European colonizers tended to construct the identities of colonized peoples and lands as other: undeveloped, primitive, and immature; as homogeneous objects, rather than sources of knowledge; see Anand (2007) New Polit. Sci. 29, 1 on Western colonial representations of the (non-Western) other. The colonizer was represented as having a duty which entailed both financial and emotional cost (and, for many, these costs were very real).

Colonial discourse analysis critically examines the role played by these representations in colonialism and imperialism, ‘rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation…a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism’s basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized’ (Harris (2004) AAAG 96, 1). ‘The city-state of Singapore is first represented in terms of a narrative of masculine heroism’ (S. Mathur 1997).