Global Expansion: Colonialism

The term colonialism refers to the the supremacy of one people over another. The dominant group blocks the autonomous development of the colonized and imposes rules, institutions and cultural codes of the colonizers on the colonized. Colonial history has shaped the structure of the world and its societies and culture profoundly. The suppression and exploitation of people and their land, the imposition of Western cultural ideals and eradication of other cultures, and the creation of nations and national boundaries are all phenomenon of the Post-Colonial Age.

Keywords Colonialism; Empire; Identity; Modernity; Postcolonialism; Race and Ethnicity; Social Darwinism; Subaltern

Overview

The age of Colonialism begins as early as the 15th century and ends with the two World Wars of the 20th century. The European empires first claim the lands of Africa, Asia and then the newly discovered American continent for their own. In these lands, countries and islands, they found communities, societies and different cultures which they declared to be inferior to their own. They turned native people into laborers and slaves, and forced their religions and their political and cultural patterns upon them. They declared the rich cultural life to be primitive or barbarian on the mere basis that these cultures were different. Eventually, they declared them a curiosity for their social and anthropological sciences, which was upheld well into the 20th century, despite the plea for a culturally relativistic point of view by anthropologists like Franz Boas or Margaret Mead.

The effects of colonial heritage still shape world politics today. Many parts of the African continent have been stripped of their resources, while others are still dependent on Western companies, who have secured mining rights to control the markets for their products. The map of Africa or the Middle East is today largely a result of colonial conquest and postcolonial negotiation. African National borders often divide common cultures and force the most different cultural heritage and religions to exist in one nation. These cultures come with different rituals and social institutions for the resolution of conflict and were left with having to employing Western ideas of political institutions. In this situation, many newly created nations were torn apart internally or ended in military dictatorships.

The ethnic and political situation in Iraq today, the mixture of Sunni, Shia, Kurds and others, was also the product of Western colonialism. Even after the colonial age, the Western influence has not stopped its progress. During the Cold War, the world outside of West and East was a playing field for proxy wars and ideological conflict.

In the 1970s with the new perspectives of Postmodernism and multiculturalism, the heritage of colonialism was reviewed in terms of ethnic and identity politics. Post-colonial theory dealt with the question of cultures that were hybrids of imposed Western ideas on traditional culture.

The history of colonialism probably began with the Portuguese laying claim on African lands in around the 15th century. The goals of colonization were economic, religious and ideological. In Africa, as well as in Asia and the American continent, the Europeans found an abundance of natural resources, including gold, which they thought of as "riches." The people they encountered in these lands were very different from them. Above all, they were not organized the same way as were the Europeans, which meant they could not muster large enough forces to defend themselves.

The technological sophistication and superiority in organized numbers gave these early Europeans the idea that they were superior in every aspect; that they were more civilized and developed. They encountered people who where so different from them that it was even debated among theologians of the 16th century, whether or not they had souls. In the end it was decided they did, and therefore should be subject to missionary efforts. They were converted to Christianity (often enough at gun-point). The history of slavery in the United States is essentially the direct result of these events.

In general, colonialism can be defined as the rule of one people over another. The effects of this rule, however, are graver than the occupation and oppression of another country. Colonialism refers specifically to the fact that the ruling culture will impose its own culture onto the people it has conquered, thereby cutting off the independent development this culture. Europeans of the time even spoke of the "white man's burden" to justify their forced "civilizing" of the cultures they declared primitive. Sadly, they obliterated rich civilizations and entire cultures in the process.

In the 19th century, the rationalization for this changed from the missionary and civilizing ideology to ideologies of racial supremacy. With the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, biology and political philosophy were irrevocably changed. Evolution as natural selection and the struggle for life were quickly turned into political ideologies. The school of Social Darwinism tried to apply these biological concepts to human societies and the ideology thus created proliferated some misconstrued idea of "white supremacy."

Eventually, as Hannah Arendt has argued, colonialism and pan-nationalism conflated and the colonizers turned in on themselves, culminating in the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who brought war over Europe. And colonialism was not just a European phenomenon. The Japanese had invaded and colonized parts of China and Korea with the same kind of rhetoric, but eventually Japanese Colonialism ended with the second World War.

