History of Colonialism – Institute for ReWriting World History

One hundred and sixty-nine years after colonial scholars first started rewriting India’s history, most Indians still don’t know the full story of colonialism.

_{Illustration: “Types de nez, de profil” from Éléments d’anthropologie générale}

_{By Pseudo-Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes
Published April 20, 2023}

Sometime in 1854, an English history book, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, Applied to Language and Religion, was published in the City of London, advertised as the essential facts in the emerging science of speech. Contained in the work was a nine-page section on “The Arian Settlers and Aboriginal Races of India” that claimed Sanskrit had been introduced in India by conquerors in some very remote age. The argument, likely borrowing from earlier research in racial classification in India, depended almost entirely on re-interpreting the Sanskrit word anâsas in liturgical texts to mean “noseless.” The colonial administrator Sir Herbert Hope Risley, working almost forty years after, later remarked “[n]o one can have glanced at the literature of the subject and in particular at the Vedic accounts of the Aryan advance without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India.” Measurements of noses were soon after used to order the patchwork of caste reporting practices in the 1901 Census of India.

These peculiar events were part of the pattern of colonialism. Universal histories were not uncommon—the Bible had been studied and debated in Europe for ages—but they had not been based on race. Colonial scholarship, which grew out of studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity” or the Humanities) during the early modern era, developed the idea of race in response to European colonialism, enabling in certain important ways forms of social existence that were commercialized, racialized and inherited. Large bodies of people—in some cases entire regions—came to be seen not as part of society at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though India had a long tradition of writing history, the nine-page section would nonetheless set the course for enduring perceptions of India as uniquely divided and oppressive.

^{The broadside pictured above shows a figure from Éléments d’anthropologie générale published in 1885 classifying ethnicity based on the ratio of the breadth of a nose to its height. Developed by the French anthropologist/anthropometrist Paul Topinard, “narrow” noses (Types 1–5) indicate European origin; “medium” noses (Type 6) are the “yellow races”; and “broad” are either African (Type 7) or Melanesian and Australian aboriginal (Type 8).}

No. 1/ Justice, War, and the Imperium

In the 15th century, the campaigns to ‘retake’ Iberia from the Moors—the Reconquista—began moving southwards into the coast of Africa. These campaigns, despite sharing many similarities with earlier expansions, started diverging from Christendom in Europe. In 1526, Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I), the King of Kongo, wrote a letter to João III, the King of Portugal, recording frustration about the permissiveness with which Portuguese trading agents established shops and the destabilizing effects of the salve trade. Later Pope Paul III, responding to more reports of abuse in the Indies, issued Sublimis Deus in 1537, declaring Indians and all other people who may be discovered were not to be “deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property.“ The papal bull, however, was largely circumvented, and later ignored as slavery became central to the Atlantic Economy. Eventually other European powers — the Netherlands, France, and England — began seeking overseas colonies similar to Portugal and Spain. With these efforts, a new model of power came into being. It was endorsed by the European powers and based on race, and it resulted in one of the most harrowing periods in history. Tens of millions of people died not only from disease and malnutrition but also brutal working conditions in European colonies. The exploitation of colonized regions helped bring the modern world into being, including colonial empires. In the colonized world, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statue, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of colonialism and ensure power.