Europeans were epistemological colonizers before any actual colonial deployment

Evidence

Around the time of the American Colonization Society’s founding, European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa (as well as Asia). English, French, German, and Portuguese armies fought African armies throughout the nineteenth century, trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 394 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Knowledge about the colonized became central to conquest only with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion; Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 218; Europeans regarded the colonized as creatures of nature rather than culture — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1401 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• European colonization of Africa preceded and required the racist ideas justifying it #complicates (0.74) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 394