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See colony and colonisation for examples of colonialism which do not refer to Western colonialism.

Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled or displaced. Colonizers generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population; this has led critics of colonialism to call it cultural imperialism. However, though colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism, the latter is broader as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formally. The term colonialism also refers to a set of beliefs used to legitimize or promote this system, especially the ethnocentric belief that the mores of the colonizer are superior to those of the colonized. Such beliefs are often a form of racism, and were codified as pseudo-scientific theories at the end of the 19th century. The historical phenomenon of European colonisation may be broadly divided into two large waves, the first one starting with the "Age of Exploration" and the beginning of the Columbian Exchange, and the second one beginning in the second part of the 19th century with the New Imperialism period. Colonisation and decolonisation have overlapped themselves, since most of the New World colonies had already acquired their independence when the scramble for Africa and the New Imperialism began. However, many authors argue that colonialism doesn't end with the decolonisation, largely achieved in the 1960s apart from the Portuguese colonies: neocolonialism is a form of continuing colonialism by other means, while postcolonialism refers to the legacy of colonialism on the "subaltern subjects", as Gayatri Spivak has put it.

Types of colonialism

Settler colonies, dependencies, plantations colonies, trading posts

Different types of colonialism may be distinguished, according to the form of colonization and also the date. Settler colonies, such as the original thirteen states of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina arose from the emigration of peoples from a metropole, or mother country, and involved displacement of the indigenous peoples to their permanent detriment . Settler colonies may be contrasted with dependencies, where the colonizers did not arrive as part of a mass emigration, but rather as administrators over existing sizeable native populations, exercising control by use or threat of force. Examples in this category include the British Raj, Egypt, the Dutch East Indies and the Japanese colonial empire. In some cases large-scale colonial settlement was attempted in substantially pre-populated areas and the result was either an ethnically mixed population (such as the mestizos of the Americas), or racially divided, such as in French Algeria or Southern Rhodesia. A fourth category may be considered for plantation colonies such as Barbados, Saint-Domingue and Jamaica where the white colonizers imported black slaves who rapidly began to outnumber their owners, leading to minority rule, similar to a dependency. Trading posts, such as Macau, Malacca, Deshima and Singapore constitute a fifth category, where the primary purpose of the colony was to engage in trade rather than as a staging post for further colonization of the hinterland.

The role of missionaries

Since the first European wave of colonization, the Catholic Church had a non-negligible role in the making of the colonial policies. Thus, the 1481 Papal Bull Aeterni regis granted all lands south of the Canary Islands to Portugal, while in May 1493 the Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI decreed in the Bull Inter caetera that all lands west of a meridian only 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands should belong to Spain while new lands discovered east of that line would belong to Portugal. These arrangements were later precised with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. While the Pope himself was a political power to be heeded, the Church also sent missionaries to convert to the Catholic faith the "savages" of others continents. Thus, missionaries were instrumental in the colonization, in particular the Jesuits, whether in Asia, in Africa or in the Americas. This Christian presence explains the current worldmap of the Catholic faith, as well as many buildings such as the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Macau, built from 1582 to 1602, or the Santisima Trinidad de Paraná in Paraguay, which gives an example of the many Jesuit Reductions built in the 16th and 17th century.

In the 16th century, the Valladolid Controversy concerning the existence of souls in Amerindian bodies shook Spain in 1550-51. The School of Salamanca, which gathered theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria (1480-1546) or Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), argued in favor of the existence of natural law, which thus gave some rights to indigenous people. However, while the School of Salamanca limited Charles V's imperial powers over colonized people, they also legitimized the conquest, defining the conditions of "Just War". For example, these theologians admitted the existence of the right for indigenous people to reject religious conversion, which was a novelty for Western philosophical thought. However, Suárez also conceived many particular cases — a casuistry — in which conquest was legitimized. Hence, war was justified if the indigenous people refused free transit and commerce to the Europeans; if they forced converts to return to idolatry; if there come to be a sufficient number of Christians in the newly discovered land that they wish to receive from the Pope a Christian government; if the indigenous people lacked just laws, magistrates, agricultural techniques, etc. In any case, title taken according to this principle must be exercised with Christian charity, warned Suárez, and for the advantage of the Indians. Henceforth, the School of Salamanca legitimized the conquest while at the same time limiting the absolute power of the sovereign, which was celebrated in others parts of Europe under the notion of the divine right of kings.

In the 1970s, the Jesuits would become a main proponent of the Liberation theology which openly supported anti-imperialist movements. It was officially condemned in 1984 and in 1986 by then cardinal Ratzinger (current Pope) as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under charges of Marxist tendencies, while Leonardo Boff was suspended.

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The contradiction between the unity of the nation-state and imperialism

According to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), there was a contradiction between the unity of the nation-state and 19th century imperialism, which was, by definition, unlimited. She thus quoted Cecil Rhodes, the colonizer of Rhodesia, declaring: "all of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets" . Arendt underlined this contradiction between the economic expansion upheld by the bourgeoisie, and nationalism which aimed at integrating all citizens in one unity, the nation-state.

The British model of colonization vs. the French Republic model of colonization

According to Arendt, this explains the two different models of colonization: on one hand, the British Empire created the Commonwealth and used indirect rule, allowing the local elites to govern the colonies, under the supervision of the colonial administration; on the other hand, the French Third Republic (1871-1940) directly ruled over the colonies, claiming they were integrally part of the French Republic. Separation was thus opposed to the French ideal of assimilation, based on its universalist philosophy, a legacy of the 1789 French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Thus, the Republic tried to extend French citizenship to the colonies. For example, the Crémieux decrees provided for representation of the French department of Algeria in the National Assembly. The Crémieux Decrees also granted blanket French citizenship to Algerian Jews, who then numbered about 40,000. This act set them apart from Muslims, in whose eyes they were identified thereafter with the colonists. The measure had to be enforced, however, over the objections of the colons, who made little distinction between Muslims and Jews.

