For 200 years, the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the U.S. and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the historical injustices perpetuated by colonial powers and their continued impact on the oppressed peoples.
Martin Jacques' quote emphasizes the long-term consequences of colonialism, asserting that dominant powers like European nations, the United States, and Japan have historically exploited and oppressed other nations without facing consequences. It reflects on the moral obligation of these powers to acknowledge and address the injustices inflicted upon those they colonized, underlining the ongoing ramifications of such actions in contemporary society.
In practice
This quote could be used in a lecture about the impact of colonialism on modern politics.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.
For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
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