Colonialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Colonialism is the practice of one people extending and maintaining political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a territory and its people, in pursuit of interests defined in an often distant metropole. By 1800, European colonial empires spanned 35% of Earth's land. By the beginning of World War I, that figure peaked at 84%. The word itself comes from the Latin colonia, originally a city or outpost founded and populated by newly settled Roman citizens at the direction of the Roman government. That root word, colonus, simply meant farmer. How did a Roman word for a farming settlement come to describe the domination of most of the planet? Why did so many empires convince themselves they were entitled to rule others? And what happens to the colonizer and the colonized long after the flags come down? The answers run through plantations and slave ships, through maps drawn with deliberate blank spaces, through diseases that emptied continents, and through a debate that is still unsettled about whether any of it ever paid.

• 2. The Logic Of Domination

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  Colonialism monopolizes power by understanding conquered land and people to be inferior, justified by a belief in a civilizing mission, historically often rooted in the belief of a Christian mission. These beliefs establish what scholars call a coloniality, which keeps the colonized socio-economically othered and subaltern. Lorenzo Veracini, an Australian historian, defines colonialism as the establishment and maintenance of an unequal relationship between a colonial metropole and a colonized territory through violence. He argues it is sustained through the essential forces of displacement and violence. Julian Go frames it as the direct political control of a society by a foreign ruling state that keeps the subordinated people in a legally inferior position. In his theoretical overview of colonialism, Jürgen Osterhammel settles on a three-sentence definition. The colonisers, he writes, are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule, rejecting cultural compromises with the colonised. Defining the term was not an idle exercise. The international anti-colonial movement needed a clear definition, and the question was debated at the 1955 Bandung Conference.

• 3. Four Kinds Of Conquest

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  Settler colonialism involves large-scale immigration by settlers who aim to supplant prior existing populations with a settler one. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States are among the nations created or expanded in their contemporary form this way. French-controlled Algeria, Rhodesia, and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe are examples of past or failed attempts at settler colonies. Exploitation colonialism, by contrast, uses fewer colonists and focuses on extracting natural resources or labour for the benefit of the metropole. The European colonization of Africa and Asia was largely conducted this way. Surrogate colonialism involves a settlement project supported by a colonial power in which most settlers do not share the ruling power's ethnic group, controversially argued to be the case of Mandatory Palestine and the Colony of Liberia. Internal colonialism describes uneven structural power within a single state, where the source of exploitation comes from within. National colonialism blends settler and internal forms, remaking colonized peoples into the state's own cultural and political image. Taiwan under the KMT's military dictatorship is the archetypal example. Trade colonialism supported merchants' opportunities, most prominent in 19th-century Asia, where isolationist states were forced to open their ports. The Opium Wars and the opening of Japan both belong to this category.

• 4. A Long History

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  Phoenicia ran an enterprising maritime trading-culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BC to 300 BC. The Romans followed, setting up coloniae throughout the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and in Western Asia. From the 9th century, Vikings such as Leif Erikson established colonies in Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, North America, and Normandy. European Crusaders set up colonial regimes in Outremer in the Levant between 1097 and 1291, and Venice reached its greatest nominal colonial extent at the conclusion of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Modern colonialism is generally considered to have begun with the Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands, when the relationships involved in domination became recognisably colonial. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 pushed Europeans toward the sea, and the routes discovered by Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator, who lived from 1394 to 1460, helped fuel the Age of Discovery. The Crown of Castile encountered the Americas in 1492. The Treaty of Tordesillas divided these new lands between the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in 1494. The 17th century brought the Dutch Empire, the French colonial empire, and the English overseas possessions that became the British Empire. The Japanese colonial empire began in the mid-19th century with the settler colonization of Hokkaido and the destruction of the island's indigenous Ainu people.

