Imperialism and colonisation — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Imperialism and colonisation
Themes
What you need to know
How Wells explores empire and conquest, as the Martians do to Britain what the British Empire had done to others, from the Tasmanians to the dodo across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise', 'what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought', 'The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence', 'Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?', 'So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest', 'than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked', 'as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees', 'taking possession of the conquered country', 'They were hamstringing mankind', 'a sense of dethronement', 'the fear and empire of man had passed away', 'pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion', 'as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power'.
Context: the British Empire, which by 1913 was the largest empire in history, the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, the war of extermination against the Aboriginal Tasmanians that the narrator recalls, and readings of the novel as a challenge to the morality of empire.
Different readings: a warning against empire, or a story that still sees conquered peoples, like animals, as lesser.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
