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Colonialism is a particular relationship of domination between states, involving a wide range of interrelated strategies, including territorial occupation, population settlement, and extraction of economic resources by the colonizing state. Historically, colonialism also depended upon legal, cultural, and political justifications of the colonial project in the metropolis and the colonized state. While colonialism and imperialism share many of these characteristics, colonialism involved significant amounts of settlement of citizens from the colonial center in the colonized territory, as well as formal relationships of law and governance between colonial states and their subjects. Variations in the colonizing power; the period and region of colonization; local conditions of polity, economy, society, religion, and culture; and global circumstances all contributed to enormous variations amongst and within colonies and colonial projects.

The term colony has a long history and has been applied to a wide range of state arrangements, beginning with the extension of the legal status of Roman citizens to the conquered territories they settled. It was later applied in the sixteenth century to refer to the conquest by competing European powers—initially Portugal and Spain, and in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries the Dutch, French, English, and Germans—of territories in Africa, the Americas, India, and Asia. The era of formal colonialism is widely understood to have ended by the mid-twentieth century with waves of decolonization leading to independent nation states. However, the term has more recently been used to refer to informal relations of domination and economic exploitation by former colonial powers of previous colonies, and to the assertion of economic, military, and cultural dominance by ascendant global powers, the United States paramount among these.

While the practice of colonialism was undertaken by many powers at many times, including the Persians, Chinese, Mongols, Russians, Ottomans, and Japanese, scholarship and critique of colonialism has tended to focus on modern European colonial powers and the settlement and exploitation of non-European territories and subjects. Scholars of world systems, colonialism, and state formation have sought in recent years to decenter Europe and formal state visions of colonization, by focusing on colonialism as a system whose local components, state and nonstate, were shaped by transnational processes and affected these processes in turn.

Components And Goals

Early colonial settlement as practiced by the Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean region involved the establishment of independent and self-governing city-states with close ties to the central colonial power. Their major functions included the facilitation of trade and economic growth and the securing of conquests. Beginning in the early modern period and reaching their apogee in the nineteenth century, changes in technological capacity allowed large-scale maritime trade and expansion, warfare, and migration. Later types of large-scale settler colonialism—as of the Spanish in South America; the British in North America and Australia; and other European powers in parts of South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia—involved multiple modes of intervention, governance, and rule.

Another variant of colonialism, labeled exploitation colonialism because its major objectives were seen to be economic extraction rather than settlement, can further be divided into direct and indirect colonialism. The major distinguishing feature of direct colonialism was government and administration by colonial officials, such as the British in the American colonies. Indirect colonialism, by contrast, preserved (or constructed) some local governmental institutions and incorporated some local elites into colonial administrations, as in the princely states of British India, parts of Malaya, and Africa. For colonial administrations like the British in Africa, where a small amount of colonial manpower was extended over large territories and populations, indirect rule presented important advantages: Military, tax, and external relations were undertaken by British personnel, and all other areas of governance left, at least in name, to compliant local elites.

These categories of colonialism were never fully separate, and often overlapped across and within colonial territories, changed with time and with policy, and featured important exceptions. Even in indirectly ruled colonies, the areas left to the governance of local elites became part of the colonial project in critical ways, such as reorganizing regimes of land, labor and social life, religion and custom, as well as law and order. Some colonial powers, even though they exercised control over particular territories, worked in the shadow of more powerful imperial powers, such as Portugal’s colonization of Brazil in the eighteenth century, dependent on British treaties for economic gain and British military protection in warfare.

The fundamental goal of modern European colonialism was economic gain—colonial possessions provided the raw materials (spices, cotton, silk, tea, opium) for trade and industry as well as markets into which goods produced from these materials would be sold. Competition and growth in the economies of empire fueled large flows of global exchange, precious metals for spices and textiles between Europe and Asia, but also interregional trade in Asia, and the development and extension of technologies of transport, manufacturing, and markets. Imperial economic organization included the ceding of territory and, in some cases, sovereignty, to merchant companies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, who were granted particularly favorable rights and exemptions from their governments to conduct trade.

