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See colony and colonisation for examples of colonialism which do not refer to Western colonialism. Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled or displaced. Colonizers generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population (see also cultural imperialism). However, though colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism, the latter is sometimes used more broadly as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formally. The term colonialism may also be used to refer to a set of beliefs used to legitimize or promote this system. Colonialism was often based on the belief that the mores and values of the colonizer were superior to those of the colonized. (This can also be called ethnocentricism). Some observers link such beliefs regarding values to racism, and to pseudo-scientific theories dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. In terms of race, this led to a sort of proto-Social Darwinism that placed Caucasians at the top of the Animal Kingdom, "naturally" in charge of dominating and civilizing non-European indigenous populations. In terms of values, this led to cultural hegemony, chauvinistic jingoism, missionary zealotry and blindly patriotic nationalism in the colonies, especially among the colonizers. Types of colonies Several types of colonies may be distinguished, reflecting different colonial policies. Settler colonies, such as the original thirteen states of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina arose from the emigration of peoples from a metropole, or mother country, and involved displacement of the indigenous peoples to their permanent detriment. Settler colonies may be contrasted with dependencies, where the colonizers did not arrive as part of a mass emigration, but rather as administrators over existing sizeable native populations, exercising control by use or threat of force. Examples in this category include the British Raj, Egypt, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese colonial empire. In some cases large-scale colonial settlement was attempted in substantially pre-populated areas and the result was either an ethnically mixed population (such as the mestizos of the Americas), or racially divided, such as in French Algeria or Southern Rhodesia. A fourth category may be considered for plantation colonies such as Barbados, Saint-Domingue and Jamaica where the white colonizers imported black slaves who rapidly began to outnumber their owners, leading to minority rule, similar to a dependency. Trading posts, such as Macau, Malacca, Deshima and Singapore constitute a fifth category, where the primary purpose of the colony was to engage in trade rather than as a staging post for further colonization of the hinterland. History of colonialism The historical phenomenon of colonisation is one that stretches around the globe and across time, including such disparate peoples as the Hittites, the Incas and the British, although the term colonialism is normally used with reference to discontiguous European overseas empires rather than contiguous land-based empires, European or otherwise, which are conventionally described by the term imperialism. Examples of land-based empires include the Mongol Empire, a large empire stretching from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe, the Empire of Alexander the Great, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. The Ottoman Empire was created across Mediterranean, North Africa and into Southern Europe and existed during the time of European colonization of the other parts of the world. European colonialism began in the 15th century with the "Age of Discovery", led by Portuguese and Spanish exploration of the Americas, and the coasts of Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia. Despite some earlier attempts, it was not until the 17th century that England, France and Holland successfully established their own overseas empires, in direct competition with each other and those of Spain and Portugal. The end of the 18th and early 19th century saw the first era of decolonization when most of the European colonies in the Americas gained their independence from their respective metropoles. Spain and Portugal were irreversibly weakened after the loss of their New World colonies, but Britain (after the union of England and Scotland), France and Holland turned their attention to the Old World, particularly South Africa, India and South East Asia, where coastal enclaves had already been established. The industrialization of the 19th century led to what has been termed the era of New Imperialism, when the pace of colonization rapidly accelerated, the height of which was the Scramble for Africa. During the 20th Century, the overseas colonies of the losers of World War I were distributed amongst the victors as mandates, but it was not until the end of World War II that the second phase of decolonization began in earnest. Neocolonialism
U.S. foreign intervention On the other hand, because of the Cold War, which led Moscow and Peking to support anti-imperialist movements, the US (as well as other NATO countries) interfered in various countries, for example by issuing an embargo against Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution — which started on February 7, 1962 — and supporting various covert operations (the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Project, etc.) The US, as well as France for that matter, preferred supporting dictatorships in Third World countries rather than having democracies which always presented the risk of having the people choose being aligned with the Communist bloc rather than the so-called "Free World". Thus, in South America, the US began by supporting Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, and continued by giving support to the "dirty war" — including Operation Condor, in which 50,000 persons were murdered and 30,000 "disappeared" (aka "desaparecidos"). On March 6, 2001, the New York Times revealed a 1978 cable which proved that chiefs involved in Condor "kept in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covered all of Latin America". On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a Chilean Christian Democrat, was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington D.C. Among the people prosecuted for the people were Michael Townley, a DINA agent who had worked for the CIA. Townley confessed that he had hired anti-Castrist Cubans to boobytrap the car, through Luis Posada Carriles' CORU organization. US intervention in Latin American countries continued with the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 1989 United States invasion of Panama against druglord Manuel Noriega. In Indonesia, Washington supported Suharto's New Order dictatorship, etc. 5 This interference, in particular in South and Central American countries, is reminiscent of the 19th century Monroe doctrine and the Big stick diplomacy codified by US president Theodore Roosevelt. Left-wing critics have spoken of an "American Empire", pushed in particular by the military-industrial complex, which president Eisenhower warned against in 1961. On the other hand, some Republicans have supported, without much success since World War I, isolationism. Defenders of U.S. policy have asserted that intervention was sometimes necessary to prevent Communist or Soviet-aligned governments from taking power during the Cold War. Most of the actions described in this section constitute imperialism rather than colonialism, which usually involves one country settling in another country and calling it their own. US imperialism has been called neocolonial because it is a new sort of colonialism: one that operates not by invading, conquering, and settling a foreign country with pilgrims, but by exercising economic control through international monetary institutions, via military threat, missionary interference, strategic investment, so-called "Free trade areas," and by supporting the violent overthrow of leftist governments (even those that have been democratically elected, as detailed above). French foreign intervention France wasn't inactive either: it supported dictatorships in the former colonies in Africa, leading to the expression Françafrique, coined by François-Xavier Verschave, a member of the anti-neocolonialist Survie NGO, which has criticized the way development aid was given to post-colonial countries, claiming it only supported neo-colonialism, interior corruption and arms-trade. The Third World debt, including odious debt, where the interest on the external debt exceeds the amount that the country produces, had been considered by some a method of oppression or control by first world countries; a form of debt bondage on the scale of nations. Post-colonialism Post-colonialism (aka post-colonial theory) refers to a set of theories in philosophy and literature that grapple with the legacy of colonial rule. In this sense, postcolonial literature may be considered a branch of Postmodern literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of peoples formerly subjugated in colonial empires. Many practitioners take Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) to be the theory's founding work (although French theorists such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon made similar claims decades before Said). Edward Said analyzed the works of Balzac, Baudelaire and Lautréamont, exploring how they were both influenced by and helped to shape a societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fictional writers interact with the traditional colonial discourse, but modify or subvert it; for instance by retelling a familiar story from the perspective of an oppressed minor character in the story. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (1998) gave its name to the Subaltern Studies. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Spivak explored how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is famous for its explicit ethnocentrism, in considering the Western civilization as the most accomplished of all, while Kant also allowed some traces of racialism to enter his work. Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization Debate about the perceived positive and negative aspects of colonialism has occurred for centuries, amongst both colonizer and colonized, and continues to the present day. The questions of miscegenation; the alleged ties between colonial enterprises, genocides — see the Herero Genocide — and the Holocaust; and the questions of the nature of imperialism, dependency theory and neocolonialism (in particular the Third World debt) continues to retain their actuality. See also Bibliography Penguin Book, 2001 | |||||||||
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