However, this opposition between the British and the French empire mustn't be abused. Arendt clearly states that the French Republican ideal was more "generous", because it accorded full citizenship to all the colonized people. However, it led to absurd situations, such as the famous sentence which started the Third Republic's textbooks, in the metropole as well as in the colonies: "Our ancestors the Gauls" (Nos ancêtres les Gaulois). This has become a cliché of the Third Republic colonialism. In Haïti, for example, the Haïtian Revolution (1791-1804), spearheaded by Toussaint L'Ouverture, was not taught in schools until recently. History school programs have been only recently adapted to local history, in the 2000s. As B. Villalba puts it, the definition of the French people teeters between universalism and multiculturalism . Dominique Schnapper, member of the Constitutional Council of France, defines the nation as "an entity which, opposed to the ethnic group, affirms itself as an open community, the will to live together expressing itself by the acceptation of the rules of an unified public domain which transcends all particularisms" Despite this theoretical universality of the French conception of the nation , full citizenship was never really accorded to the inhabitants of the French colonies, something which both Hannah Arendt and B. Villalba points out: according to him, the May 7, 1946 law meant that soldiers from the "Empire" (such as the tirailleurs) killed during World War I and World War II weren't citizens .

The opposition between the metropole and the colonial administration

While the French universalist ideal of according full citizenship to the inhabitants of the colonies partly remained what it was, an ideal to be realized — an idea as defined by Kant — in Great Britain several voices opposed themselves to the separation system and the colonial administration. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, this classic opposition between the British Empire model of colonization and the French Republican model, was doubled by a second opposition, between the colonial administration and the metropole. While the colonial administration commonly displayed open contempt for the indigenous people, which it considered as hardly superior to beasts, in the metropole colonialist abuses were sometimes criticized, and colonialism questionned for various reasons (sometimes ethical, sometimes political — e.g. Gladstone or Clemenceau). Members of Parliaments sometimes considered the Empire to be a full part of the Nation, and thus the colonized people to be full citizens, in the British Empire as in the French Republic. Hannah Arendt's reasoning ultimately leads her to conclude that the human rights are, in fact, dependent on civil rights, and not the reverse as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen implies. Colonial abuse was criticized in the metropole on behalf of the colonized people's supposed citizenship, while it was justified in the colonies because of their non-membership to the nation.

The first European colonization wave (15th century-19th century)

Portuguese exploration

Colonisation of the Western Hemisphere has its roots in Portuguese exploration. Explorers such as Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Queirós and Torres went sailing from their capital Lisbon up to the Cape of Good Hope, before reaching India in 1498, opening a rush among other European nations to discover a route of their own. Indeed, the Portuguese had already captured Ceuta in 1415 and discovered the islands of Madeira in 1418 and Azores in 1432 . The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world outside of Europe in an exclusive duopoly between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.

Spanish colonization of the Americas

The year 1492 marked the "discovery of the Americas" by Christopher Columbus on behalf of Spain — actually, of Castille which became the Spanish Empire at the end of the 16th century . 1492 thus may be seen as the symbolic summum of the European "Age of Exploration", and the beginning of the Columbian Exchange, although proper colonization had already started. .

It was not long after this that Spain began the conquest of Central America, South America and the Caribbean through its famous conquistadores, such as Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro. This first phase of European's expansion led to the building of global empires such as the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, so large that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (aka Charles I of Spain) could declare "in my realm the sun never sets." The cultural achievements of the Spanish Edad de Oro were largely provided for by gold and silver from the Potosí mines, which belonged to the Viceroyalty of Peru (created in 1542), and the Zacateca mines in modern Mexico.

Before the annihilation of most of the Amerindian population, they were reduced to slavery in order to work in the Spanish mines. African slaves were then brought to the New World when the local manpower had been exhausted. In accordance to the contemporary theories of mercantilism, once transformed into pieces of eight, the precious metals helped finance the expensive Spanish Armada, sent to England by Philip II of Spain in 1588 in a failed attempt to bring an end to the conflict with England (1585-1604). As the legitimate son of Charles V and Isabella, Philip II united the Portuguese throne under the Spanish Habsburg's authority, thus gathering the Iberian peninsula under one political authority, which would be known as the "Spanish Empire". The Habsburg would keep the throne until 1640.

European colonization of the Americas

The 17th century saw other European nations beginning to colonize the Americas (mainly the Netherlands, France and England) and these Europeans largely saw conventional movements of families into new lands. The British West Indies, the French West Indies (which included Haiti, and current overseas départements of Martinique and Guadeloupe, etc.), the Dutch West Indies, the Danish West Indies and Spain's colonies (Cuba, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti), Puerto Rico and Bay Islands, briefly) were the territories colonized during this first European imperialist wave. At the same time, England "planted" nearby Ireland extensively with English and Scottish settlers (see Plantations of Ireland).

Rule in the colonies: the Leyes de Burgos and the Code Noir

The January 27, 1512 Leyes de Burgos codified the laws for the government of the indigenous people of the New World, since the common law of Spain wasn't applied in these recently discovered territories. The scope of the laws were originally restricted to the island of Hispaniola, but were later extended to Puerto Rico and Jamaica. They authorized and legalized the colonial practice of creating encomiendas, where Indians were grouped together to work under colonial masters, limiting the size of these establishments to a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 150 people. The document finally prohibited the use of any form of punishment by the encomenderos, reserving it for officials established in each town for the implementation of the laws. It also ordered that the Indians be catechesized, outlawed bigamy, and required that the huts and cabins of the Indians be built together with those of the Spanish. It respected, in some ways, the traditional authorities, granting chiefs exemptions from ordinary jobs and granting them various Indians as servants. To poor fullfillment of the laws in many cases lead to inummerable protests and claims. In fact, the laws were so often poorly applied that they were seen as simply a legalization of the previous poor situation. This would create momentum for reform, carried out through the Leyes Nuevas ("New Laws") in 1542. Ten years later, Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas would publish A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in the midst of the Valladolid Controversy, a debate about the existence or not of souls in Amerindians bodies. Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, was opposed to Sepúlveda, who claimed Amerindians were "natural slaves".

In the French empire, slave trade and other colonial rules were regulated by Louis XIV's 1689 Code Noir.

Role of companies in early colonialism

This first wave of colonialism was already linked to early capitalism. Merchant adventurers clubbed together to profit, some of them gained theoretical monopolies from nascent states. While the Muscovy Company, chartered in 1555, and the Levant Company (1581) in Elizabethan England failed to parlay their charters into colonial empires, the British East India Company (1600) and the Hudson's Bay Company (1670) succeeded spectacularly in acquiring vast wealth and territories, taking over the government of India and of much of Canada over the centuries. The Dutch East India Company, established in 1602, and the French East India Company (1664) rivalled them in scope and profit in an age before their holdings underwent nationalisation. Colonisation with an emphasis on settlement also often took on a corporate tinge. In North America the Virginia Companies (1606), the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629) and its predecessors exemplify the process; the two New Zealand Companies (1825 and 1839) played a major role in setting up New Zealand.

