"Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race"
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Wallace links the spread of civilization to movement and collision: people migrate, empires expand, and with them come clashes of opinion, religion, and race. He treats conflict not only as destructive but as historically generative, a force that shatters stagnant orders and creates new institutions, laws, and habits. The polished veneer of civilization, in this view, is not the product of gentle persuasion or moral exhortation alone, but the residue of encounters that unsettle established ways of life.
The line grows out of Wallace’s experiences in the mid-19th century Malay Archipelago, where he watched trade, migration, and colonial rule transform coastal towns and interior societies. He saw Chinese merchants, Arab traders, and European administrators produce abrupt shifts in labor, technology, and belief. He was skeptical of the idea that preaching hymns could by itself reorder social life; commerce, competition, and the movement of peoples proved more potent engines of change. As a co-formulator of natural selection, he was primed to see struggle and contact as drivers of adaptation, and he read human history through a similar lens of pressure and response.
At the same time, the sentence carries the ambivalence of its era. Civilization here reflects a Victorian metric tied to urbanization, literacy, and industrial discipline, often equated with European norms. Wallace could acknowledge the costs of empire, yet he still framed progress as emerging through conquest and the friction of difference. The term race also bears the period’s scientific pretensions and its blind spots.
Read this way, the statement exposes both an insight and an ideology: change does often arise at the boundaries where groups meet, argue, and contest power, but those crucibles typically involve coercion and loss as well as innovation. Wallace’s observation captures the dynamic energy of contact while revealing how 19th-century thinkers naturalized the violence and inequalities that carried so-called civilization across the globe.
The line grows out of Wallace’s experiences in the mid-19th century Malay Archipelago, where he watched trade, migration, and colonial rule transform coastal towns and interior societies. He saw Chinese merchants, Arab traders, and European administrators produce abrupt shifts in labor, technology, and belief. He was skeptical of the idea that preaching hymns could by itself reorder social life; commerce, competition, and the movement of peoples proved more potent engines of change. As a co-formulator of natural selection, he was primed to see struggle and contact as drivers of adaptation, and he read human history through a similar lens of pressure and response.
At the same time, the sentence carries the ambivalence of its era. Civilization here reflects a Victorian metric tied to urbanization, literacy, and industrial discipline, often equated with European norms. Wallace could acknowledge the costs of empire, yet he still framed progress as emerging through conquest and the friction of difference. The term race also bears the period’s scientific pretensions and its blind spots.
Read this way, the statement exposes both an insight and an ideology: change does often arise at the boundaries where groups meet, argue, and contest power, but those crucibles typically involve coercion and loss as well as innovation. Wallace’s observation captures the dynamic energy of contact while revealing how 19th-century thinkers naturalized the violence and inequalities that carried so-called civilization across the globe.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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