Colonialism is the holding and ownership of colonies, or the treating of another country as though it was in fact a colony. Indeed recently the concept has been extended to refer to ‘internal’ colonialism, where the capital or economically dominant part of a country treats a distant region just as it might a genuinely foreign colony. For true colonialism to exist two conditions are necessary. The land held as a colony must have no real political independence from the ‘mother country’, but also the relationship must be one of forthright exploitation. The entire reason for having colonies is to increase the wealth and welfare of the colonial power, either by extracting resources, material or labour from the colony more cheaply than they could be bought on a free market, or by ensuring a market for one’s own goods at advantageous rates. In this way a set of colonies may be rather different from an empire. The far flung lands that constitute an empire may be integrated equally in economic and political terms with the original homeland, the motive for imperial expansion being the spreading of a way of life or of a political design, or merely the distancing of external borders, and thus military danger, from the heartland. To some extent this demonstrates a change in meaning of ‘colony’. The original colonies were new settlements by Greek city states, where over-population led to a need for expansion. Expansion was not, principally, at the cost of an indigenous population in the new territory, and the relationship between the parent city and the colony was neither exploitative nor one of political dominance.
In practice there are no pure examples either of colonialism, or of this non-exploitative version of imperialism. Colonial government has often been justified, sincerely or otherwise, as an attempt to spread ‘civilization’to socially underdeveloped societies, and few empires have not rested, fundamentally, on the economic advantage to producers and merchants in the imperial centre of captive markets and resources on the periphery.
Britain’s Colonial Office, for example, was largely staffed with those who believed that they were both exporting decent values and assisting the development of underprivileged natives. Nevertheless, the essence of colonialism as a concept, and especially in modern pejorative usage, is the idea of deliberate exploitation of another country and its inhabitants. Thus the earliest colonies of the modern world, the British colonies in India or North America, for example, were set up by trading companies operating under royal warrants, with the express intention of making a profit. The earliest colonies of which we have much evidence are probably those set up all over the Mediterranean basin by the Greek city states from around 600 BC. Nothing was seen to be wrong or undesirable about the policy of colonialism at a time when the general indigenous populations of the parent countries themselves were allowed no political involvement, and the idea that colonialism was politically unacceptable arose only with the development of internal democracy in the home countries. In fact the absolute illegitimacy of colonialism is a later 20th-century phenomenon. One of the war aims that was expressed by Germany in both world wars was the achievement of colonial territory on a par with Britain’s, and few found the demand in principle wrong, but rather objected simply to having to give up their own colonies or national independence. Not until the creation of the League of Nations between the wars, and its successor, the United Nations, did it become commonly accepted that only a mandate from the international community to govern in the long-term interests of the colony itself could justify a developed land owning and controlling a less developed one. It is still, of course, often alleged that the essence of colonialism characterizes the relations between former colonial powers and the newly independent states, and indeed between the industrially developed powers and the underdeveloped countries of the Third World. This modern objection to colonialism rests on the acceptance of the ethnically based nation state, for otherwise there is no a priori reason why London or Paris have less right to rule India or Algeria than they have to rule Manchester or Lyons. The French, particularly, tried to make this a justification. They argued that their colonies, especially in Algeria, were simply departments of the French State that happened to be separated physically from mainland France, and several far flung territories continue to constitute parts of metropolitan France.
This is the complete article, containing 740 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
