Machine conquest: Jules Verne's technocratic worldmaking

Of course here in the real world space exploration is too costly and complex a game for any organizations other than governments to play, and Verne and Heinlein were optimists with stars in their eyes. Or that's what it seemed like in the seventies when it was pretty much true.

Where does this either-or (private/government) come from?

I look at Gregor Mendel as an example for how many different parties worked as one. (Biology) professor Eric Lander of MIT mentioned in one biology/genetics intro course lecture video (on edX) that Mendel was not some lone figure, but that he got the task to do his research from his boss, who as representative of the church was in turn part of a local group consisting of important figures from local business and government. They talked about economics and decided that they needed better sheep - for better wool. Back then clothing was the big important business, the technical revolution and also new science was very important for it.

So I don't think there was a situation as described in that quote. I think they all worked along and with one another in those days.

The entire expansion of empires and colonies was not driven by some government officials who were bored, commerce, industry and politics were aligned.

Verne was far more sympathetic towards non-European people that the vast majority of the Europeans of his time and many non-Europeans had very positive roles in his writings, even if their roles were less important than of the main European heroes. There were even a few strong female characters in some of his novels, even if most had male protagonists.

Therefore I think that it is stupid to insist on this. Only in the context of describing racism of the entire society of the 19th century it makes sense to give examples from Verne, among many others, to illustrate the way of thinking of that time.

Discussing this only in Verne can give the impression that he was worse than others, when in fact he was much better from this point of view.

He certainly was not an "apostle of colonization" and even the article recognizes that many of his works are very critical of colonization.

The main thing that can be reproached to Verne is that he tended to be much more indulgent about French colonization than about British colonization, under the mistaken assumption that in the French colonies abuses happen much less frequently than in the British colonies (though the British appear to have indeed been the worst, judging after the very small percentages of surviving natives in the British colonies in comparison with the colonies of all other countries).

As a child I have read a very large number of the novels of Jules Verne. While there were a few passages where he expressed a naive optimism about the possible benefits of bringing "civilization" to some remote parts of the Earth, those have made very little impression on me. What I have retained because I was impressed by them have been exactly the parts where the European colonization was criticized and where various natives had very positive images.

So any article author that describes Jules Verne as an "apostle of colonization" cannot have done due diligence in really reading his works.

Seems to me like taking a sledgehammer to tore down doors which are already wide open but maybe I’m missing something. At this point, the mandatory postcolonial blurb in any literature article feels so expected that it has become slightly trite at least to me.