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What Is Colonialism? Definition and Examples

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Colonialism is the practice of one country taking full or partial political control of another country and occupying it with settlers to profit from its resources and economy. Colonialism can be hard to distinguish from imperialism since both practices involve political and economic control of a dominant country over a vulnerable territory.

From ancient times to the beginning of the 20th century, powerful countries openly scrambled to expand their influence through colonialism . By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European powers had colonized countries on virtually every continent. While colonialism is no longer so aggressively practiced, there is evidence that it remains a force.

Key Takeaways: Colonialism

• Colonialism is the process of a country taking full or partial political control of a dependent country, territory, or people.
• Colonialism occurs when people from one country settle in another country to exploit its people and natural resources.
• Colonial powers typically attempt to impose their languages and cultures on the indigenous people of the countries they colonize.
• Colonialism is similar to imperialism, the process of using force and influence to control another country or people.
• By 1914, a majority of the world’s countries had been colonized by Europeans. 

Colonialism Definition

In essence, colonialism is an act of political and economic domination involving the control of a country and its people by settlers from a foreign power . In most cases, the goal of the colonizing countries is to profit by exploiting the human and economic resources of the countries they colonized. In the process, the colonizers—sometimes forcibly—attempt to impose their religion , language , cultural , and political practices on the indigenous population .

While colonization is typically viewed negatively due to its often disastrous history and similarity to imperialism, some countries have benefited from having been colonized. For example, leaders of modern Singapore—a British colony from 1826 to 1965—credit the “valuable aspects of colonial heritage” with the independent city-state’s impressive economic development . In many cases, colonization gave underdeveloped or emerging countries immediate access to the burdening European trade market . As the major European nations’ need for natural resources grew ever greater during the Industrial Revolution , their colonized countries could sell those materials for substantial profits.

Especially for many of the European, African , and Asian countries affected by British colonialism, the advantages were numerous. Besides lucrative trade contracts, English institutions, such as common law, private property rights , and formal banking and lending practices provided the colonies with a positive basis for economic growth that would propel them to future independence.

In many cases, however, the negative effects of colonialism far outweighed the positive.

The governments of the occupying countries often imposed harsh new laws and taxes on the indigenous people. Confiscation and destruction of native lands and culture were common. Due to the combined effects of colonialism and imperialism, scores of indigenous people were enslaved, murdered, or died of disease and starvation . Countless others were driven from their homes and scattered across the globe.

For example, many members of the African diaspora in the United States trace their roots to the so-called “ Scramble for Africa ,” an unprecedented period of imperialism and colonialism from 1880 to 1900 that left most of the African continent colonized by European powers. It is believed that only two African countries, Ethiopia and Liberia , escaped European colonialism .

Imperialism vs. Colonialism

While the two terms are often used interchangeably, colonialism and imperialism have slightly different meanings. While colonialism is the physical act of dominating another country, imperialism is the political ideology that drives that act. In other words, colonialism can be thought of as a tool of imperialism.

Imperialism and colonialism both imply the suppression of one country by another. Similarly, through colonialism and imperialism, the aggressor countries look to profit economically and create a strategic military advantage in the region. However, unlike colonialism, which always involves the direct establishment of physical settlements in another country, imperialism refers to the direct or indirect political and monetary dominance of another country, either with or without the need for a physical presence.

Countries that undertake colonialism do so mainly to benefit economically from the exploitation of the valuable natural and human resources of the colonized country. In contrast, countries pursue imperialism in hopes of creating sprawling empires by extending their political, economic, and military dominance over entire regions if not entire continents.  

A few examples of countries generally considered to have been affected by colonialism during their histories include America , Australia , New Zealand , Algeria , and Brazil —countries that came to be controlled by a large number of settlers from European powers. Typical examples of imperialism, cases in which foreign control is established without any significant settlement, include the European dominance of most African countries in the late 1800s and the domination of the Philippines and Puerto Rico by the United States.

History of Colonialism

The practice of colonialism dates to around 1550 BCE when Ancient Greece , Ancient Rome , Ancient Egypt , and Phoenicia began extending their control into adjacent and non-contiguous territories. Using their superior military power, these ancient civilizations established colonies that used the skills and resources of the people they conquered, expanding their empires.

The first phase of modern colonialism began in the 15th century during the Age of Exploration . Looking for new trading routes and civilizations beyond Europe, Portuguese explorers conquered the North African territory of Ceuta in 1419, creating an empire that would endure until 1999 as the longest-lived of the modern European colonial empires .

After Portugal grew its empire by colonizing the populated central Atlantic islands of Madeira and Cape Verde, its arch-rival Spain decided to try its hand at exploration. In 1492, Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus sailed searching for a western sea route to China and India . Instead, he landed in the Bahamas , marking the beginning of Spanish colonialism. Now battling each other for new territories to exploit, Spain and Portugal went on to colonize and control indigenous lands in the Americas, India, Africa , and Asia.

Colonialism flourished during the 17th century with the establishment of the French and Dutch empires and the English overseas possessions—including the colonial United States —which would later become the sprawling British Empire. Spanning the globe to cover nearly 25% of the Earth’s surface at the peak of its power in the early 1900s, the British Empire was justifiably known as “the empire on which the sun never sets.”

The end of the American Revolution in 1783 marked the beginning of the first era of decolonization during which most of the European colonies in the Americas gained their independence. Spain and Portugal were permanently weakened by losing their New World colonies. Great Britain, France , the Netherlands , and Germany made the Old World countries of South Africa , India, and Southeast Asia the targets of their colonial efforts.

Between the opening of the Suez Canal and the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1870s and the start of World War I in 1914, European colonialism became known as “New Imperialism.” In the name of what was termed “empire for empire’s sake,” the Western European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan competed to acquire vast areas of overseas territory. In many cases, this new hyper-aggressive brand of imperialism resulted in the colonization of countries in which the subjugated majority indigenous populations were denied basic human rights through the enforcement of doctrines of racial superiority such as the White minority-ruled system of apartheid in British-controlled South Africa .

A final period of decolonization began after World War I, when the League of Nations divided the German colonial empire among the victorious allied powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania , Japan, and the United States. Influenced by the famous 1918 Fourteen Points speech by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson , the League mandated that the former German possessions be made independent as soon as possible. During this period, the Russian and Austrian colonial empires also collapsed.

Decolonization sped ahead after the end of World War II in 1945. The defeat of Japan spelled the end of the Japanese colonial empire in the Western Pacific and East Asian countries. It also showed still subjugated indigenous people around the world that colonial powers were not invincible. As a result, all remaining colonial empires were greatly weakened.  

During the Cold War , global independence movements such as the United Nations ’ 1961 Non-Aligned Movement led to successful wars for independence from colonial rule in Vietnam , Indonesia , Algeria, and Kenya . Pressured by the United States and the then-Soviet Union, the European powers accepted the inevitability of decolonization.   

Types of Colonialism

Colonialism is generally classified into one of five overlapping types according to the practice’s particular goals and consequences on the subjugated territory and its indigenous peoples. These are settler colonialism; exploitation colonialism; plantation colonialism; surrogate colonialism; and internal colonialism.

The most common form of colonial conquest, settler colonialism describes the migration of large groups of people from one country to another country to build permanent, self-supporting settlements. Remaining legal subjects of their native country, the colonists harvested natural resources and attempted to either drive the indigenous peoples away or force them to assimilate peacefully into colonial life. Typically supported by wealthy imperialistic governments, settlements created by settler colonialism tended to last indefinitely, except in rare cases of total depopulation caused by famine or disease.

The mass migration of Dutch, German, and French settlers— the Afrikaners —to South Africa and the British colonialism of America are classic examples of settler colonialism.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established an outpost in South Africa near the Cape of Good Hope. These early Dutch settlers were soon joined by French Protestants, German mercenaries, and other Europeans. Despite having been associated with the oppressive atrocities of White apartheid rule, millions of Afrikaners remain a vital presence in a multiethnic South Africa after four centuries.

The systematic European colonization of the Americas began in 1492, when Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Far East inadvertently landed in the Bahamas, declaring he had discovered the “New World.” During the subsequent Spanish explorations, repeated efforts were made to either exterminate or enslave the indigenous population. The first permanent British colony in what is now the United States, Jamestown , Virginia, was established in 1607. By the 1680s, the promise of religious freedom and cheap farmland had brought scores of British, German, and Swiss colonists to New England.

The early European settlers shunned the indigenous people, viewing them as threatening savages incapable of being assimilated into colonial society. As more European colonial powers arrived, avoidance turned to outright subjugation and enslavement of the indigenous population. The Native Americans were also vulnerable to new diseases, like smallpox , brought by the Europeans. By some estimates, as much as 90% of the Native American population was killed by disease during the early colonial period.

Exploitation

Exploitation colonialism describes the use of force to control another country to exploit its population as labor and its natural resources as raw material. In undertaking exploitation colonialism, the colonial power sought only to increase its wealth by using the indigenous people as low-cost labor. In contrast to settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism required fewer colonists to emigrate, since the indigenous people could be allowed to remain in place—especially if they were to be enslaved as laborers in service to the motherland.

Historically, countries settled through settler colonialism, such as the United States, experienced far better post-colonial outcomes than those who experienced exploitation colonialism, such as the Congo .

Potentially one of the richest countries in the world, years of exploitation and colonialism have turned the Congo into one of the poorest and least stable. In the 1870s, Belgium’s infamous King Leopold II ordered the colonization of the Congo. The effects were and continue to be devastating. While Belgium, and Leopold personally, realized a vast fortune from exploiting the country’s ivory and rubber, millions of the Congo's indigenous people starved to death, died of disease, or were executed for failing to meet work quotas. Despite gaining its independence from Belgium in 1960, the Congo remains largely impoverished and consumed by bloody internal ethnic wars .  

Plantation colonialism was an early method of colonization in which settlers undertook the mass production of a single crop, such as cotton, tobacco , coffee, or sugar. In many cases, an underlying purpose of the plantation colonies was to impose Western culture and religion on nearby indigenous peoples, as in the early East Coast American colonies like the lost colony of Roanoke . Established in 1620, the Plymouth Colony plantation in what is today Massachusetts served as a sanctuary for English religious dissenters known as the Puritans . Later North American plantation colonies, such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Dutch Connecticut Colony , were more openly entrepreneurial, as their European backers demanded better returns on their investments.

An example of a successful plantation colony, Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British colony in North America, was shipping over 20 thousand tons of tobacco per year back to England by the end of the 17th century. The South Carolina and Georgia colonies enjoyed similar financial success from the production of cotton.

In surrogate colonialism, a foreign power encourages and supports, either openly or covertly, the settlement of a non-native group on territory occupied by an indigenous population. Support for surrogate colonialism projects might come in the form of any combination of diplomacy, financial aid, humanitarian materials, or arms.

Many anthropologists consider the Zionist Jewish settlement inside the Islamic Middle Eastern state of Palestine to be an example of surrogate colonialism because it was established with the urging and assistance of the ruling British Empire. Colonization was a key factor in negotiations that resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which facilitated and legitimized the still-controversial Zionist settlement in Palestine. 

Internal colonialism describes the oppression or exploitation of one racial or ethnic group by another within the same country. In contrast to traditional types of colonialism, the source of the exploitation in internal colonialism comes from within the country rather than from a foreign power.

The term internal colonialism is often used to explain the discriminatory treatment of Mexicans in the United States after the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. As a result of the war, many Mexicans who had been living in what is now the southwestern United States became subjects of the U.S. government, but without the rights and freedoms associated with U.S. citizenship. Viewing these people as having been effectively “colonized” by the United States, many scholars and historians use the term internal colonialism to describe the ongoing unequal economic and social treatment of Chicanx peoples in the United States through a de-facto system of subordination.

Does Colonialism Exist Today?

Though the traditional practice of colonialism has ended, over 2 million people in 17 “ non-self-governing territories ,” scattered around the globe continue to live under virtual colonial rule, according to the United Nations . Rather than being self-governed, the indigenous populations of these 17 areas remain under the protection and authority of former colonial powers, such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.

For example, the Turks and Caicos Islands is a British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic Ocean midway between the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic . In 2009, the British government suspended the Islands’ 1976 constitution in response to reports of widespread corruption in the territory. Parliament imposed direct rule over the democratically elected local governments and removed the constitutional right to trial by jury. The territorial government was disbanded and its elected premier was replaced by a British-appointed governor. 

While British authorities defended the action as essential to restoring honest government in the territory, the deposed former premier called it a coup d’etat that put Britain “on the wrong side of history.”

The years following World War II saw the rise of “neocolonialism,” a term describing the post-colonial practice of using globalization , economics, and the promise of financial aid to gain political influence in less-developed countries instead of the traditional methods of colonialism. Also referred to as “nation building,” neocolonialism resulted in colonial-like exploitation in regions like Latin America, where direct foreign colonial rule had ended. For example, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was criticized for practicing neocolonialism in the 1986 Iran-Contra affair involving the illegal sale of U.S. arms to Iran to secretly fund the Contras, a group of rebels fighting to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua .

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that the true eradication of colonialism remains an “unfinished process,” that has been with the global community for too long.

Sources and Reference

• Veracini, Lorenzo. “Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 978-0-230-28490-6.
• Hoffman, Philip T. “Why Did Europe Conquer the World?” Princeton University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4008-6584-0.
• Tignor, Roger. “Preface to Colonialism: a theoretical overview.” Markus Weiner Publishers, 2005, ISBN 978-1-55876-340-1.
• Rodney, Walter. “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” East African Publishers, 1972, ISBN 978-9966-25-113-8.
• Vasagar, Jeevan. “Can colonialism have benefits? Look at Singapore.” The Guardian , January 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/colonialism-work-singapore-postcolonial-british-empire.
• Libecap, Gary D. “The Bright Side of British Colonialism.” Hoover Institution , January 19, 2012, https://www.hoover.org/research/bright-side-british-colonialism.
• Atran, Scott. “The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine 1917–1939.” American Ethnologist , 1989, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5090131_the_surrogate_colonization_of_Palestine_1917-1939.
• Fincher, Christina. “Britain suspends Turks and Caicos government.” Reuters, August 14, 2009, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-turkscaicos/britain-suspends-turks-and-caicos-government-idUSTRE57D3TE20090814.
• “International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism.” The United Nations , https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/history/international-decades 
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Colonialism

Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. At least since the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas, political theorists have used theories of justice, contract, and natural law to both criticize and justify European domination. In the nineteenth century, the contradiction between liberal ideals and colonial practice became particularly acute, as the dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith. This entry begins with a definition of colonialism, and the second section explains how European thinkers justified, legitimized, and challenged the conquest of the Americas. The third section focuses on liberalism and the fourth section briefly discusses the Marxist tradition, including Marx’s own defense of British colonialism in India and Lenin’s anti-imperialist writings. The fifth section provides an introduction to contemporary “post-colonial theory.” This approach has been particularly influential in literary studies because it draws attention to the diverse ways that postcolonial subjectivities are constituted and resisted through discursive practices. The final section will introduce Indigenous critiques of settler-colonialism that emerge as a response to colonial practices of domination and dispossession of land, customs and traditional history and to post-colonial theories of universalism. The goal of the entry is to provide an overview of the philosophical response to the experience of European colonization.

1. Definition and Outline

2. natural law and the conquest of the americas, 3. liberalism and empire, 4. marxism and leninism.

• 5.Theories of Decolonization and Post-colonial Theory

6. Recognition and Revolt in Settler-Colonial States

Other internet resources, related entries.

Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon. World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. In the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world. The modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political control in spite of geographical dispersion. This entry uses the term colonialism to describe the process of European settlement, violent dispossession and political domination over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.

The difficulty of defining colonialism stems from the fact that the term is often used as a synonym for imperialism. Both colonialism and imperialism were forms of conquest that were expected to benefit Europe economically and strategically. The term colonialism is frequently used to describe the settlement of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and Brazil, places that were controlled by a large population of permanent European residents. The term imperialism often describes cases in which a foreign government administers a territory without significant settlement; typical examples include the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century and the American domination of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The distinction between the two, however, is not entirely consistent in the literature. Some scholars distinguish between colonies for settlement and colonies for economic exploitation. Others use the term colonialism to describe dependencies that are directly governed by a foreign nation and contrast this with imperialism, which involves indirect forms of domination. Like colonialism, imperialism also involves political and economic control over a dependent territory. The etymology of the two terms, however, provides some clues about how they differ. The term colony comes from the Latin word colonus , meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium , meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control.

The confusion about the meaning of the term imperialism reflects the way that the concept has changed over time. Although the English word imperialism was not commonly used before the nineteenth century, Elizabethans already described the United Kingdom as “the British Empire.” As Britain began to acquire overseas dependencies, the concept of empire was employed more frequently. Imperialism was understood as a system of military domination and sovereignty over territories. The day to day work of government might be exercised indirectly through local assemblies or indigenous rulers who paid tribute, but sovereignty rested with the British. The shift away from this traditional understanding of empire was influenced by the Leninist analysis of imperialism as a system oriented towards economic exploitation. According to Lenin, imperialism was the necessary and inevitable result of the logic of accumulation in late capitalism. Thus, for Lenin and subsequent Marxists, imperialism described a historical stage of capitalism rather than a trans-historical practice of political and military domination. The lasting impact of the Marxist approach is apparent in contemporary debates about American imperialism, a term which usually means American economic hegemony, regardless of whether such power is exercised directly or indirectly (Young 2001).

Given the difficulty of consistently distinguishing between the two terms, this entry will use colonialism as a broad concept that refers to the project of European political domination that began in the early sixteenth century. While the national liberation movements of the post-World War II era brought formal colonization to an end in many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples still live in settler-colonial states, and there are on-going struggles to reclaim control of traditional territories. Post-colonialism will be used to describe the political and theoretical struggles of societies that experienced the transition from political dependence to sovereignty. This entry will use imperialism as a broad term that refers to economic, military, political domination that is achieved without significant permanent European settlement.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas sparked a theological, political, and ethical debate about the use of military force to acquire control over foreign lands. This debate took place within the framework of a religious discourse that legitimized military conquest as a way to facilitate the conversion and salvation of indigenous peoples. The idea of a “civilizing mission” was by no means the invention of the British in the nineteenth century. The Spanish conquistadores and colonists explicitly justified their activities in the Americas in terms of a religious mission to bring Christianity to the native peoples. The Crusades provided the initial impetus for developing a legal doctrine that rationalized the conquest and possession of lands that were held by non-Christians. Whereas the Crusades were initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian lands that had been conquered, the resulting theoretical innovations played an important role in subsequent attempts to justify the conquest of the Americas. The core claim was that the “Petrine mandate” to care for the souls of Christ’s human flock required Papal jurisdiction over temporal as well as spiritual matters, and this control extended to non-believers as well as believers.

The conversion of the native peoples, however, did not provide an unproblematic justification for the project of overseas conquest. The Spanish conquest of the Americas was taking place during a period of reform when humanist scholars within the Church were increasingly influenced by the natural law theories of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas. According to Pope Innocent IV, war could not be waged against infidels and they could not be deprived of their property simply because of their non-belief. Under the influence of Thomism, Innocent IV concluded that force was legitimate only in cases where infidels violated natural law. Nonbelievers had legitimate dominion over themselves and their property, but this dominion was abrogated if they proved incapable of governing themselves according to principles that every reasonable person would recognize. The Spanish quickly concluded that the habits of the native Americans, from nakedness to unwillingness to labor to alleged cannibalism, clearly demonstrated their inability to recognize natural law. This account of native customs was used to legitimize the enslavement of the Indians, which the Spanish colonists insisted was the only way to teach them civilization and introduce them to Christianity.

Some of the Spanish missionaries sent to the New World, however, noticed that the brutal exploitation of slave labor was widespread while any serious commitment to religious instruction was absent. Members of the Dominican order in particular noted the hypocrisy of enslaving the indigenous peoples because of their alleged barbarity while practicing a form of conquest, warfare, and slavery that reduced the indigenous population of Hispaniola from 250,000 to 15,000 in two decades of Spanish rule. Given the genocidal result of Spanish “civilization,” they began to question the idea of a civilizing mission. Bartolomé de Las Casas and Franciscus de Victoria were two of the most influential critics of Spanish colonial practice. Victoria gave a series of lectures on Indian rights that applied Thomism to the practice of Spanish rule. He argued that all human beings share the capacity for rationality and have natural rights that stem from this capacity. From this premise, he deduced that the Papal decision to grant Spain title to the Americas was illegitimate. Unlike the position of Pope Innocent IV, Victoria argued that neither the Pope nor the Spaniards could subjugate the Indians in order to punish violations of natural law, such as fornication or adultery. He noted that the Pope had no right to make war on Christians and take their property simply because they were “fornicators or thieves.” If this were the case, then no European king’s dominion would ever be safe. Furthermore, according to Victoria, the pope and Christian rulers acting on his mandate had even less right to enforce laws against unbelievers, because they were outside of the Christian community, which was the domain of Papal authority (Williams 1990).

Despite this strongly worded critique of the dominant modes of justifying Spanish conquest, Victoria concluded that the use of force in the New World was legitimate when Indian communities violated the Law of Nations, a set of principles derivable from reason and therefore universally binding. At first it might sound contradictory that the Indians’ supposed violation of the natural law did not justify conquest but their violation of the Law of Nations, itself derived from natural law, did. Victoria emphasizes that the Law of Nations is binding because “there exists clearly enough a consensus of the greater part of the whole world” (391) and because the principles benefit “the common good of all.” This distinction seems to rely on the assumption that other principles usually associated with natural law (such as the prohibitions on adultery and idolatry) only affect those who consent to the practices, whereas violations of the Law of Nations (e.g. prohibitions on peaceful travel and trade) have consequences for those who do not consent. Ultimately, Victoria’s understanding of the Law of Nations led him to defend the practice of Spanish colonialism, even though he emphasized that warfare should be limited to the measures required to attain the legitimate objectives of peaceful trade and missionary work. Within Victoria’s critique of the legality and morality of Spanish colonialism was a rationalization for conquest, albeit a restrictive one.

The legitimacy of colonialism was also a topic of debate among French, German, and British philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Smith and Diderot were critical of the barbarity of colonialism and challenged the idea that Europeans had the obligation to “civilize” the rest of the world. The colonial system of slavery, land theft, and feudal labor was antithetical to the principles of freedom and self-government. The rise of anti-colonial political theory, however, required more than a universalistic ethic that recognized the shared humanity of all people. Given the powerful economic interests in the control of Indigenous land and the exploitation of Indigenous labor, universalism proved to be a relatively weak basis for criticizing colonialism.

One of the key issues that distinguished critics from proponents of colonialism and imperialism was their view of the relationship between culture, history and progress. Many of the influential philosophers writing in France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had assimilated some version of the developmental approach to history that was associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. According to the stadial theory of historical development, all societies naturally moved from hunting, to herding, to farming, to commerce, a developmental process that simultaneously tracked a cultural arc from “savagery,” through “barbarism,” to “civilization.” “Civilization” was not just a marker of material improvement, but also a normative judgment about the moral progress of society. (Kohn and O’Neill 2006)

The language of civilization, savagery, and barbarism is pervasive in writers as diverse of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. It would therefore be incorrect to conclude that a developmental theory of history is distinctive of the liberal tradition; nevertheless, given that figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Ferguson and Smith were among its leading expositors, it is strongly associated with liberalism. Smith himself opposed imperialism for economic reasons. He felt that relations of dependence between metropole and periphery distorted self-regulating market mechanisms and worried that the cost of military domination would be burdensome for taxpayers (Pitts 2005). The idea that civilization is the culmination of a process of historical development, however, proved useful in justifying imperialism. According to Uday Mehta, liberal imperialism was the product of the interaction between universalism and developmental history (1999). A core doctrine of liberalism holds that all individuals share a capacity for reason and self-government. The theory of developmental history, however, modifies this universalism with the notion that these capacities only emerge at a certain stage of civilization (McCarthy 2009). For example, according to John Stuart Mill (hereafter Mill), savages do not have the capacity for self-government because of their excessive love of freedom. Serfs, slaves, and peasants in barbarous societies, on the other hand, may be so schooled in obedience that their capacity for rationality is stifled. Only commercial society produces the material and cultural conditions that enable individuals to realize their potential for freedom and self-government. According to this logic, civilized societies like Great Britain are acting in the interest of less-developed peoples by governing them. Imperialism, from this perspective, is not primarily a form of political domination and economic exploitation but rather a paternalistic practice of government that exports “civilization” (e.g. modernization) in order to foster the improvement of native peoples. Despotic government (and Mill doesn’t hesitate to use this term) is a means to the end of improvement and ultimately self-government.

Mill, a life-long employee of the British East India Company, recognized that despotic government by a foreign people could lead to injustice and economic exploitation. These abuses, if unchecked, could undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the imperial project. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill identifies four reasons why foreign (e.g. European) peoples are not suited to governing colonies. First, foreign politicians are unlikely to have the knowledge of local conditions that is necessary to solve problems of public policy effectively. Second, given cultural, linguistic, and often religious differences between colonizers and colonized, the colonizers are unlikely to sympathize with the native peoples and are likely to act tyrannically. Third, even if the colonizers really try to treat the native peoples fairly, their natural tendency to sympathize with those similar to themselves (other foreign colonists or merchants) would likely lead to distorted judgment in cases of conflict. Finally, according to Mill, colonists and merchants go abroad in order to acquire wealth with little effort or risk, which means that their economic activity often exploits the colonized country rather than developing it. These arguments echo points made in Edmund Burke’s voluminous writings assailing the misgovernment in India, most notably Burke’s famous Speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783). Recent scholarship, however, has challenged the view of Burke as an opponent of imperialism. Daniel O’Neill has argued that Burke was a staunch supporter of the British Empire in the eighteenth century (2016). According to O’Neill, Burke’s defense of empire was ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution.

Mill’s solution to the problem of imperial misgovernment was to eschew parliamentary oversight in favor of a specialized administrative corps. Members of this specialized body would have the training to acquire relevant knowledge of local conditions. Paid by the government, they would not personally benefit from economic exploitation and could fairly arbitrate conflicts between colonists and indigenous people. Mill, however, was not able to explain how to ensure good government where those wielding political power were not accountable to the population. In this sense, Mill’s writing is emblematic of the failure of liberal imperial thought.

Nineteenth century liberal thinkers held a range of views on the legitimacy of foreign domination and conquest. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, made a case for colonialism that did not rely on the idea of a “civilizing mission.” Tocqueville recognized that colonialism probably did not bring good government to the native peoples, but this did not lead him to oppose colonialism since his support rested entirely on the way it benefited France. Tocqueville insisted that French colonies in Algeria would increase France’s stature vis-à-vis rivals like England. Colonies would provide an outlet for excess population that caused disorder in France. Tocqueville also suggested that imperial endeavors would incite a feeling of patriotism that would counterbalance the modern centrifugal forces of materialism and class conflict.

Tocqueville was actively engaged in advancing the project of French colonization of Algeria. Tocqueville’s first analysis of French colonialism was published during his 1837 electoral campaign for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville argued in favor of expanding the French presence in Algeria. He traveled to Algeria in 1841 composing an “Essay on Algeria” that served as the basis for two parliamentary reports on the topic (Tocqueville 1841). Unlike the more naïve proponents of the “civilizing mission,” Tocqueville admitted that the brutal military occupation did little to introduce good government or advance civilization. In an apparent reversal of the four-stages theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, he acknowledged that “we are now fighting far more barbarously than the Arabs themselves” and “it is on their side that one meets with civilization.” (Tocqueville 1841: 70) This realization, however, did not imply a critique of French brutality. Instead, Tocqueville defended controversial tactics such as the destruction of crops, confiscation of land, and seizure of unarmed civilians. His texts, however, provide little in the way of philosophical justification and he dismisses the entire just war tradition by stating, “I believe that the right of war authorizes us to ravage the country.” (Tocqueville 1841: 70). In Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria, the French national interest is paramount and moral considerations are explicitly subordinate to political goals.

Tocqueville’s analysis of Algeria reflects little anxiety about its legitimacy and much concern about the pragmatics of effective colonial governance. The stability of the regime, he felt, depended on the ability of the colonial administration to provide good government to the French settlers. Tocqueville emphasized that the excessive centralization of decision-making in Paris combined with the arbitrary practices of the local military leadership meant that French colonists had no security of property, let alone the political and civil rights that they were accustomed to France. Tocqueville was untroubled by the use of martial law against indigenous peoples, but felt that it was counterproductive when applied to the French. For Tocqueville, the success of the French endeavor in Algeria depended entirely on attracting large numbers of permanent French settlers. Given that it was proving impossible to win the allegiance of the indigenous people, France could not hold Algeria without creating a stable community of colonists. The natives were to be ruled through military domination and the French were to be enticed to settle through the promise of economic gain in an environment that reproduced, as much as possible, the cultural and political life of France. After a brief period of optimism about “amalgamation” of the races in his “Second Letter on Algeria” (Tocqueville 1837: 25), Tocqueville understood the colonial world in terms of the permanent opposition of settler and native, an opposition structured to ensure the economic benefit of the former.

In recent years, scholars have devoted less attention to the debates on colonialism within the Marxist tradition. This reflects the waning influence of Marxism in the academy and in political practice. Marxism, however, has influenced both post-colonial theory and anti-colonial independence movements around the world. Marxists have drawn attention to the material basis of European political expansion and developed concepts that help explain the persistence of economic exploitation after the end of direct political rule.

Although Marx never developed a theory of colonialism, his analysis of capitalism emphasized its inherent tendency to expand in search of new markets. In his classic works such as The Communist Manifesto , Grundrisse , and Capital , Marx predicted that the bourgeoisie would continue to create a global market and undermine both local and national barriers to its own expansion. Expansion is a necessary product of the core dynamic of capitalism: overproduction. Competition among producers drives them to cut wages, which in turn leads to a crisis of under-consumption. The only way to prevent economic collapse is to find new markets to absorb excess consumer goods. From a Marxist perspective, some form of imperialism is inevitable. By exporting population to resource rich foreign territories, a nation creates a market for industrial goods and a reliable source of natural resources. Alternately, weaker countries can face the choice of either voluntarily admitting foreign products that will undermine domestic industry or submitting to political domination, which will accomplish the same end.

In a series of newspaper articles published in the 1850s in the New York Daily Tribune , Marx specifically discussed the impact of British colonialism in India. His analysis was consistent with his general theory of political and economic change. He described India as an essentially feudal society experiencing the painful process of modernization. According to Marx, however, Indian “feudalism” was a distinctive form of economic organization. He reached this conclusion because he believed (incorrectly) that agricultural land in India was owned communally. Marx used the concept of “Oriental despotism” to describe a specific type of class domination that used the state’s power of taxation in order to extract resources from the peasantry. According to Marx, oriental despotism emerged in India because agricultural productivity depended on large-scale public works such as irrigation that could only be financed by the state. This meant that the state could not be easily replaced by a more decentralized system of authority. In Western Europe, feudal property could be transformed gradually into privately owned, alienable property in land. In India, communal land ownership made this impossible, thereby blocking the development of commercial agriculture and free markets. Since “Oriental despotism” inhibited the indigenous development of economic modernization, British domination became the agent of economic modernization.

