Colonialism
See colony and colonisation for examples of colonialism which do not refer to Western colonialism. |
World in 1898, showing large colonial empires. |
Colonialism is the extension of a nation's
sovereignty over
territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either
settler colonies or
administrative dependencies in which
indigenous populations are
directly ruled or
displaced. Colonizers generally dominate the
resources,
labor, and
markets of the
colonial territory and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population; this has led critics of colonialism to call it
cultural imperialism. However, though colonialism is often used interchangeably with
imperialism, the latter is broader as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formally. The term colonialism also refers to a set of beliefs used to legitimize or promote this system, especially the
ethnocentric belief that the
mores of the colonizer are superior to those of the colonized. Such beliefs are often a form of
racism, and were codified as
pseudo-scientific theories at the end of the 19th century. The historical phenomenon of
European
colonisation may be broadly divided into two large waves, the first one starting with the "
Age of Exploration" and the beginning of the
Columbian Exchange, and the second one beginning in the second part of the 19th century with the
New Imperialism period. Colonisation and
decolonisation have overlapped themselves, since most of the
New World colonies had already acquired their
independence when the
scramble for Africa and the New Imperialism began. However, many authors argue that colonialism doesn't end with the decolonisation, largely achieved in the 1960s apart from the
Portuguese colonies:
neocolonialism is a form of continuing colonialism by other means, while
postcolonialism refers to the legacy of colonialism on the "
subaltern subjects", as
Gayatri Spivak has put it.
Settler colonies, dependencies, plantations colonies, trading posts
Different types of colonialism may be distinguished, according to the form of colonization and also the date.
Settler colonies, such as the original thirteen states of the
United States of America,
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand and
Argentina arose from the emigration of peoples from a
metropole, or mother country, and involved
displacement of the indigenous peoples to their permanent detriment
[ According to political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfers were considered as an almost humanist solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around World War II and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but 'often necessary' means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war, and was rendered easy through the invention of railroads. See Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd Ed (Verso, 2003) p.xiv - also An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict ]. Settler colonies may be contrasted with
dependencies, where the colonizers did not arrive as part of a mass emigration, but rather as administrators over existing sizeable native populations, exercising control by use or threat of force. Examples in this category include the
British Raj,
Egypt, the
Dutch East Indies and the
Japanese colonial empire. In some cases large-scale colonial settlement was attempted in substantially pre-populated areas and the result was either an ethnically mixed population (such as the
mestizos of the
Americas), or racially divided, such as in
French Algeria or
Southern Rhodesia. A fourth category may be considered for
plantation colonies such as
Barbados,
Saint-Domingue and
Jamaica where the white colonizers
imported black slaves who rapidly began to outnumber their owners, leading to minority rule, similar to a dependency.
Trading posts, such as
Macau,
Malacca,
Deshima and
Singapore constitute a fifth category, where the primary purpose of the colony was to engage in trade rather than as a staging post for further colonization of the hinterland.
The role of missionaries
Since the first European wave of colonization, the
Catholic Church had a non-negligible role in the making of the colonial policies. Thus, the 1481
Papal Bull Aeterni regis granted all lands south of the
Canary Islands to
Portugal, while in May 1493 the Spanish-born
Pope Alexander VI decreed in the Bull
Inter caetera that all lands west of a meridian only 100 leagues west of the
Cape Verde Islands should belong to
Spain while new lands discovered east of that line would belong to Portugal. These arrangements were later precised with the 1494
Treaty of Tordesillas. While the
Pope himself was a political power to be heeded, the Church also sent missionaries to convert to the
Catholic faith the "savages" of others continents. Thus, missionaries were instrumental in the colonization, in particular the
Jesuits, whether in Asia, in Africa or in the Americas. This Christian presence explains the current worldmap of the Catholic faith, as well as many buildings such as the
Cathedral of Saint Paul in Macau, built from 1582 to 1602, or the
Santisima Trinidad de Paraná in
Paraguay, which gives an example of the many
Jesuit Reductions built in the 16th and 17th century.