Further Insights

The Case of Ghana

The effects of colonialism in Africa are a central reason for the continent's many political and humanitarian crises. Moreover, Western involvement in Africa did not end when colonialism ended. The case of the Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) is a testament to that fact.

Nkrumah was a major political figure for post-colonial Africa and spearheaded an international Pan-African. He had studied Catholic Theology, Education and finally philosophy first in Accra, and later in the US (in Pennsylvania) in the 1940s. He encountered Marxist literature and made the acquaintance of international members of Marxist and Trotzkyist movements. Combining the lessons from catholic divinity with Marxist ideals, Nkrumah renewed a pattern which the famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) had foreseen as an alternative to the Neo-Kantian and the liberal critique of capitalism. Parsons had encountered the same mixture of ideals and ideologies while studying in Heidelberg in 1925 and deliberated how Marxism, reformed by catholic social ethics, (for example in the work of Max Scheler) could actually prove a useful alternative way of addressing the problems of capitalism (Stingl, 2008).

In this spirit, Nkrumah went to London and eventually became a famous figure in the Pan-African movement under W.E.B. Dubois. He then went on to unify his native country in the Gold Coast territories which were under British rule and eventually declared Ghana's statehood and independence from the UK. He was incarcerated several times, but eventually Ghana won its independence and Nkrumah was elected president. Applying governmental economic planning for over a decade, Nkrumah successfully modernized and industrialized a country that was stripped and intertwined in the global economy in way it could not turn into profit. Before Nkrumah took office, the Ghanaian lands were the largest producer of cocoa world-wide, but did not have a single refinery.

Neocolonialism

Nkrumah continued to write political books and unmasked the web of international corporations that were profiting from creating obstacles for African development. He went on to declare these and Western political engagements in the region a form of Neocolonialism. Even if Western nations no longer controlled the African people directly, the economic dependencies they created on the world market very much established their dictatorial rule.

For a time it seemed as if Nkrumah managed to be the leader the African continent had been waiting for and many African nations and societies seemed willing to unite under a Pan-African idea he laid out. Since Nkrumah was never silent about his affinities for Marxist ideas, the British and American Government perceived such a movement (and therefore Nkrumah) as a threat.

Despite his successful leadership, a military coup by a pro-western movement deposed Nkrumah and tarnished his reputation. He was declared a power hungry dictator who only worked for his personal profit and that of his cronies. He died in 1972 in exile in Bukarest. Rumors have been afloat for decades concerning the role of the CIA in plotting both the coup and assassination attempts on Nkrumah.

It can also be argued that modern information and communication technology is used as a tool for neocolonialism. On the one hand, participation in modern economy rests on access to these technologies, which creates new dependencies. On the other hand it also creates a new process of exclusion and line of divide between those that have access and those that haven't. This is commonly known as the digital divide. And to a large degree, the content of information technology is structured by Western cultural scripts; thus, this can be considered a colonization of the mind.

Viewpoints

Are There Benefits to Colonialism?

A classic counter-argument has been and still is occasionally employed that colonialism was a vehicle of modernization for the African nations. It is applied usually by scholars who assume that the Western mode of modernization, democracy and industry is without alternative.

And it is true that there is along-standing and very convincing argument, which fits with the work of remarkable scholars like David Landis; that is the idea of property rights being guaranteed for every individual by a government or authority being the most important factor for a society's or nations success in economic development. It is true that this model has been realized in all Western democracies. This does not mean, however, that there were no authority structures in existence in the former colonies before colonization that were able to fulfill that role and would have eventually enabled autonomous development.

Very often Colonialism and Imperialism are used by journalists and scholars as if these two concepts were interchangeable. In this worldview, colonial states are supposedly necessarily imperialistic and imperialistic states necessarily have colonial aspirations. A recent approach in sociological field theory by Julian Go (2008) addresses some of these aspects from a new point of view.

It has become quite fashionable among Neo-Marxists and Leftists to declare the contemporary United States a modern empire and thereby imply that the promotion of democracy and human rights and values is automatically an expression of a continuing colonial attitude. However, leaving aside the question whether the US even is an empire, the conflation of these two concepts is in itself highly speculative.

