Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:14:31.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Racism, Colonialism and Slavery as International Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2024

Parthasarathi Shome
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Get access

Summary

Introduction

This chapter attempts to reveal how racism and colonialism have comprised important factors in the genesis of poverty and inequality across the world. It would be pertinent to begin with a quote from Gilroy (2019):

Du Bois had learned about the world's ‘race problems’ by placing colonial rule, the Third Reich and the US racial order in historical, moral and conceptual relation. (p 3) The widespread appeal of racialised group identity and racism, often conveyed obliquely with a knowing wink, has been instrumental in delivering us to a situation in which our conceptions of truth, law and government have been placed in jeopardy. (p 1)

The attractiveness of generic racial identities is part of a psycho-political shift that has encouraged fascination with ossified culture: lacking vitality but easily regulated. The invocations to whiteness now circulating in Europe are freighted with notions of victimage and vulnerability. (p 2)

This chapter will pursue arguments along the earlier-mentioned lines in an attempt to establish their roles in perpetrating poverty and inequality.

Genesis of poverty and inequality

A reflection on the incidence of poverty and inequality globally leads to an inevitable conclusion, that they are not self-generated but are constructed, imposed and often perpetuated.

The genesis of inequality and, consequently, of poverty is a timeless phenomenon of societies. Indeed, the very nature of Man in its ability to remain in a state of opacity regarding the phenomenon, has to be pondered. In that vein, poverty and inequality must reflect certain societal beliefs and actions that must generate and elevate them. They comprise,

  • • first, to exclude, a portion of society from the rest. Exclusion can be specified in various ways. The more the exclusion is layered, the higher is the number of exclusion criteria and excluded categories generated;

  • • second, to isolate the excluded categories preferably into non-intersecting groups, more often than not by locating their residences apart and prohibiting any social interaction between them except for well-defined economic functions for which the input of a particular category may be needed by another category;

  • • third, to dominate them in as many ways as possible thus ensuring that the economic return diminishes per unit of work as the order of categories is descended even if those occupying the bottom categories approach extreme poverty;

Type
Chapter
Information
The Creation of Poverty and Inequality in India
Exclusion, Isolation, Domination and Extraction
, pp. 99 - 137
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×