In the 16th century, the
Valladolid Controversy concerning the existence of souls in Amerindian bodies shook Spain in 1550-51. The
School of Salamanca, which gathered theologians such as
Francisco de Vitoria (1480-1546) or
Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), argued in favor of the existence of
natural law, which thus gave some rights to indigenous people. However, while the School of Salamanca limited
Charles V's imperial powers over colonized people, they also legitimized the conquest, defining the conditions of "
Just War". For example, these theologians admitted the existence of the right for indigenous people to reject
religious conversion, which was a novelty for Western philosophical thought. However, Suárez also conceived many particular cases — a
casuistry — in which conquest was legitimized. Hence, war was justified if the indigenous people refused free transit and commerce to the Europeans; if they forced converts to return to
idolatry; if there come to be a sufficient number of Christians in the newly discovered land that they wish to receive from the Pope a Christian government; if the indigenous people lacked just laws, magistrates, agricultural techniques, etc. In any case, title taken according to this principle must be exercised with Christian
charity, warned Suárez, and for the advantage of the Indians. Henceforth, the School of Salamanca legitimized the conquest while at the same time limiting the absolute power of the
sovereign, which was celebrated in others parts of Europe under the notion of the
divine right of kings.
In the 1970s, the Jesuits would become a main proponent of the
Liberation theology which openly supported anti-imperialist movements. It was officially condemned in 1984 and in 1986 by then
cardinal Ratzinger (current
Pope) as the head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under charges of
Marxist tendencies, while
Leonardo Boff was suspended.
The contradiction between the unity of the nation-state and imperialism
According to
Hannah Arendt's
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), there was a contradiction between the unity of the
nation-state and 19th century
imperialism, which was, by definition, unlimited. She thus quoted
Cecil Rhodes, the colonizer of
Rhodesia, declaring: "all of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets"
[ S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p.138 ]. Arendt underlined this contradiction between the economic expansion upheld by the
bourgeoisie, and
nationalism which aimed at integrating all
citizens in one unity, the nation-state.
The British model of colonization vs. the French Republic model of colonization
 |
World map of colonialism at the end of the Second World War in 1945. |
According to Arendt, this explains the
two different models of colonization: on one hand, the
British Empire created the
Commonwealth and used
indirect rule, allowing the local elites to govern the colonies, under the supervision of the colonial administration; on the other hand, the
French Third Republic (1871-1940) directly ruled over the colonies, claiming they were integrally part of the French Republic. Separation was thus opposed to the French ideal of
assimilation, based on its
universalist philosophy, a legacy of the 1789
French Revolution and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Thus, the Republic tried to extend French citizenship to the colonies. For example, the
Crémieux decrees provided for representation of the
French department of Algeria in the
National Assembly. The Crémieux Decrees also granted blanket French citizenship to Algerian Jews, who then numbered about 40,000. This act set them apart from Muslims, in whose eyes they were identified thereafter with the colonists. The measure had to be enforced, however, over the objections of the colons, who made little distinction between Muslims and Jews.
However, this opposition between the British and the French empire mustn't be abused. Arendt clearly states that the French
Republican ideal was more "generous", because it accorded full citizenship to all the colonized people. However, it led to absurd situations, such as the famous sentence which started the Third Republic's textbooks, in the metropole as well as in the colonies: "Our ancestors the
Gauls" (
Nos ancêtres les Gaulois). This has become a
cliché of the Third Republic colonialism. In
Haïti, for example, the
Haïtian Revolution (1791-1804), spearheaded by
Toussaint L'Ouverture, was not taught in schools until recently. History school programs have been only recently adapted to local history, in the 2000s. As B. Villalba puts it, the definition of the
French people teeters between
universalism and
multiculturalism [ ].
Dominique Schnapper, member of the
Constitutional Council of France, defines the nation as "an entity which, opposed to the
ethnic group, affirms itself as an open community, the will to live together expressing itself by the acceptation of the rules of an unified public domain which transcends all particularisms"
[ Dominique Schnapper, " La conception de la nation ", "Citoyenneté et société", Cahiers Francais, n° 281, mai-juin 1997 ] Despite this theoretical universality of the French conception of the nation
[ See in particular the famous 1882 conference "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" by Ernest Renan ], full citizenship was never really accorded to the inhabitants of the French colonies, something which both Hannah Arendt and B. Villalba points out: according to him, the
May 7,
1946 law meant that soldiers from the "Empire" (such as the
tirailleurs) killed during
World War I and
World War II weren't citizens
. The same kind of difficulty can be found in the Roman Empire which used to grant Roman Citizenship to distant subjects. Later on, there was the Holy Roman Empire, which was in fact German.
