The long 19th century.

“Every people must build its own civilization from its own materials. Africa must build from African materials, use African forms of expression, and create African institutions. A civilization borrowed wholesale from another people is not a civilization—it is a decoration.” — Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 1887

Blyden (1832–1912), born in the Caribbean and educated in Liberia, became the most influential Pan-African intellectual of the 19th century. His writings challenged Social Darwinism and the “civilizing mission” ideology directly, arguing that African peoples had their own valid civilizations—and that the West’s claim to represent universal progress was a rationalization for conquest. His ideas shaped later Pan-African and independence movements. Read the source →

“I have no intention of being an indifferent spectator if distant powers attempt to divide Africa among themselves. Ethiopia has need of no one; she stretches out her hands unto God.” — Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, circular letter to European powers, 1891

While the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 divided Africa among European powers without consulting African leaders, Ethiopia was the only African nation to successfully defeat a European army in battle. Menelik’s 1891 letter explicitly rejected the conference’s authority to assign Ethiopian territory. His victory at the Battle of Adwa in 1896—where Ethiopian forces defeated an Italian army—proved this was not mere rhetoric and inspired anti-colonial movements across Africa and the African diaspora. Read the source →

“If you men will not go forward, then we, the women, will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight until the last of us falls in the battlefields.” — Yaa Asantewaa, Ashanti queen mother of Ejisu, speech to the Ashanti chiefs, Kumasi, March 1900 (recorded in British colonial records)

When the British governor-general demanded the Ashanti surrender their sacred Golden Stool—the symbol of Ashanti sovereignty and the seat of the nation’s spirit—Yaa Asantewaa led a six-month armed rebellion now called the War of the Golden Stool. Her speech, recorded by British colonial officials, is one of the most direct documented African women’s voices confronting European colonialism. She was eventually captured and exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921. Read the source →

“I see everywhere the poverty of the people, the destruction of native industries, the exhausting of India’s wealth, the flooding of India with foreign goods. India is being drained to enrich England, and Indians are being kept poor so they will remain dependent.” — Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901

Naoroji (1825–1917) was an Indian politician, scholar, and the first Asian elected to the British Parliament (1892). He developed the “Drain Theory”—a systematic economic argument that British rule was extracting more wealth from India than it invested, impoverishing the subcontinent. His analysis provided the economic critique of empire that later independence movements would use. Where AP covers India as a site of British industrialization’s raw materials, Naoroji documented what that relationship cost Indians. Read the source →

“The United Fruit Company / reserved for itself the most succulent, / the coast of my country, / the sweet waist of America. / It rechristened its territories / as the Banana Republic.” — Pablo Neruda, “La United Fruit Co.,” Canto General, 1950 (translated from Spanish)

Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and Nobel laureate who documented the economic imperialism of U.S. corporations in Latin America. The United Fruit Company controlled vast tracts of Central American land, its own railroad and telegraph networks, and the political systems of the countries it operated in—hence the term “banana republic.” His poem captures what economic imperialism looked like from the inside: not trade, but occupation by corporation. Read the source →

“America has power, but not justice. In prison we were victimized as if we were criminals. / Our imprisonment was without cause. / It was really brutal and unreasonable. / On the day that I was to be liberated, I was overjoyed.” — Anonymous Chinese detainee, carved inscription, Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco Bay, c. 1910–1940 (translated from Chinese)

From 1910 to 1940, the U.S. government detained hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island while processing or denying their entry under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Detainees carved poems in Chinese into the wooden walls of the barracks documenting their frustration, grief, and determination. The poems, discovered after the station closed, are among the most powerful records of the migration experience from the perspective of those excluded by law. This is what the effects of migration looked like for the migrants themselves. Read the source →

“I had graduated from an American university; I could read and write in both English and Chinese. And yet I could not become an American citizen. I was tolerated as a curiosity, but never welcomed as a man.” — Yung Wing, My Life in China and America, 1909 (approximate)

Yung Wing (1828–1912) was the first Chinese person to graduate from an American university (Yale, 1854). He spent decades working to bring Chinese students to U.S. universities and to improve Sino-American relations. His autobiography documents what diaspora life looked like for a highly educated Chinese man in an era of racial exclusion: simultaneously valued for his skills and denied citizenship, belonging, and full humanity. His account shows the gap between the rhetoric of migration as opportunity and its reality for non-European migrants. Read the source →

“The Nation… has cut itself asunder from the rest of humanity. A nation which has its own history and its own glorification becomes a monster of selfishness and its worship becomes a kind of idolatry of the worst order.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 1917

Tagore (1861–1941), Indian poet and Nobel laureate (1913), delivered these lectures in Japan and the United States in 1916–1917 as World War I was being fought. He argued that Western nationalism—the ideology of the nation-state as supreme organizing principle—was not universal progress but a particular and dangerous European invention. He warned that Asia, which was being pressured to adopt Western nationalism as part of modernization, would be better served by its own traditions of community and spiritual life. Read the source →