EDWARD SAID

Culture and Imperialism York University, Toronto, February 10, 1993

Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine and attended schools there and in Cairo. He received his B.A. from Princeton and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is University Professor at Columbia. He is the author of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, After the Last Sky, and Culture and Imperialism. I want to begin with an indisputable fact, namely that during the nineteenth century unprecedented power, compared to which the power of Rome, Spain, Baghdad or Constantinople in their day were far less formidable, was concentrated in Britain and France and later in other Western countries, the United States especially. This century, the nineteenth century, climaxed what has been called the "rise of the West." Western power allowed the imperial metropolitan centers at the end of the nineteenth century to acquire and accumulate territory and subjects on a truly astonishing scale. Consider that in 1800, Western powers claimed fifty-five percent, but actually held approximately thirty-five percent, of the earth's surface. But by 1878, the percentage was sixty-seven percent of the world held by Western powers, which is a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate by which the Western empires acquired territory had risen to an astonishing 247,000 square miles per year. And Europe held a grand total of roughly eighty five percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and Commonwealth, one of them of course being Canada. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis. As a result, says William McNeill, in his book The Pursuit of Power, "the world was united into a single interacting whole as never before." In Europe itself at the end of the nineteenth century scarcely a corner of life was untouched by the facts of empire. The economies were hungry for overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor and profitable land. Defense and foreign policy establishments were more and more committed to the maintenance of vast tracts of distant territory and large numbers of subjugated peoples.

When the Western powers were not in close and sometimes ruthless competition with each other for more colonies--and it's good to remind ourselves, that the great Scottish historian of empire, V.G. Kiernan has said, all modern empire imitate each other--they were hard at work settling, surveying, studying and of course ruling the territories under their jurisdiction. For citizens of nineteenth century Britain and France, unlike in America, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention. British India and French North Africa alone played a tremendous role in the imagination, the economy, the political life and social fabric of British and French society. If we mention names like Edmund Burke, Delacroix, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling, Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert or Conrad, we would be mapping only a tiny corner of a much larger reality than even their immense collective talents cover. There were scholars, administrators, travelers, traders, parliamentarians, merchants, novelists, theorists, speculators, adventurers, visionaries, poets, and every variety of outcast and misfit in the outlying possessions of these two imperial powers, each of whom contributed to the formation of a colonial actuality existing at the heart of metropolitan life. As I shall be using the term--and I'm not really too interested in terminological adjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory. "Colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As the historian Michael Doyle puts it, "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire." In our time direct colonialism of a kind of for example the British in India or the French in Algeria and Morocco has largely ended. Yet imperialism lingers where it often has been in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as its specific political, ideological, economic and social practices. The point I want to make is that neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. It's not just a matter of going out there and getting a territory and sitting on it. Both of these practices are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive cultural formations, that include ideas that certain people and certain territories require and beseech domination. For example, if you look at some of the writings about India in England from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, you realize that India existed in order to be ruled by England. As Kipling represented in his novel Kim, principally,

but also in some of the short stories, and he has Indian characters say this, without the English, India would disappear. It would just not the same place. So that these people and territories require domination as well as forms of knowledge that are affiliated with domination. The vocabulary of classic nineteenth century imperial culture in places like England and France is plentiful with words and concepts like "inferior" or "subject races." Notions of "subordinate people," of "dependency," of "expansion" and "authority." Out of the imperial experiences, notions about culture were clarified, reinforced, criticized or rejected. As for the curious but perhaps allowable idea propagated about a hundred years ago by the English historian J.R. Seeley that some of Europe's overseas empires were originally acquired by accident, it doesn't by any stretch of the imagination account for their inconsistency, persistence and systemized acquisition and administration, let alone their augmented rule and sheer presence. As David Landes has said in his book The Unbound Prometheus, which is about the industrial expansion of Europe in the early nineteenth century, "the decision of certain European powers to establish plantations, that is, to treat their colonies as continuous enterprises, was, whatever one may think of the morality, a momentous innovation." The primacy in the nineteenth century, and through most of the twentieth, of the British and French empires by no means obscures the quite remarkable modern expansion of Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan and, in a different way, Russia and the United States. Russia, however, acquired its imperial territories almost exclusively by adjacence, that is to say, taking territories that are east or south of the actual borders of Russia. Unlike Britain or France, which jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to other continents, Russia moved to swallow whatever lands or people stood next to its borders, which in the process kept moving further and further east and south. But in the British and French cases, the sheer distance of attractive territory summoned the projection of far-flung interests. That is my focus here, partly because I'm interested in examining the cultural forms and structures of feeling which it produces, and partly because overseas domination is the world I grew up in and we still live in But there's more than that to imperialism. There was a commitment to imperialism over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation which on the one hand allowed decent men and women from England or France, from London or Paris, to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated and, on the other hand, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the empire as a protracted, almost metaphysical

obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less advanced peoples. We mustn't forget, and this is a very important aspect of my topic, that there was very little domestic resistance inside Britain and France. There was a kind of tremendous unanimity on the question of having an empire. There was very little domestic resistance to imperial expansion during the nineteenth century, although these empires were very frequently established and maintained under adverse and even disadvantageous conditions. Not only were immense hardships in the African wilds or wastes, the "dark continent," as it was called in the latter part of the nineteenth century, endured by the white colonizers, but there was always the tremendously risky physical disparity between a small number of Europeans at a very great distance from home and a much larger number of natives on their home territory. In India, for instance, by the 1930s, a mere 4,000 British civil servants, assisted by 60,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians, had billeted themselves upon a country of 300,000,000 people. The will, self-confidence, even arrogance necessary to maintain such a state of affairs could only be guessed at. But as one can see in the texts of novels like Forster's Passage to India or Kipling's Kim, these attitudes are at least as significant as the number of people in the army or civil service or the millions of pounds that England derived from India. For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire, as Joseph Conrad so powerfully seems to have realized in Heart of Darkness. He says that the difference between us in the modern period, the modern imperialists, and the Romans is that the Romans were there just for the loot. They were just stealing. But we go there with an idea. He was thinking, obviously, of the idea, for instance in Africa, of the French and the Belgians that when you go to these continents you're not just robbing the people of their ivory and slaves and so on. You are improving them in some way. I'm really quite serious. The idea, for example, of the French empire was that France had a "mission civilisatrice," that it was there to civilize the natives. It was a very powerful idea. Obviously, not so many of the natives believed it, but the French believed that that was what they were doing. The idea of having an empire is very important, and that is the central feature that I am interested in. All kinds of preparations are made for this idea within a culture and then, in turn and in time, imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture. To a very great degree, the era of high nineteenth century imperialism is over. France and Britain gave up their most splendid possessions after World War II, and lesser powers also divested themselves of their far-flung dominions. That era clearly had an identity--for example, Eric Hobsbawm, in the third book of the trilogy of the Age of

Revolution, the Age of Capital, and the Age of Empire, talks about the latter part of the nineteenth century. Yet, although the age of empire clearly had an identity all of its own, and historians talk about it roughly from 1878 through World War II, the meaning of the imperial past is not totally contained within it, but has entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people. Its existence as shared memory in a highly conflicted texture of culture, ideology, memory and policy still exercises tremendous force. Franz Fanon says, "We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us." This was in 1961. "Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their dues when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the foreign colonists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than criminals." A proper understanding of imperialism must take stock also in the present of the nostalgia for empire, that is, you still find it in the writings of French and English historians, for example, who regret the day and the idea that we had to give India up, or that we had to withdraw from Algeria. That still exists. And what also exists is the anger and resentment it provokes, the memory of empire, in those who were ruled and who see in empire nothing but an unmitigated disaster for the native people. So we must try to look carefully and integrally at the culture that nurtured the sentiment, the rationale, and above all the imagination of empire. And we need also to understand the hegemony of imperial ideology, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become completely embedded in the affairs of cultures whose less regrettable features we still celebrate.