Empire justified commodity circulation by inventing a barbarous other needing civilization

Evidence

The analysis of imperial ideology and practice sees quite readily that Africa has always had a special place in the European imagination, that the stereotypes of the Dark Continent provided a focus for the energies of imperial annexation and oppression around the world (Brantlinger, 1988). It also reveals the extent to which the present system of global capital has a cultural base in the marginalizing rhetoric of imperialism; its constant need to invent an abject other for the civilized world in order to justify the circulation of commodities and growth of profit. In economic terms this other is assumed to have “need” for commodities, for the need for commodities is universal. But in ideological terms the supply of these commodities must be buttressed by the hegemonic distinction of the civilized and the barbarous; the spread of capitalism becomes synonymous with the destruction of barbarism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3440

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that global capital itself rests on a cultural base of imperial marginalizing rhetoric — that economic exchange needs an ideological buttress of civilized/barbarous distinction — is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the critique of how the West defined itself against a constructed ‘other’; also resonates with the criticism of Islamophobia as a class/identity signaling in my existing notes. — connects to: Mandate-era thinkers equated civilization with investor-friendly contract and property law — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 91