When most of the world’s colonial dependencies attained independence as sovereign nation-states in the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that an epoch had ended logically as well as historically. Colonies had been particular forms of imperialism, created during the tide of western European expansion into other continents and oceans from the sixteenth century onwards. At high noon—the end of the nineteenth century—almost every society outside Europe had become or had been the colony of a western European state. Colonialism began as a series of crude ventures. Whether by force or by treaty, sovereignty was seized, and exercised by governors responsible to foreign states. If indigenous rulers were retained, they mainly veiled the reality of power. As colonial states became more secure and elaborate, they intruded more pervasively into the daily life of subject populations; popular resentment seemed to foreshadow the gradual transfer of governmental machinery to indigenous nationalist leaders.
The actual outcomes were much less orderly. Dislodged or dislocated by the Second World War, and assailed by the United Nations rhetoric of national self-determination, many colonial states in South and South-east Asia passed without ceremony into the hands of nationalists; several in Africa negotiated independence before they had trained indigenous bureaucracies; others had to mount and endure sustained warfare to reach the same goal; and yet others—usually islands with small populations—chose to remain dependencies, with rights of individual entry into the former metropolitan country. A few fragments were retained by metropolitan powers, either as conveniently remote nuclear testing facilities or as significant entrepots. Despite this messy variety, most scholars believed that a logical narrative had come to an end: western colonialism, born in the sixteenth century and maturing until the twentieth, had reached its apotheosis in the sovereign states which succeeded them and took their places in the community of nations.
Yet colonialism continues to fascinate social scientists, both applied and theoretical. The successor-states were often bounded by arbitrary frontiers which exacerbated ethnic identities, and were vulnerable to the rivalries of the Cold War. Brave attempts to generate solidarity on the basis of the whole Third World, or even more modest efforts such as African unity, failed to reorient the ex-colonies’ long-established links with the former metropolitan powers. Their inherited bureaucracies were better equipped to control than to mobilize the populace, and their formal economies were well designed to export unprocessed commodities. Their scanty education and training institutions could not immediately cope with the rising expectations of burgeoning populations. Independence was expected to liberate national energies in escaping from underdevelopment and backwardness, in pursuit of development and modernization. The United Nations Development Decade focused international attention on these goals, and academic centres of development studies graduated platoons of experts to assist in achieving them by finding technical solutions.
Few ex-colonies responded as planned, to strategies of agricultural intensification and economic diversification. Most of tropical Africa and some other parts of the world have performed so poorly that they have, in effect, retired from the global economy, their peoples committed to environmentally dubious practices in order to survive, their cities swelling and their recurrent budgets dependent upon aid flows. These catastrophes contrast sharply with the performance of the economic tigers of South-east and East Asia, whose success owes rather little to the advice of development experts. In either case, the imperatives of economic development legitimized authoritarian styles of government, which often adopted and elaborated the colonial structures of control in ways which hardly meet the old criteria of modernization.
These disconcerting tendencies add grist to the post-modernist mill and its critique of academic positivism. Stage theories of human progress have suffered especially badly at the hands of post-modern writers. Colonialism was not, after all, an aberration. Some see it as inherent in the western Enlightenment, quoting (for example) John Locke’s opinion that ‘God gave the world to men in Common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational’. Edward Said’s (1978) seminal Orientalism, and the Subaltern Studies pioneered and elaborated by expatriate South Asian scholars (Guha 1994), insist that colonialism was neither a finite era nor a particular set of governmental mechanisms. The desired achievement of post-colonialism therefore requires a great deal more than the application of technical solutions to discrete problems. Colonial apologetics and the triumphalist narratives of anti-colonial nationalism are portrayed as two sides of the same coin, alternative stage theories of social evolution which distort rather than illuminate past and present human experience. Only their deconstruction may exorcise colonialism’s diffuse influences in the minds and practices of subalterns and superiors alike.
Just as colonialism has been applied beyond its earlier chronological limits, so it has burst its conventional boundaries in space. Ethnic identities which survived the homogenizing pressures of the modern nation-state have been unleashed by the end of the Cold War. When communities seek shelter from open competition, in solidarities which transcend market relations, ethnic identities are reasserted and historic charters invoked. Whether the immediate demands are political recognition and decentralized institutions, or land rights or other tangible benefits, the spectre of ethnic nationalism walks abroad, wearing the bloody robe of colonialism. Curiously, this extension of the term’s application severs the ties with capitalism and imperialism, and brings it closer to an earlier usage, whereby the movement of any group of settlers into territory claimed or occupied by others could be described quite interchangeably as colonialism or colonization.
Donald Denoon
Australian National University
Further reading
Guha, R. (ed.) (1994) Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, 2 vols, Delhi.
