Winners may write history, but they do not make history, at least not alone. Dominant groups everywhere—
In recent decades, historians have been at pains to uncover the ways in which subordinated people—
Likewise, colonized people in any number of ways actively shaped the history of the colonial era. On occasion, they resisted and rebelled; in various times and places, they embraced, rejected, and transformed a transplanted Christianity; many eagerly sought Western education but later turned it against the colonizers; women both suffered from and creatively coped with the difficulties of colonial life; and everywhere people created new ways of belonging. None of this diminishes the hardships, the enormous inequalities of power, or the exploitation and oppression of the colonial experience. Rather, it suggests that history is often made through the struggle of unequal groups and that the outcome corresponds to no one’s intentions.
Perhaps we might let Karl Marx have the last word on this endlessly fascinating topic: “Men make their own history,” he wrote, “but they do not make it as they please nor under conditions of their own choosing.” In the colonial experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both the colonizers and the colonized “made history,” but neither was able to do so as they pleased.