The opposition between the metropole and the colonial administration
While the French universalist ideal of according full citizenship to the inhabitants of the colonies partly remained what it was, an ideal to be realized — an
idea as defined by
Kant — in Great Britain several voices opposed themselves to the separation system and the colonial administration. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, this classic opposition between the British Empire model of colonization and the French Republican model, was doubled by a second opposition, between the colonial administration and the
metropole. While the colonial administration commonly displayed open contempt for the
indigenous people, which it considered as hardly superior to beasts, in the
metropole colonialist abuses were sometimes criticized, and colonialism questionned for various reasons (sometimes ethical, sometimes political — e.g.
Gladstone or
Clemenceau). Members of Parliaments sometimes considered the Empire to be a full part of the Nation, and thus the colonized people to be full citizens, in the British Empire as in the French Republic. Hannah Arendt's reasoning ultimately leads her to conclude that the
human rights are, in fact, dependent on
civil rights, and not the reverse as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen implies. Colonial abuse was criticized in the metropole on behalf of the colonized people's supposed citizenship, while it was justified in the colonies because of their non-membership to the nation.
Portuguese exploration
See also: Portuguese Empire & Portugal in the Age of DiscoveryEuropean colonisation of both
Eastern and
Western Hemispheres has its roots in
Portuguese exploration. Explorers such as
Diogo Cão,
Bartolomeu Dias,
Vasco da Gama,
Álvares Cabral and
Ferdinand Magellan went sailing from their capital
Lisbon up to the
Cape of Good Hope, before reaching
India in
1498, opening a rush among other European nations to discover a route of their own.
Brazil was "discovered" in
1500 by ships sailing to India.
Indeed, the Portuguese had already captured
Ceuta in
1415[ Ceuta (Sebta in Arabic) is as of 2006 a Spanish enclave in Northern Morocco, which used to be strategic due to its location on the Mediterranean sea ] and discovered the islands of
Madeira in
1418,
Azores in
1432,
Cape Verde in
1456, etc. Since 1415, Portuguese exploration and occasional colonization (settlement of outposts) of the Western African coast takes the whole
15th century. North African cities other than Ceuta were also captured during the same period.
The
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world outside of Europe in an exclusive duopoly between the
Spanish and the
Portuguese along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of Cape Verde.
|
Portuguese colonial possessions in the late XVI century. |
In the
16th century, the Portuguese explored the
Indian Ocean, making the first direct contact between Europeans and the peoples inhabiting present day countries such as
Mozambique,
Madagascar,
Sri Lanka,
Malaysia,
Indonesia,
East Timor (
1512),
China (
Macau was occupied in
1557), and
Japan (starting the
Nanban Period in
1543), apart from India itself (
Goa becomes a permanent Portuguese settlement in
1510).
In India, the
Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf, and Indonesia, the Portuguese were in a state of continual
warfare with
Muslim states and cities, subduing several of the latter. Portuguese Eastern conquests and outposts were governed from Goa and called the
Viceroyalty of India.
Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500.
Portuguese colonization of South America started then, but increased dramatically in the
17th and
18th centuries, before Brazil became independent in
1822.
Spanish colonization of the Americas
The year
1492 marked the "
discovery of the Americas" by
Christopher Columbus on behalf of
Spain — actually, of
Castille which became the
Spanish Empire at the end of the 16th century
[ By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified by the crown, although not as a modern, centralized state. In contemporary minds, "Spain" was a geographic term that was more or less synonymous with Iberia, not the present-day state called Spain, although today's more restricted notion of it was beginning to gain in currency. As the old states continued to exist and function with their own laws, assemblies and administrations under one monarch the title of the reigning Habsburgs was "The King of the Spaniards", not "Spain". The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor but called in Spain Carlos I, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580.]
During the 16th century, early Habsburg Spain (i.e. the reigns of Charles V and Philip II) became the most powerful state in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, some of Eastern Asia (including the Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire from 1580), southern Italy, Sicily, Germany, and the Netherlands. . 1492 thus may be seen as the
symbolic summum of the European "
Age of Exploration", and the beginning of the
Columbian Exchange, although proper colonization had already started.
[ ]
The celebration of the Columbus Day, Día de la Raza in Spanish ("Day of the Race"), has been disputed on the grounds that it celebrated European colonialism (explicit in its Spanish version), and ignored pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contacts. It has been renamed Día de la Resistencia Indígena in Venezuela. .