Various degrees of inter-relationship may pertain between corporate colonisers and their home governments. The protection of trade, the interests of coercive monopoly and mercantilism, and the role of plausible deniability may all play their part.

The destruction of the Amerindian population and the Atlantic slave trade

The arrival of the conquistadores caused the annihilation of most of the Amerindians. However, contemporary historians now generally reject the Black Legend according to which the brutality of the European colonists accounted for most of the deaths. It is now generally believed that diseases, such as the smallpox, brought upon by the Columbian Exchange, were the greatest destroyer, although the brutality of the conquest itself isn't contested. As late as in the 19th century, Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentinian caudillo from 1829 to 1852, openly pursuied the extermination of the local population, an event related by Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). He was then followed by the "Conquest of the Desert" in the 1870-80s. This slow process of extermination is still on-going: in Tierra del Fuego, there are only two natives left who speak the Yaghan language. The other Yaghans died in part of taking the European habits of wearing clothes, which proved lethal in the humid, although very cold climate. After the Amerindians' quasi-total disparition, the mines and the sugar cane plantations thus led to the booming of the Atlantic slave trade, especially apparent in the Caribbean where the largest ethnic group is of African descent.

Contemporary historians debate the legitimacy of calling the quasi-disparition of the Amerindians a "genocide". Estimates of pre-Columbian population have ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons; in 1976, geographer William Deneva derived a "consensus count" of about 54 million people.

David Stannard has argued that "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world", with almost 100 million Amerindians killed in what he calls the American Holocaust. Like Ward Churchill, he believes that the American natives were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day.

Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. In response, political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."

European colonies in India during the first wave of colonization

In 1498, the Portuguese set foot in Goa. Rivalry between reigning European powers saw the entry of the Dutch, British, French, Danish among others. The fractured debilitated kingdoms of India were gradually taken over by the Europeans and indirectly controlled by puppet rulers. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I accorded a charter, forming the East India Company to trade with India and eastern Asia. The British landed in India in Surat in 1624. By the 19th century, they had assumed direct and indirect control over most of India.

North America in the 19th century

After the American Revolution and the 1776 independence of the United States, the colonization was not quite finished. As in South America, the frontier and the Wild West had to be conquered. For the next century, the expansion of the nation into these areas, as well as the subsequently acquired Louisiana Purchase (1803), Oregon Country (1846) and Mexican Cession (1848, after the Mexican-American War), would absorb much of the energy of the nation and largely define its politics and character, in particular its relations with Native Americans. The question of whether the American frontier would become "slave" or "free" was a spark of the American Civil War (1861-1865).

The settlement of the West became progressively organized through acts of the federal government, most notably the 1862 Homestead Act. In 1890, the frontier line was no more, though the frontier still existed in disconnected locations. The popular culture impact of the frontier was enormous, in dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier.

The colonization wasn't anymore pacifist than it had been elsewhere. North America was also the theater of the use of detention centers, population transfers (leading to the Seminole Wars in Florida at the beginning of the 19th century) and "unvoluntary extermination" (through diseases). In the United States, the 1830 Indian Removal treaty was a policy seeking to relocate American Indian (or "Native American") tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river. In the decades following the American Revolution (1763-1783), the rapidly increasing population of the United States resulted in numerous treaties in which lands were purchased from Native Americans. Eventually, the U.S. government began encouraging Indian tribes to sell their land by offering them land in the West, outside the boundaries of the then-existing U.S. states, where the tribes could resettle. This process was accelerated with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided funds for President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to conduct land-exchange ("removal") treaties. An estimated 100,000 American Indians eventually relocated in the West as a result of this policy, most of them emigrating during the 1830s, settling in what was known as the "Indian territory".

The first large-scale confinement of a specific ethnic group in detention centers began in the summer of 1838, when President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) ordered the U.S. Army to enforce the December 29, 1835 Treaty of New Echota (an Indian Removal treaty) by rounding up the Cherokee into prison camps before relocating them. Although these camps were not intended to be extermination camps, and there was no official policy to kill people, some Indians were raped and/or murdered by US soldiers. Many more died in these camps due to disease, which spread rapidly because of the close quarters and bad sanitary conditions. This event, known as the Trail of Tears (or Nunna daul Isunyi - "The Trail Where We Cried" in Cherokee), resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokee Indians. Throughout the remainder of the Indian Wars, various populations of Native Americans were rounded up, trekked across country and put into detention, some for as long as 27 years.

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Central and South America in the 19th century

The Haitian Revolution and the abolition of slavery

The 1791 Haitian Revolution, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, gives the first example of the constitution of a black Republic and of the abolition of slavery. The rebels imposed to the First Republic (1792-1804) the repeal of slavery, regulated by the 1689 Code Noir, on February 4, 1794. The Abbé Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, led by Jacques Pierre Brissot, were part of the abolitionist movement, which had laid important groundwork in building anti-slavery sentiment in the metropole. The first article of the law stated that "Slavery was repealed" in the French colonies, while the second article stated that "slave-owners would be indemnified", with a financial compensation. On May 10, 1802, colonel Delgrès signed a public notice, which was a call to Guadeloupe for insurgency against general Richepanse, sent by Napoleon to reestablish slavery. The rebellion was repressed, and slavery reestablished. It would be definitely abolished on April 27, 1848, by the decree-law Schœlcher under the Second Republic (1848-52). Slaves were bought back to the colons (Békés in Creole) and then freed by the state. However, at the same moment, France started participating in the scramble for Africa, transferring the population to the mines, the forestry and rubber plantations.

Wars of Independence in Latin America

The Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) and the various Wars of Independence led in the 1810s and 1820s by famous Libertadores such as José de San Martin in the South or Simón Bolívar in the North, brought to most Latin American countries independence from the European powers.

