أميرة’s Reviews > English and the Discourses of Colonialism > Status Update

ELT is a product of colonialism not just because it is colonialism that produced the initial conditions for the global spread of English but because it was colonialism that produced many of the ways of thinking and behaving that are still part of Western cultures. ELT not only rode on the back of colonialism to the distant corners of the Empire but was also in turn produced by that voyage.

“Césaire (1972) argues that Europeans are all complicit with Nazism since ‘before they were its victims, they were its accomplices’. Europeans tolerated Nazism ‘before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then it had been applied only to non-European peoples. Nazism was nothing less than the barbarity of colonialism brought back to its European home.

While Hitler’s mad genocide lasted less than a decade and murdered six or more million men, women and children, the British imperial opium system in Asia began in Bengal in 1757, with a solid market going in China in the 1780s, until World War II, the better part of two centuries, and killed an incalculable number but surely in the hundreds of millions.