It was not long after this that Spain began the conquest of
Central America,
South America and the
Caribbean through its famous
conquistadores, such as
Hernán Cortés or
Francisco Pizarro. This first phase of European's
expansion led to the building of
global empires such as the
Spanish Empire in the 16th century, so large that the
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (aka Charles I of Spain) could declare "
in my realm the sun never sets." The cultural achievements of the Spanish
Edad de Oro were largely provided for by
gold and
silver from the
Potosí mines, which belonged to the
Viceroyalty of Peru (created in 1542), and the
Zacateca mines in modern
Mexico.
Before the
annihilation of most of the Amerindian population, they were reduced to
slavery in order to work in the Spanish mines.
African slaves were then brought to the New World when the local manpower had been exhausted. In accordance to the contemporary theories of
mercantilism, once transformed into
pieces of eight, the precious metals helped finance the expensive
Spanish Armada, sent to
England by
Philip II of Spain in 1588 in a failed attempt to bring an end to the
conflict with England (1585-1604). As the legitimate son of Charles V and
Isabella, Philip II united the Portuguese throne under the
Spanish Habsburg's authority, thus gathering the
Iberian peninsula under one political authority, which would be known as the "
Spanish Empire". The Habsburg would keep the throne until 1640 in Portugal, and until 1700 in Spain.
European colonization of the Americas
The
17th century saw other European nations beginning to colonize the Americas, apart from Portugal and Spain (mainly the
Netherlands,
France and
England), and these Europeans largely saw conventional movements of families into new lands. The
British West Indies, the
French West Indies (which included
Haiti, and current
overseas départements of
Martinique and
Guadeloupe, etc.), the
Dutch West Indies, the
Danish West Indies and Spain's colonies (
Cuba,
Hispaniola (present-day
Dominican Republic and
Haiti),
Puerto Rico and
Bay Islands, briefly) were the territories colonized during this first European imperialist wave. At the same time, England "planted" nearby
Ireland extensively with English and Scottish settlers (see
Plantations of Ireland).
Rule in the colonies: the Leyes de Burgos and the Code Noir
The
January 27,
1512 Leyes de Burgos codified the
laws for the government of the indigenous people of the New World, since the common law of Spain wasn't applied in these recently discovered territories. The scope of the laws were originally restricted to the island of
Hispaniola, but were later extended to
Puerto Rico and
Jamaica. They authorized and legalized the colonial practice of creating
encomiendas, where Indians were grouped together to work under colonial masters, limiting the size of these establishments to a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 150 people. The document finally prohibited the use of any form of punishment by the
encomenderos, reserving it for officials established in each town for the implementation of the laws. It also ordered that the Indians be catechesized, outlawed
bigamy, and required that the huts and cabins of the Indians be built together with those of the Spanish. It respected, in some ways, the traditional authorities, granting chiefs exemptions from ordinary jobs and granting them various Indians as servants. To poor fullfillment of the laws in many cases lead to inummerable protests and claims. In fact, the laws were so often poorly applied that they were seen as simply a legalization of the previous poor situation. This would create momentum for reform, carried out through the
Leyes Nuevas ("New Laws") in 1542. Ten years later,
Dominican friar
Bartolomé de las Casas would publish
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in the midst of the
Valladolid Controversy, a debate about the existence or not of
souls in
Amerindians bodies. Las Casas, bishop of
Chiapas, was opposed to
Sepúlveda, who claimed
Amerindians were "natural slaves".
In the
French empire,
slave trade and other colonial rules were regulated by
Louis XIV's 1689
Code Noir.
Role of companies in early colonialism
This first wave of colonialism was already linked to early
capitalism.
Merchant adventurers clubbed together to profit, some of them gained theoretical
monopolies from nascent states. While the
Muscovy Company, chartered in 1555, and the
Levant Company (1581) in
Elizabethan England failed to parlay their
charters into colonial empires, the
British East India Company (1600) and the
Hudson's Bay Company (1670) succeeded spectacularly in acquiring vast wealth and territories, taking over the government of
India and of much of
Canada over the centuries. The
Dutch East India Company, established in 1602, and the
French East India Company (1664) rivalled them in scope and profit in an age before their holdings underwent
nationalisation. Colonisation with an emphasis on settlement also often took on a corporate tinge. In North America the
Virginia Companies (1606), the
Massachusetts Bay Company (1629) and its predecessors exemplify the process; the two
New Zealand Companies (1825 and 1839) played a major role in setting up
New Zealand.