As in North America, the independent territories still had to be fully explored. Thus, in Argentina, caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas pursuied the "conquest of the desert" from 1829 to 1852, explicitly leading a "campaign of extermination" against the indigenous people. The Empire of Brazil, proclaimed in 1822 by Dom Pedro I, began to colonize its backcountry (including the Sertão), an enterprise which continues to this day in the Amazons. The 1888 Lei Áurea abolished slavery, creating public uproar among Brazilian slave owners and upper classes, which was the immediate cause of the toppling of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic in 1889.

The 1898 Spanish-American War, during which the United States occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico, ended Spanish occupation in the Americas.

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The second European colonization wave in the 19th-20th century

The New Imperialism

Rise of the New Imperialism

The latter half of 19th century saw the transition from an "informal" empire of control through military and economic dominance to direct control, marked from the 1870s on by the scramble for territory in areas previously regarded as merely under Western influence. Colonialism would take its full extent only during the period known as New Imperialism, starting in the 1860s with the Scramble for Africa: British, French, and German imperialisms opposed themselves to conquer the most territories possible as quickly as possible.

The Berlin Conference (1884 - 1885) mediated the imperial competition among the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK), the French Third Republic and the German Empire, defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of colonial claims and codifying the imposition of direct rule, accomplished usually through armed force.

A decade later, rival imperialisms would collide in the 1898 Fashoda Incident, during which war between France and the UK was barely avoided. This fear led to new alliances, and in 1904 the Entente Cordiale was signed between both powers. Imperialistic rivalry between the European powers would a main cause of the triggering of World War I in 1914.

In Germany, rising pan-germanism was coupled to imperialism in the Alldeutsche Verband ("Pangermanic League"), which argued that Britain's world power position gave the British unfair advantages on international markets, thus limiting Germany's economic growth and threatening its security. Pan-slavism and pan-germanism were considered by Hannah Arendt (1951) as the continental version of imperialism.

The Scramble for Africa

Many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate the Scramble for Africa, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. The inventor of Realpolitik, Bismarck thus pushed a Weltpolitik vision ("World Politic"), which considered the colonization as a necessity for the emerging German power. German colonies in Togoland, Samoa, South-West Africa and New Guinea had corporate commercial roots, while the equivalent German-dominated areas in East Africa and China owed more to political motives. The British also took an interest in Africa, using the East Africa company to take over Kenya and Uganda. The British crown formally took over in 1895 and renamed the area the East Africa Protectorate.

Leopold II of Belgium personally owned the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, while the Dutch had the Dutch East Indies.

In the same manner, Italy tried to conquer its "place in the sun", acquiring Somaliland in 1899-90, Eritrea and 1899, and, taking advantage of the "Sick Man of Europe", the Ottoman Empire, also conquered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Lybia) with the 1911 Treaty of Lausanne. The conquest of Ethiopia, which had remained the last African independent territory, had to wait till the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935-36 (the First Italo-Abyssinian War in 1895-96 had been a disaster for Italian troops).

The Portuguese and Spanish colonial empire were smaller, mostly legacies of past colonization. Most of their colonies had acquired independence during the Latin American revolutions at the beginning of the 19th century.

Asia

In Asia, the Great Game, which lasted from 1813 to 1907, opposed the British Empire against Imperial Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. China was opened to Western influence starting with the First and Second Opium Wars (1839-1842; 1856-1860). After the visits of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1852-1854, Japan opened itself to the Western world during the Meiji Era (1868-1912).

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After World War I

The colonial map was redrawed following the defeat of the German and the Ottoman Empire after the first World War (1914-18). Colonies from the defeated empires were transferred to the newly founded League of Nations, which itself redistributed it to the victorious powers as "mandates".

The twentieth century saw the era of the banana republics, in particular in Latin America, whereby corporations such as United Fruit or Standard Fruit dominated the economies and sometimes the politics of parts of Latin America. The United Fruit, nicknamed 'The Octopus' for its willingness to involve itself in politics, was present in most American countries and was involved in several coups, in Honduras and elsewhere. 1971 Nobel prize for literature winner Pablo Neruda would later denounce such neocolonialism in a poem titled La United Fruit Co.

Oil companies such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell held sway in "key" areas such as parts of Iran and of Nigeria, despite the preservation of de jure independence.

Middle East

After World War I, the Arabs, whom had revolted against the Ottomans in 1916-18, supported by the UK who sent them Captain T. E. Lawrence, found they had been doubly betrayed. For not only had the British and the French concluded the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to partition the Middle East between them, but the British had also promised to the international Zionist movement their support in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine via the 1917 Balfour Declaration, although the former site of the ancient Kingdom of Israel had had a largely Arab population for over a thousand years. When the Ottomans departed, the Arabs proclaimed an independent state in Damascus, but were too weak, militarily and economically, to resist the European powers for long, and Britain and France soon established control and re-arranged the Middle East to suit themselves.

Syria became a French protectorate (thinly disguised as a League of Nations Mandate), with the Christian coastal areas split off to become Lebanon. Iraq and Palestine became British mandated territories, with one of Sherif Hussein's sons, Faisal, installed as King of Iraq. Palestine was split in half, with the eastern half becoming Transjordan to provide a throne for another of Hussein's sons, Abdullah. The western half of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the already substantial Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Most of the Arabian peninsula fell to another British ally, Ibn Saud, who created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1922.

Another turning point in the history of the Middle East came when oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in Libya and Algeria. The Middle East, it turned out, possessed the world's largest easily accessible reserves of crude oil. Although Western oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding automobile industry and other industrial developments, the emirs of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them a stake in preserving Western hegemony over the region. Oil wealth also had the effect of stultifying whatever movement towards economic, political or social reform might have emerged in the Arab world under the influence of the Kemalist revolution , which had created the modern state of Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

During the 1920-30s Iraq, Syria and Egypt moved towards independence, although the British and French did not formally depart the region until they were forced to do so after World War II. But in Palestine the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and Zionist colonisation created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. Although the Zionist movement was born in the 19th century, following various pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair, with Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat (1896), the rise of nazism created a new urgency in the quest to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance, with the Great Uprising in 1936-39.

This struggle culminated in the 1947 UN Partition Plan in favor of a Two-state solution instead of a Binational solution. The plan was rejected and the State of Israel proclaimed in 1948, leading to the first Arab-Israeli War and to the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. About 800,000 Palestinians fled from areas annexed by Israel, thus creating the "Palestinian problem" which has bedevilled the region ever since. The June 1967 Six Day War led to the occupation of various territories. In November 1967, UN Resolution 242 called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict", something which has became a permanent revendication of the Fatah, founded by Yassir Arafat in 1959, and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded in 1964 by the Arab League.

