possible without the loose, colonially-motivated wording of the law.

The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, better known as the American Colonization Society was a group established in 1816 by Robert Finley of New Jersey which supported the migration of free African Americans to the continent of Africa In 1822, the American Colonization Society established a new colony on the West Coast of Africa that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By 1867, the American Colonization Society had sent more than 13,000 black emigrants to this new country. Beginning in the 1830’s the society was harshly attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a scheme perpetrated by the slaveholder’s to rid themselves of any responsibility regarding the freeing of their former slaves. Of course this was true prior to the Civil War and laterr during the “Jim Crow” era! The concept had a sizable following of, southern whites, who thought of this as a way to rid America of a growing black population. Others felt that since the slaves were brought to America against their will that it was only right that they be returned to Africa. Paul Cuffee and other free Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to either give African and Native Americans the right to vote or to stop taxing them. Cuffee also advocated the return to Africa of freed slaves. Some years later, after the Civil War, many freed blacks actually wanted to go to the new country of Liberia to make a better life for themselves, however the money necessary to send them back, as could be expected, dried up. The entire program came to an end during the latter part of the 19th century when the American Colonization Society stopped transporting former slaves to West Africa and concentrated instead on educational and missionary efforts. Those blacks that did come from the United States and populated Liberia became known as the Americo-Liberians who soon become the ruling class of Liberia.

This creates potential confusion, because the French used Annam to indicate all of Vietnam as well as its central region alone. If a modern writer uses it, it probably means just the central area; if a colonial era writer uses it, it may mean either.

Agood part of the British case for having created India’s political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy’s building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipient parliamentary system and the rule of law. This trifecta, which India retains and has continued to develop in its own ways, existed in the colonial era, but with significant distortions, and is therefore worth examining.

They gave advice on alternatives to the standard food ration. “Make the root of rice plants into a powder and eat it! It’s rich in protein! . . . Arrowroot contains a lot of starch! . . . If you eat and survive, we can definitely prevail!” Useless information, all delivered with the usual histrionic exclamation marks. By that time, we’d been scouring the ground for ages for anything edible—acorns, mugwort, pine-tree bark. It was hellish stuff. You can use bark to make something vaguely resembling a rice cake. It was a dreadful thing. People had eaten it out of desperation at the end of the colonial era and again just after the Korean War. Times when people had no other choice. Times like the ones we found ourselves in.

Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of the Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization.

There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism now would be an error. There was a time when the cold war dicated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has the chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands.

Mas la sorpresa vino cuando puse atención en lo que esta- ba escrito en el folio mismo del cuadernillo, que separaba el volante. Se leía una lista de libros, donde el número once po- nía: Manuscrito pernicioso de los indios infieles de Ilabaya; y en corchetes le seguía una glosa en tinta azul moderna, hecha con un bolígrafo común de nuestros días: [Arte de los Qui- pus, 1574]. Enseguida saqué la nota de papel que aún conser- vaba arrugada en el bolsillo de atrás de mis vaqueros; la releí con mayor detenimiento y sentí que volvía a ser observada; me giré a mirar hacia la puerta y ésta se cerró con un golpe de viento. Un escalofrío recorrió mi cuerpo. Entonces pensé en cuestión de segundos cuál tendría que ser el paso a seguir. ¿Fotografiar estas listas?, ¿llamar a Salamanca a mi profesora, la doctora Del Pozo?, ¿llamar a Burgos y contárselo a María Con- cepción?, ¿guardar silencio?, ¿comunicarme con el de la carta?, ¿y si era una broma?, ¿quién me gastaría una broma así?, ¿me estaría poniendo a prueba el Padre José?. De pronto, mis pen- samientos consiguieron asociar la palabra ‘Inquisición’ impre- sa en el viejo volante, que hizo de separador en el cuadernillo, con aquella foto del folio de algún Índice colonial, que yo vie- ra en la exposición fotográfica itinerante del Museo de la Santa Inquisición el primer día que llegué al Perú. Yo había estado soñando con poseer ese libro pecaminoso, que supuse un Bes- tiario indiano. Pero el gran pecado del libro de Ilabaya parecía ir por el camino de dar luces a la escritura indígena, idólatra hijastra de Belcebú para ciertos inquisidores. Mi corazón casi detuvo sus latidos. Entonces clavé mis ojos en la poca luz que aún entraba por la claraboya del techo, y luego los cerré. Oí el zumbido de un moscardón, o tal vez sólo le imaginé. Resoplé. O suspiré. Mis cartas estaban echadas desde un principio".

