Colonization was framed as organic self-reproduction of mature societies

Evidence

A society colonizes, when itself having reached a high degree of maturity and of strength, it procreates, it protects, it places in good conditions of development, and it brings to virility a new society to which it has given birth. Colonization is one of the most complex and delicate phenomena of social physiology. … Colonization is the expansive force of a people; it is its power of reproduction; it is its enlargement and its multiplication through space; it is the subjection of the universe or a vast part of it to that people’s language, customs, ideas, and laws. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 550

Categorization

• DEFINE: Leroy-Beaulieu’s biological metaphor is a core building block of the colonial vocabulary that Said is reconstructing — useful to carry forward.
• CANDY: The sheer rhetorical audacity of describing colonization as ‘giving birth to a new society’ is striking enough to quote in conversation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this organic conception of colonization as reproduction prefigure later biopolitical framings of empire?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 550