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i
was
r
The author has been lecturer in Government, University of
M~nchester (1960-65); Head, Department of Political Science,
University of Khartoum (1965-69); Visiting Professor in
Political Science, Universities of Makerere and Lusaka (1970-71);
Unesco Senior Expert in Social Sciences and Public Administra-H' t ry and Internationaltion (1971-73); Professor of Modern 1S..,O
Relations, University of Rabat (1973~74);' SUdanes~ Ambassador
to the Nordic Countries (1974-75) and Visiting Research Fellow
at the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala.
b11' s h e d works include Imperialism and Nationalism inHis pu . . .the Sudan, oxford 1969; Human Rights in Theory and Pract1ce,
Beirut 1968; and The Problem of the Southern Sudan, Beirut
1971.
INTRODUCTION
Writing some six hundred years ago the great North African
sociologist and philosopher of history Abd al-Rahman Ibn
Khaldoun observed that the subjection of one people by an
other gives rise to serious social and psychological dis
location which may, in due cours~, ~e~ult in the total ex
tinction of the people concerned. l
But the capacity for psychological distortion and physical
destruction of modern European imperialism - which, inci
dentally, began to gather momentum only a few decades after
the death of Ibn Khaldoun in 1406 - was by far greater than
that of any form of imperialism or domination previously
known to mankind. And this was due to two principal factors:
First amongst these is the fact that modern European imperia
lism was able, from its very inception, to draw on the hither
to unparalleled technical skill and efficiency resulting from
the harnessing of the discoveries and inventions of modern
science and technology to the purposes of navigation, trade
and warfare. The resultant technical superiority of the new
nation states of Europe did not only facilitate such remark
able human achievements as the circurnnavition of the globe
and the discovery of the Americas; it also gave birth to an
era which - beginning with the arrival of Vasco Da Gama at
Calicut in 1498 - was to be characterized by the colonial and
imperial domination, by various European powers, of the enti
re non-industrialized world - including, not only the newly
discovered lands of the Western hemisphere and the islands of
the Southern Seas, but also the ancient continents of Asia
and Africa.
Another factor of Key importance in explaining the distinctly
predatory and destructive character of modern European impe
rialism is that it has been - and in its contemporary neo
colonial form continues to be - a totalitarian phenomenon in
volving not only the political subjugation of the people it
dominates and the economic exploitation of their labour and
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