Definition
While its meaning is often debated and used in divergent contexts, colonialism may be defined as as the practices of domination that subject groups of people to the power of another.
This dominance may take on a number of forms including political and legal domination over an external society, economic and political dependence on the colonial power, exploitation of the colony by the colonial power (often in the form of land, natural resources, or labor), or racial and cultural inequality, among numerous others.
Discussion
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, colonialism is “a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.” This broad definition can cover a range of more specific practices that vary across time and place. Colonialism can include the resettlement of large and small communities of people from the colonial metropole; control of political and economic apparatuses; cultural domination; and resource extraction, among other practices.
“Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
The Crash Course Geography video below gives an overview of colonialism – including examples from Europe and Asia.
Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang identify different forms of colonization. The first is external colonization, which refers to the extraction of resources to increase wealth and power of colonial center. The second is internal colonization, or the policing of internal boundaries, extraction of labor and resources to enrich elite and politically powerful classes. And third is settler colonialism. Settler colonialism refers to when settlers arrive in a new land with the intention to stay, create a new home on colonized land, and in which there is no physical or geographical separation between the metropole and the colony.
What is settler colonialism?
Most broadly, settler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society.
The past few decades have witnessed the growth of settler colonial studies across a broad range of disciplines. As settler colonial studies has developed and become institutionalized as a field, a series of critiques and debates has prompted both revision and rearticulation from various scholars.
The scholar Patrick Wolfe defines settler colonialism as a system rather than a historical event, that perpetuates the erasure and destruction of native people as a precondition for settler colonialism and expropriation of lands and resources.
The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life.
Patrick Wolfe (2006) Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4, 387-409, DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240
Returning Land
In the context of settler colonialism, the process to decolonization must include the return of land to Indigenous people. Many Indigenous-led organizations, often headed by Indigenous women, are working to recover their traditional homelands. One of these organizations is the Sogorea Te Land Trust in Northern California. Sogorea Te Land Trust asks non-Indigenous allies to pay shuumi, or a land tax, that helps to fund the purchase of land. The land obtained by the organization is then put into land trust that expands Indigenous stewardship of the territory.
Transnational Approaches to Colonialism
Transnational approaches to studying colonialism open up new ways to understand empire and colonialism as overlapping and inter-connected phenomena that extend across and through nations. Instead of focusing on discrete nations, a transnational framework focuses on the way power travels and reproduces colonial inequalities through knowledge, bodies, and ideologies. More recent transnational studies of empire, for example, often take analyses of U.S. colonialism a step further to emphasize overlapping colonial projects and the ways in which various nations or imperial governments collaborated and in turn co-constituted colonial systems and infrastructure.
Media
Empire as territories and US military bases
Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad—from giant “Little Americas” to small radar facilities. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined.
Art as Resisting Empire
References to the racial tensions in Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the profiling of black British people by the police serve to echo the actions of colonial forces in the nineteenth century.
Jeremy Dutcher – Indigenous Songwriter & the Preservation of Language and Stories
The debut album by Canadian composer and tenor, Jeremy Dutcher – mixes post-classical rearrangement of his Wolastoq First Nation traditional music from 1907 of his ancestors singing forgotten songs and stories. The album is his contribution to his heritage and community in attempts to revitalize the Wolastoq language to the world, which has less than 100 speakers alive today.
Terminology – Settler Colonialism vs. Westward Expansion
In this clip, historian Naoko Shibusawa argues for the importance of saying “settler colonialism” versus “westward expansion” in how we reference the acquisition of US territory resulting in the violence displacement and dispossession of Indigenous communities both in the continental United States and in various territories such as Hawaii, Guam, and Samoa.
References
Ahmad, Aijaz, 1994. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso.
Alfred, Taiaiake, 2005. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bell, Duncan, 2016. Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Burke, Edmund, 2000. On Empire, Liberty and Reform: Speeches and Letters, David Bromwich (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Chibber, Vivek, 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso.
Coulthard, Glen, 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fanon, Frantz, 1952 [2008]. Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Press.
Gandhi, Leela, 1988. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press.
Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri, 1988. Selected Subaltern Studies, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kohn, Margaret, 2010. “Post-colonial Theory,” in Duncan Bell (ed.), Ethics and World Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–218.
Kohn, Margaret and O’Neill, Daniel, 2006. “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Racism and Slavery in the West Indies,” Political Theory, 34: 192–228.
Kymlicka, Will, 2013. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity, New York: Oxford University Press.
Lightfoot, Sheryl, 2016. Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution, New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl, 1972. On Colonialism: Articles from the New York Tribune and other writings, New York: International Publishers.
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McCarthy, Thomas, 2009. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, New York: Cambridge University Pres.
McClintock, Anne, 1992, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,” Social Text, 31/32: 84–98.
Mehta, Uday, 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mill, John Stuart, 1861. Considerations on Representative Government, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Volume XIX), John Robinson (ed.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963, pp. 371–577.
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Pagden, Anthony, 1990. Spanish Imperialism and Political Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pitts, Jennifer, 2005. A Turn To Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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Simpson, Audra, 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: A Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Durham: Duke University Press.
Simpson, Leanne, 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.
Spivak, Gayatri, 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313.
Tocqueville, Alexis, 1837, “Second Letter on Algeria,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts (ed. and trans.), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 14–26.
Tocqueville, Alexis, 1841, “Essay on Algeria,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts (ed. and trans.), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 59–116.
Turner, Dale, 2006. This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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Additional Resources
- Visualizing Palestine Digital Project – https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/settler-colonialism-still-reality
Page Editors
- Professor Sarah Fong
- Professor Courtney Sato