Pan-Arabism was a popular anti-imperialist ideology in the 1960s, and Nasserism favorized the merging of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic (1958-61). The short term Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan (1958) also attempted to bypass the 1920s artificial borders. Pan-Arabism was however defeated with the 1967 Six-Day War and the emergence of Islamism in the 1980s as a popular substitution to secular Arab nationalism, as represented for example by the Baath Party.

Japanese imperialism

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After being closed for centuries to Western influence, Japan opened itself to the West during the Meiji Era (1868-1912), characterized by swift modernization and borrowings from European culture (in law, science, etc.) This, in turn, helped make Japan the modern power that it is now, which was symbolized as soon as the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War: this war marked the first victory of colored people over a European group, and led to widespread fears among European populations (first appearance of the "Yellow Peril"). During the first part of the 20th century, while China was still victim of various European imperialisms, Japan became itself one of the first non-European imperialist power, conquering what it called a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". Allying itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it would lose its colonies after its final defeat during World War II.

The French colonial empire

In France, the colonial empire wasn't used for massive emigration, as in the British Empire. In fact, until the Third Republic (1871-1940), apart from the colonization of Algeria started on June 12, 1830, in the last days of the Restoration, France didn't have yet many colonies compared to the Spanish or the Portuguese empire. The Antilles, in the Caribbean Sea, had been colonized during this first wave of colonialism. After the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, the French Guiana — as well as New Caledonia — were used for transportation of criminals and Communards. Because of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the "colonial lobby", gathering a few politicians, businessmen and geographers favorable to colonialism, was not very popular till World War I. In the 1880s, a debate thus opposed those who opposed the colonization, such as Georges Clemenceau (Radical), who declared that colonialism diverted France from the "blue line of the Vosges", referring to the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region, Jean Jaurès (Socialist) or Maurice Barrès (nationalist), to the "colonial lobby", supported by Jules Ferry (moderate republican), Léon Gambetta (republican) or Eugène Etienne, the president of the parliamentary colonial group.

Prime minister from 1880 to 1881 and 1883 to 1885, Republican Jules Ferry directed the negotiations which led to the establishment of a French protectorate in Tunis (1881) (the Bardo treaty), prepared the treaty of December 17, 1885 for the occupation of Madagascar; directed the exploration of the Congo and of the Niger region; and above all he organized the conquest of Indochina. The excitement caused at Paris by the sudden retreat of the French troops from Lang Son led to his violent denunciation by Clemenceau and other radicals, and his downfall on March 30, 1885. Although the treaty of peace with China (June 9, 1885), in which the Qing Dynasty ceded suzerainty of Annam and Tonkin to France, was the work of his ministry, he would never again serve as premiere.

According to Sandrine Lemaire, only 1% of the French population actually visited its colonial empire. Because of this relative unpopularity, until at least World War I, the colonial lobby set up an intensive propaganda in order to convince the French of the legitimity of its Empire, which most thought costly and rather useless. Ethnological expositions — including human zoos, in which natives were displayed alongside apes, in a tentative to justify scientific racism and to popularize the colonial empire — had a crucial role in the popularisation of colonialism . Although in France these colonial exhibitions played a crucial propaganda role, they were common in all colonizing powers: the 1924 British Empire Exhibition was one, as the successful 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris. Germany and Portugal also had such exhibitions, as well as Belgium's, which had a Foire coloniale as late as 1948. The political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff said about the French Third Republic that it was host to "racialism or an ideological racism that didn't perceive itself as such, and that called neither for hate, nor for stigmatisation, nor either for segregation, but which found its legitimity in colonial exploitation and domination, and its justification in its thesis of the future evolution of these inferior peoples".

Olivier LeCour Grandmaison has argued, for his part, that the techniques used for the French colonization of Algeria starting with the invasion on June 12, 1830, a few days before the end of the Restoration, were later extended to the whole of the French colonial empire (Indochina, New Caledonia, French West Africa, a federation created in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa, created in 1910). LeCour Grandmaison argued that Algeria thus provided the laboratory for concepts later used during the Holocaust, such as "inferior races", "life without value" and "vital space" (translated in German by "Lebensraum", a concept used by the Völkisch movement), as well as for repressive techniques: the 1881 Indigenous Code in Algeria, the principle of "collective responsibility", the "Scorched Earth" policy, which made of French colonial rule in Algeria a permanent state of exception. Internment camps were also first tested during the 1830 invasion of Algeria, before being used (under the official name of concentration camps) to receive the Spanish Republican refugees first, than to intern communists and, finally, Jews during Vichy France . Concentration camps were also used by the British Empire during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

After World War I, the colonized people were frustrated at France's quasi-total absence of recognition toward the effort provided by the French colonies (resources, but more importantly colonial troops - the famous tirailleurs). Although in Paris the Great Mosque of Paris was constructed as recognition of these efforts, the French state had no intention to allow self-rule, let alone independence to the colonized people. Thus, nationalism in the colonies became stronger in between the two wars, leading to Abd el-Krim's Rif War in Morocco and to the creation of Messali Hadj's Star of North Africa in Algeria. However, these movements would gain full potential only after World War II. The October 27, 1946 Constitution creating the Fourth Republic substituted the French Union to the colonial empire. In the night of March 29 to March 30, 1947, a nationalist uprising in Madagascar led the French government led by Paul Ramadier (Socialist) to violent repression: one year of bitter fighting, in which 90,000 to 100,000 Malagasy died. On May 8, 1945, the Setif massacre took place in Algeria.

In 1946, the states of French Indochina withdrew from the Union, leading to the Indochina War (1946-54). In 1956, Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence, while the Algerian War was raging (1954-1962). With Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958 amidst turmoil and threats of a right-wing coup d'Etat to protect "French Algeria", the decolonization was completed with the independence of African's colonies in 1960 and the March 19, 1962 Evian Accords, which put an end to the Algerian war. To this day, the Algerian war - officially called until the 1990s a "public order operation" - remains to this day a traumatism both for France and Algeria. Philosopher Paul Ricœur has spoke of the necessity of a "decolonization of memory", starting with the recognition of the 1961 Paris massacre during the Algerian war and the recognition of the decisive role of immigrated manpower in the Trente Glorieuses post-WW II economic growth period. In the 1960s, due to the necessity of reconstruction and of economic growth, French employers actively sought manpower in the colonies, explaining today's multiethnic population.

