Mental captivity and resistance lessons from Taiwanese anti-colonialism

Abstract

From the sixteenth century to the present, imperialist domination has taken many forms—plunder, trade, annexation, spheres of influence, corporate investment, international aid—all serving the same end. What Peter Worsley wrote about formal colonies also applies to earlier and later manifestations of imperialism in the Third World: “It is no ideological assertion; but a simple generalization rooted in empirical observation, that the prime content of colonial rule was economic exploitation.” Yet despite the common goal of all phases of imperialism, the experience of peoples under colonial rule from the 1880s through World War II had a unique quality. Devastation wrought by plunder or unequal trade may be as great or greater than the kind of damage done to a people by colonial government. But subjugation of a people to direct alien rule—the direct regulation of the lives of the colonized by the colonizer—brings with it special dimensions of exploitation.

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Notes on contributors

E. Patricia Tsurumi

I wish to thank Jan Walls for reading and commenting upon this essay in an earlier form and Donald Burton for encouraging me while I was writing it. I am deeply indebted to Eng-kiang Ching and Muggs Sigurgeirson for teaching me so much about resistance to mental captivity. This paper also owes a considerable debt to the work the economists Giovanni Arrighi and John S. Saul have done on Africa.