Balfour denied Orientals any capacity for self-government in 1910

Evidence

First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government … having merits of their own… . You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries—and they have been very great—have been passed under despotisms, under absolute governments. All their great contributions to civilization—and they have been great—have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motivation establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 202

Categorization

• XREF: Direct primary-source evidence that the same Balfour who authored the Declaration on Palestine held the racist denial of Eastern self-rule — bridging the reader’s Palestine question with imperial ideology. — connects to: Balfour’s 1910 speech exemplifies the knowledge-power nexus of British empire; Orientalist scholarship produced knowledge about the Orient that Orientals themselves did not possess — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 341; Twentieth-century intellectuals attributed laziness, mysticism, and statelessness to Orientals en masse (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how the Balfour Declaration’s Zionism and this 1910 denial of self-rule connect to the domestic English politics of the era.