Various degrees of inter-relationship may pertain between corporate colonisers and their home governments. The protection of
trade, the interests of
coercive monopoly and
mercantilism, and the role of
plausible deniability may all play their part.
The destruction of the Amerindian population and the Atlantic slave trade
The arrival of the
conquistadores caused the annihilation of most of the
Amerindians. However, contemporary historians now generally reject the
Black Legend according to which the brutality of the European colonists accounted for most of the deaths. It is now generally believed that
diseases, such as the
smallpox, brought upon by the
Columbian Exchange, were the greatest destroyer, although the brutality of the conquest itself isn't contested. As late as in the 19th century,
Juan Manuel de Rosas,
Argentinian caudillo from 1829 to 1852, openly pursuied the extermination of the local population, an event related by
Darwin in
The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). He was then followed by the "
Conquest of the Desert" in the 1870-80s. This slow process of extermination is still on-going: in
Tierra del Fuego, there are only two natives left who speak the
Yaghan language. The other Yaghans died in part of taking the European habits of wearing clothes, which proved lethal in the humid, although very cold climate. After the Amerindians' quasi-total disparition, the mines and the
sugar cane plantations thus led to the booming of the Atlantic slave trade, especially apparent in the
Caribbean where the largest ethnic group is of African descent.
Contemporary historians debate the legitimacy of calling the quasi-disparition of the Amerindians a "
genocide". Estimates of
pre-Columbian population have ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons; in 1976, geographer
William Deneva derived a "consensus count" of about 54 million people.
[ 20th century estimates in Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ISBN 0806120746, p.22; Denevan's consensus count; recent lower estimates ] David Stannard has argued that "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world", with almost 100 million Amerindians killed in what he calls the
American Holocaust. Like
Ward Churchill, he believes that the American natives were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day.
[ Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195085574; p. x (quotation), p. 151 (death toll estimate). ]Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. In response,
political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls
democide. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."
[ Cf. R. J. Rummel's quote and estimate from his website, about midway down the page, after footnote 82. Rummel's estimate is presumably not a single democide, but a total of multiple democides, since there were many different governments involved.]European colonies in India during the first wave of colonization
In 1498, the
Portuguese set foot in
Goa. Rivalry among reigning European powers saw the entry of the
Dutch,
British,
French,
Danish among others. The fractured debilitated kingdoms of
India were gradually taken over by the Europeans and indirectly controlled by puppet rulers. In 1600, Queen
Elizabeth I accorded a
charter, forming the
East India Company to trade with India and eastern Asia. The British landed in India in
Surat in
1624. By the 19th century, they had assumed direct and indirect control over most of India.
North America in the 19th century
After the
American Revolution and the 1776 independence of the
United States, the
colonization was not quite finished. As in South America, the
frontier and the
Wild West had to be conquered. For the next century, the expansion of the nation into these areas, as well as the subsequently acquired
Louisiana Purchase (1803),
Oregon Country (1846) and
Mexican Cession (1848, after the
Mexican-American War), would absorb much of the energy of the nation and largely define its politics and character, in particular its relations with
Native Americans. The question of whether the American frontier would become "slave" or "free" was a spark of the
American Civil War (1861-1865).
The settlement of the West became progressively organized through acts of the federal government, most notably the 1862
Homestead Act. In 1890, the frontier line was no more, though the frontier still existed in disconnected locations. The popular culture impact of the frontier was enormous, in dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910,
Western movies set on the frontier.
The colonization wasn't anymore
pacifist than it had been elsewhere.
North America was also the theater of the use of
detention centers,
population transfers (leading to the
Seminole Wars in
Florida at the beginning of the 19th century) and "unvoluntary extermination" (through diseases). In the
United States, the 1830
Indian Removal treaty was a policy seeking to relocate
American Indian (or "Native American") tribes living east of the
Mississippi River to lands west of the river. In the decades following the
American Revolution (1763-1783), the rapidly increasing population of the United States resulted in numerous treaties in which lands were purchased from Native Americans. Eventually, the U.S. government began encouraging Indian tribes to sell their land by offering them land in the West, outside the boundaries of the then-existing U.S. states, where the tribes could resettle. This process was accelerated with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided funds for President
Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to conduct land-exchange ("removal") treaties. An estimated 100,000 American Indians eventually relocated in the West as a result of this policy, most of them emigrating during the 1830s, settling in what was known as the "
Indian territory".
