Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque and India's Cries to British Humanity

COLONIAL VOICES Revised First Edition Edited by M. L. Brillman Florida International University Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Kassie Graves, Director of Acquisitions Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor Jess Estrella, Senior Graphic Designer Carrie Montoya, Manager, Revisions and Author Care Kaela Martin, Associate Editor Natalie Lakosil, Licensing Manager Joyce Lue, Interior Designer Abbey Hastings, Associate Production Editor Copyright © 2017 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. Cover image: Copyright © in the Public Domain. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-5165-1521-9 (pbk)/ 978-1-5165-1522-6 (br) CONTENTS Introduction ix PART I: INITIAL ENCOUNTERS Journal of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage 3 Christopher Columbus An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies 17 Bartolomé de Las Casas PART II: WOMEN The True History of the Conquest of New Spain 45 Bernal Diaz del Castillo Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque 55 Fanny Parks India’s Cries to British Humanity 61 James Peggs Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military 65 Maria Rosa Henson PART III: SLAVERY Equiano’s Travels 85 Olaudah Equiano The Negro in the Caribbean 117 Eric Williams PART IV: ECONOMICS Imperialism: A Study 127 J. A. Hobson Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism 149 V. I. Lenin PART V: LITERATURE The White Man’s Burden 167 Rudyard Kipling Orientalism 173 Edward W. Said PART VI: EDUCATION The Education of a British-Protected Child 189 Chinua Achebe Minute on Education 205 Thomas Babington Macaulay PART VII: NATIONALISM On the Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland 219 Douglas Hyde Indian Home Rule 229 Mohandas K. Gandhi The Wretched of the Earth 255 Frantz Fanon Speech, September 15, 1956 269 Gamal Abdel Nasser PART VIII: SOVEREIGNTY The Declaration of Independence 279 Thomas Jefferson The Haitian Declaration of Independence 289 J. J. Dessalines The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam 295 Ho Chi Minh The Rivonia Trial Speech to the Court, April 20, 1964 301 Nelson Mandela For My Parents, Jon and Diane Introduction inston Churchill, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Leo S. Amery, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Simón Bolívar, Miguel Hidalgo, Salman Rushdie, Benedict Anderson, Arthur James Balfour, Túpac Amaru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Francisco Pizarro, Aimé Césaire, Cecil John Rhodes, WAlexis de Tocqueville, Robert Mugabe, Jan Christian Smuts, Kwame Nkrumah, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jomo Kenyatta, Arthur Griffith, Ashis Nandy, Haile Selassie, Dadabhai Naoroji, Reginald Dyer, Robert Emmet, C. L. R. James, Daniel O’Connell, William Ewart Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria, V. S. Naipaul, Edmund Burke, Benito Mussolini, Roger Casement, Joseph Chamberlain, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Annie Besant, King Leopold II, David Cannadine, Adam Smith, José Morelos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Emperor Lin Zexu, Wole Soyinka, Theodore Roosevelt, George Orwell, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Bob Marley, Vo Nguyen Giap, Fela Kuti, Charles de Gaulle, Gustave de Beaumont, James and John Stuart Mill, and Margaret Thatcher. The preceding very lengthy list contains some colonial voices that had to be omitted from this volume in the interest of space. Obviously, the assortment above is not exhaustive; a hundred more names could easily be added. Before addressing the selections that are actually included in this book, however, some terms should be defined. Students will sometimes use “imperialism” and “colonialism” interchangeably, when they are not precisely the same things. Imperialism occurs when the government of one nation controls the political, economic, or public life of another. Colonialism, by contrast, possesses the charac- teristics of imperialism, plus settlement. In other words, inhabitants of the metropole take up residence in the periphery. Nigeria, Egypt, and Palestine were all examples of imperialism. Canada, Haiti, and Algeria were cases of colonialism. I have attempted to use each where appropriate while avoiding as much monotony or repetition as possible. Within this nomenclature, a further dissection is necessary. In the British context, for example, there existed different forms of colonial authority, namely crown colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. Crown colonies were governed directly from Westminster, especially if they had proven to be rebellious. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 constituted two such episodes, and these crown colonies were under the jurisdiction of the India Office and the Colonial ix Office, respectively. Protectorates were semiautonomous areas “protected” by government mandate, under which a European resident essentially oversaw law and order. Egypt exemplified a protectorate. Spheres of influence were not instances of imperialism in the traditional sense, but could have far- reaching and devastating economic effects nonetheless. European powers negotiated through “gunboat diplomacy,” whereby they dictated their terms of trade with the threat of force at the ready. China and Argentina were examples of British spheres of influence in the 19th century. Victorians neither inhabited nor even occupied Peking or Buenos Aires, yet exerted tremendous pressure to the capitals’ economic detriment. French imperialism differed from that of Britain mainly in its conceptions of those over whom they governed. Natives who would have been considered mere subjects in the British Empire theoretically were granted citizenship in the French republic. How often, or to what extent, this was actually put into practice remains elusive. The trickiest part—racially, anyway—was convincing natives in Senegal or Guadeloupe that they were of the same stock and civilization as the Gauls. Britain and France became the largest beneficiaries of colonial expansion, but other powers included Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Japan, and the United States. After 1871, Germany became Europe’s most industrialized nation. Japan had begun its modernization process in 1868, and took the lead among Asian economies by 1900, the year in which the United States eclipsed all European nations as the world’s most productive economy. What were the reasons for imperialism and colonialism? Was there something more complex, more ambiguous, or more sinister to it all than economic exploitation pure and simple; a capitalist monopoly over an underdeveloped world? The advent of the Industrial Revolution placed enormous economic and technological demands on the state. These demands could be met by European expansion across the world; something akin to Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System theory, with three distinct economic zones: the core (which dominated the world politically and economically); a semi-periphery with skilled labor; and a periphery (with unskilled, often coerced labor that contributed basic com- modities such as agricultural products and raw materials).1 Thus, along with industrialization came an increased demand for natural resources such as rubber, oil, copper, manganese, or bauxite. Europeans extracted food from subsistence farmers, forcing them to buy “imported” food that they might have pre- viously grown themselves. Europeans—or more precisely, their colonial subjects—cut trees, dug mines, and drilled oil. In terms of infrastructure, they strung telegraph lines, laid rails, and built harbors and processing and manufacturing plants in the colonies to turn raw materials into more useful things for European and American consumers. Local industries were ruined by the competition posed by cheap Westernized machine-made products. The Indian cotton textile industry, for example, which had been pre-eminent in the 18th century, was decimated by the mills of northern English industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham in the 19th century, and Indians were forced to buy cloth rather than sell it as Britain opened up the subcontinent commercially. The empire, therefore, served as a web of new markets for the production of industrialized European manufactures. Colonies, moreover, provided excellent sources of cheap labor for other colonies, particularly through the transmigration of South and East Asian coolie labor to destinations such as South Africa and the Caribbean. Displaced colonials would work more cheaply than unionized European workers. These coolies often extracted, processed, and shipped resources from the colonies back to Europe. 1 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). x | Colonial Voices There were also political and military reasons: strategic areas were sought for defense. British and Russian imperial interests, for example, clashed in the Great Game for Iran and Afghanistan because the British believed that the overland route to India could not be left unprotected. Similarly, the British wrested control of the Suez Canal,

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