Marx’s analysis of colonialism as a progressive force bringing modernization to a backward feudal society sounds like a transparent rationalization for foreign domination. His account of British domination, however, reflects the same ambivalence that he shows towards capitalism in Europe. In both cases, Marx recognizes the immense suffering brought about during the transition from feudal to bourgeois society while insisting that the transition is both necessary and ultimately progressive. He argues that the penetration of foreign commerce will cause a social revolution in India. For Marx, this upheaval has both positive and negative consequences. When peasants lose their traditional livelihoods, there is a great deal of human suffering, but he also points out that traditional village communities are hardly idyllic; they are sites of caste oppression, slavery, misery, and cruelty. The first stage of the modernization process is entirely negative, because poor people pay heavy taxation to support British rule and endure the economic upheaval that results from the glut of cheaply produced English cotton. Eventually, however, British merchants begin to realize that Indians cannot pay for imported cloth or British administration if they don’t efficiently produce goods to trade, which provides an incentive for British investment in production and infrastructure. Even though Marx believed that British rule was motivated by greed and exercised through cruelty, he felt it was still the agent of progress. Thus, Marx’s discussion of British rule in India has three dimensions: an account of the progressive character of foreign rule, a critique of the human suffering involved, and a concluding argument that British rule must be temporary if the progressive potential is to be realized.

Lenin developed his analysis of Western economic and political domination in his pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) (see Other Internet Resources). Lenin took a more explicitly critical view of imperialism. He noted that imperialism was a technique which allowed European countries to put off the inevitable domestic revolutionary crisis by exporting their own economic burdens onto weaker states. Lenin argued that late-nineteenth century imperialism was driven by the economic logic of late-capitalism. The falling rate of profit caused an economic crisis that could only be resolved through territorial expansion. Capitalist conglomerates were compelled to expand beyond their national borders in pursuit of new markets and resources. In a sense, this analysis is fully consistent with Marx, who saw European colonialism as continuous with the process of internal expansion within states and across Europe. Both Marx and Lenin thought that colonialism and imperialism resulted from the same logic that drove the economic development and modernization of peripheral areas in Europe. But there was one distinctive element of Lenin’s analysis. Since late capitalism was organized around national monopolies, the competition for markets took the form of military competition between states over territories that could be dominated for their exclusive economic benefit.

Marxist theorists including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, and Nikolai Bukharin also explored the issue of imperialism. Kautsky’s position is especially important because his analysis introduced concepts that continue to play a prominent role in contemporary world systems theory and post-colonial studies. Kautsky challenges the assumption that imperialism would lead to the development of the areas subjected to economic exploitation. He suggests that imperialism is a relatively permanent relationship structuring the interactions between two types of countries. (Young 2001) Although imperialism initially took the form of military competition between capitalist countries, it would result in collusion between capitalist interests to maintain a stable system of exploitation of the non-developed world. The most influential contemporary proponent of this view is Immanuel Wallerstein, who is known for world-systems theory. According to this theory, the world-system is a relatively stable set of relations between core and peripheral states. This international division of labor is structured to benefit the core states (Wallerstein 1974–1989) and transfers resources from the periphery to the core.

5. Theories of Decolonization and Post-colonial Theory

Frantz Fanon was one of the leading theorists of the struggle for decolonization. His two most influential works focused on anti-black racism and the impact of colonial violence. Black Skin, White Masks (2008 [1952]) describes racialized subjectivity and the structural conditions that sustain racial domination. Drawing on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, Fanon demonstrates the constitutive effects of European colonialism on identity. It details the traumatic consequences of immersion in a cultural framework that pathologizes blackness, thereby dividing the racialized subject. Wretched of the Earth (1961) was the most influential philosophical account of the anti-colonial struggle and the challenges of post-colonial governance. The book provides a complex account of the relationship between violence and liberation. Violence is the foundation of the colonial regime, and therefore inevitably plays a role in its overthrow, but Fanon also explores its psychological dimension. Revolutionary violence can be a productive redirection of the internalized violence characteristic of the experience of oppression because it can bring about structural change. It is also a praxis that generates political agency, group cohesion and national identity. Wretched of the Earth also includes incisive reflections on the way that colonial states continue to exert economic power after independence. According to Fanon, the economic exploitation typical of colonialism can be secured in a new way through the leadership of the comprador bourgeoisie, a segment of the indigenous managerial class that is allied with foreign economic interests. He also suggests that collective identity based on ethnicity or national consciousness can have harmful effects, when it functions ideologically to mask class differences in service of elite economic interests. Fanon’s Marxist-influenced approach to anti-colonial critique is part of a black radical traditional that includes other Caribbean thinkers such as Eric Williams, whose book Capitalism and Slavery (1994) demonstrated that the wealth extracted from sugar plantations bankrolled the industrial revolution and C.L.R James’s The Black Jacobins (1989), which retold the story of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of the victorious revolutionaries. These books were foundational for theories of racial capitalism, a position that holds that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing. (Robinson 2000)

Another seminal critic of colonialism is Mahatma Gandhi. He is remembered for his leadership of the Indian independence movement, his critique of British colonialism, and his theory of political resistance. Among his theoretical innovations is the concept of satyagraha . While the literal meaning is closer to “holding on to truth,” the term is often used to describe non-violent resistance or civil disobedience. According to Gandhi, it is through the practice of non-cooperation with oppression that the force of truth is animated. The central place of non-violence in Gandhi’s theory and practice reflects the influence of the Hindu concept ahimsa , or avoiding harm, but this principle was transformed in the context of anti-colonial struggle. Gandhi was a prolific writer who was deeply engaged in theoretical and political debates. Among his influential writings was the book Hind Swaraj (1997), published in 1909. It takes the form of a dialogue between a Reader and an Editor. The text provides an account of British domination in India, an analysis of the meaning of swaraj (self-rule), a discussion of political strategy, and a critique of Western civilization. Gandhi denaturalizes “Western civilization” by showing that the underlying materialism is not normatively justified and the alleged benefits of colonialism (modern medicine, technology) are actually harmful to the human condition. He also shows that the colonists fail in their own terms, pointing out that the European colonists claimed to bring civilization but cemented their rule by engaging in brutal violence.

Contemporary literary theorists have also drawn attention to practices of representation that reproduce a logic of subordination that endures even after former colonies gain independence. The field of postcolonial studies was influenced by Edward Said’s path-breaking book Orientalism . In Orientalism Said applied Michel Foucault’s technique of discourse analysis to the production of knowledge about the Middle East. The term orientalism described a structured set of concepts, assumptions, and discursive practices that were used to produce, interpret, and evaluate knowledge about non-European peoples. Said’s analysis made it possible for scholars to deconstruct literary and historical texts in order to understand how they reflected and reinforced the imperialist project. Unlike previous studies that focused on the economic or political logics of colonialism, Said drew attention to the relationship between knowledge and power. By foregrounding the cultural and epistemological work of imperialism, Said was able to undermine the ideological assumption of value-free knowledge and show that “knowing the Orient” was part of the project of dominating it. Orientalism can be seen as an attempt to extend the geographical and historical terrain of the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology.

Said uses the term orientalism in several different ways. First, orientalism is a specific field of academic study about the Middle East and Asia, albeit one that Said conceives quite expansively to encompass history, sociology, literature, anthropology and especially philology. He also identifies it as a practice that helps define Europe by creating a stable depiction of its other, its constitutive outside. Orientalism is a way of characterizing Europe by drawing a contrasting image or idea, based on a series of binary oppositions (rational/irrational, mind/body, order/chaos) that manage and displace European anxieties. Finally, Said emphasizes that it is also a mode of exercising authority by organizing and classifying knowledge about the Orient. This discursive approach is distinct both from the materialist view that knowledge is simply a reflection of economic or political interests and from the idealist view that scholarship is disinterested and neutral. Following Foucault, Said describes discourse as a form of knowledge that is not used instrumentally in service of power but rather is itself a form of power.

The second quasi-canonical contribution to the field of post-colonial theory is Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Spivak works within Said’s problematic of representation but extends it to the contemporary academy. Spivak questions the idea of transparent subaltern speech. When well-meaning scholars want to let the subaltern “speak for themselves” they hope that removing the intermediary (the expert, the judge, the imperial administrator, the local elite) will enable some authentic truth based on experience to emerge. But experience itself is constituted through representation; therefore denying the problem of representation does not make it go away but only makes it harder to recognize. The central claim of the essay is that “representation has not withered away.” Since power is everywhere, even in language itself, transparency and authenticity are impossible; this means that the messy and controversial work of interpretation is necessary.

Aijaz Ahmad has argued that, despite Spivak’s claims to be working within the Marxist tradition, her essays exhibit contempt for materialism, rationalism, and progress, the core features of Marxism (Ahmad 1997). According to Ahmad, Spivak is concerned with narratives of capitalism rather than the institutional structures and material effects of capitalism as a mode of production. Spivak’s sharp criticism of movements that essentialize subaltern subjects casts doubt on the basic premise of Marxist politics, which privileges the proletariat as a group with shared, true interests that are produced by the capitalist system.

Vivek Chibber (2013) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) have taken up these issues. In his influential book Provincializing Europe , Chakrabarty argues that distinctively European concepts such as disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty inform the social sciences. When these standards are treated as universal, the third world is seen as incomplete or lacking. Chibber challenges the position. Chibber advances a critique of Subaltern Studies and defends universal categories such as capitalism, class, rationality, and objectivity. He argues that these categories need not be reductionist or Eurocentric and that they are useful in illuminating the motivation of political actors and the structural constraints faced by leaders in countries such as India.

This debate reflects a tension that runs through the field of postcolonial studies. Although some thinkers draw on both Marxism and poststructuralism, the two theories have different goals, methods, and assumptions. In the humanities, postcolonial theory tends to reflect the influence of poststructuralist thought, while theorists of decolonization focus on social history, economics, and political institutions. Whereas postcolonial theory is associated with the issues of hybridity, diaspora, representation, narrative, and knowledge/power, theories of decolonization are concerned with revolution, economic inequality, violence, and political identity.

Some scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the concept post-colonial theory. Like the idea of the Scottish four-stages theory, a theory with which it would appear to have little in common, the very concept of post-colonialism seems to rely on a progressive understanding of history (McClintock 1992). It suggests, perhaps unwittingly, that the core concepts of hybridity, alterity, particularity, and multiplicity may lead to a kind of methodological dogmatism or developmental logic. Moreover, the term “colonial” as a marker of this domain of inquiry is also problematic in so far as it suggests historically implausible commonalities across territories that experienced very different techniques of domination. Thus, the critical impulse behind post-colonial theory has turned on itself, drawing attention to the way that it may itself be marked by the utopian desire to transcend the trauma of colonialism (Gandhi 1998).

Indigenous scholars have articulated a critique of post-colonialism, noting that the concept obscures the continued existence of settler colonialism. Decolonization within setter states is framed through an ethics of reconciliation, which recognizes the historical and ongoing effects of colonization and aims at establishing a mutually respectful framework for a sustainable nation to nation relationship between settler and Indigenous peoples. The theoretical literature on settler colonialism includes a diverse range of positions that offer different assessments of approaches focused on reconciliation and resurgence. A point of controversy in contemporary Indigenous political theory literature is the extent to which it is desirable to participate in colonial and political institutions in order to transform them. A central tension that underlies this controversy is whether institutional accommodation aimed toward reconciliation advanced an idea of self-determination that is defined through Indigenous interests, cosmologies, and ethics or further reproduces the conditions of domination that only perpetuate the historical settler-colonial relationship.

Scholars such as Dale Turner suggests that it is possible to achieve successful reconciliation through Western practices of democratic deliberation and procedures. In This is Not a Peace Pipe: Toward a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (2006), Turner emphasizes that the way to undermine the power dynamics that perpetuate the conditions of colonialism is through participation within the legal and political institutions of the state. He argues that “word warriors,” who mediate between Indigenous communities and legal and political institutions, should ensure the preservation and expansion of Indigenous rights within the larger community. Turner further suggests that an effective relationship between settler states and Indigenous peoples will only emerge from a dialogue grounded in democratic presumptions of equality and respect. This dialogue entails that Indigenous peoples, in order to establish claims of cultural distinctiveness, must learn how to engage within settler states’ legal and political discourses in more effective ways (2006:5).

In their essay “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (2012) Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang criticize settler worldviews for failing to acknowledge the distinct, totalizing effect of settler colonialism. They emphasize that settler colonialism operates through the exploitation and expropriation of Indigenous worlds by privileging colonial economies while simultaneously involving the use of particularized modes of control, such as schools and policing, to ensure and legitimize progress and development in accordance with settler epistemologies and ontologies. In this sense, settler-colonialism is a structure rather than an event (Wolfe 1999) that reinforces the total appropriation of Indigenous life and land. Tuck and Yang describe contemporary approaches to reconciliation as “moves to innocence” that reconcile settler guilt while securing the future of settler colonialism.

A prominent idea that is brought up in the struggle for Indigenous self-determination is the Doctrine of Discovery. Settlers claimed discovery from the normative political and legal view of terra nullius , which translates to “empty land.” Scholars of Indigenous resurgence argue that doctrines of discovery and terra nullius persist in the present period within recognition-based methods of reconciliation, and they stifle movements of self-determination. Theorists of Indigenous resurgence advance an understanding of decolonization that refuses contemporary settler-colonial methods of institutional and cultural accommodation while reviving Indigenous legal and political institutions and ways of being. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson points out that rebuilding needs to start from within, and Indigenous people require not only the re-establishment of pre-colonial history and languages but also the introduction of Indigenous custom and forms of governance that re-center a grounded normativity, which is a norm guided by ancestral land-based relationships and practices. This can build on the oral tradition of storytelling, which is a framework that informs social experience. Most recently, in Short History of Blockades (2021) Simpson argues that practices of blockading represent both a negation of settler colonial states and the affirmation or amplification of Indigenous futurity that directly addresses the implications of continual dispossession and domination by rebuilding relations of self-determination.

In Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), Glen Coulthard deepens the theoretical framework of resurgence and refusal by arguing that the current framework of reconciliation tends to dehistoricize and neutralize acts of dispossession, violence, and displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands and culture. For Coulthard, settler colonialism is an ongoing process emergent in settler institutions and structures of recognition, not merely the legacy of past injustices. This is evident in unsettled land claims, the dispossession of land, the limitations placed on Indigenous governments, and the displacement of Indigenous ways of life that are tied to access to traditional territories. Rather than relying on recognition from within the colonial-settler relationship, Coulthard calls for an Indigenous sovereignty informed by an intellectual, social, political, and artistic movement that embodies a “self-reflective revitalization” of traditional values, principles, and cultural practices.

