Macaulay’s assimilationist formula captured the entire European colonial project, applied to Europe itself

Evidence

When the intellectually unremarkable Thomas Babington Macaulay famously said that the British in India need to create a “class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” he was not speaking on behalf of the British alone. His statement captured Europe’s colonial project in its entirety and, in light of my discussion earlier, Europe’s own internal history over the two preceding centuries. Algeria, like India and everything else, including Europe itself, had to be refashioned. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 237

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that Europe itself was being refashioned by the same project echoes the internal disciplining, self-construction themes from the surrounding book and from broader critiques of European self-invention (e.g. Foucault’s disciplinary society, and the civilizing mission turned inward).
• DEEPTHINKING: The striking move is flipping the familiar colonial formula back onto Europe itself — the colonizer’s self-fashioning as subject was the same operation applied to the colonized, making ‘us’ and ‘them’ two outputs of one machine.