Land, Labour, and Power in a Colonial Catholic Mission in Trinidad

Colonial propaganda that masks “humanitarianism” behind self-interest, and breeds euphemisms that are inversions of reality, constitute the recurring subjects of the critiques produced on Zero Anthropology. Little of what we encounter in the present is either new or “original”: much of the “foreign policy” language of elite geopolitical strategists is in fact derived from much older sources and prior histories of conquest and attempted dominance. In colonial Trinidad as elsewhere, Catholic missions for native “Indians” were the “strategic hamlets” and “model villages” of their time—missions were tools of both commerce and counterinsurgency, aiming at both pacification and incorporation. The one difference is that, in the present, the ideological and military aspects of “humanitarianism” are emphasized, whereas in the past, explicitly economic and financial imperatives also stood out more clearly. Thus the lucrative cocoa industry in Trinidad was first founded by Catholic Indian Missions....

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https://zeroanthropology.net/2020/02/04/land-labour-and-power-in-a-colonial-catholic-mission-in-trinidad/