The Impacts of Colonialism on the Colonized and the Colonizer: A Study on E.M.Forster's A Passage to India and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (original) (raw)
The Industrial Revolution was a time of great age throughout the world. It represented major change from 1760 to the period 1820-1840. The movement originated in Great Britain and affected everything from industrial manufacturing processes to the daily life of the average citizen. The main industry at the time was the textile industry. It had the most employees, output value, and invested capital. It was the first to take on new modern production methods. The effects caused by the industrial revolution which has mentioned above, can lead to another impact such as the emergence of where the industry must obtain the availability of raw materials, and the next impact is where the result of the raw material processess by the industry will be marketed. For colonialism itself, generally it is the direct and overall domination of one country by another on the basis of state power being in the hands of a foreign power. Spesifically colonialism has two objectives, they are political domination and the second one is to make possible the exploitation of colonized country. This research aims to find out the colonialisms traits of the characters perform in their respective position, and to reveal the impacts of colonialism on characters.
AFRICAN EXPERIENCES OF COLONIALISM: A STUDY OF JOSEPH CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS
Imperialism and desire for expansion of empire across the globe by powerful empires caused the process of establishments of their colonies in the distant geographical spaces. It paved way to colonialism. It is a system of powerful colonial state to impose their hegemony over weaker countries. It initiated the large scale explorations of new continents. Colonialism came under the garb of trade and religion. The European powers like Rome,
3/22/12 5:59 PM Colonialism : Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Colonialism is both a practice and a worldview. As a practice, it involves the domination of a society by settlers from a different society. As a worldview, colonialism is a truly global geopolitical, economic, and cultural doctrine that is rooted in the worldwide expansion of West European capitalism that survived until well after the collapse of most colonial empires. Historically, colonies in the strict sense of "settlements" had existed long before the advent of global capitalism; the English word colony is derived from the ancient Latin term colonia, denoting an outpost or settlement. However, colonialism as a principle of imperial statecraft and an effective strategy of capitalist expansion that involved sustained appropriation of the resources of other societies, indeed regions, of the world for the benefit of the colonizing society, backed by an elaborate ideological justificatory apparatus, is a modern, West European invention par excellence, emerging from the 15th century onward. Colonialism involved a combination of several processes, recurring with remarkable consistency across various instances. Some of these were as follows: Encounter and repeated/sustained contact between the Western "discoverers" and the rest of the world, typically involving invasion, conquest, strategic genocide, the relegation of local rulers to subservient roles, and, eventually, some form of settlement by West Europeans. The surveying and scientific analysis of the geography, resources, peoples, and customs of the colonies, with the explicit intent of facilitating resource extraction and/or unequal exchange through forced trading. The imposition of extractive enterprises, such as plantations, mining, and other forms of raw-materialyielding activities, and the deployment of nonfree "native" labor in such enterprises. The systematic destruction of indigenous industries to transform the colonies into captive markets for European goods. Triangular trade (the hawking of European commodities to Africa, enslaved people to the Americas/the Caribbean, and plantation products to Europe). The establishment of modernizationist projects, such as the construction of elaborate transportation and information infrastructures, the introduction of private property in land, specific forms of taxation, and colonial law with the purpose of enabling the extractive and disciplinary apparatus of the colonial administration. The forced transfer and circulation of enslaved or indentured labor between colonies, or between regions within the same colony, disrupting culturally articulated modes of interaction between nature and people, and creating buffer populations between the colonizers and the locals. Creation of collaborationist/comprador colonial elites, mass educational systems, and public cultures that systematically facilitated the explicit alignment of ideas such as knowledge and progress with Western civilization, thereby producing the illusion of European superiority and the normalization of colonial relations. Continuous and systematic framing of colonized populations as the backward, inferior, dehumanized "other" of the enlightened European/White "self," and the use of the discourse of scientific racism to this end. In later phases of colonialism, warfare using colonial populations from one colony in armed incursions against other (potential) colonies. Prevention of the access of colonial subject populations to Europe.
Colonialism: The Rape of Minds and Nations
In 1972, the popular musical act War, wrote the following, "Don't you know that it's true, that for me and for you, the world is a ghetto." The song reached number seven on the Billboard charts. The lyrics resonated with the people. The irony of the band's name should not go unnoticed. Less than a hundred years before the nations of Europe viewed the world as their ghetto. In their quest for more resources, land, and wealth, they simply raped the minds and nations of those they viewed as inferior. In Niccolo Machiavelli's book The Prince, he wrote, "The end justifies the means." It appears European nations followed that creed by using whatever means necessary, including military force, 1 to extract everything they could from less powerful nations. Europe colonized wherever they could and made the world their ghetto.
