Colonialism

Colonialism is both a practice and a worldview. As a practice, it involves the domination of a society by settlers from a different society. As a worldview, colonialism is a truly global geopolitical, economic, and cultural doctrine that is rooted in the worldwide expansion of West European capitalism that survived until well after the collapse of most colonial empires.

Historically, colonies in the strict sense of “settlements” had existed long before the advent of global capitalism; the English word colony is derived from the ancient Latin term colonia, denoting an outpost or settlement. However, colonialism as a principle of imperial statecraft and an effective strategy of capitalist expansion that involved sustained appropriation of the resources of other societies, indeed regions, of the world for the benefit of the colonizing society, backed by an elaborate ideological justificatory apparatus, is a modern, West European invention par excellence, emerging from the 15th century onward.

Colonialism involved a combination of several processes, recurring with remarkable consistency [Page 229]across various instances. Some of these were as follows:

• Encounter and repeated/sustained contact between the Western “discoverers” and the rest of the world, typically involving invasion, conquest, strategic genocide, the relegation of local rulers to subservient roles, and, eventually, some form of settlement by West Europeans.
• The surveying and scientific analysis of the geography, resources, peoples, and customs of the colonies, with the explicit intent of facilitating resource extraction and/or unequal exchange through forced trading.
• The imposition of extractive enterprises, such as plantations, mining, and other forms of raw-material-yielding activities, and the deployment of nonfree “native” labor in such enterprises.
• The systematic destruction of indigenous industries to transform the colonies into captive markets for European goods.
• Triangular trade (the hawking of European commodities to Africa, enslaved people to the Americas/the Caribbean, and plantation products to Europe).
• The establishment of modernizationist projects, such as the construction of elaborate transportation and information infrastructures, the introduction of private property in land, specific forms of taxation, and colonial law with the purpose of enabling the extractive and disciplinary apparatus of the colonial administration.
• The forced transfer and circulation of enslaved or indentured labor between colonies, or between regions within the same colony, disrupting culturally articulated modes of interaction between nature and people, and creating buffer populations between the colonizers and the locals.
• Creation of collaborationist/comprador colonial elites, mass educational systems, and public cultures that systematically facilitated the explicit alignment of ideas such as knowledge and progress with Western civilization, thereby producing the illusion of European superiority and the normalization of colonial relations.
• Continuous and systematic framing of colonized populations as the backward, inferior, dehumanized “other” of the enlightened European/White “self,” and the use of the discourse of scientific racism to this end.
• In later phases of colonialism, warfare using colonial populations from one colony in armed incursions against other (potential) colonies.
• Prevention of the access of colonial subject populations to Europe.

Because it involved the superimposition of the rule of an alien social order on another, violence inhered in all aspects of colonialism. As Aimé Césaire has pointed out, colonialism allowed the routine practice of all elements of what later came to be decried as Nazi violence within Europe, on non-European populations overseas.

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