The title of Coulthard’s book alludes to Black Skin, White Masks (2008), the path breaking work by Frantz Fanon. Writing in 1950s, Fanon challenged the abstract universalism of Western philosophy, showing how universalism serves to structure a hierarchical relationship between settler and colonized. Fanon’s critical theory challenges the assumption that European notions of progress truly advance justice and secure mutual benefit. In Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon focuses on the development of Black consciousness by exploring the psychological alienation and displacement caused by colonial domination. He describes a divided self who identifies with French culture even while experiencing exclusion from the ideals of universalism, equality, and reason. Coulthard’s reading of Fanon informs his view that cultural recognition by the colonial state is not a solution. Following Fanon, he concludes the paternalist recognition serves to legitimize the colonial state and further divide Indigenous subjects.

While international recognition-based models have gained momentum since the 2007 United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), their potential to establish Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination remains contested. Scholars such as Sheryl Lightfoot (2016) highlight the revolutionary potential of international movements to enable a collective voice where local struggles may strategically coalesce on a global platform. Others are critical of UNDRIP as it remains formulated within a Westphalian system that fails to universally recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous law and practices in cases where it conflicts with settler law or territorial sovereignty (see Hayden King).

In her book Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance, and Gender (2019) Rauna Kuokkanen is skeptical of the ability of human rights frameworks, such as UNDRIP, to inform and express Indigenous self-determination. Drawing from Indigenous and feminist political and legal theory, Kuokkanen highlights the way human rights frameworks and current models of Indigenous self-government are limited in their ability to adequately address violence against women because of their focus on civil and political rights. As an alternative, Kuokkanen proposes a relational theory of self-determination that recognizes that social and political orders as interconnected and interdependent, which she contrasts with a rights-based framework that fosters values of autonomy. Kuokkanen positions self-determination as a core value and traces the way certain ideas and rights of self-determination both structure social and political experience and how this value could be transformed if informed and developed through Indigenous ontologies based on the idea of integrity of both the land and the body alongside a freedom from bodily harm and violence.

Resurgence scholars aim to unsettle settler perspectives of civilization through the revitalisation of Indigenous practices of responsibility and relations with the natural world. Theorists within this field reject all stadial theories of human development and the idea that history’s direction is irreversible. Similar to Gandhi, some Indigenous thinkers critique modern civilization as a profound sickness destroying what is meaningful in human life, characterizing modern civilization as ailing and on the threshold of self-destruction (Henderson, 2017). These thinkers challenge the idea of a single authoritative account of politics guided by the ideas of Enlightenment rationality. Instead, they make a case for a new way of doing politics that provides an alternative to the materialism and consumerism of modern Western societies that develops through a close study of the values destroyed through colonialism. John Borrows (2008), for example, challenges settler understandings that shape human relationships and obligations to the earth by re-telling the idea of seven generations that exists in many Indigenous legal and political traditions. According to this approach, when making judgments in the present, we have duties of obligation to seven generations in the past and seven generations in the future.

Along the lines of colonial and post-colonial thinkers, like Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Fanon, Indigenous political theorists do not necessarily advocate for a reversion to historical or traditional ways of living. Rather, Indigenous thinkers describe a new humanism within the context of settler colonialism that requires politics guided by a practice of truth-seeking from various perspectives. In their work Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings (2019), Michael Ash, John Borrows, and James Tully compile a collection of work that brings forward a theoretical framework of reconciliation that is empowered by practices of resurgence. Decolonization in this sense is likened to the activity of the ancient sweetgrass braiders, which brings various independent strands of branches, roots, filaments and fibre together in a strong braid. This act of weaving – a predominantly female apprenticeship – necessitates a deep understanding of community life and its history, with a knowledge of patterns, impressions, and conventions in both the natural and human world (2019:10).

Indigenous political theory has developed into a robust scholarship that calls for the radical responsibility of Indigenous nations for their own self-determination. This scholarship advocates for the emergence of a new set of values that develops not through privileging a European conception of universalism but by sketching a conception of universalism that emerges from the co-existence of many particulars. This emergent universalism assembles different worlds and ideas of civilization by addressing issues surrounding land rights and cultural distinctiveness.

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• Lenin. V.I. 1999 [1917]. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. , Marxist Internet Archive.

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

What is colonialism?

The subjugation of indigenous people—and the exploitation of their land and resources—has a long and brutal history.

Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” It occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people. By 1914, a large majority of the world's nations had been colonized by Europeans at some point.

Japan, Korea, and Thailand are the only other nations never to have been colonized by Europeans.

The concept of colonialism is closely linked to that of imperialism, which is the policy or ethos of using power and influence to control another nation or people, that underlies colonialism.

History of colonialism

In antiquity, colonialism was practiced by empires such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and Phoenicia. These civilizations all extended their borders into surrounding and non-contiguous areas from about 1550 B.C. onward, and established colonies that used the physical and population resources of the people they conquered to increase their own power .

In Ancient Greece, for example, city-states often established colonies in search of both extra living space and economic gain. After consulting an oracle, members of the city-state would send a select group of its inhabitants to establish a new colony. To seal the association between colony and city, its founding members would light a fire with a flame taken from the original city’s central hearth and engage in other rituals laying claim to the new location.

During what is now known as the Age of Discovery, founding a new colony depended on another ritual: gaining the sponsorship of a wealthy patron, usually a monarch, and embarking on large ships to search for unceded land. Beginning in the 15th century, Portugal began looking for new trade routes and searching for civilizations outside of Europe. In 1415, Portuguese explorers conquered Ceuta, a coastal town in North Africa, kicking off an empire that would last until 1999.

Soon the Portuguese had conquered and populated islands like Madeira and Cape Verde, and their rival nation, Spain, decided to try exploration, too. In 1492, Christopher Columbus began looking for a western route to India and China . Instead, he landed in the Bahamas, kicking off the Spanish Empire. Spain and Portugal soon became locked in competition for new territories and took over Indigenous lands in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia.

The rest of Western Europe swiftly followed: England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany quickly began their own empire building overseas, fighting Spain and Portugal for the right to lands they had already colonized.

Often, the colonies were wrested from the hands of their Indigenous inhabitants by relatively small parties of European men who lay claim after short skirmishes or by intimidating locals with their vessels, weapons, and trade items. For example, Columbus’ crew for his famous 1492 voyage consisted of just 90 men, 39 of whom he left behind to build a settlement in what is now Haiti.

Subjugation and revolutions

Among the allures of colonialism was the chance to recruit—and often enslave—Indigenous people to benefit a colonial power. In Brazil, for example, explorers called bandeirantes   embarked on expeditions in search of Native people to capture and enslave for Portuguese-established plantations and mines. And slavers from throughout Europe participated in the Atlantic slave trade, dealing in kidnapped Central and West Africans and forcing them to perform labor that enriched their empires overseas.

Even former colonies eventually became colonizers themselves: The U.S., which was formerly held by Great Britain, extended its territory shortly after winning the War of Independence and later expanded its claims to the Pacific and Latin America.

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Starting in the 1880s, European nations also began taking over African nations, racing to coveted natural resources and establishing colonies they would hold until an international period of decolonization that lasted from around 1914 to 1975 and challenged European rule

By far, the most successful colonizer was the British Empire, which at its height soon after World War I could boast territories in every time zone in the world. The sun “never set” on England’s political and economic ambitions, which it carried out with the help of British colonial governments.

Despite the growth of European colonies in the Western Hemisphere, most colonized countries gained independence during the 18th and 19th century, beginning with the American Revolution in 1776 and the Haitian Revolution in 1781. However, the Eastern Hemisphere continued to tempt European colonial powers.

Colonial rationale and resistance

Colonial powers justified their conquests by claiming they had a legal and religious obligation to control the land and culture of Indigenous peoples. Conquering nations cast their role as civilizing “barbaric” or “savage” nations , and argued that they were acting in the best interests of those whose lands and peoples they exploited.

Historically, church leaders both encouraged and participated in the takeover and exploitation of foreign lands and labor, most often in the name of Christian conversion. In the 15 th century, Catholic popes laid out a religious justification for colonization, issuing a series of papal bulls now known as the Doctrine of Discovery that asserted colonization was necessary to save souls and seize lands for the growth of the Church. Often, Christian missionaries were among the first to make inroads into new lands. Inspired by the belief that they must convert as many Indigenous people to Christianity as possible, they imported both religious and cultural customs and a paternalistic attitude toward the colonies’ Native inhabitants.

Yet resistance to this control is an integral part of the story of colonialism. Even before decolonization, Indigenous people on all continents staged violent and nonviolent resistance to their conquerors. These included the Pueblo Rebellion overthrowing Spanish rule of what is now New Mexico in 1680, the slave revolt turned revolution in Haiti in 1791, a series of rebellions against English rule in India, and many other instances of collective and personal resistance.

Ethiopia was able to remain one of just two African nations to sidestep European colonial rule due to a series of savvy alliances forged by its emperor, and in 1896 the nation managed to stave off an Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa.

Colonialism’s legacy

Colonial governments invested in infrastructure and trade and disseminated medical and technological knowledge. In some cases, they encouraged literacy, the adoption of Western human rights standards , and sowed the seeds for democratic institutions and systems of government. Some former colonies, like Ghana, experienced a rise in nutrition and health with colonial rule, and colonial European settlement has been linked to some development gains .

However, coercion and forced assimilation often accompanied those gains, and scholars still debate colonialism’s many legacies . Colonialism’s impacts include environmental degradation , the spread of disease , economic instability , ethnic rivalries , and human rights violations —issues that can long outlast one group’s colonial rule.

As South Asia historian John McQuade writes , “It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized.”

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As of January 1st 2021, The Correspondent has discontinued publishing its journalism.

You can read more about it here .

Talking about everyday things may seem banal, but great injustices happen when people grow accustomed to them. As the Everyday Colonialism correspondent, I intend to lead better nuanced, more accessible conversations.

The past is still present: why colonialism deserves better coverage

How do you report on a story that began hundreds of years ago, or cover a global phenomenon that spans continents and centuries? How does understanding the past help us make sense of the present? 

Despite several hundred years of imperialism and colonialism, the mid-20th Century marked a period when many countries in Asia and Africa freed themselves from formal colonial rule. As a result, it is often thought – in both former colonising and colonised nations – that colonialism is a thing of the past.

In reality, it remains a powerful force in today’s world. From Kashmir to Palestine, Western Sahara to Crimea and South Ossetia, many parts of the world remain under direct military occupation.

Countries such as Britain and the USA also retain control over colonial territories. And let’s not forget the settler colonial countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, where the colonisation of indigenous lands has been entrenched and institutionalised in the long-term.

Colonial domination not only shapes our ideas about race, but also strongly influences how people think about class, culture, gender, and sexuality

Growing up in Malawi in the 1990s, I witnessed the enduring impact of colonialism for myself. I saw how the southern African country struggled to free itself from an oppressive one-party regime, Wikipedia’s entry on Hastings Banda, president of Malawi from 1964 - 1994, gives more details on the post-independence period. one that had weaponised many of the structures inherited from the British colonial system.

Even through the layers of privilege that swaddled me as a wee white Scottish boy, I could see that life in Malawi during those years was a kind of informal apartheid. Entrenched hierarchies of race, class and gender were unmistakable and entirely normalised. If the colonial roots of this social order lay below the surface, it took only the merest brush to expose them. 

Ever since then, I’ve been preoccupied with understanding how colonialism continues to blight people’s lives, helping create a shared understanding of what the word continues to mean.

Colonialism, as I understand it now, is the structure or structures through which one group of people (typically a nation) subordinates and exploits another, then justifies this subordination and exploitation by claiming to be the intrinsically superior group. Colonial domination not only shapes our ideas about race, but also strongly influences how people think about class, culture, gender, and sexuality. 

Think of the so-called “anti-sodomy” laws from the colonial era that criminalised homosexuality in dozens of countries around the world – from Bhutan to the Maldives, Gambia to Zimbabwe. In many cases these laws have never been repealed. Human Rights Watch reported in 2015 that over half of the 80 countries worldwide where homosexuality is illegal were once British colonies. The LGBTQ activists who have been fighting hard overturn the law in Kenya against gay sex This BBC article covers the Kenyan court’s decision to uphold colonial-era laws against gay sex. are literally struggling against a colonial rule. 

Over the next three months, working as the Everyday Colonialism correspondent, I want to rewrite histories of colonialism in a clear, nuanced and accessible way that equips us all to understand the complex forms it takes as it lives on in our everyday realities.

The concept of the everyday is not meant to trivialise my approach. “Everyday” can mean banal or ordinary; but great injustices can also seem banal when people have grown used to them as permanent features of day-to-day life.

The enduring presence of colonialism

Colonialism blights the cultures of the colonisers as well as the colonised. The Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire wrote that a basic feature of colonialism is the way it “decivilises” those responsible. In Césaire’s view, colonialism operates through extreme violence against colonised peoples. When this violence was justified and normalised by European beneficiaries of colonial rule, Césaire thought, “a poison [was] distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceed[ed] towards savagery.”  

Yet the poison continues to be felt most acutely in the more insidious forms of violence that once-colonised peoples still experience today. The laws, economic structures and cultural basis for European colonialism didn’t disappear when nations gained independence in the mid-20th century.

The legacies of these empires continue to infest many aspects of our world, from borders, migration, and unequal citizenship, to prisons, labour conditions, supply lines, healthcare, trade agreements, international development aid, education, diplomacy, tourism, art, and sport.

The roots of autocracy and corrupt government run deep

In some cases, such as the Windrush scandal, Read The Guardian’s series of reports on the Windrush scandal here. the legacy of the past is all too clear. Since 2017, The Guardian has been reporting on how the British government erroneously deported at least 83 people of Caribbean origin who had settled in the country between 1948 and 1973, and has harassed and detained hundreds more as part of the official policy of creating a “hostile environment” This article in The Conversation explains the UK’s draconian immigration policy. for so-called “illegal immigrants.”  

Many of these people had arrived in Britain as small children, part of the “Windrush generation” Read this BBC explainer about the Windrush generation. , named after the ship that brought over 1,000 people from Jamaica in 1948. They helped to rebuild a country and society devastated by the second world war, made lives for themselves, raised British children and grandchildren, and were rewarded with a litany of threats and humiliations. 

Reports showed that the UK government pursued people who had been born as British subjects in countries under colonial rule, and who therefore had full British citizenship rights under a law passed in 1948. Others persecuted had come to live in the UK perfectly legally under the terms of the shifting legal framework around British citizenship and immigration during the period of decolonisation up to 1973. 

In this case the relevant history was reported in some depth, since the UK government’s ignorance of its own history of colonial citizenship was fundamental to the story. It was even shown that the UK Home Office had destroyed the landing cards that would have provided crucial evidence in favour of those threatened with deportation; the extent of official malfeasance This Guardian article investigates evidence that the UK Home Office destroyed landing cards. was profound.

An invisible past

Examples such as the Windrush scandal aside, when connections between colonial history and present crises are explicitly made in daily news reporting, these links are often mentioned only in passing. Reports typically include few concrete details of the context, because what counts as “relevant” is often limited to events of, at most, the last few years. 

The roots of autocracy and corrupt government run deep. Purely cultural, ahistorical explanations not only risk reproducing racist tropes, they mask the role of powerful international corporate interests in sustaining systems of resource extraction, profiteering, exploitation and  rent-seeking that sustain the underlying economic transactions that has always made colonialism financially profitable for colonisers.

Everyday Colonialism is also about probing my own status as a beneficiary of these long histories

I want my work to be meaningful to readers whose lived experience has been at the sharp end of colonialism; those readers for whom colonialism represents a violation and dispossession that can never fully be redressed. But I’m in Edinburgh, working from within Europe as a white man. The world I describe above is not one in which I am positioned myself. 

