Colonialism’s engine was its underlying thought structure, not its technology

Evidence

The driving engine of colonialism was not, as most military and other historians think, the Maxim machine gun, the steamship, or even a new form of bureaucratic and administrative management. The driving engine was the structure of thought that made all these and many others like them possible. To focus on the machine gun and its massively destructive power is to miss the point altogether. To focus on the Euro-American Orientalist text as an epitome of misrepresentation and on its collusion with political and economic power—as Said and others believe—is merely tantamount to saying that the Europeans and Americans invented the destructive machine gun but merely happened to have used it for conquest. This tells us nothing new. What matters most is nothing short of an interrogation into why the machine gun was invented in the first place; what made it possible, as an idea? What was the thought system that shaped the minds of the inventors? What was the relationship between this thought system and the purpose of invention? What was the relationship between the machine gun and the steamship, between the steamship and the misrepresenting text? If the misrepresenting text was “reinforced” by political and colonialist power, how did it turn itself around and reinforce, nay, make possible, that lethal power? To speak of such a text as being reinforced by power and as failing to engage the dispassionate scholarship that it claimed to embrace is in effect to say that the use of the machine gun merely tells of the violent disposition of its user, and that a machine gun’s raison d’être is to maintain the peace, the very condition that would have made the very conception of the weapon impossible. Once the full implications of the narrative this chapter has offered regarding colonialism and its Orientalism are appreciated, it will be clear that Said insisted on drawing a picture in which the tail wags the dog. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior reading on how idea-systems (communication technology claims, law-merchant institutions, rational-choice frameworks) precede and enable material outcomes rather than merely following them. — connects to: Cultural imperialism is driven by science’s demand for legitimation, not by material conquest — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 235; The enclosures, not the steam engine, caused the Great Transformation — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 280
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense inversion of the standard ‘power co-opts knowledge’ picture: the text is not reinforced by power but is itself the condition making the machine gun conceivable.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 270