We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too… When my father’s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather’s name as surname. Wainaina.
Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura’s second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.
Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines – they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.
The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence.
There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.
I’ll tell you what colonial experience is.
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets.
I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors.
Famines were frequent in colonial India and some estimates indicate that 30 to 40 million died out of starvation in Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Bengal during the later half of the 19th century.
The denial with which many African leaders and communities greeted the appearance of HIV and AIDS across the continent in the 1990s is now considered a tragic mistake rather than a purposeful pushback against lingering colonial prejudice.
My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.
I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
These wars appear also to have given its death blow to colonialism and to imperialism in its colonial form, under which weaker peoples were treated as possessions to be economically exploited. At least we hope that such colonialism is on the way out.
Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old – from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British – even the largest do fall.
The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power.
The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans – all of the other major powers – keep slavery. And the fact is that it’s almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.
Once Europe’s colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization’s primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century – just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
My father was one of the fortunate wartime servicemen: he made a full recovery from his injuries, was promoted to captain, survived the war, had a satisfying career as a colonial officer and, eventually, died in February 2002, a month before his 85th birthday.
I read Gide’s ‘The Immoralist’ over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It’s written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.
Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers – there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.
I cite in my book countless examples of the foundational documents of the colonial period in America and the writings of the leaders, that this was intended to be a Christian nation.
The brank, or scold’s bridle, was unknown in America in its English shape: though from colonial records we learn that scolding women were far too plentiful, and were gagged for that annoying and irritating habit.
Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?
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