As such, this beat is also about probing how to negotiate my own status as a beneficiary of these long histories. Like many readers of The Correspondent, I didn’t choose to inherit my colonial complicity, this sense I have of my life being inescapably folded into lives and events that are decades, even centuries old. 

Those of us who come from coloniser societies have been failed not only by our education systems – which have tended to celebrate or simply ignore colonial histories – but also by dominant cultural narratives that claim to explain our colonial entanglements and connections without ever really taking them seriously.

Every time we learn about some new facet of colonialism, these lessons possess an especially strong clarifying power. Without such knowledge, many complex realities in a place like Edinburgh today (or in many other parts of the global north) are simply inexplicable.

Where we’re ignorant, it’s easier to lean on complacent ideas that naturalise the existing social and economic order – who gets marginalised, who gets privileged – as not only the way things have always been, but the way things  ought to be .

We’re not responsible for what happened in the past. That doesn’t mean we have no responsibility now. 

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Article contents

Colonial history and historiography.

• Marie-Albane de Suremain Marie-Albane de Suremain Centre for Social Sciences Studies on the African, American and Asian Worlds, Paris Diderot University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.303
• Published online: 20 December 2018

The colonial condition in Africa has been revisited by all of the main historiographic currents of thought, from a heroizing, highly political and military history of colonization primarily considered from the colonists’ standpoint, to a much more complex and rich history integrating the colonized perspective. This history has been enhanced by contributions from Postcolonial Studies and Subaltern Studies as well as from New Imperial History and perspectives opened by its global interconnected history.

At the intersection of these issues and methods, colonial studies offers an innovative reinterpretation of various facets of colonial Africa, such as the factors and justifications for colonial expansion; conquests and colonial wars; processes of territorial appropriation and border demarcation; and the organization and control of the colonies. In these fundamentally inegalitarian societies, accommodation and social and cultural hybridization processes were also at work, as well as multiple forms of resistance or subversion that paved the way for African states to win their independence. In addition to the role played by the First and Second World Wars, the emergence of nationalist and separatist movements helps to clarify the multifaceted nature of these independences, when approached from a political as well as a cultural and social perspective, while questioning the durability of the legacy of the colonial phase in African history.

• Colonial Africa
• decolonization
• Subaltern Studies
• postcolonial studies
• colonial studies
• methods, sources, and historiography in African history

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The Aftermath of Colonial Rule

• First Online: 29 October 2021

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• Joachim Betz 2  

For decades, there has been a heated debate among economic historians about the extent to which the almost complete colonial domination of today’s developing countries by the European colonial powers has slowed down or promoted economic and social progress. The latter position is not exactly politically correct, nor does it form a majority academically. This was demonstrated by a wave of indignation that swept over the editors of Third World Quarterly when they chose to publish an essay by Bruce Gilley (The case for colonialism, Third World Quarterly, 2017), who found good things were brought by colonial rule, namely economic progress, the building of infrastructure, the rule of law, and civil liberties. Because of these alleged beneficial effects, he also argued for partial recolonization. The editors had to withdraw the article after angry protests. So can’t the question raised be answered without partisanship? It is difficult to do so, given the undeniable suffering that colonial rule and its antecedents brought upon the people living in the dominated countries. Such an attempt must prove that (a) the former colonies did not differ too much economically, socially, and politically from the colonial powers before their dependence, (b) their further development was decisively slowed down by colonialism, and this (c) irrespective of the character of the colonies and the respective method of rule, and (d) the after-effects of colonialism are still detectable today. Such a comparatively outrage-free approach is quite rare.

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International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement

Home Issues 1 Dossier | Afrique : 50 ans d'indé... African Economic Development and ...

African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies

This article reviews how colonial rule and African actions during the colonial period affected the resources and institutional settings for subsequent economic development south of the Sahara. The issue is seen from the perspective of the dynamics of development in what was in 1900 an overwhelmingly land-abundant region characterised by shortages of labour and capital, by perhaps surprisingly extensive indigenous market activities and by varying but often low levels of political centralisation. The differential impact of French and British rule is explored, but it is argued that a bigger determinant of the differential evolution of poverty, welfare and structural change was the contrast between “settler” and “peasant” economies.

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Thematic keywords: , geographic keywords: , 1. introduction.

• 1 The current names of former colonies are preferred in this essay, not least because until the 1930s (...)

1 This article asks how the legacies of European rule, both generally and in particular categories of colony, have affected post-colonial economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The year 1960 is conventionally used as the “stylised date” of independence, for the good reason that it saw the end of colonial rule in most of the French colonies south of the Sahara as well as in the most populous British and Belgian ones (Nigeria and Congo respectively). 1 Half a century is a reasonable period over which to review the economic impact of legacies because it allows us to consider the issue in the context of different phases of post-colonial policy and performance.

2 The causal significance of legacies varies, in that they affect subsequent freedom of manoeuvre to different extents and in different directions. At its strongest, legacy takes the form of “path determination”, implying that colonial choices determined post-colonial ones, or at least conditioned them, such that departure from the colonial pattern was, and perhaps remains, difficult and costly. Besides asking about the strength of the influence of the past on the future, we need to consider the nature of that influence. Did colonial rule put African countries on a higher or lower path of economic change? It will be argued here that the “path(s)” on which African economies were (to a greater or lesser extent) set by the time of independence are most usefully seen not as necessarily initiated in the colonial period, but often rather as continuations and adjustments from paths of change established before the European partition of the continent.

3 The following discussion has three preliminary sections. Thus, chapter 2 first attempts a summary of the economic record since independence in order to define the pattern for which colonial legacies may have been partly responsible. Chapter 3 outlines contending views of those legacies. Chapter 4 tries to define the economic and political structures and trends within Africa on the eve of the European partition of the continent. It identifies an emerging African comparative advantage in land-extensive forms of production, which West Africans in particular were already exploiting and, by their investments and initiatives, deepening.

4 In this framework, chapter 5 then introduces the colonial regimes, highlighting their fiscal constraints and comparing different national styles of colonial rule, focusing on the largest empires, those of Britain and France. It is a theme of this essay, however, that another kind of variation between colonies was more important, i.e. that defined by the extent and form of European appropriation and use of land: “settler”, “plantation” and “peasant” colonies. Chapter 6 considers how far colonial rule (and the actions of European companies that it facilitated) reinforced the emergence of a comparative advantage in land-extensive primary exports and looks at the consequences of this for the welfare of the population. Chapter 7 explores colonial contributions, and their limits, for the very long-term shift of African factor endowments from labour scarcity towards labour abundance and a relatively high level of human capital formation, such as helped Tokugawa Japan, and more recently other parts of Asia, to achieve “labour-intensive industrialisation” (Sugihara 2007). Chapter 8 assesses the impact of different kinds of European regime on African entrepreneurship and on institutions facilitating, hindering or channelling African participation in markets. Chapter 9 completes the substantive discussion by commenting on the long-term effects of the colonial intrusion on the capacity of the State in Africa for facilitating and promoting economic development.

2. Post-colonial change and variation

5 Notoriously, output per head in Sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest of any major world region and has, on average, expanded slowly and haltingly since 1960. But there have been important changes, and variations over space, in policy and performance. In policy, structural adjustment in the 1980s marked a watershed: a fundamental shift from administrative to market means of resource allocation. The change, however, was less dramatic in most of the former French colonies, where (except in Guinea) the maintenance of a convertible currency had enabled governments to avoid some of the supplementary price and quantity controls which had increasingly been imposed in the mostly former British colonies outside the franc zone. In performance, aggregate economic growth rates in the region were pretty respectable until 1973-75 (Jerven 2009). Ironically, in the decade or so following the adoption of structural adjustment they were stagnant or negative, before the Chinese-led boom in world commodity prices eased the region into 12 years of gross domestic product (GDP) growth at an average of 5% a year before the crises of 2007 (rising fuel and food prices, then the beginning of the international financial crisis) and 2008 brought about a “great recession” in 2009 (IMF 2009).

1  For a general account see Rimmer (1992, esp. 5, 228).

6 There were notable exceptions to the general growth trends, both before and after the turning-point in the early to mid-1970s. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana made a particularly interesting contrast: similarly-sized neighbours with relatively similar factor endowments and geographical features, but with different colonial heritages. Côte d’Ivoire underwent what might loosely be described as a magnified version of the standard growth trajectory. It averaged an annual GDP growth of 9.5% from 1960 to 1978 (Berthélemy and Söderling 2001, 324-5) but then had several years of stagnation followed by civil war. Meanwhile, Ghana did almost the opposite. Ghanaian GDP per capita was barely higher in 1983, when it began structural adjustment, than at independence in 1957. 1 However, as one of the two most successful cases of structural adjustment in Africa (the other being Uganda), Ghana averaged nearly 5% annual growth during the quarter-century after 1983. Thus, roughly, while Côte d’Ivoire was rising Ghana was falling, and vice versa. Only one Sub-Saharan economy, Botswana, sustained growth over three, indeed four, decades since its independence, which was in 1966. Botswana averaged 9.3% annual growth (Berthélemy and Söderling 2001, 324-5).

3. Contrasting perspectives on the colonial legacy

2  For Africanist commentaries see Austin (2008b) and Hopkins (2009).

7 A feature of the theoretical and ideological debate about the history of economic development in Africa is that it is possible to reach rather similar conclusions from very different scholarly and political starting-points. Regarding the colonial impact, the case for the prosecution, which a generation ago was urged most strongly by dependency theorists and radical nationalists (Amin 1972; Rodney 1972), is now championed by “rational choice” growth economists. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson (2001; 2002) have argued that Africa’s relative poverty at the end of the 20th century was primarily the result of the form taken by European colonialism on the continent: Europeans settling for extraction rather than settling themselves in overwhelming numbers and thereby introducing the kinds of institution (private property rights and systems of government that would support them) that, according to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, was responsible for economic development in Europe and the colonies of European settlement in North America and Australasia. 2

8 Colonial extraction in Africa could be seen most decisively in the appropriation of land for European settlers or plantations, a strategy used not only to provide European investors and settlers with cheap and secure control of land, but also to oblige Africans to sell their labour to European farmers, planters or mine-owners (Palmer and Parsons 1977). Even in the “peasant” colonies, i.e. where the land remained overwhelmingly in African ownership, we will see that major parts of the services sector were effectively monopolised by Europeans. Then there was coercive recruitment of labour by colonial administrations, whether to work for the State or for European private enterprise (Fall 1993; Northrup 1988). Of potentially great long-term importance was the unwillingness of colonial governments to accept, still less promote, the emergence of markets in land rights on land occupied by Africans, whether in “settler” or “peasant” colonies (Phillips 1989). From the perspectives of both dependency theory and “rational choice” institutionalism, the original sin of colonialism in Africa was that it did not introduce a full-blooded capitalist system, based upon private property and thereby generating the pressures towards competition and accumulation necessary to drive self-sustained economic growth.

9 A narrower but important argument was made by the then small group of liberal development economists between the 1950s and 1970s. At a time when development economists (especially but not exclusively those writing in French) tended to favour a leading role for the State in the search for development in mixed economies (Hugon 1993; Killick 1978) P. T. Bauer (1953; 1972) attacked the late colonial State for introducing statutory marketing boards and thereby laying the foundation of what he considered to be deadening State interventionism.

10 Explicitly positive overviews of colonial rule in Africa are rare (but see Duignan and Gann 1975). Many studies, though, mention the suppression of intra-African warfare, the abolition of internal slave trading and slavery, the introduction of mechanised transport and investment in infrastructure, and the development of modern manufacturing in the “settler” economies and in the Belgian Congo. Excited by the late 20th century wave of economic “globalisation”, some economic liberals have argued that the British empire pioneered the process through its general opposition to tariff protection (1846-1931) and by other pro-market measures (Ferguson 2003; Lal 2004). With respect to tariffs, this case would apply less strongly to French colonies because of the protectionism of the French empire. It is also much less true of the final 30 years of British rule in Africa, which saw not only tariffs but also the creation of marketing boards. From the perspective of institutional change, a fundamental observation applicable to the region generally was highlighted by John Sender and Sheila Smith (1986). Writing in the “tragic optimist” tradition of Marx’s writings on British rule in India, they emphasised that wage labour was rare at the beginning of colonial rule and increasingly common by the end of it. For them, as for Bill Warren (1980), imperialism was the “pioneer of capitalism”.

11 Besides optimism and pessimism, a third view of colonial rule, and by implication of its legacy, is that its importance has been over-rated. There are different routes to this conclusion. Many historians are struck by the brevity of colonial rule south of the Sahara, i.e. about 60 years in most of tropical Africa (Ajayi 1969), and by the weakness of the colonial State (Herbst 2000). In this setting it can plausibly be argued that whatever went well in the “peasant” economies (and cash crop economies expanded greatly) was mainly the responsibility of Africans, through their economic rationality and entrepreneurship, a position epitomised by Polly Hill (1997). More ambivalent are the arguments of Jean-François Bayart (1989; 2000). Building on the familiar observation that rulers in Africa have usually found it hard to raise large revenues from domestic sources, Bayart argues that, during colonial rule and since, African elites became clients of colonial or overseas States. Thereby they forged relations which, though unequal, benefited themselves as well as the foreigners. Whereas dependency theory emphasised the primacy of foreign agency in determining historical outcomes, Bayart insists that African elites played a calculating and key role in establishing the “extraverted” pattern of African political economy.

4. A pre-colonial perspective on colonial legacies

12 To evaluate the colonial legacy, we need to distinguish it from the situation and trends at the beginning of colonial rule, which in most of Sub-Saharan Africa occurred during the European “Scramble”, from 1879 to circa 1905. At that time the region was, as before, characterised generally (not everywhere all the time) by an abundance of cultivable land in relation to the labour available to till it (Hopkins 1973; Austin 2008a). This did not mean “resource abundance” as much of Africa’s mineral endowment was either unknown or inaccessible with pre-industrial technology or was not yet valuable even overseas. For example, many of the major discoveries (notably of oil in Nigeria and diamonds in Botswana) were to occur only during the period of decolonisation. Moreover, the fertility of much of the land was relatively low or at least fragile, making it costly or difficult to pursue intensive cultivation, especially in the absence of animal manure. Sleeping sickness prevented the use of large animals, whether for ploughing or transport, in the forest zones and much of the savannas. The extreme seasonality of the annual distribution of rainfall rendered much of the dry season effectively unavailable for farm work. The consequent low opportunity cost of dry-season labour reduced the incentive to raise labour productivity in craft production. Conversely, the characteristic choices of farming techniques were land-extensive and labour-saving; but the thinness of the soils constrained the returns on labour (Austin 2008a). All this helps to explain why the productivity of African labour was apparently higher outside Africa over several centuries, cf. the underlying economic logic of the external slave trades which in turn, ironically, aggravated the scarcity of labour within Africa itself (Austin 2008b; Manning 1990).

13 Within Africa, the structure of incentives encouraged a high degree of self-sufficiency, and by the middle of the 20th century it was widely assumed that pre-colonial economies had necessarily been overwhelmingly subsistence-oriented. The last half-century of research has progressively changed this assessment, especially for West Africa where a strong tendency towards extra-subsistence production was evident in the 16th and 17th centuries. While damaged by the aggravated “Dutch disease” effects of the Atlantic slave trade (Inikori 2007; Austin, forthcoming), this tendency was strongly resumed from the first decade of the 19th century when that trade began to be abolished, with West Africans producing on a wider and larger scale for internal as well as overseas markets. Given the relative scarcity of labour, and in the absence (generally) of significant economies of scale in production, it was rare for the reservation wage (the minimum wage rate sufficient to persuade people to sell their labour rather than work for themselves) to be low enough for a would-be employer to afford to pay it. Hence the labour markets of pre-colonial Africa mainly took the form of slave trading (Austin 2005, chapters 6, 8; Austin 2008a).

