Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon.

World history is full of examples of one society

gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered
territory. The ancient Greeks set up colonies as did the Romans, the Moors, and the Ottomans, to
name just a few of the most famous examples. Colonialism, then, is not restricted to a specific time
or place. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of
technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world.
Fast sailing ships made it possible to reach distant ports and to sustain close ties between the center
and colonies. Thus, the modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to
move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political sovereignty in spite of
geographical dispersion. This entry uses the term colonialism to describe the process of European
settlement and political control over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and
parts of Africa and Asia.
The difficulty of defining colonialism stems from the fact that the term is often used as a synonym
for imperialism. Both colonialism and imperialism were forms of conquest that were expected to
benefit Europe economically and strategically. The term colonialism is frequently used to describe
the settlement of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and Brazil, places that were
controlled by a large population of permanent European residents. The term imperialism often
describes cases in which a foreign government administers a territory without significant
settlement; typical examples include the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century and the
American domination of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The distinction between the two,
however, is not entirely consistent in the literature. Some scholars distinguish between colonies
for settlement and colonies for economic exploitation. Others use the term colonialism to describe
dependencies that are directly governed by a foreign nation and contrast this with imperialism,
which involves indirect forms of domination.
The confusion about the meaning of the term imperialism reflects the way that the concept has
changed over time. Although the English word imperialism was not commonly used before the
nineteenth century, Elizabethans already described the United Kingdom as “the British Empire.”
As Britain began to acquire overseas dependencies, the concept of empire was employed more
frequently. Imperialism was understood as a system of military domination and sovereignty over
territories. The day to day work of government might be exercised indirectly through local
assemblies or indigenous rulers who paid tribute, but sovereignty rested with the British. The shift
away from this traditional understanding of empire was influenced by the Leninist analysis of
imperialism as a system oriented towards economic exploitation. According to Lenin, imperialism
was the necessary and inevitable result of the logic of accumulation in late capitalism. Thus, for
Lenin and subsequent Marxists, imperialism described a historical stage of capitalism rather than
a trans-historical practice of political and military domination. The lasting impact of the Marxist
approach is apparent in contemporary debates about American imperialism, a term which usually
means American economic hegemony, regardless of whether such power is exercised directly or
indirectly (Young 2001).
Given the difficulty of consistently distinguishing between the two terms, this entry will use
colonialism as a broad concept that refers to the project of European political domination from the
sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that ended with the national liberation movements of the 1960s.
Post-colonialism will be used to describe the political and theoretical struggles of societies that
experienced the transition from political dependence to sovereignty. This entry will use
imperialism as a broad term that refers to economic, military, political domination that is achieved
without significant permanent European settlement.

“Colonial literature” is most easily defined as literature written during a time of colonization,
usually from the point of view of colonizers. The classic example is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, a novel about a man employed in the ivory trade who sails up the Congo River and
witnesses the terrible effects of colonization and imperialism. Though Conrad’s novel is critical of
the ivory trade, his focus is on the emotional and psychological effects colonization has on the
colonizers themselves. The black people the narrator encounters are rarely portrayed as fully
human. I’d place this book firmly in the colonial category.

“Postcolonial literature,” then, refers to literature written in a “postcolonial” period, generally by

members of the colonized community. This literature is a reaction to colonization. Often,
postcolonial literature turns established narratives upside down by responding to or reinterpreting
popular colonial texts

Main Points of Colonialism

• Anticolonialism

"Anticolonialism is a broad term used to describe the various resistance movements

directed against colonial and imperial powers. The ideas associated with anticolonialism—
namely justice, equality, and self-determination—commingled with other ideologies such
as nationalism and antiracism."

• Colonialism (Encyclopedia of Human Geography)

Colonialism, as distinguished from imperialism, is generally defined as the appropriation,

occupation, and control of one territory by another.
• Colonialism (Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society)

" Colonialism is a system of domination and value based on the belief that the subjugated
people are inferior to the colonizers. The development of the European colonial project
since the 16th century coincided with the development of the concept of racism and
ethnocentrism, as well as the theory of Social Darwinism. These concepts and theories
were used to justify White European domination over non-White European populations."

• Critical Race Theory (Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods)

Critical race theory is a body of radical critique against the implicit acceptance of White
supremacy in prevailing legal paradigms and in contemporary law.

• Critical Theory (Encyclopedia of Governance)

Critical theory proceeds from the view of mankind as the creator of history and society; it
seeks a society of free actors that transcends the tension between, and abolishes the
opposition to, the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality and the results
of his or her labor.

• Decolonization (Encyclopedia of Human Geography)

"Although formal political independence inevitably brought with it the trappings of a new
society—a new flag, currency, national airline, and so on—many observers question
whether or not decolonization ended as simply as it appeared to end."

• Globalization (from the Encyclopedia of Human Geography)

A common stereotype pertaining to globalization is that it is purely economic in nature.

Yet such a view is overly narrow and ignores the multiple ways in which globalization
operates as a political, cultural, and ideological force as well. For example, immigration
clearly is a topic pertinent to globalization, with many so-called noneconomic dimensions
associated with it. Equally, one could point to the globalization of education, disease, or
terrorism. Some of the aspects of globalization that are resisted most vehemently in parts
of the world are its cultural dimensions, including the globalization of fast food, dress, and
cinema, all of which are bound up with people's worldviews and daily lives.

• Local Knowledge (Encyclopedia of Governance)

Local knowledge refers to people's knowledge of their own circumstances and lived
experiences, whether those be community residents for whom public policies are being
legislated or the legislators' staff members or the implementors of public policies (or any
other setting).

• Postcolonialism (Encyclopedia of Governance)

 "Postcolonialism refers both to a specific historical period or state of affairs—the aftermath
of imperialism—and to an intellectual and political project to reclaim and rethink the
history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of European imperialism."

• Postcolonialism (Encyclopedia of Social Theory)

A central feature of anticolonial and postcolonial thought is the recognition that

colonization is a sophisticated and multileveled ideological process, which operates both
externally and internally. In reality, colonization is not restricted to physical deprivation,
legal inequality, economic exploitation, and classist, racist, and sexist unofficial or official
assumptions. [It includes a psychological dimension wherein] the colonized become their
own oppressor, in that they exert the colonizers' imaginary suppositions of inferiority upon
their own self-esteem...the objectification and dehumanization of the colonized.

• Third Worldism

"Third-worldism...became the belief that the world would be emancipated by means of the
liberation of the poor peoples through revolutionary transformation in the style of Cuba
and Vietnam. Thus, whereas traditional Marxist philosophy contended that revolution was
class-based and the hallmark of industrialized societies, third-worldism argued instead for
socialist revolutions in the poor countries."