Foundation and Empire

Here's a passage of science fiction that captures what a bit of colonialism was like for Indigenous peoples back on Earth. I'm not sure there is a way to make the descendants of colonists (I am one, with my ancestors arriving in New England on the Mayflower in 1620 and in New France in 1640) understand how bizarre and disconcerting the imposition of a foreign power's sovereignty and alien laws and practices was for the unwilling people who were living happily on the land, unless it is transported into the future through science fiction as a way to tell us about our past and present.

This is from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of novels - not Foundation and Empire, as my blog post's title would suggest, but Second Foundation, published in 1953. This passage is set on Rossem, a chilly but inhabited planet on the periphery of the Galaxy, visited only by trading ships.

And then one day not unlike other days a ship arrived again. The old men of each village nodded wisely and lifted their old eyelids to whisper that thus it had been in their father's time - but it wasn't, quite... The men within called themselves soldiers of Tazenda.

The peasants were confused. They had not heard of Tazenda, but they greeted the soldiers nonetheless in the traditional fashion of hospitality. The newcomers inquired closely as to the nature of the planet, the number of its inhabitants, the number of its cities - a word mistaken by the peasants to mean "villages" to the confusion of all concerned - its type of economy and so on.

Other ships came and proclamations were issued all over the world that Tazenda was now the ruling world, that tax-collecting stations would be established girding the equator - the inhabited region - that percentages of grain and furs according to certain numerical formulae would be collected annually.

The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes."

I don't know if this was Asimov's intent, but how dissimilar is the Rossemites' experience from that of the original peoples of the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific when Tazenda/European powers asserted sovereignty based on a decree made by a far-away ruler?

Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation, © 1953 by Isaac Asimov (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983, 12th ed. 1987), p. 43.