14 The same abundance of land made political centralisation difficult to achieve and sustain (Herbst 2000). Political fragmentation had facilitated the Atlantic slave trade, in that larger States would have had stronger incentives and capacities for rejecting participation in it (Inikori 2003). This fragmentation later facilitated the European conquest. Ethiopia was the exception that proved the rule, with its fertile central provinces and large agricultural surplus supporting a long-established and modernising State that, alone in Africa, had the economic base to resist the “Scramble” successfully.

• 2 The historiography is too complex to be summarised here. But it can be said that, although the moti (...)

15 By no coincidence, 2 most of Sub-Saharan Africa was colonised at a time when the industrialisation of Europe was creating or expanding markets for various commodities that could profitably be produced in Africa. The land-labour ratio, the environmental constraints on intensive agriculture and also the specific qualities of particular kinds of land in various parts of the continent gave Africa at least a potential comparative advantage in land-extensive primary production. By the time of colonisation, especially in West Africa, the indigenous populations were increasingly taking advantage of the combination of these supply-side features and of access to expanding overseas markets. From Senegal to Cameroon thousands of tonnes of groundnuts and palm oil, and from the 1880s rubber, were being produced for sale to European merchants (Law 1995).

5. Colonial regimes: similarities and variations

16 Colonial rule in Africa was intended to be cheap, viz. for taxpayers in Europe. The British doctrine was that each colony should be fiscally self-supporting. Thus, any growth in government expenditure was supposed to be financed from higher revenues, as it was in Ghana in the 1920s when Governor Guggisberg was able to fund the creation of what became the country’s best-known hospital and school, as well as a new harbour and more railways and roads, from customs proceeds that had been fuelled by the colony’s increasing exports of cocoa beans. In practice the French were equally committed to covering costs. In French West Africa too there was a major programme of public works in the 1920s, although, as also in Ghana, within a few years expenditure had to be curtailed when export prices fell and the growth of revenue ended (Hopkins 1973, 190).

17 After retrenchment during the 1930s Depression, and especially during the Second World War, colonial administrations found themselves (for a variety of reasons) entering the post-war era with a new public commitment to be seen to promote actively the development of the economies over which they presided. “Developmental” language was partly redeemed by greater spending. In principle this came partly from the metropolitan taxpayer. However, in the French case Patrick Manning (1998, 123-5) has calculated that the government continued to receive more in tax from Africa than it spent in Africa. In British West Africa the new statutory export marketing boards accrued substantial surpluses by keeping a large margin between the price paid to producers and the price that the boards received for the crop on the world market. The surpluses were kept in London, in British government bonds, as forced savings from African farmers (Rimmer 1992, 41-2), which assisted the British metropolitan economy to recover from the post-war dollar shortage.

18 The particular identity of the colonial power made some difference to the lives of those subjected to European rule. Contrasts between the two largest empires in Africa are traditionally made with reference to greater British reliance on African chiefs as intermediaries (“indirect rule”) and the French doctrine of assimilating a small minority of Africans into French culture and citizenship. On the whole it is arguable that, in economic terms, the similarities were much greater than the differences, except when the latter arose from the composition of their respective African empires. French rule, like British, relied on African intermediaries, including chiefs, even though France was much more insistent on abolishing African monarchies (as in Dahomey, in contrast to the British treatment of the structures and dynasties of the States of Buganda, Botswana, Lesotho and, after an abortive attempt at abolition, Ashanti). In West Africa the French made much greater use of forced labour, but that was primarily because the French territories were, from the start, relatively lacking in cash-earning and therefore wage-paying potential. That specific policy, Corvée and its use to benefit white planters rather than African farmers, made a difference to the colonial legacy in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It meant that African cocoa farming took off much more quickly and dramatically in the former, so that Ghana was much wealthier at independence, when Côte d’Ivoire was in the process of catching up (and overtaking) after a late start (Hopkins 1973, 218-9), which it proceeded to do by the 1980s.

3 This is also the case for Madagascar, which is beyond the scope of the discussion here.

• 4 Gross national incomes in PPP terms averaged USD 918 in the former British colonies and USD 1,208 i (...)

19 The contention here that the differences between the legacies of British and French rule in Africa are primarily attributable to variations in the composition of the African empires concerned may need to be qualified in the light of valuable recent research by Thomas Bossuroy and Denis Cogneau (2009). They examined social mobility in five African countries and found that in the former British colonies in their sample, Ghana and Uganda, “the links between origin, migration, education and occupational achievement appear much looser” than in the former French colonies they examined, i.e. Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea 3 (Bossuroy and Cogneau 2009, 2). In explanation, they emphasise the importance of greater investment in education in the British colonies than the French colonies in their sample. This is a novel and important line of inquiry. I suspect that the favourable conclusion about the former British colonies also partly reflects the fact that Ghana and Uganda, for reasons that are only partly and indirectly connected to their respective British legacies, were the two major growth successes of structural adjustment in Africa, therefore perhaps offering greater opportunities for educational, physical and occupational mobility from the mid-1980s, which was early enough to be partly reflected in the data and which coincided with economic stagnation and then civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. Finally, the contrast may also partly reflect the legacy of the era of Corvée and “settler” agriculture in Côte d’Ivoire, before the economy took off in the 1950s and 1960s. As of 1990, helped by the legacy of the Ivorian “miracle”, in a sample of 26 former British and French colonies in tropical Africa (so excluding southern Africa) it was the former French colonies that had the higher per capita incomes in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, by over 30% (Bossuroy and Cogneau 2009, 45, citing World Bank data). 4

6. Colonial rule and Africa’s specialisation in primary product exports

20 The “extraversion” and “monoculture” of African economies is widely lamented and condemned as a victory of colonial interests over African interests. The risks entailed in extreme specialisation, however, need to be set against the long-run income gain to be expected from the exploitation of comparative advantage. But again, although the location of a colonial economy’s comparative advantage could be identified, sooner or later the task of capitalising on it raised the question of what investments might profitably deepen that advantage and, above all, of how the costs and benefits would be distributed. Conflicts of ideology, and especially the balance of power between different interest groups, worked out variously across the range of African colonies. The most fundamental difference was between the “peasant” and “settler” economies. Let us consider the contrasting cases of export agriculture in the former, notably in West Africa, and mining in the latter, most obviously in South Africa.

21 We have noted that, by the eve of the European partition of the continent, Africa had already revealed an emerging comparative advantage in export agriculture. In West Africa in particular it was in the joint interests of the population, European merchants and the colonial administrations to further this. In Ghana British planters were initially allowed to enter to grow cocoa beans. But lacking the discriminatory support from the government that their counterparts enjoyed in Kenya and southern Africa, they failed in commercial competition with African producers (Austin 1996a), just as French planters were later to be eclipsed by African ones in Côte d’Ivoire following the abolition of Corvée . Colonial reliance on the efforts of African small capitalists and peasants in the growing and local marketing of export crops paid off in what became Ghana and Nigeria, with more than 20-fold increases in the real value of foreign trade between 1897 and 1960 (Austin 2008a, 612), benefiting British commercial interests as well as (via customs duties) the colonial treasury. The efforts of W. H. Lever, the soap manufacturer, to win government permission, along with the necessary coercive support, to establish huge oil palm plantations in Nigeria continued from 1906 to 1925, but they were always rebuffed in favour of continued African occupation of virtually all agricultural land. Ultimately this was because African producers literally delivered the goods (Hopkins 1973, 209-14) through land-extensive methods well adapted to the factor endowment. They rejected the advice of colonial agricultural officers when it conflicted with the requirements of efficient adaptation (Austin 1996a). The positive contribution of the administrations was to reinforce and permit the exploitation of these economies’ comparative advantage in export agriculture. They did this partly by investment in transport infrastructure, investment to which African entrepreneurs also contributed (Austin 2007). Equally important, although the colonial administration never really established a system of land titling, in Ghana (for example) it upheld the indigenous customary right of farmers to ownership of trees they had planted, irrespective of the outcome of any later litigation about the ownership of the land the trees stood upon. Thus, African producers enjoyed sufficient security of tenure to feel safe in investing in tree crops on a scale sufficient to create, in the case of Ghana, what became for nearly 70 years the world’s largest cocoa economy (Austin 2005, chapters 14, 17).

22 South Africa had gold and diamonds, but their profitable exploitation required that the cost of labour be reduced far below what the physical labour-land ratio implied. C. H. Feinstein’s quantitative exercise indicates that without such coercive intervention in the labour market, most of South Africa’s mines would have been unprofitable until the end of the gold standard era in 1932 (Feinstein 2005, 109-12). If South Africa eventually obtained a “free market” comparative advantage in mining, it was only after several decades of using extra-market means to repress black wages, notably through land appropriation and measures to stop Africans from working on European-owned land except as labourers rather than tenants.

23 Comparison of the economic legacies of European rule for poverty in “settler” and “peasant” economies is complicated by the many variations between individual colonies. However, some generalisations are possible. It is clear that the distribution of wealth and income was, and has remained, much more unequal in the “settler” economies than in the “peasant” ones. Preliminary findings by Sue Bowden, Blessing Chiripanhura and Paul Mosley (2008) support the proposition that possession of land put a floor under real wages in the “peasant” colonies, enabling labourers migrating into export-crop growing areas to share in the gains from exports that were otherwise divided between European firms, African and Asian middlemen and African farm-owners (see also Austin 2005). Bowden, Chiripanhura and Mosley find real wages beginning to rise from the 1920s and 1930s in the “peasant” colonies of Ghana and Uganda respectively and not falling back afterwards to the 1914 floor. In contrast, it was only in the 1970s that the real wages of black gold-miners in South Africa began a sustained rise above their early 20th century level (Lipton 1986, 410). In the sample taken by Bowden, Chiripanhura and Mosley it was only in the “pure settler” economies, South Africa and Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), not in the “peasant” colonies of Ghana or Uganda nor even in the intermediate case of Kenya, that there were declines in rural African living standards over periods of longer than 15 years within the 20th century. This pattern in real wages, together with the long-term expansion of African export agriculture which underpinned the growth of real wages in the “peasant” colonies, was reflected in the earlier onset of falling infant mortality in Ghana and Uganda compared to Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

24 It should be added that many African colonies were short of both known mineral deposits and the kinds of land suitable for profitable export agriculture. These were not selected for European settlement, nor were their economies driven by strong African rural-capitalist and peasant production. They had to rely on seasonal exports of male wage labourers, and on growing the less lucrative cash crops such as cotton, the timing of whose labour requirements conflicted with those of food crops, thereby creating risks to food security (Tosh 1980). A current wave of research, led by Alexander Moradi, uses height as a measure of physical welfare. The average height of African populations rose during the colonial period in Ghana and even in the “semi-settler” economy of Kenya (Moradi 2008; 2009). When this research is extended to poorer colonies such as southern Sudan, Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) or those in the West African Sahel, it would be no surprise if welfare improvements there are found to have been smaller than in the better-endowed economies studied so far. It was particularly in (selected areas of) the less favourably-endowed economies that colonial governments sought to raise productivity through very large-scale, capital-intensive and authoritarian projects, notably the massive irrigation scheme of the Office du Niger in Mali and the mechanisation campaign of the East African Groundnut Project in Tanganyika. Both were spectacular failures in their own output and productivity terms, not least because they were inefficient in relation to the prevailing factor ratios and physical environments (Hogendorn and Scott 1981; Roberts 1996, 223-48; Van Beusekom 2002).

25 Poor as was the record of “settler” colonialism for the living standards of the indigenous population, it was in colonies where Europeans appropriated land on a large scale, for settlers or for companies, that the earlier and larger beginnings were made in modern manufacturing.

7. Towards manufacturing?

26 Where industrialisation has occurred in Asia, it has tended to follow a more labour-intensive route than in Europe and North America, substituting longer working hours for additional machinery where possible (Sugihara 2007) and generally having a higher proportion of labour to capital at any given level of output. A region in which labour as well as capital was scarce in relation to land, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, was not well suited to follow either route in the early 20th century.

• 5 In Katanga, in contrast to South Africa, the black labour force was “stabilised” from the 1920s onw (...)

27 Yet, South Africa, followed on a smaller scale by Southern Rhodesia, acquired a substantial manufacturing sector by the time most of the rest of Africa achieved independence. The “artificially” low cost of black labour helped, but only in unskilled jobs because the skilled ones were anyway reserved for whites and the choice of technique was generally capital-intensive. Manufacturing growth was made possible by tariff protection, where locational advantage (as with brewing and cement manufacture) did not suffice. Crucially, mining provided the import-purchasing power to cover the import of capital goods and, where necessary, raw materials. It was also the direct or indirect source of much of the revenue used by governments to invest in manufacturing, whether directly or through the provision of infrastructure. The large European populations were a source of both educated workers and capital, but arguably their most important contribution to industrialisation was the political commitment to support it even at the cost of consumer prices that were often above world market levels (Austen 1987, 181-7; Kilby 1975; Wood and Jordan 2000). Moving up the value chain became an ambition of substantial proportions of white voters where they controlled governments, as in South Africa after 1910 and to a large extent in Southern Rhodesia from 1923, as well as of African voters since independence. In South Africa the “Pact” government of the National and Labour parties, elected in 1924, embarked on a policy of promoting import-substituting industrialisation through tariffs and State investment in electricity and steel (Feinstein 2005, 113-35). Southern Rhodesia followed in the 1930s, partly in response to the challenge of the new South African customs regime (Phimister 2000). Besides these “settler” colonies, there was a third case of precocious growth of modern manufacturing, i.e. the Belgian Congo. This was absolutely not a case of settler independence or autonomy. As in southern Africa, however, mines provided a favourable context for import-substituting industry, providing infrastructure, import-purchasing power and part of the market. 5 South Africa remained the flagship of manufacturing in the region, but the scope for further expansion was increasingly restricted by the high price of skilled labour in an economy where only a minority of the population had access to secondary education and by the limited market for mass-produced goods that resulted from the low level of black wages. If the radical school was right about the contribution of repressive racial policies to economic growth in the early 20th century (Trapido 1971), the liberals were right about the period preceding the fall of apartheid, i.e. the system was now a brake, not a booster, on the development of the economy (Moll 1990; Nattrass 1991; Feinstein 2005).

• 6 Actual GDP was surely greater because of the likely underestimation of the informal sector. This im (...)

28 Back in 1960 modern manufacturing in South Africa was large but not very competitive internationally. In the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa it was much smaller. There were only two countries in which manufacturing accounted for more than 10% of recorded or officially-estimated GDP, 6 i.e. Southern Rhodesia (16%) and the Belgian Congo (14%). Next, on 9.5%, the “semi-settler” economy of Kenya tied with Senegal (Kilby 1975, 472). The latter was a “peasant” colony but, as the administrative and commercial centre of French West Africa, had an exceptionally large resident European population, which increased the supply of people with managerial experience, technical expertise and access to capital (Kilby 1975, 473, 488-90). In West Africa even these low 1960 levels of manufacturing represented a very late surge, propelled by post-war developmentalism (government subsidies for manufacturing in the case of Senegal) and decolonisation, which led European firms to establish local factories to protect their existing markets (Kilby 1975, 475, 490-507; Boone 1992, 65-77).

