Talk:Colonialism

From Wikiquote
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Quote[edit]

This is noteworthy and should be added to this topic. Does anyone have any views for or against this proposition? --2001:8003:4085:8100:1551:D6CF:22D5:8411 07:59, 16 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How is notewrothy? Rupert Loup 13:49, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
It is noteworthy because it states that China has been engaging in its own colonialism in Africa. --2001:8003:4085:8100:989E:A97D:F2C6:A1A7 02:56, 17 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't present evidence of notabilty it won't be added. Rupert Loup 04:11, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
the evidence for notability is here. Take a look. --2001:8003:4085:8100:989E:A97D:F2C6:A1A7 04:22, 17 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Moving some quotes here from the main page[edit]

As suggested by BD2412 I will show removed material on this talk page so that others can consult it and make their own assessments.

  1. Controversial but not very quotable words by w:Bruce Gilley removed from the A section, it would be good to find a more quotable quote from Gilley and put it into the G section though.

    In times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-government, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally indefensible.

  1. Not a "sourced notable quotation"

* It was all deceit, all lies and chicanery. Could one have done something about it? To complain, to confront the supervisor? It would be to no avail. Then one would lose one's chance to be promoted. To work hard, to do one's duty, duty animal, duty bastard and to deceive for the benefit of the company and your own. In this way everything of value was destroyed. Nature itself withered, was just an obstacle and no more than that. And the blacks, they were black cattle who you had to treat harshly, rigidly and cruelly; you had to keep them under your thumb and make sure that they did not steal from you. With kind words? O, No! With bestial toughness and with lots of beatings. Yes, sure, ultimately you had to become a torturer, to beat your fellow human beings with dried out rhinoceros skin until they started bleeding, these hard long, dirty-yellow sticks with which you could hit so hard that whole muscle groups were torn apart. The shares stood a lot above par and there they should stay. You had sold yourself, so duty-animal, duty-scoundrel! Duty-torturer! And all the profit to the company.

  1. Considerable digging unearthed the source of two quotes from the B, Pepijn Brandon and Aditya Sarkar, Introduction to “Labour History and the Case against Colonialism,” International Review of Social History 64 (2019): 73-109. I don't disagree with them, but neither Pepijn Brandon nor Aditya Sarkar is notable. I am leaving one of their quotes because it is at least colorful and quotable, but removing this one because it fails WQ inclusion criteria on every count.

*One of the driving forces of the colonial project at large was the extraction of natural resources and the cheap supply of precious commodities through the labour of the colonized.

  1. Rmv 3 non-quotable pieces of 1992 POV-pushing by a non-notable author. Maybe one of these should be restored for its POV, but the three of them essentially repeat the same thought in different words.
  • The argument that colonization accounts for Africa’s poverty is so easily refuted that it should have gone out of currency long ago.
  • To believe that colonization thwarted the economic development of Africa is to believe that indigenous societies were on their way towards prosperity but were brutally shoved off course by Europeans. In fact, African societies south of the Sahara that had not had contact either with Europeans or with Middle Eastern traders showed no signs of modern development. No pre-contact African society had devised a written language or had discovered the wheel. None had a calendar, or built multi-story buildings. No African had learned how to domesticate animals. The smelting of iron was widespread, as was fire-hardened pottery, but the continent did not produce anything that could be called a mechanical device.
  • It is possible to argue that Africans might have been better off if they had been left entirely alone. This is to take a romantic view of the disease, tribal warfare, slavery, and ignorance that were widespread on the continent. Moreover, no African group that has glimpsed the possibilities of Western progress has opted to return to purely African primitivism. This suggests that Africans themselves would rather have the benefits of Western technology than do without them. Given that people naturally yearn for medical advance and material progress, colonization was an obvious and striking benefit to Africa.
  1. I also put the B section into alphabetical order by author's last name.

I will come back to this later but here is a start on my trying to improve the article. HouseOfChange (talk) 12:43, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  1. The C section has two long passages from Cesare; I trimmed them for "quotability." Showing the entire quote here, with the part I removed in italics.

* What, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies

  • First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
  1. Moved quote by C. L. R. James from F section to J section
  1. Removed 1938 quote from Sylva de Jonghe not notable or particularly well-expressed outdated defense of colonialism:

* The colonial is everything related to the Colony, to the profit region, which is exploited by a more advanced and more civilised country, in order to civilise the colony and to uplift the population. Indeed, civilization seems to be the first objective of colonization. Civilizing means the creation of a new and better social environment and the spreading of the greatest of all benefactions: spirituality and Christianity

  1. Rmv non-notable and non-quotable expression of the conventional opinion that learning about colonialism is a good thing.