The first large-scale confinement of a specific ethnic group in detention centers began in the summer of 1838, when President
Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) ordered the U.S. Army to enforce the
December 29,
1835 Treaty of New Echota (an Indian Removal treaty) by rounding up the
Cherokee into prison camps before relocating them. Although these camps were not intended to be
extermination camps, and there was no official policy to kill people, some Indians were raped and/or murdered by US soldiers. Many more died in these camps due to disease, which spread rapidly because of the close quarters and bad sanitary conditions. This event, known as the
Trail of Tears (or
Nunna daul Isunyi - "The Trail Where We Cried" in Cherokee), resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokee Indians. Throughout the remainder of the
Indian Wars, various populations of Native Americans were rounded up, trekked across country and put into detention, some for as long as 27 years.
Central and South America in the 19th century
The Haitian Revolution and the abolition of slavery
The 1791
Haitian Revolution, led by
Toussaint L'Ouverture, gives the first example of the constitution of a black
Republic and of the
abolition of slavery. The rebels imposed to the
First Republic (1792-1804) the repeal of slavery, regulated by the 1689
Code Noir, on
February 4,
1794. The
Abbé Grégoire and the
Society of the Friends of the Blacks, led by
Jacques Pierre Brissot, were part of the abolitionist movement, which had laid important groundwork in building anti-slavery sentiment in the metropole. The first article of the law stated that "Slavery was repealed" in the French colonies, while the second article stated that "slave-owners would be indemnified", with a financial compensation. On
May 10,
1802,
colonel Delgrès signed a public notice, which was a call to Guadeloupe for
insurgency against
general Richepanse, sent by
Napoleon to reestablish slavery. The rebellion was repressed, and slavery reestablished. It would be definitely abolished on
April 27,
1848, by the
decree-law Sch"lcher under the
Second Republic (1848-52). Slaves were bought back to the colons (
Békés in
Creole) and then freed by the state. However, at the same moment, France started participating in the
scramble for Africa,
transferring the population to the
mines, the
forestry and
rubber plantations.
Wars of Independence in Latin America
The Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) and the various Wars of Independence led in the 1810s and 1820s by famous
Libertadores such as
José de San Martin in the South or
Simón Bolívar in the North, brought to most Latin American countries independence from the European powers.
As in North America, the independent territories still had to be fully explored. Thus, in
Argentina,
caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas pursuied the "
conquest of the desert" from 1829 to 1852, explicitly leading a "campaign of extermination" against the indigenous people. The
Empire of Brazil, proclaimed in 1822 by
Dom Pedro I, began to colonize its backcountry (including the
Sertão), an enterprise which continues to this day in the
Amazons. The 1888
Lei Áurea abolished slavery, creating public uproar among Brazilian slave owners and upper classes, which was the immediate cause of the toppling of the monarchy and the
establishment of a republic in 1889.
The 1898
Spanish-American War, during which the
United States occupied
Cuba and
Puerto Rico, ended Spanish occupation in the Americas.
The New Imperialism
Rise of the New Imperialism
The latter half of 19th century saw the transition from an "informal" empire of control through military and economic dominance to direct control, marked from the
1870s on by the scramble for territory in areas previously regarded as merely under Western influence. Colonialism would take its full extent only during the period known as
New Imperialism, starting in the 1860s with the
Scramble for Africa:
British,
French, and
German imperialisms opposed themselves to conquer the most territories possible as quickly as possible.
The
Berlin Conference (1884 - 1885) mediated the imperial competition among the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK), the
French Third Republic and the
German Empire, defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of colonial claims and codifying the imposition of
direct rule, accomplished usually through armed force.
A decade later, rival imperialisms would collide in the 1898
Fashoda Incident, during which war between France and the UK was barely avoided. This fear led to new alliances, and in 1904 the
Entente Cordiale was signed between both powers. Imperialistic rivalry between the European powers would a main cause of the triggering of
World War I in 1914.
In Germany, rising
pan-germanism was coupled to imperialism in the
Alldeutsche Verband ("Pangermanic League"), which argued that Britain's world power position gave the British unfair advantages on international markets, thus limiting Germany's economic growth and threatening its security.
Pan-slavism and pan-germanism were considered by Hannah Arendt (1951) as the continental version of imperialism.