29 Given the relative scarcity of labour and the small markets, together with the comparative advantage in land-extensive primary production, it is not surprising that there was not much more manufacturing by the end of the colonial period. Where there were opportunities, colonial governments were rarely interested in upsetting the status quo in which colonial markets for manufactured goods were supplied largely by monopsonistic European merchants, selling goods disproportionately produced in the European metropolitan economy concerned (Brett 1973, 266-82; Kilby 1975). But given that, despite rising population, the factor endowments of even the larger African economies were not suited to industrialisation in 1960, the more important question is perhaps whether colonial rule, directly or indirectly, laid foundations on which Africa might later develop the conditions for a much larger growth of manufacturing.

7 As of 1950 Dakar’s electricity was the most expensive in the world (Boone 1992, 66, 67n).

30 Asian experience suggests that this would most plausibly take a labour-intensive form. In the long term the most fundamental change of the colonial period was probably the start of sustained population growth, which in aggregate can be dated from the end of the 1918 influenza pandemic, although local timing varied. How far the demographic breakthrough was the result of colonial actions, such as the suppression of slave raiding, the post-1918 peace within Africa and public health measures that reduced crisis mortality, is difficult to determine (Iliffe 1995, 238-41). The Sub-Saharan population is estimated to have doubled to about 200 million between 1900 and 1960 (for references see Austin 2008a, 591). So the demographic conditions for cheaper labour were beginning, but only beginning, to be established. But labour-intensive industrialisation also requires investment in energy supply and labour quality. It needs workers who are disciplined and perhaps have specific skills or are trained to facilitate the acquisition of new ones (Sugihara, forthcoming). School enrolment rates rose during the colonial era from low or non-existent levels and in many countries doubled or tripled between 1950 and 1960. This was especially helped by African politicians gaining control of domestic budgets during the transition to independence, such as in Nigeria where primary enrolment was raised from 971,000 to 2,913,000 and secondary enrolment was raised from 28,000 to 135,000 (Sender and Smith 1986, 62). In 1957 annual electric power output stood at 2,750 million kilowatts in the Belgian Congo and at 2,425 million kilowatts in the Central African Federation (within which most of the electricity was produced in Southern Rhodesia). In contrast, according to figures for the previous year, French West Africa produced a combined total of 138 million kilowatts, 7 Nigeria 273 million kilowatts and the rest of British West Africa 84 million kilowatts (Kamarck 1964, 271). Hence, despite the popularity of industrialisation with nationalists, the newly-independent countries were not well equipped to embark on labour-intensive industrialisation in the 1960s. Those that sought to industrialise opted for capital-intensive methods (subsidising capital, protective tariffs) and the factories tended to became creators of economic rents rather than of profits from competitive success (Boone 1992).

8. Markets and African entrepreneurship

• 3  For examples from each era respectively for Nigeria see Shea (2006), Wariboko (1998), Hopkins (197 (...)

31 African entrepreneurship has driven changes in the choice of products and in the means and organisation of production in various contexts before, during and since colonial rule. 3 This has been particularly conspicuous in West Africa, whose 19th century pre-colonial economies tended to be regarded as more market-oriented than those of the other major regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (Austin, forthcoming). The colonial impact on African entrepreneurship and on the markets in which they operated again turned to a large extent on whether there were large-scale appropriations of land for the use of Europeans, be they individual settlers or corporations.

32 This familiar division between “settler” and “plantation” colonies, on one hand, and “peasant” (and rural capitalist) colonies, on the other, was far from purely exogenous to African economic history. Where African producers were able to enter export markets early and on a wide scale, before European exporters really got going, their success was sufficient to tip the balance of the argument among colonial policy-makers in favour of those who thought it economically as well as politically wisest to leave agricultural production in African hands. As we saw in chapter 6, British West Africa was the major example of this. In South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Kenya African farmers responded quickly to opportunities to grow additional grain to supply internal markets. But the governments reacted by trying to drive Africans out of the produce market and into the labour market by reserving land for Europeans, while either prohibiting Africans from leasing it back or (as in inter-war Kenya) limiting the time that African “squatters” could work for themselves rather than for their European landlords (Palmer and Parsons 1977; Kanogo 1987). African production for the market proved resilient, however, and the governments eventually accepted this and shifted to imposing controls on agricultural marketing that favoured European producers rather than trying to displace African ones. In Kenya it was only in the mid-1950s, during the Mau Mau revolt, that the government lifted restrictions on African production of high-value cash crops (Mosley 1983). Thus, to the extent that African production for the market in the late 19th century was greater in what became the “peasant” agricultural-export economies than in what became the “settler” economies, that contrast was reinforced by government actions in the latter over the following decades.

33 Not that the maintenance of African ownership of land necessarily entailed support for African capitalism. Admittedly, we have seen that the colonial State in Ghana protected the property of agricultural investors, in the sense of preserving the ownership of a farmer over trees or crops that he or she had planted, irrespective of the outcome of legal disputes about the ownership of the land on which they stood. But in “settler” and “peasant” colonies alike colonial governments were hesitant and usually hostile to the emergence of land markets in areas controlled by Africans. This policy eventually changed in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya, with selective promotion of land registration, in response to the de facto emergence of land sales and individual proprietorship (cultivable land having become increasingly scarce in the areas left to Africans) and with African land-owners being seen as a politically conservative force in the context of Mau Mau (Mosley 1983, 27-8; Kanogo 1987). In West Africa, without the settler pressure on African access to land, and given the expansion of cash crops that occurred early in the colonial period and again in the 1950s, neither the political case nor the economic case for compulsory land titling was as yet compelling (Austin 2005).

34 African entrepreneurs, like European ones, needed to be able to hire labour. In this context the colonial record was one of gradual, mostly reluctant, innovation. Sooner or (often) later, they legislated against slavery. But in West Africa, the region with evidently the largest slave population at the start of the 20th century, the replacement of the slave market by a wage labour market depended very much on the progress of African cash crop agriculture (Austin 2009). During the inter-war decades the continued use of forced labour by colonial administrations came under sustained pressure from the International Labour Office in Geneva. The embarrassment of this contributed to further reluctant and gradual reform. By the end of the Second World War, as Frederick Cooper (1996) has shown, British and French authorities had accepted that wage labour had become a regular occupation for Africans, rather than a seasonal sideline from farming. Indeed, Cooper went on to show that in London and Paris the long-run fiscal implications of having to give workers in Africa the same rights as workers in Europe contributed to the decisions to withdraw from tropical Africa. For African societies the end of slavery and the rise of wage labour was arguably a condition of continued large-scale participation in international trade. As early as 1907 the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury had moved its cocoa-buying to Ghana following bad publicity about “slave-grown” cocoa in the Portuguese colony of Sao Tome, where it had been buying before (Southall 1975, 39-49). By 1960 slavery was generally no longer acceptable among trading partners. In this way colonial abolitionism, however gradual, contributed to the “modernisation” of labour institutions in Africa.

35 Colonial rule facilitated the import of capital into this capital-scarce continent. But only in mining, and to some extent in “settler” and “plantation” agriculture, did this happen on a large scale. The survey by Herbert S. Frankel (1938) of external capital investment in white-ruled Africa remains the only comprehensive study for the colonial period. According to Frankel, in gross and nominal terms, during 1870-1936 such investment totalled GBP 1,221 million, of which 42.8% was in South Africa. This meant GBP 55.8 per head in South Africa, but only GBP 3.3 in the French colonies and GBP 4.8 in British West Africa. Public investment constituted 44.7% of the grand total and almost 46% of the non-South Africa total (Frankel 1938, 158-60, 169-70). Governments, and to some extent mining and plantation companies, invested in the transport infrastructure required for the development of, mainly, the export-import trade. In Nigeria and Ghana Africans also took a leading role in building motor roads and pioneering lorry services (Heap 1990). In institutional terms the colonial period saw the eventual abolition of human pawning, with its replacement by promissory notes and, in those areas of West Africa where it was possible, by loans on the security of cocoa farms. It also saw the introduction of modern banking, but the banks were much more willing to accept Africans’ savings than to offer them loans, partly because of the colonial governments’ non-introduction of compulsory land titling (Cowen and Shenton 1991).

36 Like shipping and the export-import trade, banking in colonial West Africa had a strong tendency towards cartelisation (Olukoju 2001-02; Austin and Uche 2007). The initial imposition of colonial rule and boundaries itself disrupted intra-African networks of exchange, and the increasing presence of European merchants in the interior relegated many African traders further down the chain of intermediation between shippers and farmers (Goerg 1980; Nwabughuogu 1982). Organised resistance to European cartels mostly emerged later and was largely confined to particular colonies, given the tradition of cocoa “hold-ups” with which African farmers and brokers confronted successive European merchant cartels in Ghana and the indigenous banking movement in Nigeria (Miles 1978; Hopkins 1966). Until the advent of independence it remained the case in the “peasant” colonies that the markets dominated by Europeans were cartelistic, whereas the markets populated by Africans were characterised by extreme competition (Hopkins 1978, 95). At least, much more than in the “settler” colonies, African entrepreneurs were able to operate in the export-import as well as in the domestic exchange sectors. Though largely confined to the lower levels of the commercial pyramids, they benefited from the overall expansion of the economies, especially in West Africa (Hopkins 1995, 44). The monopolistic arrangements were shaken a bit by decolonisation (Austin and Uche 2007), but the old African sector became the “informal” sector, the old European sector the “formal” one (Austin 1993). At independence, new governments were faced with the familiar problems of this financial dualism, notably lack of cheap credit from the formal sector for informal enterprises.

37 Despite asymmetric competition, the more economically successful “peasant” colonies saw the continuation of a tradition of entrepreneurship and mostly (but not always) small-scale accumulation in agriculture, crafts and trade. The result, as John Iliffe (1983, 67) noted, was “a strong contrast between West Africa, with its long-established capitalistic sector and its entrepreneurs from artisanship and trade, and eastern and southern Africa, where entrepreneurs had emerged chiefly through (…) Western education and modern sector employment”. Early post-colonial policy did not always build on this, for example in the case of Ghana, with high taxation of export agriculture and the creation of State monopolies in certain sectors (Austin 1996b).

9. State capacity

38 It is widely accepted that States have a critical role in economic development, at least in enforcing the rules of economic activity and providing physical public goods. Therefore, we should ask how colonial rule affected the historic constraint on political centralisation in Africa, namely the difficulty of raising revenue. Beyond this we need to consider the size of the State and the nature of authority and legitimacy, i.e. whether colonisation was responsible for fragmenting Africa, as is often said, or whether, as the colonial rulers themselves claimed, they were a modernising force, bringing the State to the “Stateless” and replacing patrimonial authority by bureaucratic authority.

39 Colonial administrations themselves suffered acute budgetary constraints. Although European empires introduced to Africa the possibility of raising loan finance (at least in an impersonal, law-governed though undemocratic way), the colonial administrations were restricted in their resort to money markets by the metropolitan insistence that each colony be fiscally self-sufficient and balance its budget. The introduction in each colony of a single currency as legal tender probably reduced net transaction costs (although in some cases the demonetisation of existing currencies hurt Africans holding them). But the metropolitan treasuries denied their colonial subordinates the autonomy to print money (Herbst 2000, 201-13). The French colonies used the French franc. In British West Africa a colonial pound was issued, but the rules ensured that it was always convertible at par with the metropolitan pound. It was only at independence that the new African governments had the option of creating national currencies, an option the former French colonies mostly declined while the former British colonies soon accepted.

40 Given that they faced much the same practical constraints as the African States that had preceded them, colonial governments generally continued the reliance of pre-colonial kingdoms upon taxes on trade and people, rather than on land or agriculture. It was the above-mentioned discovery, during the Second World War, that the export marketing board could be a major revenue-raiser, which was the major fiscal innovation of colonial rule. As independence approached, this unintended consequence of a wartime expedient offered African politicians unprecedented opportunities to, for example, transform educational opportunities for their populations. The marketing board as a fiscal instrument was an important colonial legacy, and its possibilities and implications were only beginning to be understood. By the 1980s the limits of the device had become clear, as ordinary traders and producers could evade it by trading on parallel markets (Azarya and Chazan 1987).

41 Smuggling brings us to one of the more notorious legacies of the colonial partition of Africa: the imposition of boundaries dividing people of shared culture, the delineation of some States so small as to be of questionable economic viability and the creation of some States so large as to be potentially ungovernable. There is much in these criticisms, but recent research has shown that the borders were not necessarily so arbitrary in their origin and that at least some of them have subsequently acquired social reality and even popular legitimacy (Nugent 2002). Again, while the colonial legacy includes several very small States, most colonies (even the small ones) were larger than the pre-colonial polities on which or in place of which they were imposed; and some of them formed parts of larger regional units (notably French West Africa). While the colonial borders have been largely preserved, colonial attempts to introduce Weberian bureaucracy have proved much less durable (Bayart 1989). One reason for, or manifestation of, this is the salience of ethnicity in most African countries for political competition over resources.

42 From the late 1970s onwards a generation of historians and anthropologists tended to argue that ethnicity in Africa, far from being “primordial”, was created, or at least greatly entrenched, by colonial strategies of “divide and rule” (seminal contributions included Iliffe 1979, 318-41, and Ranger 1983, although the thesis was pursued beyond those cautious initial statements). Recent historiography has shown that the emphasis on the capacity of colonial States to invent and manipulate traditions, including those relating to ethnicity and chieftaincy, was partly justified, but it underestimated the capacity of African elites and peoples to influence the outcomes themselves (Spear 2003). By no means all ethnic divisions originated in the colonial period (Vansina 2001), although they were usually deepened and reified by the interaction of colonial and African elites (Prunier 1995). Whatever the precise division of responsibility in this interaction, there is general agreement among scholars that ethnicity has been a more important organising principle of political association and conflict since colonial rule than before it. This matters for economic development because ethnic divisions are often seen, by public opinion and by some economists (notably Easterly and Levine 1997), as primarily responsible for rent-seeking rather than growth-promoting policies in post-colonial Africa. However, that approach has been criticised on various grounds (notably by Arcand, Guillaumont and Jeanneney 2000), and it is arguable that the salience of ethnicity in African political and economic life is as much a response to as a cause of the difficulties of enlarging the economic cake in African conditions and of the continued weakness of State capacity.

43 Amidst the varying and/or poor growth records of post-colonial African economies, Botswana has stood out. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (2002a) argue that it is an exception that proves the rule, i.e. that while Botswana did not have the beneficial institutional legacy characteristic of the “full settler” colonies like Australia, it was exceptionally lightly ruled by Britain and as a result escaped the worst of the extractive propensities that they see as generally characteristic of non-“settler” colonialism. In my view two considerations point to a different conclusion. First, without the discovery of diamonds, it is hard to see how post-colonial Botswana could have grown dramatically faster than colonial Bechuanaland. Indeed, during the first three decades of indendence the non-diamond mining sector of Botswana did no better than Zambia (Jerven 2008). Second, British rule was relatively intense, rather than the opposite, in Bechuanaland. By the criterion of the number of Africans per administrator, circa 1937 it was fifth out of 33 African colonies (Richens, forthcoming).

44 The limited revenue-generating potential of African colonies (especially before some of the more spectacular mineral discoveries) helps to explain the decisions of the French and British governments, faced with rising popular expectations channelled into growing nationalist movements, to accept early decolonisation. Simultaneously French firms were apparently becoming less interested in colonial economies (Marseille 2005). If so, it is ironic that the French government remained closely involved with its former colonies after their independence, not least through the franc zone. Again, in the 1950s British firms on the spot expressed concern about their future under independent African governments, but they failed to attract much notice from the decolonising authorities (Tignor 1998; Stockwell 2000). The irony of the latter case is that a few years later the British government’s attitude to the Biafran secession was influenced by the interests of British oil companies (Uche 2008).

