White Commonwealth members viewed non-white imperial territories as private property, not partners

Evidence

The eminent South African writer, Jan Disselboom, expressed very bluntly the attitude of the Commonwealth peoples on this question: “Great Britain is merely a partner in the concern …all descended from the same closely allied stock… Those parts of the Empire which are not inhabited by races of which this is true, were never partners in the concern. They were the private property of the predominant partner… You can have the white dominion, or you can have the Dominion of India, but you cannot have both.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2194

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supplies a colonial-era articulation of the race-based distinction between settler dominions and exploited colonies — carries over to the Islamophobia field’s account of the imperial construction of racialized Others.
• SEED: The ‘white dominion or Dominion of India, but not both’ framing is a crisp primary-source quote for an essay on how imperial racial rankings prefigured modern citizenship hierarchies.