Il sionismo, dalle prime fasi della sua evoluzione moderna sino alla creazione dello stato d'Israele, fece sempre appello a un'opinione pubblica europea, per la quale la classificazione dei territori d'oltremare e degli indigeni in classi inferiori era giusta e “naturale”. Ecco perché oggi ogni singolo stato o movimento di liberazione nelle ex colonie dell'Africa o dell'Asia comprende, si identifica e sostiene la lotta palestinese. In molti casi c'è un'indiscutibile coincidenza tra l'esperienza degli arabi palestinesi sotto il dominio sionista e la storia di quelle persone dalla pelle nera, gialla o scura che venivano descritte dagli imperialisti del XIX secolo come esseri inferiori e non propriamente umani.

Every one of these ideas though must be considered in the cultural context and time in which it was authored. All are by European men being exposed to the peoples of the world as a result of expanded trade routes, colonialization, and empire building, and in many cases the conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

​The system, as it exists today, is thought to be the result of developments during the collapse of the Mughal era and the British colonial regime in India.

I could never forget how excited I felt, as a student of anthropology in the early 1990s, to be entering a field that promised to mitigate racism in America. I fantasized about working alongside Indians to pursue deeper understandings of our colonial-era pasts as we gleefully dismantled whatever ideological machinery prevented us from truly seeing one another in the present. It was a noble and poetic vision which carried a generic promise of "making a difference" in the world. What I failed to foresee was that ideological machinery being ironically maintained by a morally elite stratum of antiquarians, archaeologists, and Indians in the twenty-first century.

Enero 9 Elogio de la brevedad Hoy se publicó, en Filadelfia, en 1776, la primera edición de Sentido común. Thomas Paine, el autor, sostenía que la independencia era un asunto de sentido común contra la humillación colonial y la ridícula monarquía hereditaria, que tanto podía coronar a un león como a un burro. Este libro de cuarenta y ocho páginas se difundió más que el agua y el aire, y fue uno de los papás de la independencia de los Estados Unidos. En 1848, Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels escribieron las veintitrés páginas del Manifiesto comunista, que empezaba advirtiendo: Un fantasma recorre Europa… Y ésta resultó ser la obra que más influyó sobre las revoluciones del siglo veinte. Y veintiséis páginas sumaba la exhortación a la indignación que Stéphane Hessel difundió en el año 2011. Esas pocas palabras ayudaron a desatar terremotos de protesta en varias ciudades. Miles de indignados invadieron las calles y las plazas, durante muchos días y noches, contra la dictadura universal de los banqueros y los guerreros.

Europe is a New modern era America's colony, European people are biggest victim of US policies because their leaders loyalty lies for US masters not for European people, for the last 20 years Europen people are paying cost for crises created by american policies, floud of millions refugees, Inflation, killing higher oil and gas prices, After all Their tax money is not for their health sector or to manage unemployment. Rather, it is used for the supply of weapons, for war, which is not their war. European countries are just like an army base of an over-ambitious power which wants to control world order. They have been exploited by the politics of fear.

In the early 1980s, historian Jon Halliday asked Genaro Carnero Checa, a radical Peruvian writer and frequent traveler to the DPRK who published a book on the country in 1977 entitled Korea: Rice and Steel, his honest opinion of North Korea. Checa replied, “They fought the North Americans; they have done incredible things in the economy; it’s the only Third World country where everyone has good health, good education and good housing.” Halliday then asked Checa about his view of North Korea as a poet. Checa said, “It is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life. As a poet, it strikes bleakness into my heart.” Checa’s statements reflect what many in the Third World thought of North Korea during the Cold War era. On one hand, this small nation overcame Japanese imperialism, brought the mighty U.S. military to a standstill in a three-year war, and rapidly rebuilt itself into a modern socialist state. For many struggling peoples in the Third World that recently overcame decades of Western colonialism and imperialism, North Korea’s economic recovery and military prowess were justifiably admirable. On the other hand, the oppressiveness and brutality of the North Korean political system undermined the appeal of the DPRK’s developmental model to the Third World. The growing inefficiencies of North Korea’s economic system also became too obvious to ignore. In fact, Kim Il Sung’s Third World diplomacy may have furthered the DPRK’s domestic economic troubles. A former member of the North Korean elite, Kang Myong- do, said after his defection to South Korea that “excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s already serious economic problems.

the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by the colonial government.

in the twenty-first century, with the era of traditional empires and colonies long since behind us, the word “nationalist” has become a label almost always employed to lend prestige to the behavior of people who tend to agree with everything their government says, have no other aim but to curry favor with those in power, and lack the courage to stand up to authority.

The colonial era propagated the concept of scarcity and competition to many inherently collaborative and cooperative cultures, replacing the idea of strength as a community with an obsessive focus on individualism. The ideology of isolationism and individualism is uniquely that of colonization. The world has suffered from excepting this ideology, systems of oppression easily stay in place and are unquestioned under this framework.