• 5. Did Colonies Pay

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  Asking whether colonies paid, the economic historian Grover Clark, who lived from 1891 to 1938, gave an emphatic no. He reported that in every case the support cost, especially the military system needed to defend colonies, outran the total trade they produced. The arithmetic is complicated by the multiplicity of interests involved. In some cases colonial powers paid heavily in military costs while private investors pocketed the benefits. In others, the powers shifted administrative costs onto the colonies themselves by imposing taxes. The world's colonial population at the outbreak of the First World War totalled about 560 million people, of whom 70% lived in British possessions and 10% in French. The domestic populations of the colonial powers totalled about 370 million. The economic afterlife of colonies has varied enormously. Economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, in their work on institutions as a fundamental cause of long-run growth, describe a Reversal of Fortune. The less developed civilisations of 1500, like North America and Australia, are now far richer than once-prosperous societies such as the Mughals in India and the Incas in the Americas. Where colonists could extract resources quickly, they kept existing systems. Where there was little to extract, they built new institutions to protect their interests, and those institutions outlasted them.

• 6. Bondage And Its Aftermath

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  In the 17th century, nearly two-thirds of English settlers came to North America as indentured servants. The European colonial system took approximately 11 million Africans to the Caribbean and to North and South America as slaves. The Portuguese Empire brought 3,646,800 enslaved people to Brazil between 1450 and 1870, the largest single destination. The British Caribbean received 1,665,000, the French Caribbean 1,600,200, and Spanish Latin America 1,552,100. Abolitionists in Europe and the Americas protested the inhumane treatment of African slaves, and the slave trade was eliminated by the late 19th century. One disputed school of thought points to the role of abolitionism in the American Revolution, as slave-owning elites in the Thirteen Colonies saw Britain's move against slavery as a reason to fight for independence. The labour shortages that followed abolition inspired colonisers in Queensland, British Guiana, and Fiji to re-adopt indentured servitude. India and China were the largest sources. Between 1830 and 1930, around 30 million indentured servants migrated from India, and 24 million returned. In practice these servants were exploited through terrible working conditions and burdensome debts they had no means of negotiating once they arrived.

• 7. The Invisible Conquest

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  Half the native population of Hispaniola in 1518 was killed by smallpox. The same disease ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing 150,000 in Tenochtitlan alone, including the emperor, and aided the conquerors in Peru in the 1530s. Measles killed a further two million Mexican natives in the 17th century. In 1618 and 1619, smallpox wiped out 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Native Americans, and some believe Old World diseases caused the death of up to 95% of the Native American population of the New World. Smallpox killed around 50% of indigenous Australians in the early years of British colonisation. As late as 1848 and 1849, as many as 40,000 out of 150,000 Hawaiians are estimated to have died of measles, whooping cough, and influenza. In 1875, measles killed over 40,000 Fijians, roughly a third of the population. The traffic in disease ran both ways. Researchers have hypothesised that a precursor to syphilis was carried from the New World to Europe after Columbus's voyages, where it became a major killer during the Renaissance. Colonial powers later turned to countering disease. As early as 1803 the Spanish Crown organised the Balmis expedition to carry the smallpox vaccine to its colonies. Waldemar Haffkine, who mainly worked in India and developed vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague in the 1890s, is considered the first microbiologist.

• 8. Maps, Returns, And Memory

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  Britain and France traced close to 40% of the entire length of the world's international boundaries. Maps were not neutral. The cartographer Bassett observed that by providing geographical information in a convenient and standardised format, mapmakers helped open West Africa to European conquest. As J.B. Harley put it, the steps in making a map, selection, omission, simplification, classification, and symbolisation, are all inherently rhetorical. A common practice was to mark unexplored areas as blank spaces, which sparked competition among colonial powers eager to fill them for national glory. Decolonisation, which started in the 18th century, accelerated sharply after 1945, with a large wave between 1945 and 1975. When empires fell, populations moved in reverse. 900,000 French colonists known as the Pied-Noirs resettled in France following Algeria's independence in 1962. 800,000 people of Portuguese origin returned to Portugal after the independence of former African colonies between 1974 and 1979. Jean-Paul Sartre coined the word neocolonialism in 1956 to describe colonial-style exploitation by other means. Whether the era is remembered as shame or pride remains contested. A 2014 YouGov survey found that most British people thought the British Empire was more something to be proud of, at 59%, than to be ashamed of, at 19%, and a third said they would like it if Britain still had an empire.