7b ] ME y i F.SL IO V O h I'Al.t.nil.ir. territories tbr centuries were suddenly denied their right to live on that land, came the great dispossessing movements of modern European colonialism, and with ihcm all the schemes for redeeming the land, resettling the natives, civilizing them, taming their savage customs, turning them into useful beings under European rule. Land in A sia, A frica, and the Am ericas was there for European exploitation, because Europe under­ stood the value of land in a way impossible for the natives. A t the enci o f the century, Joseph Conrad dramatized this philosophy in Heart o f Darkness, and em bodied it powerfully in the figure o f Kurtz, a man whose colonial dreams for the earth’s “ dark places" were made by “ all E u rop e.” But what Conrad drew on, as indeed the Zionists drew on also, was the kind o f philosophy set forth by Robert Knox in his work The Races o f Man,'* in which men were divided into white and advanced (the producers) and dark, inferior wasters. Similarly, thinkers like John W estlake and before him Emer de Vattel divided the world's territories into empty (though inhabited by nomads, and a low kind of society) and civilized— and the former were then “ revised” as being ready for takeover on the basis o f a higher, civilized right to them. I very greatly simplify the transformation in perspective by which millions o f acres outside metropolitan Europe were thus declared em pty, their people and societies decreed to be obstacles to progress and developm ent, their space just as assertively declared open to European white settlers and their civilizing exploitation. During the 1870s in particular, new European geographical societies mushroomed as a sign that geography had becom e, according to Lord Curzon, “ the most cosmopolitan o f all the sciences.” 's Not for nothing in Heart o f Darkness did M arlow admit to his passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces (populated by natives, that is] on the earth, and when 1 saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (hut they all