Companies were at times also given the right to exercise some of the functions of government such as war and treaty making, the establishment of colonies, the coining of currency and collection of taxes, as had the Dutch East India Company in Southeast Asia and South Africa in the seventeenth century—or the mandate to govern, as the British East India Company ruled in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from 1757 to 1858. When these companies faltered, due to economic and political problems at home and in the colonies, their territories became part of the colonial possessions of the home country (e.g., in the creation of the British raj in India, between 1858 and 1947).

Law And Legal Institutions

Law played a critical role in the establishment, justification, and control of colonies, supplying the institutional and discursive mechanisms by which subject territories would be governed, their populations ordered, and their economic resources extracted. The reorganization of local land, labor, and production to achieve the economic aims of colonization took place through means of law, policing, and administrative ordering: Land title systems, inheritance and transfer of property, social and family organization, taxation, policing, criminality, order, and the differential rights and privileges of colonizer and colonized were constructed through law.

Law and legal institutions also provided one means by which the actions and aspirations of colonial settlers and agents could be limited, and provided one means, albeit limited, for colonized subjects to make claims against the colonial state. The provision of customary, personal status, and religious law based upon perceived or constructed traditional practices of native societies was a common feature of colonial governance, especially within British and French rule. These native legal forms were often placed within a hierarchical colonial legal system with laws, institutions, and legal personnel imported from the colonial metropolis, interpreted within the overarching system of the colonial state, and transformed by both colonial actors and local elites for multiple ends.

Ideologies And Effects Of Colonialism

Ideologies of colonialism varied, depending on the specific colonial relationship; the interests and assumptions of multiple parties in the colonial project and outside it; and larger contemporary intellectual, philosophical, and political debates. One characteristic feature of the colony was the establishment of a distinct cultural group within the colonized territories, and the valorization of that group’s difference from the “natives” along racial, moral, biological, and civilizational lines. A prominent justification of European colonization was that it represented the oversight by a stronger, advanced civilization over a weaker, backward people, for whom the introduction of stable institutions of government, rationalized economic relations, moral tutelage, and cultural example would result in increased civilizational maturity.

Other rationales included imperial competition amongst the great powers of Europe, social and cultural reformism, the spread of Christianity, and the achievement of more targeted objectives, such as the abolition of slavery, sexual purity, moral reform, education, health and hygiene, temperance, law, and order. This ideological orientation defined both the colonizing and the colonized society, established a moral justification for multiple interventions as well as rationalized their methods, and posited difference (racial and cultural) along developmental and historical lines.

The violence of colonialism was multiple, and an indispensable part of the colonial project. This included warfare conducted on behalf of the colonial state against its subjects, local opponents, and imperial competitors; the arming and support of some local elites against others; forced labor, collective punishment and later aerial bombardment; and the application of new techniques of bio power and knowledge. Brute force was both a component of state strength, controlling subjects and territories by superior force, and a symptom of its weakness, reflecting the failures of administrative and cultural discipline.

Colonial power was never total, and colonialism itself never a completed project; within the colonial center and in the colonies themselves, colonization had its opponents. Within European intellectual and moral debates, Christian theologians lent moral strength to imperialism by casting it as a conduit for Christianization, but also cast doubt upon the colonial impulse through theologies of natural law and universal humanity. Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant opposed imperialism based upon ideas of justice, pluralism, and human nature. Local actors deployed varied strategies to resist, oppose, deflect, limit, and transform colonial efforts. Anticolonial struggles and nationalist movements advocated a range of approaches, including preemptive modernization and westernization; deeper religious, ethnic, and national commitments among colonized peoples; and appeals to ideals such as natural justice, democracy, and popular sovereignty. Anticolonial figures such as Frantz Fanon advocated uprising and violent resistance, arguing that the violence of colonialism was systemic, its effects both physical and psychological, and that its overthrow required anticolonial recruitment in the population least dependent on colonial resources.

The effects of colonialism extended to the colonial metropole and the global system as well as to colonized states and subjects. Efforts required to maintain empire, and attain the rewards—economic, political and moral—of colonial interventions were part of the domestic governing apparatus of European colonial states. The efforts allowed establishment of hierarchies of citizens and subjects, applying policies and experiences at home that were initially developed in the colony, and vice versa, percolating into the self-perceptions, culture, and politics of the colonizing state as well as the colonized. The costs of maintaining colonial ambitions also had effects on the structure of the economies of colonial powers, investing heavily in some sectors and neglecting others, further increasing disparities between regions and sectors in the colonizing state itself.

