Colonialism


Colonialism is the practice of extending and maintaining political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a territory and its people by another people in pursuit of interests defined in an often distant metropole, who also claim superiority. While frequently an imperialist project, colonialism functions through differentiating between the targeted land and people, and that of the colonizers. Rather than annexation, this typically culminates in organizing the colonized into colonies separate to the colonizers' metropole. Colonialism sometimes deepens by developing settler colonialism, whereby settlers from one or multiple colonizing metropoles occupy a territory with the intention of partially or completely supplanting the existing indigenous peoples, possibly amounting to genocide.
Colonialism monopolizes power by understanding conquered land and people to be inferior, based on beliefs of entitlement and superiority, justified with beliefs of having a civilizing mission to cultivate land and life, historically often rooted in the belief of a Christian mission. These beliefs and the actual colonization establish a so-called coloniality, which keeps the colonized socio-economically othered and subaltern through modern biopolitics of sexuality, gender, race, disability and class, among others, resulting in intersectional violence and discrimination.
While different forms of colonialism have existed around the world, the concept has been developed as a description of European colonial empires of the modern era. These spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century, spanning 35% of Earth's land by 1800 and peaking at 84% by the beginning of World War I. European colonialism employed mercantilism and chartered companies, and established complex colonialities.
Decolonization, which started in the 18th century, gradually led to the independence of colonies in waves, with a particular large wave of decolonizations happening in the aftermath of World War II between 1945 and 1975. Colonialism has a persistent impact on a wide range of modern outcomes, as scholars have shown that variations in colonial institutions can account for variations in economic development, regime types, and state capacity. Some academics have used the term neocolonialism to describe the continuation or imposition of elements of colonial rule through indirect means in the contemporary period.

Etymology

Colonialism is etymologically derived from the Latin term colonia, originally a designation for a type of city or outpost that was founded and populated by newly settled Roman citizens at the direction of the Roman government. The word colonia is then in turn derived from the Latin word colonus and its root word colere.

Definitions

The earliest uses of colonialism referred to plantations that men emigrated to and settled. The term expanded its meaning in the early 20th century to act as a historical reference for European imperial expansion and the imperialist subjection of Asian and African peoples, while also serving as a paradigm for analysing the form of rule. Defining colonialism became necessary for the international anti-colonial movement, and it was discussed in the 1955 Bandung Conference and the contexts it applied to disputed. The concept entered the forefront of academia in the late 20th century, followed by the development of postcolonialism.
Collins English Dictionary defines colonialism as "the practice by which a powerful country directly controls less powerful countries and uses their resources to increase its own power and wealth". Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary defined colonialism as "the policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people or territories". The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers several definitions: "domination of a people or area by a foreign state or nation", "the practice of extending and maintaining a nation's political and economic control over another people or area" and "the policy of or belief in acquiring and retaining colonies".
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as "a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another" and uses the term "to describe the process of European settlement and political control over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia". It discusses the distinction between colonialism, imperialism, and conquest and states that "he difficulty of defining colonialism stems from the fact that the term is often used as a synonym for imperialism. Both colonialism and imperialism were forms of conquest that were expected to benefit Europe economically and strategically".
In his preface to Jürgen Osterhammel's Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Roger Tignor says "For Osterhammel, the essence of colonialism is the existence of colonies, which are by definition governed differently from other territories such as protectorates or informal spheres of influence." In the book, Osterhammel asks, "How can 'colonialism' be defined independently from 'colony? He settles on a three-sentence definition:
According to Julian Go, "Colonialism refers to the direct political control of a society and its people by a foreign ruling state... The ruling state monopolizes political power and keeps the subordinated society and its people in a legally inferior position." He also writes, "colonialism depends first and foremost upon the declaration of sovereignty and/or territorial seizure by a core state over another territory and its inhabitants who are classified as inferior subjects rather than equal citizens."
Australian historian Lorenzo Veracini defines colonialism as the establishment and maintenance of an unequal relationship between a colonial metropole and a colonized territory through violence and argues that colonialism is sustained as an unequal relationship through the essential forces of displacement and violence. The imbalance of power that results from a colonial relationship allows a colonial metropole to exploit unequal trading terms between it and its colonies.
Wendell Bell in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sociology describes colonialism as a "a process by which dominance is acquired and held by a foreign power over another people and land". This definition is cited and complemented by the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, clarifying that the rule of colonialism is different to annexation as it does not involve actual incorporation.
In A Dictionary of Human Geography colonialism is described as control over another people accompanied by an ideology of superiority and racism.
Colonial studies have been criticized for eurocentrism in determining the threshold between colonialism versus conquest.

Types of colonialism

Modern studies of colonialism distinguish between various overlapping categories of colonialism, broadly classified into four types: settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism, surrogate colonialism, and internal colonialism. Some historians have identified other forms of colonialism, including national and trade forms.
  • Settler colonialism involves large-scale immigration by settlers to colonies, often motivated by religious, political, or economic reasons. This form of colonialism aims largely to supplant prior existing populations with a settler one, and involves large number of settlers emigrating to colonies for the purpose of establishing settlements. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Indian Controlled Kashmir, Israel, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and Uruguay, are examples of nations created or expanded in their contemporary form by settler colonialism. French-controlled Algeria, Rhodesia, Italian-controlled Libya, the Kenya Colony, Japanese-controlled Korea and Manchuria, and most infamously Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe are examples of past or failed attempts to establish settler colonies.
  • Exploitation colonialism involves fewer colonists and focuses on the exploitation of natural resources or labour to the benefit of the metropole. This form consists of trading posts as well as larger colonies where colonists would constitute much of the political and economic administration. The European colonization of Africa and Asia was largely conducted under the auspices of exploitation colonialism.
  • Surrogate colonialism involves a settlement project supported by a colonial power, in which most of the settlers do not come from the same ethnic group as the ruling power, as it has been argued was the case of Mandatory Palestine and the Colony of Liberia.
  • Internal colonialism is a notion of uneven structural power between areas of a state. The source of exploitation comes from within the state. This is demonstrated in the way control and exploitation may pass from people from the colonizing country to an immigrant population within a newly independent country.
  • National colonialism is a process involving elements of both settler and internal colonialism, in which nation-building and colonization are symbiotically connected, with the colonial regime seeking to remake the colonized peoples into their own cultural and political image. The goal is to integrate them into the state, but only as reflections of the state's preferred culture. The Taiwan under the KMT's military dictatorship is the archetypal example of a national-colonialist society.
  • Trade colonialism involves the undertaking of colonialist ventures in support of trade opportunities for merchants. This form of colonialism was most prominent in 19th-century Asia, where previously isolationist states were forced to open their ports to Western powers. Examples of this include the Opium Wars and the opening of Japan.

    Versus imperialism