Colonization
Colonization is a process of establishing control over areas or peoples for foreign people to advance their trade, cultivation, exploitation and possibly settlement. Colonization functions through establishing a differentiation between the area and people of the colonized and colonizers, establishing metropoles, coloniality and possibly outright colonies. Colonization is commonly pursued and maintained by, but distinct from, imperialism, mercantilism, or colonialism. Conquest can take place without colonization, but a conquering process may often result in or from migration and colonizing. The term "colonization" is sometimes used synonymously with the word "settling", as with colonization in biology.
Settler colonialism is a type of colonization structured and enforced by the settlers directly, while their or their ancestors' metropolitan country maintains a connection or control through the settler's activities. In settler colonization, a minority group rules either through the assimilation or oppression of the existing inhabitants, or by establishing itself as the demographic majority through driving away, displacing or outright killing the existing people, as well as through immigration and births of metropolitan as well as other settlers.
The European colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and other places in Oceania was fueled by explorers, and colonists often regarding the encountered landmasses as . This resulted in laws and ideas such as Mexico's 1824 General Colonization Law and the United States' manifest destiny doctrine which furthered colonization.
Etymology
The term colonization is derived from the Latin words colere, colonia and colonus, then by extension "to inhabit". Someone who engages in colonization, i.e. the agent noun, is referred to as a colonizer, while the person who gets colonized, i.e. the object of the agent noun or absolutive, is referred to as a colonizee, colonisee or the colonised.Pre-modern colonizations
Classical period
In ancient times, maritime nations such as the city-states of Greece and Phoenicia established colonies in other parts of the Mediterranean.Another period of colonization in ancient times was during the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire conquered large parts of Western Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. In North Africa and West Asia, the Romans often conquered what they regarded as 'civilized' peoples. As they moved north into Europe, they mostly encountered rural peoples/tribes with very little in the way of cities. In these areas, waves of Roman colonization often followed the conquest of the areas. Many of the current cities throughout Europe began as Roman colonies, such as Cologne, Germany, originally called Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium by the Romans, and the British capital city of London, which the Romans founded as Londinium.
Middle Ages
The decline and collapse of the Roman Empire saw the large-scale movement of people in Eastern Europe and Asia. This is largely seen as beginning with nomadic horsemen from Asia moving into the richer pasture land to the west, thus forcing the local people there to move further west and so on until eventually the Goths were forced to cross into the Roman Empire, resulting in continuous war with Rome which played a major role in the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period there were large-scale movements of people establishing new colonies all over western Europe. The events of this time saw the development of many of the modern-day nations of Europe like the Franks in France and Germany and the Anglo-Saxons in England.In West Asia, during the reign of the Sassanid Empire, some Persians established colonies in Yemen and Oman. The Arabs also established colonies in Northern Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Levant.
The Vikings of Scandinavia also carried out a large-scale colonization. The Vikings are best known as raiders, setting out from their original homelands in Denmark, southern Norway, and southern Sweden, to pillage the coastlines of northern Europe. In time, the Vikings began trading and established colonies. The Vikings first came across Iceland and established colonies there before moving onto Greenland, where they built settlements that endured until the 15th century. The Vikings launched an unsuccessful attempt at colonizing an area they called Vinland, which is probably at a site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, on the eastern coastline of Canada.
Colonial Era
In the Colonial Era, colonialism in this context refers mostly to Western European countries' colonization of lands mainly in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included Spain, Portugal, France, the Tsardom of Russia, the Kingdom of England, the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Prussia, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden-Norway, and, beginning in the 18th century, the United States. Most of these countries had a period of almost complete power in world trade at some stage in the period from roughly 1500 to 1900. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Empire of Japan also engaged in settler colonization, most notably in Hokkaido and Korea.While some European colonization focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities or addressed specific goals such as settlers seeking religious freedom, at other times long-term social and economic planning was involved for both parties, but more on the colonizing countries themselves, based on elaborate theory-building.
Colonization may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country. One instrument to this end is linguistic imperialism, or the use of non-indigenous colonial languages to the exclusion of any indigenous languages from administrative use.
20th–21st century on Earth
Soviet Union
In the 1920s, the Soviet regime implemented the so-called korenization policy in an attempt to win the trust of non-Russians by promoting their ethnic cultures and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state. The early Soviet regime was hostile to even voluntary assimilation, and tried to de-Russify assimilated non-Russians. Parents and students not interested in the promotion of their national languages were labeled as displaying "abnormal attitudes". The authorities concluded that minorities unaware of their ethnicities had to be subjected to Belarusization, Polonization, etc.By the early 1930s, the Soviet regime introduced limited Russification; allowing voluntary assimilation, which was often a popular demand. The list of nationalities was reduced from 172 in 1927 to 98 in 1939, by revoking support for small nations in order to merge them into bigger ones. For example, Abkhazia was merged into Georgia and thousands of ethnic Georgians were sent to Abkhazia. The Abkhaz alphabet was changed to a Georgian base, Abkhazian schools were closed and replaced with Georgian schools, the Abkhaz language was banned. The ruling elite was purged of ethnic Abkhaz and by 1952 over 80% of the 228 top party and government officials and enterprise managers in Abkhazia were ethnic Georgians. For Königsberg area of East Prussia given to the Soviet Union at the 1945 Potsdam Conference Soviet control meant a forcible expulsion of the remaining German population and mostly involuntary resettlement of the area with Soviet civilians.
Russians were now presented as the most advanced and least chauvinist people of the Soviet Union.
Baltic states
Large numbers of ethnic Russians and other Russian speakers were settled in the three Baltic countries – Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – after their reoccupation in 1944, while local languages, religion and customs were suppressed. David Chioni Moore classified it as a "reverse-cultural colonization", where the colonized perceived the colonizers as culturally inferior. Colonization of the three Baltic countries was closely tied to mass executions, deportations and repression of the native population. During both Soviet occupations a combined 605,000 inhabitants of the three countries were either killed or deported, while their properties and personal belongings, along with ones who fled the country, were confiscated and given to the arriving colonists – Soviet military and NKVD personnel, as well as functionaries of the Communist Party and economic migrants from kolkhozes.The most dramatic case was Latvia, where the amount of ethnic Russians swelled from 168,300 in 1935 to 905,500 in 1989, whereas the proportion of ethnic Latvians fell from 77% in 1935 to 52% in 1989. Baltic states also faced intense economic exploitation, with Latvian SSR, for example, transferring 15.961 billion rubles more to the USSR budget from 1946 to 1990 than it received back. And of the money transferred back, a disproportionate amount was spent on the region's militarization and funding of repressive institutions, especially in the early years of the occupation. It has been calculated by a Latvian state-funded commission that the Soviet occupation cost the economy of Latvia a total of 185 billion euros.
Conversely, Marxian economist and world-systems analyst Samir Amin asserts that, in contrast to colonialism, capital transfer in the USSR was used to develop poorer regions in the South and East with the wealthiest regions like Western Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Republics being the main source of capital. Estonian researcher Epp Annus acknowledges that the Soviet rule in the Baltic states did not possess every single characteristic of traditional colonialism since the Baltic states were already modern industrial European nation states with an established sense of national identity and cultural self-confidence prior to their Soviet invasion in 1940 and proposed that the initial Soviet occupation developed into a colonial rule gradually, as the local resistance turned into a hybrid coexistence with the Soviet power. The Soviet colonial rule never managed to fully establish itself and began rapidly disintegrating during perestroika, but after the restoration of independence, the Baltic states similarly had to deal with problems of a characteristically colonial nature, such as pollution, economic collapse and demographic tensions.