A general distinction between the two concepts must be made: Imperialism designates the establishment of a nation in a transnational struggle for resources and power. The goal of an empire is to integrate other nations and societies into one's sphere of influence to build one's power base. This does not necessarily imply occupation or eradicating the cultural heritage or political and democratic development of these nations. Imperialist regimes do not construct their idea of the subjects of the empire from ideas of inferior and superior collectivities. Colonialism, on the other hand, does not care about those occupied. For the colonizer, the colonized must be constructed as inferior.

However, in the history of colonialism the "colonial masters" were also thinking of themselves as empires.

Post-Colonial Debates

It is from this background that the theoretical discourse of the latter half of the twentieth century has dealt with the aftermath of the colonial age. Questions of identity and questions of justice alike have informed these debates. The colonial age has been marked by racist ideologies, yet that did not stop people from having children. People of different religions, ethnicities and races were forced to live together, sometimes by employment, sometimes as slaves. Children were born, sometimes the product of rape and sometimes the product of love.

But the mixed heritage of these children and their children's children resulted in a plurality of culture and multicultural identities that became the topic of literature, philosophy and psychology. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was perhaps the first to address these questions when he published his controversial "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952). Born on the island of Martinique, at the time still a colony of France, Fanon entered his dissertation in France. This Freudian inspired analysis of the feelings and expectations of black people living in a "white world" using "white language" was rejected by his supervisors, yet Fanon pushed for publication nonetheless. "Black Skin White Masks" constructs the black subject as being socialized as dependent and feeling inferior; therefore forced to adapt to the white colonizers' rules of social life and conduct, while abandoning the native cultural heritage.

Fanon's work inspired the post-colonial debate and was influential for thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida or Homi K. Bhabha. Bhabha is the eminent postcolonialist theoretician at Harvard. His work focuses on the narration of hybrid identities in literature and psychoanalysis and their deconstruction. In an essay collection, "Nation and Narration" (1990), Bhabha unmasks the tendency to address former colonized cultures as one integral and homogenous entity of societies who all suffered the same fate and have been left stranded in the same state of disrepair. Instead, each of these nations have their own individual composition and history as a result of the colonial era, and the concept of nation is instead a narrative device that has been imposed by the colonizers. In treating them further in the sphere of that narrative is close to continuing the colonial narrative.

In his seminal "The Location of Culture" (1994), Bhabha attacks the binary structure of Western narratives, such as barbarian/civilized, centre/margin. Employing a Derrida-style language, he argues that in switching away from the logo-centric metaphysics the West can renew itself and turn towards the performative, an element he views as existent in the traditional cultures of the former colonies. The celebration of hybridity is an element that has the potential to renew the political discourse towards a productive course.

Gayatri Spivak is another prominent voice in the post-colonial discourse. Born in India in 1942, Spivak is considered the founder of the post-colonial discourse with her essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The subaltern was introduced into the philosophical context by the Marxist author Gramsci and refers to the proletatriat; in general, refers to people that exist outside the hegemonic power. In the 70s, the people from former South Asian colonies were by theoretical writers, defined as being a subaltern people, indicating the shift in theoretical thought. This shift now included the perspective of the colonized and even promoted it over the ideology of the former colonizers. Spivak pointed out that the term cannot be just employed by any group that feels itself marginalized and wants to claim the status of subalternity to compensate for feeling left out. So the question is posed if those who are really excluded from hegemonic discourse actually ever are in the position of claiming their marginalized status at all; if they "do have a voice."

However, even if the subaltern is without voice, somebody must speak in their name, for otherwise we would not even know that there can be a subaltern. The subaltern itself is therefore constructed by language and narration, even if it is not their own. In this regard, Michel Foucault has pointed out that every power, hegemonic or otherwise, always creates its counter-movement. For even those about whom we not speak and who we keep silent, somebody will expose this power of silence and the constraints of speech, and thereby construct the subaltern.

Reparations

An important question in reconstruction of colonialism has been the problem of reparations. Many countries and tribes have demanded reparations from Western governments for various reasons and with various justifications. Two examples are fairly famous. One is the ongoing debate in the US as to whether African-Americans deserve reparations in general for the abduction of their ancestors from the African continent and the centuries of the cruel and horrible treatment heir ancestors suffered as slaves.

The other example is the slaughter by the Germans in 1904 of tens of thousands of members of the Herero, a tribe living in Southern Africa. Herero tribe leaders have repeatedly tried to get compensation from the German government, but have lost every court case so far.