10. Conclusion

45 This article has considered the issue of colonial legacies in relation to the longer-term dynamics of economic development in what was in 1900 an overwhelmingly land-abundant region, characterised by simultaneous shortages of labour and capital, by perhaps surprisingly extensive indigenous market exchanges, especially in West Africa, and by varying but often low levels of political centralisation. Colonial governments and European firms invested in both infrastructure and (especially in southern Africa) in institutions designed to develop African economies as primary-product exporters. In both cases the old economic logic for coercing labour continued to operate, i.e. the continued existence of slavery in early colonial tropical Africa and the use of large-scale land grabs to promote migrant labour flows in “settler” economies. But there were changes and variations. While we have noted differences between French and British policy, for example in West Africa, the bigger contrasts were between “peasant” and “settler” colonies.

46 In British West Africa in particular there was a genuine coincidence of interest between African farmers, European merchants and colonial governments in enlarging and exploiting West Africa’s comparative advantage in land-extensive agriculture. The resultant income at least enabled many of the slave-owners to become employers instead. In these cases the British government (and the French in Côte d’Ivoire after 1945) correctly recognised where their own self-interest lay when they supported African investment in export agriculture. It was in those “peasant” colonies that were best endowed with lands suitable for producing the more lucrative crops that African populations experienced significant improvements in purchasing power and had the most improvement in physical welfare. In the same countries, however, colonial rulers, partly because of fiscal constraints as well as a probably realistic assessment of the short-term economic prospects, did little directly to prepare the economies to move “up the value chain”. Thus, the first generation of post-colonial rulers presided over economies which were as yet too short of educated (and cheap) labour and sufficient (and sufficiently cheap) electricity to embark successfully on industrialisation. It has taken post-colonial investment in education and other public goods to move West African economies, and tropical Africa generally, closer to the prospect of a substantial growth of labour-intensive manufacturing, if international competition permits it.

47  “Settler” colonies had a worse record for poverty reduction, especially considering the mineral resources of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, but they had a better one for structural change. The large-scale use of coercion was the basis for the construction of white-ruled economies that, especially in South Africa, eventually became profitable enough for a partly politically-impelled policy of import-substituting industrialisation to achieve some success. Thus, the rents extracted from African labourers were channelled into structural change, although the process became self-defeating as it progressed, contributing to the fall of apartheid.

48 As promoters of market institutions, the colonial regimes had a very mixed record; but probably in all Sub-Saharan countries there was far more wage labour, and a lot more land sales, and a lot more people more deeply dependent on markets, by 1960 than there had been in 1890 or 1900. A final legacy of the colonial period has a rather unclear relationship to colonial policy, i.e. the sustained growth of (total) population since 1918 has progressively transformed the factor ratios and, on the whole, increased the long-term economic potential of the continent.

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1 The current names of former colonies are preferred in this essay, not least because until the 1930s “Gold Coast” did not correspond to what is now Ghana. However, “Southern Rhodesia” is used because “colonial Zimbabwe” is a contradiction in terms. “Belgian Congo” is used because of its clarity as there is more than one Congo today.

2 The historiography is too complex to be summarised here. But it can be said that, although the motives for colonisation were not entirely economic (not least in the French and German cases), there were several links between the progress of industrialisation in Europe and the fact that, so late in the history of European overseas empire, the rival European powers finally “scrambled” for Africa. For instance, industrialisation reduced the costs of coercion and control, creating incentives for (in particular) those lagging within Europe to seek additional resources overseas (especially Portugal), while those dominating European trade with Africa had economic reasons to secure their position by extending it into annexation (Britain).

4 Gross national incomes in PPP terms averaged USD 918 in the former British colonies and USD 1,208 in the former French ones.

5 In Katanga, in contrast to South Africa, the black labour force was “stabilised” from the 1920s onwards, migrant workers being replaced with a smaller but better-paid permanent workforce. Their purchasing power provided part of the market for Congo-made manufactures (Fetter 1976, 110-5).

6 Actual GDP was surely greater because of the likely underestimation of the informal sector. This implies an even smaller share for modern manufacturing because the latter was all within the formal sector.

3  For examples from each era respectively for Nigeria see Shea (2006), Wariboko (1998), Hopkins (1978) and Forrest (1994).

Cite this article

Bibliographical reference.

Gareth Austin , “African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies” ,  International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement , 1 | 2010, 11-32.

Electronic reference

Gareth Austin , “African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies” ,  International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement [Online], 1 | 2010, Online since 11 March 2010 , connection on 02 September 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/poldev/78; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/poldev.78

About the author

Gareth austin.

Gareth Austin teaches African and comparative economic history, focusing on long-term economic development, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field We invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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By Sandra Marker

November 2003  

Around the world today, intractable conflict is found in many areas that were once colonized or controlled by Western European or Soviet powers (i.e., Africa, the Balkans, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America). The source of many of these protracted conflicts, in large part, lies in past colonial or Soviet policies, and especially those regarding territorial boundaries, the treatment of indigenous populations, the privileging of some groups over others, the uneven distribution of wealth, local governmental infrastructures, and the formation of non-democratic or non-participatory governmental systems. It is therefore essential, if one wants to understand intractable conflict and its causes , to examine not only the issues and problems of the moment, but also influential historical factors -- most notably, past colonial and Soviet policies -- and their lingering effects.

Colonial and Soviet Expansionism

Western colonial expansion began during the 15th century when Spanish and Portuguese explorers conquered "new" lands in the West Indies and the Americas. It continued for over 400 years, and ended with the start of the first World War. By that time western powers such as Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, spurred on by their competitive desire to acquire new lands and resources, had colonized the whole of Africa and the areas that we know today as the Americas, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) likewise embarked on an expansionist period that took place during the first half of the 20th century. By mid-century, due to lands gained through an aggressive expansionist policy and through post-World War II treaties, the Soviet Empire gained control of all of Russia and most of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

During these periods of expansion, Western European and Soviet powers formed new colonial multiethnic provinces (e.g., Rhodesia, French Indonesia, German East Africa) and satellite states (e.g., Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). They did so with little regard for the people living in the newly controlled areas, or for existing geographic or cultural boundaries. Populations that had previously identified themselves as distinct, based on their cultural, ethnic, and/or religious heritage, were forced to unify under a single national identity . The new multiethnic colonial territories and Soviet states were maintained, upheld, and controlled through the use of violence, and through the implementation of imperialist policies. Certain populations were denied their political, economic, social, and human rights . Imperialist policies promoted ethnic rivalry by favoring one group above the others, distributed resources in an unequal manner, disallowed democratic governments, and prohibited local participation in governmental decisions and actions.

Issues Affecting Postcolonial and Post-Soviet States

By the 1960s, after years of fighting for independence, most Western colonial territories (e.g., India, Indonesia, Algeria) had gained self-rule. Sovereignty , however, did not bring with it freedom from imperialist influences. Colonial legacies were visible in the desire of the new governments to keep the boundaries that were created during colonial times, in the promotion of ethnic rivalry, in the continuation of inhumane and unjust actions against minority populations, and in the practice of distributing the country's resources in an uneven manner. Also, after being under foreign rule for decades, newly independent governments often lacked governmental institutions, good governance skills, and the governing experience needed to effectively rule their newly sovereign nations. In most cases, the transition from colonial province to independent state was a violent and arduous journey.

Many post-Soviet states (e.g., Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia) experienced similar problems. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, conflicts involving borders, ethnic rivalry, human-rights violations, and the uneven distribution of resources raged through former Soviet regions (e.g., the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe). In addition, many post-Soviet governments were plagued by a lack of governmental institutions, good governance skills, and governmental experience.

Issues of particular importance included:

"Over a hundred new nations were born during the process of de-colonization. Most of these new nations, however, ... had not existed at all as nations before colonization, or they had not existed within the post-colonial borders."[1]

Most colonial and Soviet satellite borders were created either through conquest, negotiation between empires, or simply by administrative action,[2] with little or no regard for the social realities of those living in the areas.[3] Nevertheless, many of the leaders and governments of postcolonial and post-Soviet states have fought to keep the territorial boundaries created by past imperialist governments. As a result, a number of boundary conflicts have arisen within post-colonial and post-Soviet territories. Parties to these conflicts justify and legitimate their side's position, using different historical boundaries as evidence for their claims. For example, the Libya-Chad conflict involves a dispute over 114,000 square kilometers of territory, known as the Aouzou Strip.[4] Libya justifies its claims to this territory based on ancient historical boundaries, while Chad justifies its stance based on boundaries established during the colonial period.

Ethnic Rivalry/Group Status

Colonial and Soviet powers often created situations that encouraged ethnic rivalry. For example, when the Soviets took control of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, they created boundaries that separated members of the same ethnic group (i.e. the Tajiks) into different multiethnic regions. "This enabled the Soviet authorities to continuously be called upon by the people of the region to help them manage conflicts that were bound to emerge as a result of these artificial divisions."[5] European and Soviet imperialists also sometimes favored one ethnic or religious group over other groups in the region. This practice of favoring one group, or of giving one group a higher status in colonial society, created and promoted inter-group rivalries.

The conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots has its roots in ethnic rivalry encouraged during British colonial rule. During this time, Turkish and Greek populations were often played against one another as a means of maintaining control on the island. For example, as Greek Cypriots pushed for self-rule, the British encouraged Turkish Cypriots to actively oppose them. By the time the British pulled out of Cyprus in 1960, they had helped cleave deep divisions between the Greek and Turkish populations. The new independent nation, equally ruled by Greeks and Turks, soon was embroiled in ethnic conflict. Greek Cypriots wanted the entire island to become part of Greece, while Turkish Cypriots wanted the northern part of the island to become an independent Turkish state. Consequently, hostilities between the two groups escalated to the point of violence. Decades later, ethnic rivalries that were encouraged during British rule, continue to impact the people of Cyprus as violence between Greeks and Turks continues to periodical erupt on the island state.

Unequal Distribution of Resources

The practice of favoring one ethnic, religious, racial, or other cultural group over others in colonial society, or of giving them a higher status, helped to promote inter-group rivalries, and often contributed to the unequal distribution of resources. Favored or privileged groups had access to, or control of, important resources that allowed them to enrich their members, at the expense of nonmembers. For example, under Soviet rule the elite of the northern province of Leninabad (now the province of Sugd in Tajikistan) were given almost exclusive access to governmental positions. As a result of their control of governmental policies, they sent a disproportionate share of the country's development and industry to this northern sector. The consequence of this action was that by 1992, over half of the country's wealth had been distributed to this one province.[6]

Today, many post-colonial and post-Soviet states continue the practice of favoring one group over others, whether it be a minority European settler population (as in South Africa), a minority European alliance group (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda, Burundi) or an internal ethnic group (e.g., India).[7] As a result, we see numerous conflicts being caused in part, by dominant groups enacting and enforcing governmental, economic, political, and other social policies that distribute resources unequally among their nation's members.

Sri Lanka is an example of how the unequal distribution of wealth during colonial times, continues to affect ethnic relations today. Under colonial rule, Tamils, because of their higher rate of English-language skills, had easier access to higher education than did the Sinhalese. The better educated Tamil, thus dominated governmental and academic jobs, especially in the fields of medicine, science, and engineering. After independence, the Sinhalese majority implemented changes in the state's university admission policy that gave them an advantage in gaining access to higher education, specifically to science admissions. This policy resulted in a marked increase of Sinhalese working in the fields of medicine, science, and engineering, and a clear decline of Tamils. Today, as the admission policy to higher education is more equitable than in the past, the animosity created by first, colonial, and then post-colonial policies that promoted unequal access to education and thus, jobs, continues to breed distrust and conflict in the region.

Human Rights

The status, privilege, and wealth of colonial and Soviet ruling populations were often maintained and upheld through the use of policies that violated the human rights of those living in the colonized areas. Unjust policies subjected colonized populations to the loss of their lands, resources, cultural or religious identities, and sometimes even their lives. Examples of these brutal policies include slavery (e.g., British-controlled West Indies), apartheid (e.g., South Africa), and mass murder (e.g., the Incas of Peru, Aborigines of Australia, Hungarians after the 1956 uprising).

Today, many post-colonial and post-Soviet governments have adopted unjust colonial practices and policies as a means to preserve their dominant status. Rights with regards to traditional lands, resources, and cultural language are denied to many populations, as groups that were marginalized under colonial occupation continue to be marginalized under postcolonial governments, most notably indigenous populations such as in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, the Ashaninka of Peru, and the indigenous peoples of West Papua. Human-rights violations, including horrific events of mass murder and genocide, can be found in postcolonial and post-Soviet states such as Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, El Salvador, and South Africa.

Lack of Governmental Institutions, Skills, and Experience

For the most part, colonial and Soviet satellite societies were repressive and undemocratic in nature. Domestic governmental systems and structures were controlled and operated either from abroad or by a select domestic, privileged group. Consequently, when liberation came, these states lacked the internal structures, institutions, and 1egalitarian way of thinking needed to create good governance systems. The result is that many postcolonial and post-Soviet states, although independent, are still ruled by repressive and restrictive regimes. For example, Melber (2002) states, "(t)he social transformation processes in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa can at best be characterized as a transition from controlled change to changed control."[8]

Intractable conflicts are found in many areas that were once colonized or controlled by Western European or Soviet powers such as Africa, the Balkans, and Southeast Asia. Most of these conflicts such as the one in Kashmir, Chechnya, and Cyprus are large and complex, and involve multiple issues ranging from human rights to good governance. Imperialist practices and policies, especially those concerning boundaries, ethnic rivalry, the uneven distribution of resources, human-rights violations, and lack of good governance can be found at the heart of protracted problems. For this reason, it is vital that those wishing to transform or resolve protracted conflict, acknowledge the past, and take into account the effects past imperialist policies continue to have on today's post-colonial and post-Soviet societies.

[1] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996, p. 29.

[2] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[3] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[4] Posthumus, Bram. Chad and Libya : Good Neighbors, Enemies, Brothers - But Never Trusting Friends. Click here for document.

[5] Randa M.Slim "The Ferghana Valley: In the Midst of a Host of Crises." In Searching for Peace in Central and South Asia : An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities , eds. Monique Mekenkamp, Paul van Tongeren, and Hans van de Veen, p. 141-142

[6] John Schoeberlein, "Bones of Contention: Conflicts over Resources." In Searching for Peace in Central and South Asia : An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities , eds. Monique Mekenkamp, Paul van Tongeren, and Hans van de Veen, p. 88.

[7] Mark N. Katz, "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[8] Henning Melber, "Liberation without Democracy? Flaws of Post-Colonial Systems in Southern Africa" http://www.dse.de/zeitschr/de102-7.htm  2002.

Use the following to cite this article: Marker, Sandra. "Effects of Colonization." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: November 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/post-colonial >.

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10 Colonial Rule

• Published: October 1999
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This chapter explores the British rule in India and Africa. It specifically addresses the colonial rule and its underlying philosophy as summed up in the words ‘Indirect Rule’ a phrase indelibly associated with Sir Frederick Lugard, the founder of British Nigeria. The definition of the indirect method seems simple enough — ‘systematic use of the customary institutions of the people as agencies of local rule’ — but variations were considerable. A discussion on the variations of indirect rule is provided. An explanation on service ideologies is given as well.

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