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Orwell has a way of capturing colonial attitudes. Perhaps he cannot help harboring some of them himself. In this essay he is talking about Marrakech in Morocco.
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When you walk through a town like this - two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in - when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces - besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.
-- George Orwell, “Marrakech” (1939) in Essays (Everyman’s Library, p. 121)
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When you walk through a town like this - two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in - when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces - besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.
-- George Orwell, “Marrakech” (1939) in Essays (Everyman’s Library, p. 121)
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