Decolonization

After World War I (1914-1918), national liberation movements became more common, although they did not reach their full power until the end of World War II (1939-1945). Due to Western education of colonized elites, the use of colonial troops during WWI; US president Woodrow Wilson's January 8, 1918 speech on the Fourteen Points — the fifth one stated that: "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined." — and also the prestige of the 1917 October Revolution, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism spread itself to the colonized people, most notably with Gandhi's pacific struggle in the British Raj, which was founded on civil disobedience. The movement of decolonization, however, really started only after the Allied victory over the Axis (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire which had conquered a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere ) and the foundation of the United Nations (UN) on June 26, 1945, when 50 nations signed the UN Charter. The 1941 Atlantic Charter, signed by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued the wilsonian tradition of the 14 Points.

In 1952, demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term "Third World" in reference to the French Third Estate. The expression distinguished nations that aligned themselves with neither the West nor with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. In the following decades, decolonization would strengthen this group which began to be represented at the United Nations. The Third World's first international move was the 1955 Bandung Conference, led by Nehru for India, Nasser for Egypt and Tito for Yugoslavia. The Conference, which gathered 29 countries representing over half the world's population, led to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.

Although the US had first opposed itself to colonial powers, in particular during the 1956 Suez crisis between Egypt, France, the UK and Israel, the Cold War quickly incited it to downplay its advocacy of colonized countries and of popular sovereignty. France thus had a free hand in the First Indochina War (1946-1954) and in the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), where torture techniques were heavily employed (the Algerian war would become a military model of counter-insurgency tactics, and has been studied ever since in military schools through-out the world). Furthermore, attempts such as Mossadegh's nationalisation of the petroil in Iran were blocked by the US, who supported a coup in 1953 order to impose the Shah (the covert operation was named Operation Ajax). The next year, when Guatemala's president Arbenz tried to nationalise the United Fruit, the CIA overthrew him and replaced him by a military junta in Operation PBSuccess.

In spite of these interferences in other states, decolonization itself was a seemingly unstoppable process. In 1960, after several wars of national liberation, the UN had reached 99 members states: the decolonization of Africa was almost complete. In 1980, the UN had 154 member states, and in 1990, after Namibia's independence, 159 states But what could be seen retrospectively as a gigantic and quiet wave representing the Zeitgeist ("Spirit of Times") overthrowing the domination of European colonialist powers was in fact the product of the struggle of the colonized people, whom many payed it with their lives.

In effect, although the anticolonialist struggle didn't lead in all cases to wars such as the Algerian War (1954-62), it was nevertheless bloody. Many anticolonialist leaders were assassinated in more or less obscure circumstances in the 1960s, whether by foreign powers or internal enemies, sometimes supported by foreign powers who more or less openly supported dictatorships (for example, France and its ties with the Françafrique). The most famous names shouldn't dissimulate others less-known leaders, but a quick enumeration of slain anti-imperialist leaders would include Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo assassinated in 1961; Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, assassinated in 1963 (quickly replaced by Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who would rule Togo until his death in 2005); Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition, whom was preparing the Tricontinental Conference which was supposed to gather in La Habana in 1966 national liberation movements (not states) from all continents in order to organize the anti-imperialist struggle (kidnapped in Paris); Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of the Mozambiquan FRELIMO, allegedly assassinated by Aginter Press, the Portuguese branch of Gladio — NATO's anti-communist paramilitary organization during the Cold War — Amilcar Cabral, Oscar Romero, the prelate archbishop of San Salvador and a proponent of Liberation Theology, or Dulcie September, African National Congress (ANC) activist murdered in Paris in 1988 ...

Many of these assassinations are still unsolved cases as of 2006, but foreign power interference is undeniable in many of these cases. To take only one case, the investigation concerning Mehdi Ben Barka is continuing to this day, and both France and the US have refused to declassify files they acknowledge having in their possession

The fall of the USSR

The Soviet Union was a main supporter of decolonization movements. While the Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961 following the Bandung 1955 Conference, was supposedly neutral, the "Third World" being opposed to both the "First" and the "Second" Worlds, geopolitical concerns, as well as the refusal of the US to support decolonization movements against its NATO European allies, led the national liberation movements to look increasingly toward the East. However, China's appearance on the world scene, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, created a rupture between the Soviet Union and independentists movements. Globally, the non-aligned movement, led by Nehru (India), Tito (Yugoslavia) and Nasser (Egypt) tried to create a block of nations powerful enough to be dependent on neither the US nor the Soviet Union, but finally tilted towards the USSR, while smaller liberation movements, both by strategic necessity and ideological choice, were supported either by Moscow or by Peking. Fidel Castro's Cuba, who was at first neutral before turning itself towards Moscow, also sponsored liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique. Few liberation movements were totally independent from foreign aid.

This, however, didn't protect the Soviet Union from counter-accusations of "imperialism", in particular concerning the domination of Moscow over the Soviet Bloc. Actually, Roosevelt and Stalin were accused of having divided the world into two parts during the February 1945 Yalta Conference, over which each state would have a free hand to impose his policies, although this has been dismissed as a legend. Thus, the 1953 uprising in East-Berlin was repressed by the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, while the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring were crushed by the Warsaw Pact forces. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan has also been considered a symbol of Sovietic imperialism. Anti-communists have claimed this showed that cynic "Realpolitik" was the only true law of international relations, while others pointed out that, although the USSR's official ideology led it to support national liberation movements in the Third World, it retained its state reflexes concerning its surrounding territories. Both point out that in spite of the 1917 October Revolution and its support to guerrilla movements, the new "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" shared essential continuities with imperial Russia. This judgment was confirmed with the dissolving of the USSR, when the "socialist principles" couldn't counterbalance any more the nationalist centrifugal forces.

