Colonialism

Intimately associated with the development of capitalism was Europe's conquest of the rest of the globe. This process, often euphemistically called the “Age of Exploration,” can be viewed as the expansion of capitalism on a global scale. If the geographies of capitalism are typified by uneven spatial development, then colonialism involved the construction of uneven development on a global scale, with Europe at the center and its colonies on the world periphery. This theme is found in many theories of world development, such as world-systems theory.

Colonialism was simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural project. It was also an act of conquest, by which a small group of European powers came to dominate a very large group of non-European countries. Culturally, as Edward Said points out, this process involved the emergence of the distinction between the “West” and the “Rest.” In conquering the “Orient,” Europeans came to discover themselves as Westerners, often in contrast to other people, whom they represented in highly erroneous terms.

Everywhere, colonized people fought back against colonial rule. Examples include the Inca rebellions against the Spanish, the Zulu attacks on the Dutch Boers, the great Indian Sepoy uprising of 1857, and the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899–1901. Yet Western powers, armed with guns, ships, and cannons, effectively dominated the entire planet. While a few countries were nominally independent, such as Thailand, the only one to escape colonialism substantively was Japan, which, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, closed itself off from the world until 1868.

Colonialism had profound implications for both the colonizers and the colonized, which is why a sophisticated understanding of economic geography must include some understanding of this process. Globally, colonialism produced the division between the world's developed and less developed countries. Colonialism changed Europe too, increasing the formation of capitalist social relations and markets as well as nation-states in Western Europe. Prior to colonialism, Europe was a relatively poor and powerless part of the world, compared with the Muslim world, India, or China; afterward, Europe became the most powerful collection of societies on the planet.

The Temporal and Spatial Unevenness of Colonialism

It is important to note that colonialism did not occur in the same way in different historical moments and different geographic places. Temporally, there were two major waves of colonialism, one associated with the preindustrial mercantile era and the other with the Industrial Revolution. From the 16th century, when colonialism began, until the early 19th century, Western economic thought was characterized by mercantilism, in which state protection of private interests was justified as necessary for the national well-being. During this period, the primary colonial powers were Spain and Portugal, and their primary colonies were in the New World and parts of Africa.

[Page 509]

Figure 1 Colonial empires prior to 1914. Different European powers conquered various regions of Earth at different moments in time.

Source: Author.

Following the Napoleonic wars, which ended in the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the European powers were relatively weak. This opening provided an opportunity for nationalists in Latin America, led by Simon Bolivar, to break away and become independent countries. Thus, the number of colonies declined sharply in the early 19th century. However, during the subsequent phase of industrialization, characterized economically by the ideology of free trade, the number of colonies grew again. This time, Britain emerged as the world's premier power and, along with France, colonized large parts of Africa and Asia. Finally, the number of colonies declined rapidly after World War II, in the era of decolonization.

...