The colonial era propagated the concept of scarcity and competition to many inherently collaborative and cooperative cultures, replacing the idea of strength as a community with an obsessive focus on individualism. The ideology of isolationism and individualism is uniquely that of colonization. The world has suffered from accepting this ideology, systems of oppression easily stay in place and are unquestioned under this framework.

During his era, Franklin was America’s best-known and most admired person, in the colonies as well as in Europe:

The European Union is the biggest fraud in world history; it was created to capture all European land and resources by four power-hungry countries: the UK, Germany, France, and Italy. Small European Countries People are just happy that they can roam freely in Paris, Venice, and Berlin, but they have no idea how their governments are paying for this by mortgaging their sovereignty. They are not free nations but a modern-era colony of four power-hungry nations.

The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate in today’s postcolonial era. In the words of the historian Michael Wallace, the Columbus myth “allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”91

The preserved disrepair of colonial buildings are top selling points in tourist excursions throughout the world: colonial homes refitted as colonial-era hotels confer the nostalgic privilege of those who can pay their price; girls’ boarding schools are turned to the profit of “educational tourism”; slave quarters are now assigned as World Heritage sites; colonial ministries are updated as archival depots for the dissertation industry; plundered objects are refashioned as ethnological museums in metropolitan centers to valorize cultural difference. All are comforting affirmations that colonialisms are over, initiatives and gestures that firmly and safely consign those places and sometimes the people who once inhabited them as frozen icons of a shamed and distanced past.

Lo elegante era el ocio —es decir, el cultivo de la mente, la amistad y la conversación; la vida contemplativa—. Solo la medicina, incuestionablemente necesaria para la sociedad, logró imponer un tipo de formación propia. A cambio, los médicos padecían un claro complejo de inferioridad cultural. Desde Hipócrates a Galeno, todos repetían en sus textos el mantra de que un médico también es un filósofo. No querían dejarse encerrar dentro de su esfera particular, sino que se esforzaban por mostrarse cultos y calzar en sus escritos alguna cita de los poetas imprescindibles. Para los demás, las enseñanzas y las lecturas eran en esencia las mismas a lo largo y ancho del imperio, lo que creaba un poderoso factor de unidad colonial. Este modelo educativo permaneció vigente durante muchos siglos —el sistema romano fue solo una adaptación del mismo concepto—, y se halla en la raíz de la pedagogía europea.

The Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter has written about how the category of human came to be defined during the Enlightenment era: “Human” (the white economic man, the colonist, or the Man in “Man vs. Nature”) was defined against “nonhuman” in a moment of colonial exploitation, the results of which were recast as biological, atemporal conditions that explained the supposed racial traits of “backward,” “timeless,” or “less progressed” peoples who were not quite human.

when looking at the literature currently available, there seems to be much discussion on practical contemporary issues such as the sharing of resources or personnel, but very little on the history of Global/World relationships. Partnership is only mentioned in brief passages in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission or Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder’s Constants in Context. In J. Andrew Kirk’s What is Mission? an entire chapter is dedicated to this subject (chapter 10— “Sharing in Partnership”); however, only a few paragraphs are dedicated to how partnership has been understood historically. To date, the most complete study on this topic has been done by Lothar Bauerochse in his book Learning to Live Together: Interchurch Partnerships as Ecumenical Communities of Learning. Although Bauerochse’s main focus involves case studies on the relationships between German Protestant churches and their African partners, the first section entails an historical analysis of the term “partnership.” In his analysis, Bauerochse states that “the term partnership is a term of the colonial era . . . It is a formula of the former ‘rulers,’ who with it wished to both signal a relinquishment of power and also to secure their influence in the future. Therefore, the term can also serve both in colonial policy and mission policy to justify continuing rights of the white minority.”5 This understanding then serves as the lens through which he interprets the partnership discourse, reminding the reader that although the term was meant to connote an eventual leveling of power dynamics in relationships, it was also used by those with power to “secure their influence in the future.” This analysis is largely true. As we will see in chapter three, when the term partnership was introduced into the colonial debate, it was closely aligned with the concept of trusteeship. Later, as will be discussed in chapter six, the term partnership was also used in the late colonial period by the British as a way to maintain their colonies while offering the hope of freedom in the future; a step forward from trusteeship, but short of autonomy and independence. During colonial times, once the term partnership was introduced into ecumenical discussions, many arguments identical to those used by colonial powers for the retention of their colonies were used by church and missionary leaders to deny autonomy to the younger churches. Later, when looking at partnership in the post-World War