Thus, after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the insuing revolutions, new separatist tensions were observed in the former Soviet Union. In the Balkans, the explosion of the Yugoslavian union, created on December 1, 1918 by Serbian Prince-Regent Alexander Karađorđević's proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, led to unleash nationalisms which had been frozen under Tito's rule. The Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 2001 led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In May-June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared their independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was immediately recognized by Germany. The Croatian War (1991-95) then marqued the secession of Croatia. Macedonia declared independence in January 1992, and Bosnia in April 1992. This led to the proclamation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of the two remaining republics of Tito's Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro; as well as to the Bosnian war (1992-95), which culminated with the Bosnian Genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, and finally took an end with the December 14, 1995 Dayton Agreement. Bosnia now forms the Bosnia-Herzegovina Republic, recognized, along with Croatia, in 1996 by the Republic of Serbia. Starting in the late 1990s, new tension arose in the Kosovo between Albanian separatists and the Serbian forces, leading to the Kosovo War (1996-99) — the autonomy of Kosovo and of the Vojvodina region in the Yugoslavian Union had been cancelled in 1990 by the nationalist leader of Serbia Slobodan Milošević. These disturbs led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Although the Yugoslav wars may hardly be considered "anti-colonialists", insofar as they were separatist movements, the First and the Second Chechen Wars may doubtlessly be considered anti-colonialist struggles. On April 21, 1996, Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first separatist president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, was assassinated. On March 8, 2005, moderate separatist Aslan Maskhadov, who had also been president of the Chechen Republic, was also murdered by the FSB. The last moderate Chechen separatist was thus eliminated, leaving the way to Islamists: Sheikh Abdul Halim (killed June 17, 2006) replaced Aslan Maskhadov, a move endorsed by Shamil Basayev, thus allowing Moscow to claim its imperialist war was in fact wholly part of the George W. Bush administration's "War on Terror" triggered in 2001.

Neocolonialism

Despite the decolonization in the 1960s-70s, former colonies still are today for the most part under strong Western influence (although new imperialism have appeared on stage, namely China in Africa). Critics of this continued Occidental influence talk of neocolonialism. The exception to this rule being in particular the East Asian Tigers (mainly Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), and the emerging Indian and Chinese powers. However, even in this case colonialism has left scars, apparent in India with the 1984 Bhopal disaster, in which a pesticide plant released 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC), injuring between 150,000 to 600,000 people, at least 15,000 of whom later died. The plant was controlled by the US firm Union Carbide, and didn't benefit from the same protections as in the US.

U.S. foreign intervention

On the other hand, because of the Cold War, which led Moscow and Peking to support anti-imperialist movements, the US (as well as other NATO countries) interfered in various countries, for example by issuing an embargo against Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution — which started on February 7, 1962 — and supporting various covert operations (the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Project, etc.) The US, as well as France for that matter, preferred supporting dictatorships in Third World countries rather than having democracies which always presented the risk of having the people choose being supported by the Second World rather than the so-called "Free World".

Thus, in South America, the US began by supporting Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, and continued by giving at least tacit support to the "dirty war" — including Operation Condor, in which 50,000 persons were murdered and 30,000 "disappeared" (aka "desaparecidos"). On March 6, 2001, the New York Times revealed a 1978 cable which proved that chiefs involved in Condor " in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which all of Latin America" . On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a Chilean Christian Democrat, was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington D.C. Among the people prosecuted for the people were Michael Townley, a DINA agent who had worked for the CIA. Townley confessed that he had hired anti-Castrist Cubans to boobytrap the car, through Luis Posada Carriles' CORU organization. US intervention in Latin american countries continued with the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 1989 United States invasion of Panama against druglord Manuel Noriega. In Indonesia, Washington supported Suharto's New Order dictatorship, etc.

This interference, in particular in South and Central American countries, is reminiscent of the 19th century Monroe doctrine and the Big stick diplomacy codified by US president Theodore Roosevelt. Left-wing critics have spoken of an "American Empire", pushed in particular by the military-industrial complex, which president Eisenhower warned against in 1961. On the other hand, some Republicans have supported, without much success since World War I, isolationism.

French foreign intervention

France wasn't inactive either: it supported dictatorships in the former colonies in Africa, leading to the expression Françafrique, coined by François-Xavier Verschave, a member of the anti-neocolonialist Survie NGO, which has criticized the way development aid was given to post-colonial countries, claiming it only supported neo-colonialism, interior corruption and arms-trade. The Third World debt, including odious debt, where the interest on the external debt exceeds the amount that the country produces, had been considered by some a method of oppression or control by first world countries; a form of debt bondage on the scale of nations.

Post-colonialism

Post-colonialism (aka post-colonial theory) refers to a set of theories in philosophy and literature that grapple with the legacy of colonial rule. In this sense, postcolonial literature may be considered a branch of Postmodern literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of peoples formerly subjugated in colonial empires. Many practitioners take Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) to be the theory's founding work. Edward Said analyzed the works of Balzac, Baudelaire and Lautréamont, exploring how they were both influenced by and helped to shape a societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fictional writers interact with the traditional colonial discourse, but modify or subvert it; for instance by retelling a familiar story from the perspective of an oppressed minor character in the story. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (1998) gave its name to the Subaltern Studies. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Spivak explored how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is famous for its explicit ethnocentrism, in considering the Western civilization as the most accomplished of all, while Kant also allowed some traces of racism to enter his work.

Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization

Debate about the perceived positive and negative aspects of colonialism has occurred for centuries, amongst both colonizer and colonized, and continues to the present day. The questions of miscegenation; the alleged ties between colonial enterprises, genocides — see the Herero Genocide — and the Holocaust; and the questions of the nature of imperialism, dependency theory and neocolonialism (in particular the Third World debt) continues to retain their actuality.

