shawn1122

People go where resources are concentrated / hoarded. It makes sense to go to where the fruits of your exploited labor ended up.

To Gandhi’s credit - acknowledging that there’s a lot he did that should be questioned - he completely changed his view on this by the 40s, in part due to his debates with Ambedkar.

His views on caste can be summarized in three phases

1915 to 1920s: Traditionalist - likely shaped in part by his upbringing in the British education system - where he saw caste as absolute and hierarchical. Not meaningfully different from the European/colonial worldview at the time, where white people were essentially “high caste” and black people were “low caste”.

1930s: Debates with Ambedkar where he tries to seperate caste from varna - ie. hold onto the idea of heriditary occupations and clans but remove the hierarchical aspect. Gets absolutely cooked by Ambedkar as u/PugJesus points out above.

1940s: Abolitionist - By 1945, he writes that the caste system has to be completely destroyed. He effectively abandons his defense of hereditary occupations, realizing it is impossible to separate from oppression.

Again, there’s a lot to question of Gandhi’s actions, but the world would be a better place if it was the norm to respond this way in the face of hipocrisy.

You’re absolutely right but they were more likely to say “ok here’s the rulebook we wrote for you” (however unreasonable) “oh, you broke a rule? You deserve what’s about to happen to you” (which is also probably unreasonable). This applies especially to the British. The Spanish and Portugese would just go straight to massacre.

This isn’t in any way meant to white wash their actions, just to bring light to the efforts they made to legitimize their cruelty, which was largely effective at the time. Many nations are still working hard to rid themselves of the colonial narratives and perceptions built off the outcomes of this bureaucracy of exploitation.

It’s much easier to say the Goan inquisition is bad/immoral but there are still people that argue today that British engineered famines were not Britain’s fault because points to the rulebook/bureaucracy. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for shifting accountability and victim blaming.

Ths Spanish and Portugese were brutal colonists. While Protestant colonial powers would prefer to kill you via bureaucracy, Catholic ones wouldn’t hesitate to proceed straight to rape, murder, torture etc.

Perhaps by being the incumbent branch of Christianity, and having state support via the Papacy and its Terra Nullius (ie. land occupied by non-Christians doesn’t belong to anyone) doctine, they felt moral accountability was less of a concern. That or they felt like they were going to heaven regardless of their actions via the Pope’s blessing.

Vasco Da Gama, the Columbus of the East, is known for the following after arriving in Kerala India:

1) Setting a civilian boat returning from Mecca on fire and refusing even to take payment to end the suffering. It took several days for the boat to sink and Portugese accounts detail the wails of women and children as several hundred died slowly. It’s said that women held up their babies above the flames begging for mercy. The few children that did survive were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity.

2) When the local ruler (Zamorin) refused to expel every Muslim from Calicut (who de Gama perceived to be his competition for trade), he kidnapped a group of fishermen, had their bodies cut to pieces, and sent it to the Zamorin with a note saying to make a stew out of it.

3) When trade negotiations failed, he pioneered European colonial “gunboat diplomacy” by pointing his naval fleet at the unfortified city of Calicut, opening fire on civilians.

These two are the OGs of European colonialism. Both are venerated to this day.

It’s widely agreed upon that slavery prior to the transatlantic trade typically came with more rights and pathways to freedom and this is generally true globally. Many civilizations have stories of freed slaves becoming rulers or high tanking political officials.

The transatlantic trade sought to create a permanent underclass of slaves based on a global race based caste system based on how European powers perceived the world at the time. Essentially, if you had melanin, you were potentially a part of the slave / nonperson class.