Colonial science and exploration were intertwined with genocidal brutality

Evidence

But it was only in the later eighteenth century that the scientific comparative study of languages really got under way. Out of the English conquest of Bengal came William Jones’s pioneering investigations of Sanskrit (1786), which led to a growing realization that Indic civilization was far older than that of Greece or Judaea. Out of Napoléon’s Egyptian expedition came Jean Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics (1835), which pluralized that extra-European antiquity. Advances in Semitics undermined the idea that Hebrew was either uniquely ancient or of divine provenance. Once again, genealogies were being conceived which could only be accommodated by homogeneous, empty time. ‘Language became less of a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves.’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 289 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial violence foreshadowed the Holocaust as a preliminary laboratory; Colonial ‘scientific study’ projected the very savagery it claimed to find — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 887; Colonial exploration expanded monster-making rather than dispelling it with science — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 236 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial conquests powered the scientific comparative study of languages. #complicates (0.74) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 289