Chronology of colonialism

References

1. According to political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfers were considered as an almost humanist solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around World War II and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but 'often necessary' means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war, and was rendered easy through the invention of railroads. See Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd Ed (Verso, 2003) p.xiv - also An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
2. S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p.138
3. ^ Template:Fr icon B. Villalba. "Chapitre 2 - Les incertitudes de la citoyenneté". Catholic University of Lille, Law Department. Retrieved May 3, 2006.
4. Template:Fr icon Dominique Schnapper, " La conception de la nation ", "Citoyenneté et société", Cahiers Francais, n° 281, mai-juin 1997
5. See in particular the famous 1882 conference "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" by Ernest Renan
6. Ceuta (Sebta in Arabic) is as of 2006 a Spanish enclave in Northern Morocco, which used to be strategic due to its location on the Mediterranean sea
7. By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified by the crown, although not as a modern, centralized state. In contemporary minds, "Spain" was a geographic term that was more or less synonymous with Iberia, not the present-day state called Spain, although today's more restricted notion of it was beginning to gain in currency. As the old states continued to exist and function with their own laws, assemblies and administrations under one monarch the title of the reigning Habsburgs was "The King of the Spaniards", not "Spain". The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor but called in Spain Carlos I, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580. During the 16th century, early Habsburg Spain (i.e. the reigns of Charles V and Philip II) became the most powerful state in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, some of Eastern Asia (including The Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire from 1580), southern Italy, Sicily, Germany, and the Netherlands.
8. The celebration of the Columbus Day, Día de la Raza in Spanish ("Day of the Race"), has been disputed on the grounds that it celebrated European colonialism (explicit in its Spanish version), and ignored pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contacts. It has been renamed Día de la Resistencia Indígena in Venezuela.
9. See the Bolivian Gas War for a historical and current example of social conflict based on the popular revendications to process the gaz in the country itself instead of exporting it as a raw material
10. 20th century estimates in Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ISBN 0806120746, p.22; Denevan's consensus count; recent lower estimates
11. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195085574; p. x (quotation), p. 151 (death toll estimate).
12. Cf. R. J. Rummel's quote and estimate from his website, about midway down the page, after footnote 82. Rummel's estimate is presumably not a single democide, but a total of multiple democides, since there were many different governments involved.
13. Template:Fr Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, edition La Découverte (2002) 480 pages - French presentation of the book here ISBN 2707144010
14. Template:Fr icon Olivier LeCour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial, Fayard, 2005, ISBN 35251692005
15. Japanese imperialism lead to the interesting problem that colonialism and imperialism have not been exclusively an Western endeavour. Japanese imperialism followed the Meiji Era (1868-1912), during which Japan opened up itself to the West and learnt its techniques, assimilating its rationality, which led to the first victory of coloured people over white people during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Japan's victory at the time surprised the West that it led to fears of the "Yellow Peril"
16. "Growth in United Nations Membership, 1945-2005". United Nations. 2000. Retrieved 2006. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
17. See ISN Zurich Institute hosted by ETH Zurich University
18. See Assassinated anticolonialist leaders subsection in the Decolonization article for a more complete list
19. See Mehdi Ben Barka for further information. France has declassified some of the files, but Ben Barka's family has stated that they have shed no new light on the affair, and that further efforts must be done.
20. The cable has been published by the National Security Archives, and can be read here

See also

• Anticolonialism
• American Empire
  • American exceptionalism
  • History of United States continental expansion
  • History of United States overseas expansion
  • British Empire and Commonwealth Museum
• Chartered companies
• Colonial
• Colonial cinema
• Colonial style (architecture)
• List of Colonial Territories by country
• Colonial Exhibitions
• Colonization
  • • Arab colonization of North Africa
    • Bantu colonization of Eastern and Southern Africa
  • Colonization of Europe
    • Roman colonization of Europe
    • Arab colonization of Spain
    • Soviet colonization of eastern Poland and southern Finland
    • Osmanic colonization of the Balkans
    • Plantations of Ireland - British colonisation of Ireland
    • German colonization of Eastern Europe
  • European colonization of the Americas
    • British colonization of the Americas
    • Danish colonization of the Americas
    • Dutch colonization of the Americas
    • New Netherland
    • French colonization of the Americas
      • New France
    • Portuguese colonization of the Americas
    • Russian colonization of the Americas
    • Spanish colonization of the Americas
      • Spanish Conquest of Yucatan
      • Conquistador
      • Spanish missions in California
      • New Spain
    • Swedish colonization of the Americas
• Corporate colonialism
• Darién scheme
  • Dutch colonization of the Americas
  • Lieutenant governor
  • Viceroy of India
  • Crown colony
  • Dominion
  • Imperial Conferences
  • Balfour Declaration 1926
  • Statute of Westminster 1931
  • Commonwealth of Nations
    • Commonwealth Realm
    • Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
    • Commonwealth Games
• Global Empire
• Independence
  • Cultural imperialism
  • Culture of capitalism
  • Media Imperialism
  • Imperialism in Asia
• Indonesian colonization of East Timor
• List of extinct countries, territories, empires, etc.
• Mercantilism
  • New Netherland
  • Portugal in the period of discoveries
  • Portuguese colonization of the Americas
• Protectorate
• Israeli occupied territories Israeli settlement/colonies
• Biopiracy / Bioprospecting
• United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing TerritoriesOther chartered companies engaging in colonial pursuits include:
• The Bermuda Company
• The British East India Company
• The British South Africa Company (Rhodesia)
• Compagnie de l'Occident
• Compagnie de Chine
• Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique
• La Compagnie du Nord
• Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes
• The Danish East India Company
• The Darien Company
• The Dutch East India Company
• The Dutch West India Company
• The French African Company
• The French East India Company
• The Guiana Company
• The Guinea Company
• The Levant Company
• The Mississippi Company
• The Nanto-Bordelaise Company
• The New Guinea Company
• The North West Company
• The Providence Company
• The Royal African Company
• The Russian-American Company
• The Senegal Company
• The Somers Island Company (Bermuda)
• The South Sea Company
• The Swedish East India Company
• A fictional depiction of corporate colonialism with privateering elements appears in Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon.

Bibliography

• Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (second chapter on Imperialism examines ties between colonialism and totalitarianism)
• Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 1899
• Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, Pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Constance Farrington. London : Penguin Book, 2001
• Gobineau, Arthur de, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853-55
• Gutiérrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation, 1971
• Kipling, Rudyard, The White Man's Burden, 1899
• Las Casas, Bartolomé de, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542, published in 1552)
• LeCour Grandmaison, Olivier, Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial, Fayard, 2005, ISBN 35251692005 Template:Fr icon
• Lindqvist, Sven, Exterminate All The Brutes, 1992, New Press; Reprint edition (June 1997), ISBN 1565843592
• Said, Edward, Orientalism, 1978; 25th-anniversary edition 2003 ISBN 039474067x

External links

• Liberal opposition to colonialism, imperialism and empire (pdf) - by professor Daniel Klein

• Colonialism