Colonial discourse recasts Western self-government as a capacity Orientals lack

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Western projects justify themselves by framing colonized peoples as incapable of self-improvement.; Colonial rulers reject native self-determination as beyond subject capacity; Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206 (+12 more)

Related

• Balfour denied Orientals any history of self-government (similarity 0.91)
• Balfour claimed Orientals never developed capacities for self-government (similarity 0.91)
• The idea that Eastern peoples cannot self-govern developed in the Enlightenment and persisted. (similarity 0.88)
• Twentieth-century intellectuals attributed laziness, mysticism, and statelessness to Orientals en masse (similarity 0.87)
• British colonial officials claimed Orientals were incapable of self-government (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial knowledge treats Orientals as a fixed Platonic essence (similarity 0.86)
• The Orientals-cannot-self-govern claim runs from Oriental despotism through modernization theory (similarity 0.85)
• Balfour framed Oriental civilization as incapable of self-government (similarity 0.85)
• Western projects justify themselves by framing colonized peoples as incapable of self-improvement. (similarity 0.84)
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.83)
• Western cultural discourse about the Orient is a formidable structure of domination. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial administrator attitudes toward the Orient formed a shared consensus (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial rulers framed nationalist leaders as misguided and unable to grasp their own interests (similarity 0.83)
• All Western writers treated the Orient as fixed, feminine, and needing redemption (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Colonial rulers reject native self-determination as beyond subject capacity #corroborates (0.95)
• Balfour denied Orientals any capacity for self-government in 1910 #exemplifies (0.95) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 202
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency #corroborates (0.88)
• Colonial powers cast nationalist leaders as misguided agitators to dismiss self-rule #exemplifies (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 204
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination #corroborates (0.82) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206
• Empiricist assumptions locked Orientals into unescapable determining origins #corroborates (0.78)
• Colonial knowledge treats Orientals as a fixed Platonic essence #complicates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 122
• Orientalist discourse reduces human plurality to a few fixed collective abstractions #complicates (0.72)