Colonialism and its definition may vary depending on the use of the term and the context,[4][7] with colonies having been set up since ancient times. But colonialism in its common modern sense has its origin in being a concept describing modern era European colonial empires. This modern colonialism developed and spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century, with European colonial empires spaning 35% of Earth's land by 1800 and peaking at 84% by the beginning of World War I.[8]
Modern colonialism developed a coloniality which complemented military colonial control through intersectional violence and discrimination, developing modern biopolitics of sexuality, gender, race, disability and class among others.[9][10] Economically this was sustained by enforcing policies of mercantilism, restricting the colony to trade only with the metropole, strengthening the home-country economy. At first through the growing chartered companies and by the mid-19th century through the states themselfs colonialism shifted under new imperialism to the use of free trade, reducing market restrictions or tariffs, coercing independent or foreign colonial markets to open up, often through gunboat diplomacy or concerted interventionism, such as policing actions. From early on modern colonial politics were justified by beliefs of having a civilizing or often Christian mission to cultivate land and life.
Decolonization, while starting in the 18th century, did not at first overcome modern colonialism as such, only in the aftermath of World War II colonial power was questioned and challenged enough for nearly all colonies to gain independence between 1945 and 1975. Though often some coloniality remained, and postcolonial and neocolonial relations developed, externally and internally. Remaining as internal colonization an existential issue of indigenous peoples.
involves fewer colonists and focuses on the exploitation of natural resources or labour to the benefit of the metropole. This form consists of trading posts as well as larger colonies where colonists would constitute much of the political and economic administration. The European colonization of Africa and Asia was largely conducted under the auspices of exploitation colonialism.[22]
Exploitation colonialism
Surrogate colonialism involves a settlement project supported by a colonial power, in which most of the settlers do not come from the same ethnic group as the ruling power, as was the case of the British Mandate for Palestine.
[23]
is a notion of uneven structural power between areas of a state. The source of exploitation comes from within the state. This is demonstrated in the way control and exploitation may pass from people from the colonizing country to an immigrant population within a newly independent country.[24][25]
National colonialism is a process involving elements of both settler and internal colonialism, in which nation-building and colonization are symbiotically connected, with the colonial regime seeking to remake the colonized peoples into their own cultural and political image. The goal is to integrate them into the state, but only as reflections of the state's preferred culture. The is the archetypal example of a national-colonialist society.[26]
Republic of China in Taiwan
Trade colonialism involves the undertaking of colonialist ventures in support of trade opportunities for merchants. This form of colonialism was most prominent in 19th-century Asia, where previously states were forced to open their ports to Western powers. Examples of this include the Opium Wars and the opening of Japan.[27][28]
isolationist
The Times once quipped that there were three types of colonial empire: "The English, which consists in making colonies with colonists; the German, which collects colonists without colonies; the French, which sets up colonies without colonists."[14] Modern studies of colonialism have often distinguished between various overlapping categories of colonialism, broadly classified into four types: settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism, surrogate colonialism, and internal colonialism. Some historians have identified other forms of colonialism, including national and trade forms.[15]
Botany
Colonial botany refers to the body of works concerning the study, cultivation, marketing and naming of the new plants that were acquired or traded during the age of European colonialism. Notable examples of these plants included sugar, nutmeg, tobacco, cloves, cinnamon, Peruvian bark, peppers, Sassafras albidum, and tea. This work was a large part of securing financing for colonial ambitions, supporting European expansion and ensuring the profitability of such endeavors. Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus were seeking to establish routes to trade spices, dyes and silk from the Moluccas, India and China by sea that would be independent of the established routes controlled by Venetian and Middle Eastern merchants. Naturalists like Hendrik van Rheede, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, and Jacobus Bontius compiled data about eastern plants on behalf of the Europeans. Though Sweden did not possess an extensive colonial network, botanical research based on Carl Linnaeus identified and developed techniques to grow cinnamon, tea and rice locally as an alternative to costly imports.[104]