* On the other hand, the European authors of this article consider that they have a responsibility concerning the misdeeds of colonialism in Africa. Like Italy, Spain also resorted to a strategy of scorched earth in its colonies, including the use of poison gas (Kunz and Müller 1990). As in other Mediterranean countries, the Spanish massacres in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea (Pando Despierto 1999; Guerín 2008) have been deleted from cultural memory and replaced by nostalgic accounts of the empire. We have to help construct a critical memory that reviews the works of totalitarianism and racism in other continents, because our societies have to learn about a history that has been so often forgotten, sanitized or sweetened through popular films, books and magazines. ‘These new visual and textual formations... today shape the mental geography and the imaginary of people who travel blindly and unencumbered through geographic and historical space. As temporal distance increases, these popular constructions may even, one day, be regarded as factual truth and assimilated as knowledge by those who have only a remote inkling of colonial history’ (Norindr 1996: 158). By exposing colonialism, we may contribute to rethink its legacies in the present.

  1. There is interspersed throughout a lot of quoting and commentary on Bruce Gilley; it would be clearer to put all that material together into its own section rather than breaking it up alphabetically. And the sourcing provided needs to be better, many links go to the same URL which is an article by Geddes that does not in fact include the responses of others. But I haven't done that yet. HouseOfChange (talk) 14:08, 26 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We already have a Bruce Gilley page[edit]

Wikiquote has a separate Bruce Gilley page with quotes from Gilley's controversial work and also quotes from his commentators and critics. There is no need to replicate that debate here in Colonialism. Therefore I am removing from this page some non-notable and not very quotable longer passages:

  1. (one of 2 quotes from Gilley)

    Research that is careful in conceptualizing and measuring controls, that establishes a feasible counterfactual, that includes multiple dimensions of costs and benefits weighted in some justified way, and that adheres to basic epistemic virtues often finds that at least some if not many or most episodes of Western colonialism were a net benefit, as the literature review by Juan and Pierskalla shows. Such works have found evidence for significant social, economic, and political gains under colonialism: expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identify formation, to mention just a few dimensions.

  2. Quote attributed to "Hechter" by Gilley, although it is in fact Gilley's paraphrase of Michael Hechter in 1 The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics, Page 26 Hechter, 2013, p. 141*Alien rule has often been legitimate in world history because it has provided better governance than the indigenous alternative.
  3. Gilley's paper cites Martin Klein for this statement, but Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts, 2006 is a collection of papers that Klein was claiming to summarize, something Gilley disputes. The referencing to The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics, Page 10 Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, 2006] is very bad, and the placement of the quote in the O section is head-scratching.

    The vast majority of employees of the colonial state were Africans, but those Africans did not necessarily work for colonial rulers because of affection for them.

  4. Here Gilley quotes from the introduction of 2006 book by Lawrance, Osborn, & Roberts, again hard to see why it is listed in the O section. I am going to keep this relevant and somewhat quotable quote but move it to the L section.

    Africans used the new opportunities created by colonial conquest and colonial rule to pursue their own agendas even as they served their employers.

  5. Berny Sèbe is not notable and this "quote" is incoherent.

    *While my research certainly offered an innovative framework of interpretation in an attempt to make sense of the resurgence of European imperial heroes in Africa, my argument that this new trend reflects a ‘post-racial form of cosmopolitan nation-building’ cannot be interpreted in any way as supporting, implicitly or explicitly, a case for colonialism.

  6. Here's more context for a short quote I removed from the R section, in Gilley's text: "My quotation of a young black man in Congo from van Reybrouck—“When are the Belgians coming back?” which he reports was “a widely heard lament” that he heard “countless times” when he was there in 2010..," It would be better to include this quote in the context given to it by w:David van Reybrouck "When are the Belgians coming back? After all, you're our uncles, aren't you?" Shorn of its 2010 context, the quote is used misleadingly by Gilley.

*When are the Belgians coming back?

Lenght of quotes[edit]

The limit of words is 250 according with Wikiquote:Quotability#Length, I disagree with the butchering of quotes which strips them of their original meaning. Robin Loup (talk) 02:52, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Quotes are supposed to be notable and or quotable. The text I removed from the quote (A striking example of this effect is the fact that synthetic fabrics manufactured in the capitalist metropoles have begun to replace fabrics made from raw material grown in the colonies. In other words, (within certain limits) it is the technologically advanced metropoles who can decide when to end their dependence on the colonies in a particular sphere. When that happens, it is the colony or neo-colony which goes begging cap in hand for a reprieve and a new quota. It is for this reason that..) was pure boring blather. It did not add to the quotabilty or notability of what remained. Removing those words improved the quotability and interest of what remained: "There is a substantial difference between the dependence of the metropoles on the colonies and the subjugation of the colonies under a foreign capitalist yoke. The capitalist countries are technologically more advanced and are therefore the sector of the imperialist system which determined the direction of change...a formerly colonized nation has no hope of developing until it breaks effectively with the vicious circle of dependence and exploitation which characterizes imperialism." The extremely long quotes from Rodney's 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (which you recently added to his WQ article) may merit more length there as expounding his own POV. But in a themed article, WQ's object is not to expound this or that POV but to provide people interested in the theme with pithy quotable quotes. I welcome the opinions of other editors on this matter. HouseOfChange (talk) 03:33, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think that you are right. Robin Loup (talk) 03:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Colonialism&oldid=3365363"