The only thing that can really be forgiven is that which truly unforgivable. Colonialism is a sin committed by Europeans and Americans in the past. The ethical thing to do is probably to forgive, never to forget and to work for a future that does not know people that live under conditions of colonization.

Terms & Concepts

Colonialism: Colonialism is the supremacy of a people over another, blocking the autonomous development of the colonized and imposing the rules, institutions and cultural codes of the colonizers on the colonized. The colonized are treated as inferior and considered as resources. After they fulfilled their task, the land is stripped of its resources or it loses its strategic value, the colony and the colonized are left by the colonizers to fend for themselves.

Cultural Relativism: Cultural Relativism is the idea that a human being's ideas, thoughts and actions can only be understood within the context of her/his culture. Any form of relativism has come under scrutiny and criticism in some regard, for relativism has been used to justify arbitrariness and randomness, summed up under "anything goes". In the extreme, arguments have been cast that any kind of behavior should be tolerated, when it is specific to a culture, preserving through relativism a cultural pluralism. In that regard, even the declaration of human rights, it has been argued, is culture specific to the cultures of the West only and has no legitimacy among Asian or African Cultures. This argument has been used to justify practices from the use of torture to female circumcision.

Digital Divide: This term describes the difference in access to and practical knowledge about the use of information technology, such as the internet. The divide exists between different kinds of groups and internationally, between developing and developed nations. Between communities, it exists between rural and urban areas, or populated areas that are of more or less economic interest for internet service providers. Finally, it exists between social classes.

Imperialism: Building a transnational empire means that a nation or society expands its sphere of influence to sustain itself in a struggle for resources and power. Nations and cultures that fall under an empire's influence are absorbed, but not oppressed. They remain part of the empire and are kept on their path of cultural development.

Neocolonialism: According to classic studies, such as Kwame Nkrumah's, or contemporary writings, the dependence of the former colonies on the economic structures of the world market is artificially maintained by multinational corporations of the West and their governments which keep their former colonies in a state of quasi-colonialism.

Postcolonialism: The effects that the colonial era had on the former colonies, and also on the colonizers, have materialized in literature and in the narration of identities. The study of these effects in literature and culture studies, psychology and sociology is summed up under the term Postolonialism.

Totalitarianism: When all aspects of life are governed by the state and no private life exists we speak of totalitarian states; such was the case in the Communist Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

Social Darwinism: Converting the biological metaphors of natural selection and the struggle for life into a social philosophy is called Social Darwinism. This ideology was a centerpiece of racist ideologies that tried to defend horrors like white supremacy and the Holocaust with pseudo-science.

Bibliography

Barker, A. J. (2012). Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America. Social Movement Studies, 11(3/4), 327-334. doi:10.1080/14742837.2012.708922 Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=82937971&site=ehost-live

Bhabha, H. K. (1990). Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Birmingham, D. (1998). Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Go, J. (2008). Global fields and imperial forms: Field theory and the US and British empires. Sociological Theory 26: 201-229. Retrieved December 16, 2008 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=33923796&site=ehost-live

Hegeman, E. (2013). Ethnic Syndromes as Disguise for Protest Against Colonialism: Three Ethnographic Examples. Journal Of Trauma & Dissociation, 14, 138-146. doi:10.1080/15299732.2013.724340 Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=85460918&site=ehost-live

Landes, D. (1999). The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton.

Maddison, S. (2013). Indigenous identity, ?authenticity? and the structural violence of settler colonialism.ÿIdentities,ÿ20, 288-303. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2013.806267 Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=88833733&site=ehost-live

Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Stingl, A. (2008). The House of Parsons: The biological vernacular from Kant to James, Weber and Parsons. Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press. ..FT-Trov?o, S. (2012). Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa.ÿSocial Identities,ÿ18, 261-280. doi:10.1080/13504630.2012.661996 Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=74009272&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Boahen, A. A. (1989). African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cooper, F. (2005). Colonialism in Question. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ellis, S., & ter Haar, G. (2004). Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ziltener, P., & Knzler, D. (2013). Impacts of Colonialism --A Research Survey.ÿJournal Of World-Systems Research,ÿ19, 290-311. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=91530258&site=ehost-live