During the colonial era, the global process of colonisation served to spread and synthesize the social and political belief systems of the "mother-countries" which often included a belief in a certain natural racial superiority of the race of the mother-country. Colonialism also acted to reinforce these same racial belief systems within the "mother-countries" themselves. Usually also included within the colonial belief systems was a certain belief in the inherent superiority of male over female. This particular belief was often pre-existing amongst the pre-colonial societies, prior to their colonisation.[130][131][132]
Popular political practices of the time reinforced colonial rule by legitimising European (and/ or Japanese) male authority, and also legitimising female and non-mother-country race inferiority through studies of craniology, comparative anatomy, and phrenology.[131][132][133] Biologists, naturalists, anthropologists, and ethnologists of the 19th century were focused on the study of colonised indigenous women, as in the case of Georges Cuvier's study of Sarah Baartman.[132] Such cases embraced a natural superiority and inferiority relationship between the races based on the observations of naturalists' from the mother-countries. European studies along these lines gave rise to the perception that African women's anatomy, and especially genitalia, resembled those of mandrills, baboons, and monkeys, thus differentiating colonised Africans from what were viewed as the features of the evolutionarily superior, and thus rightfully authoritarian, European woman.[132]
In addition to what would now be viewed as pseudo-scientific studies of race, which tended to reinforce a belief in an inherent mother-country racial superiority, a new supposedly "science-based" ideology concerning gender roles also then emerged as an adjunct to the general body of beliefs of inherent superiority of the colonial era.[131] Female inferiority across all cultures was emerging as an idea supposedly supported by craniology that led scientists to argue that the typical brain size of the female human was, on the average, slightly smaller than that of the male, thus inferring that therefore female humans must be less developed and less evolutionarily advanced than males.[131] This finding of relative cranial size difference was later attributed to the general typical size difference of the human male body versus that of the typical human female body.[134]
Within the former European colonies, non-Europeans and women sometimes faced invasive studies by the colonial powers in the interest of the then prevailing pro-colonial scientific ideology of the day.[132]
Othering
Othering is the process of creating a separate entity to persons or groups who are labelled as different or non-normal due to the repetition of characteristics.[135] Othering is the creation of those who discriminate, to distinguish, label, categorise those who do not fit in the societal norm. Several scholars in recent decades developed the notion of the "other" as an epistemological concept in social theory.[135] For example, postcolonial scholars, believed that colonising powers explained an "other" who were there to dominate, civilise, and extract resources through colonisation of land.[135]
Political geographers explain how colonial/imperial powers "othered" places they wanted to dominate to legalise their exploitation of the land.[135] During and after the rise of colonialism the Western powers perceived the East as the "other", being different and separate from their societal norm. This viewpoint and separation of culture had divided the Eastern and Western culture creating a dominant/subordinate dynamic, both being the "other" towards themselves.[135]
Colonistics
The field of colonistics studies colonialism from such viewpoints as those of economics, sociology and psychology.[138]
Rönnbäck, K. & Broberg, O. (2019) Capital and Colonialism. The Return on British Investments in Africa 1869–1969 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History)
Schill, Pierre : Réveiller l'archive d'une guerre coloniale. Photographies et écrits de Gaston Chérau, correspondant de guerre lors du conflit italo-turc pour la Libye (1911–1912), Créaphis, 480 p., 2018 ( 978-2-35428-141-0). Awaken the archive of a colonial war. Photographs and writings of a French war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish war in Libya (1911–1912). With contributions from art historian Caroline Recher, critic Smaranda Olcèse, writer Mathieu Larnaudie and historian Quentin Deluermoz.
Townsend, Mary Evelyn. European colonial expansion since 1871 (1941).
U.S. Tariff Commission. Colonial tariff policies (1922), worldwide; 922pp
survey online
Velychenko, Stephen (2002). "The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought. Dependency Identity and Development". Ab Imperio. 2002 (1): 323–367. :10.1353/imp.2002.0070. S2CID155635060. Ab Imperio E
