The Myth of the “Good Coloniser”
I had the pleasure to present at this year’s Livingmaps Conference, on the theme of Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice.
The project I recently completed, Sins Beneath the Equator, seemed a reasonable fit. Until one realises that colonial extraction was perhaps, first of all, a project that caused environmental and spatial destruction, making Sins an exceptionally good fit.
The presentation started by introducing the context, which is that there is still, amongst some in the Brazilian Northeast, the idea that if only the Dutch had stayed (as colonisers), Brazil would have been better off, today. This typically rests on the idea that Dutch rule was more enlightened, rational, tolerant, or modern than Portuguese colonialism.
When we look at maps, stories, and inherited urban memory, we can see how these could have helped to make that seem plausible.
Sins is a collection of 100 location-based pieces of non-fiction in three languages, turning colonial history into a spatial experience, not as commemoration, but as interrogation. With this, it becomes clear that the colonial map is not neutral evidence of the past, but a record of what colonial power wanted us to see, and what the colonial entity wanted to own, move, defend, and extract.
The Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil lasted from 1630 to 1654. It was driven by mercantile capitalism, the sugar economy, military control, and the Dutch West India Company’s Atlantic ambitions. Recife, now the capital of Pernambuco, and the seat of Dutch colonial power in Brazil, became a node in a wider system connecting land seizure, plantation production, military logistics, financial speculation, and enslaved labour, while existing next to French, Portuguese, and British systems of extraction.
Colonial cartography was a selective technology, recording forts, ports, rivers, plantations, towns, property, coastlines, and routes. But it often erased or, at best, subordinated Indigenous presence, enslaved labour, ecological damage, everyday violence, and resistance.
The historical map gives us access to colonial space, but also reproduces the colonial gaze. Sins asked how to use these maps and histories without obeying them, without falling for the trap they set for the viewer and reader.
And, so, each of our stories acted as a small intervention into inherited geography. Instead of allowing our resulting map to underscore colonial achievements, the project added narrative pressure: who paid, who was excluded, who became useful to the colonial story, but only as labour, threat, or resource?
Our counter-map did not replace one definitive history with another, instead it made violence, ambiguity, and afterlives harder to ignore.
Our team consisted of 4 individuals. Three based in Pernambuco, with myself in São Paulo.
In parts of the production process, we leaned on the use of AI. This included the use of machine translations as first versions of texts in other languages, image generation, some audio generation, and some facilitation in original research and story scaffolding.
The irony of using AI as part of this process was not lost on us; we can see a direct and unbroken link between the mercantile capitalism of the 1600s, and modern day hyper-capitalism propagated by Big Tech, with perhaps the only real difference being the location of abuse and extraction. Where, in the 1600s, it was the periphery that was exploited, Big Tech, and modern-day capitalism in general, has shifted this exploitation to the core of Empire.
We used tools of capitalism to push back against the abuse of capitalism.
And, Brazil again is one of the battleground states in this conflict with proponents of unbridled capitalism. Elon Musk fights with Brazil’s supreme justices over ‘freedom of expression’, data centres take away energy and water from lower class suburbs, and the Amazon is predated on by capital hungry for natural resources.
So, our project used the past to make present systems more legible, where our mapping has had three functions:
- It revealed: by making hidden and normalized histories visible.
- It unsettled: by challenging national and regional myths.
- It relocated responsibility: by showing that extraction is spatially organized, historically continuous, and unevenly carried.
Counter-mapping can add missing data, but excells at changing what counts as evidence, shifting whose experience defines the place, and what the map is for.
In the end, the more urgent question is not whether one coloniser would have produced a better Brazil, but how colonial rule can still be remembered as development, when its wealth depended on dispossession, forced labour, ecological transformation, and extraction, serving the few, not the many.
And so, Sins Beneath the Equator didn’t put the past at a safe distance, but showed how this past still reverberates, instrumental in constructing our realities, today.
We have to realise that perhaps we can start from colonial and historical archives and maps, but we do not have to allow these to set the limits of what can be communicated and known.