Quantum Colonialism and the Constitution of Quantum Humanities: A Postcolonial Critique

Over the past decade, Quantum Humanities (QH) has emerged as a programmatic extension of the Digital Humanities into quantum computational territory, presenting itself as a universal methodological horizon for humanistic inquiry. This paper argues that this claim to universality obscures a structural condition: QH's institutional foundations, proof-of-concept datasets, computational infrastructure, and citational networks are concentrated in a small number of North Atlantic research centres, such that participation from the Global South is possible only on terms set by those centres. We name this condition quantum colonialism, distinguishing it from data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), the quantum divide (Gercek and Seskir, 2025), and technological colonialism (UNESCO, 2026) by its specific object: humanities knowledge production. Drawing on postcolonial Digital Humanities, infrastructure studies, and an Indian postcolonial standpoint, the paper maps the institutional geography of QH and shows how an emergent field has already been shaped by concentrated infrastructures, research partnerships, and representative datasets that become paradigmatic without being marked as particular. We then examine the limits of existing decolonial correctives in adjacent quantum social theory and quantum International Relations, arguing that these interventions remain constrained by Global North institutional locations, selective engagements with non-Western epistemologies, and vulnerability to ethicalisation. The paper next develops an infrastructure critique of India's structural dependency on North Atlantic quantum systems, distinguishing between economic participation in the quantum economy and scholarly participation in the humanities conversation about quantum computing. We conclude by arguing that the relevant question is not how Indian scholars might be included in QH as currently constituted, but how the scholarly conversation itself might be reconstituted from different institutional and epistemic grounds. This is a postcolonial critique of QH, not a QH paper. Its contribution lies in a precisely defined concept and a constructive argument for scholarly co-constitution rather than assimilation.