Discourse on Colonialism Themes

Written in 1950, just after World War II and at the height of the third wave of Western European colonialism, Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism indicts Europe for brutalizing the rest of the world in pursuit of its own self-interest. However, Césaire also highlights how colonialism degraded Europe itself: by forcing Europeans to justify their inhuman brutality toward non-European nations, colonialism degraded the moral culture of European societies and baked racism into…

Ever since the Roman Empire, Europe has used the concept of “civilization” to justify colonizing places it has deemed “barbarian.” The word is still frequently used today, often to explain why so-called “Western” countries are wealthy and most “non-Western” countries are not. This common argument claims that because of the unique scientific, economic, philosophical, political, and religious advantages of “Western civilization” stretching back to Ancient Greece and Rome, “Western” countries have been able…

While he focuses on European colonialism in this book, Césaire also insists that this colonialism cannot be understood independently of its origins in and contributions to capitalism, the profit-oriented system of private ownership over resources, property, and technology (or, collectively, the “means of production”) that has dominated the global economy for several centuries. In turn, according to Césaire’s Marxist view of history and social change, stopping colonialism is impossible without stopping capitalism, which is…