The Praxis of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: An Outline
IJRAR - International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews, 2019
Postcolonial is a period of freedom and exemption from European colonial clutches and grasping. It is quite necessary to define the word 'colonialism' before understanding 'postcolonialism.' P K Nayar in his seminal book Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction projects light upon the etymology of the word as thus "The term 'colony' once meant something very different. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the fourteenth-century term, 'colonye,' derived from the Latin 'colon-us,' meaning farmer, cultivator, planter, or settler in a new country, was used to describe the Roman settlements in the fourteenth century" (1-2). Colonialism is a gradual process of settling down Europeans in various corners of the world and considering themselves superior to those where they settled down. They migrated to non-European countries and started forming colonies and began to establish their own rules and regulation and imposed upon the colonized. Sometimes it was quite harsh and, most of the time, inhuman. The process of migration is continued since the existence of the earth and human beings kept on moving in quest of a better life and safe places. But the eighteenth and nineteenth-century scenario is extremely awful and consternation where the colonizers moved to exploit the colonized places and contaminated the previously established social cultures and introduce their own. Let's see what OED reads, "Colonialism is an alleged policy of exploitation of backward, or weak peoples by a large power." Colonialism is a derogatory word and it is a sort of stigma on colonizers. It is the second name of cruelty, oppression, exploitation, hate, servitude, racism and inequality. Colonization is dreadful for native races, cultures and spaces. Their intention at the beginning of these settlers was just to trade and later, seeing the gullible and hospitable nature of the people, their cunningness came out and they invited several people from their country and gradually tried to control and train the native people in their own way. They came to trade with the permission of local Nawabs and rulers, but with the passage of time, these traders conquered those local nawabs and rulers and became the ruler of those areas and started subjugating the people of the area. Colonialism brought destruction for the native knowledge, culture, art and understanding. Colonizers started to command the economy, politics and society as per their crafty intention. They introduced massive changes by demoralizing Indian values, customs and practices. Native people began to see their own customs and rituals with susceptible eyes in which they used to believe firmly. In India, they replace dhoti, kurta, turban, saree with shirts, pants, coats, ties and gowns. The products of colonialism are hybrid; they oscillate between their native culture and colonial culture. The colonization process started forcefully but later on it impacted on the mentality of the native people. They began to subjugate mentally, making the natives considered inferior, uncivilized, illiterate and so on. P K Nayar, quoting the most famous Orientalist scholar Edward Said, says, "Colonialism cannot be seen merely as a political or economic 'condition': it was a powerful cultural and epistemological conquest of the native populations" (Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction 3).
Colonialism and postcolonialism
Much of the history of international relations is characterized by the violent attempts of one community to subjugate another. In 1955, Aimé Césaire wrote of the "great historical tragedy" that befell Africa in its encounter with European colonialism, an encounter that led Césaire to conclude that "Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in human history " (2000: 45). A range of important ethical issues emerges from a consideration of the past interaction between colonizing and colonized peoples, both in the African context and elsewhere in the world. This article first seeks to describe the key characteristics of colonialism as a system of domination and subjugation, before considering the legitimacy of contemporary judgments on the morality of historical colonialism. It then examines how the particular character of colonialism complicates arguments relating to the rectification of injustice. It concludes by asking what lessons those interested in ethics can learn from the diverse body of work produced by writers in the postcolonial tradition.
Colonial Gaze and Cultural Other: A Postcolonial Critique of Heart of Darkness
2016
The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in which a strong metropolitan centre rules distant territories. Imperialism is maintained with a mixture of power, tyranny and desire for a make belief just world. Colonialism is a political and historical reality in which a country is subjugated and politically controlled by a more powerful country, exercising exploitation, hegemony and violence, both physical and epistemic. Colonialism is an outcome of imperialism in which an imperial nation implants colonies in distant continents or territories and rule them by proxies or representatives. It is a politically turbulent system which divides the world into the binary opposites: the colonizer and the colonized. Culture is appropriated to validate the supremacy of the colonizers in colonial political structures. This is accomplished through constructing the colonized as the cultural Other of the colonizer in discourses. Thus, colonialism was...
UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST REVIEW. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2022
Despite accusations of racism and of upholding colonialism, Heart of Darkness reveals the problematic nature of the imperial enterprise. The dichotomy between superior versus inferior / us versus them / self versus other, embedded in colonial discourse, becomes challenging when considering that the foray into the Dark Continent reveals more about the character of Europeans. The outward journey of exploration of the still partially unknown Africa is mirrored by an inward journey that reveals the degenerate nature of the European identity. The geographical journey is doubled by an anthropological one towards our earliest origins as well as a psychological one towards the primitive self.