Quotes by Mike Davis

In the British colonial cities of eastern and southern Africa... native populations [were denied] the rights of urban land ownership and permanent residence. The British... feared that city life would "detribalise" Africans and foster anti-colonial solidarities. Urban migration was controlled by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalised informal labour. Until 1954, for instance, Africans were considered only temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own leasehold property. Likewise Africans in Dar-es-Salaam, according to researcher Karin Nuru, "were only tolerated as a temporary labour force and had to return to the countryside." In Rhodesia, Africans had to ewait until the eve of independence to acquire the legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka... African residents were considered to be "more or less temporary urbanites whose only purpose in town was service to the administration's personnel."

From 1757 to 1947 during British rule in India, there was no increase in India's per capita income for almost two hundred years. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 per cent. In effect, there was no economic development at all in the usual sense of the term.

From 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by 20 per cent, a deterioration in human health probably without precedent in the subcontinent's long history of war and invasion.