Explanation: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.”
Exp. The extract has been taken from Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous novels written by Joseph Conrad. Marlow, the second and principal narrator of the novel, narrates the so-called civilizing mission of ancient conquerors such as the Romans.
Sitting on the deck of the boat Nellie, with his legs folded before him in the pose of a Buddha, Marlow begins his narration to his audience. He says that Britain had been a dark country nineteen hundred years ago, when the Romans first invaded and conquered it. Marlow feels that these Romans must have been different from contemporary conquerors, since they were not genuine colonists but mere conquerors and robbers who depended upon brute force. The strength of a conqueror, he observes, comes out of the weakness of others.
Those Roman conquerors grabbed whatever they could on their way. Their conquest was nothing but robbery accompanied by violence and murder on a large scale. They believed in conquest, and conquest meant only taking away things from people who had a different complexion or different physical features from those of the conquerors. The only thing that redeems the conquest of the earth, according to Marlow, is the idea of civilizing the conquered people.
Here Marlow hints at the civilizing mission—or rather the belief in it—through which modern colonists tried to glorify the conquest of unknown parts of the world, such as America, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa.
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