In colonized states, these effects were even more pronounced, and reached into all areas of life—economy and administration, but also internal political dynamics, education, urban and rural divides, religious institutions and doctrines, language and culture, health and infrastructure, and education. Settler colonialism in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had a particularly dire impact on the numbers of native peoples, and at times their continued existence, reducing populations through disease, warfare, resettlement, and forced integration. Indirect rule had particularly enduring effects on local power structures and institutions because colonial resources and policies were often passed down through certain local elites. These effects continued into postcolonial states in varied ways. They impacted governmental structures; long-term diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations; immigration; and national consciousness—and the effects have had enduring consequences.

Theories Of Colonialism

The study of colonialism has itself undergone multiple shifts over time, and also evolved as more scholarship has been produced by, or been based on, the former subjects of colonial rule. Political science, along with other social science and humanities disciplines, has studied, facilitated, and critiqued colonialism, while more recent scholarship like that by Edward Said has been acutely aware of the manner in which the production of knowledge is implicated in relationships of power. However, current theories of colonialism continue to occupy and draw from a wide range of philosophical, political, and empirical sources.

Developmental theories of colonialism have in common a sense that colonization was part of a historical progress from one form of statehood and subjectivity to another. Early studies of colonialism were produced as part of the European colonial project, and worked to justify, assess, compare, and improve colonial administration and policy, as well as communicate its experience to European readers. Many early scholars of colonialism, such as John Stuart Mill, were themselves employees of colonial companies (Mill of the British East India Company) or colonial officials. For thinkers like Mill—who combined a liberal view of individuals as capable and deserving of rational self-government with a belief in history as a progression along increasing levels of civilization—colonialism provided an essential bridge between the civilized and the savage subject, and the despotism of colonization the historical conduit from the uncivilized state to one capable of self-government.

Modernization theorists, including Marxist-Leninists, while they may reject the more paternalistic overtones of earlier develop mentalists, have tended to see colonization as a part of the modernization process, through its integration of colonized states into the world economy; the extension of governmental administration, control, and bureaucracy over large areas of territory; and the regularization of systems and institutions. World-systems theorists see the extension of colonial divisions on a global scale, in which economic and political relations of dependency and coercion between core states and periphery states benefit the interests of core states, themselves colonial powers.

The progression from colonized states to independent nations, largely occurring after the end of World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s, has been seen as the end of the period of formal colonialism. However, scholars like Frederick Cooper question neat delineations between empire and nation, arguing instead for the overlap of political forms, institutional continuities, and discourses. France only became a nation-state after the end of rule in Algeria in 1962, for example, and many previously colonial states continue to have dependencies and territories; the Eurasian Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires persisted into the twentieth century, and pan imperial identity became part of the repertoire of nationalist movements in these territories.

Postcolonial theory shifted the emphasis in the study of colonization and its effects from economy and diplomacy to the interrelationship between knowledge, culture, and power. Scholarship about, and knowledge of, the colonized subject and colonial societies, in which the cultural superiority of Europeans was assumed, and the casting of the “oriental” as radically different, as other, became part of the justification for colonial domination. Other postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha have emphasized language and discourses of identity, authenticity, and tradition as themselves implicated in colonial legacies.

The end of the cold war and further shifts in global power politics have given rise to academic reflections on the relationship between new forms of power, exercised primarily by the United States, and older patterns of colonialism. U.S. involvement in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and more recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been cited as examples of U.S. colonial projects, at different times, for different reasons, and different regions. Another widely discussed target of U.S. colonial power, albeit an informal and ambiguous form of colonial power, is the global system itself, control over which is exerted by allied nation states, international organizations and global capital. Scholarly treatments of U.S. colonialism occupy all the theoretical positions described here, with some distinct features including the following characteristics: informal rather than formal relations of economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic power; deeper ambiguities in jurisdiction, sovereignty, and control; and comparisons with Roman and other ancient imperial states.

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