ABSTRACT
In 1910 Jules Harmand defended the colonist’s right to dominate native peoples by invoking what was to him an obvious cultural and racial hierarchy. For Harmand and countless others like him, colonial domination and subjugation of native peoples were, quite simply, a moral cause. European imperialists-most notably Victorian England-believed it to be their moral duty to dominate the less civilized, for in English culture the human species had found its perfect form. Harmand’s perspective remains remarkable for its crystal-clear articulation of this ideology, an ideology that when practiced as a pedagogy of oppression justified a racist and violent ideological hierarchy upon the dominant culture’s ability to institutionalize itself rhetorically. Industrial powers-military and economic-were the concrete manifestations of Victorian “rhetorics of power” that made obvious and real the European right to dominate and subjugate the vast majority of the world’s population.1 Harmand spoke for a dominant culture that believed itself to be at its zenith when he wrote,
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said describes the ideological and epistemological underpinnings of European imperialism “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” For the imperialist, the Orient represents the construction of an ideological idea as much as a reconstruction of the actual physical, geographical space of the colonized. The imperialist invents the colonized and then sells this ideological invention to them a product of an advanced civilization. Understanding the way in which Victorian culture dominated its empire requires an understanding of the ways in which the whole network of interests that Europeans invested in overseas represented an ideological discourse by which “European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period…. The Orient was essentially an idea.”3 Imperialism, therefore, is an entire fabric for which the weaving requires that “all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then in turn imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture.”4 Above all, imperialism and the ideology of empire begins at home.