The Scramble for Africa
Many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate the
Scramble for Africa, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. The inventor of
Realpolitik,
Bismarck thus pushed a
Weltpolitik vision ("World Politic"), which considered the colonization as a necessity for the emerging German power. German colonies in
Togoland,
Samoa,
South-West Africa and
New Guinea had corporate commercial roots, while the equivalent German-dominated areas in
East Africa and
China owed more to political motives. The British also took an interest in Africa, using the East Africa company to take over Kenya and Uganda. The British crown formally took over in 1895 and renamed the area the East Africa Protectorate.
Leopold II of Belgium personally owned the
Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, while the
Dutch had the
Dutch East Indies.
In the same manner,
Italy tried to conquer its "
place in the sun", acquiring
Somaliland in 1899-90,
Eritrea and 1899, and, taking advantage of the "Sick Man of Europe", the
Ottoman Empire, also conquered
Tripolitania and
Cyrenaica (modern
Libya) with the 1911
Treaty of Lausanne. The conquest of
Ethiopia, which had remained the last African independent territory, had to wait till the
Second Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935-36 (the
First Italo-Abyssinian War in 1895-96 had been a disaster for Italian troops).
The
Portuguese and
Spanish colonial empire were smaller, mostly legacies of past colonization. Most of their colonies had acquired independence during the
Latin American revolutions at the beginning of the 19th century.
Asia
In Asia, the
Great Game, which lasted from 1813 to 1907, opposed the British Empire against
Imperial Russia for supremacy in
Central Asia.
China was opened to Western influence starting with the
First and
Second Opium Wars (1839-1842; 1856-1860). After the visits of
Commodore Matthew Perry in 1852-1854,
Japan opened itself to the Western world during the
Meiji Era (1868-1912).
After World War I
The colonial
map was redrawn following the defeat of the
German and the
Ottoman Empire after the
first World War (1914-18). Colonies from the defeated empires were transferred to the newly founded
League of Nations, which itself redistributed it to the victorious powers as
"mandates".
The twentieth century saw the era of the
banana republics, in particular in
Latin America, whereby corporations such as
United Fruit or
Standard Fruit dominated the economies and sometimes the politics of parts of
Latin America. The United Fruit, nicknamed 'The Octopus' for its willingness to involve itself in politics, was present in most American countries and was involved in several coups, in
Honduras and elsewhere. 1971
Nobel prize for literature winner
Pablo Neruda would later denounce such
neocolonialism in a poem titled
La United Fruit Co.
Oil companies such as
BP and
Royal Dutch Shell held sway in "key" areas such as parts of
Iran and of
Nigeria, despite the preservation of de jure independence.
Middle East
After
World War I, the
Arabs,
who had revolted against the Ottomans in 1916-18, supported by the UK who sent them Captain
T. E. Lawrence, found they had been doubly betrayed. For not only had the British and the French concluded the secret 1916
Sykes-Picot Agreement to partition the Middle East between them, but the British had also promised to the international
Zionist movement their support in creating a
Jewish homeland in Palestine via the 1917
Balfour Declaration, although the former site of the ancient
Kingdom of Israel had had a largely Arab population for over a thousand years. When the Ottomans departed, the Arabs proclaimed an independent state in
Damascus, but were too weak, militarily and economically, to resist the European powers for long, and Britain and France soon established control and re-arranged the Middle East to suit themselves.
Syria became a French protectorate (thinly disguised as a
League of Nations Mandate), with the Christian coastal areas split off to become
Lebanon.
Iraq and
Palestine became British mandated territories, with one of
Sherif Hussein's sons,
Faisal, installed as King of Iraq. Palestine was split in half, with the eastern half becoming
Transjordan to provide a throne for another of Hussein's sons,
Abdullah. The western half of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the already substantial Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Most of the Arabian peninsula fell to another British ally,
Ibn Saud, who created the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia in 1922.
Another turning point in the history of the Middle East came when
oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in
Libya and
Algeria. The Middle East, it turned out, possessed the world's largest easily accessible reserves of crude oil. Although Western
oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding
automobile industry and other industrial developments, the emirs of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them a stake in preserving Western hegemony over the region. Oil wealth also had the effect of stultifying whatever movement towards economic, political or social reform might have emerged in the Arab world under the influence of the
Kemalist revolution , which had created the modern state of
Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
During the 1920-30s
Iraq,
Syria and
Egypt moved towards independence, although the British and French did not formally depart the region until they were forced to do so after
World War II. But in Palestine the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and Zionist colonisation created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. Although the Zionist movement was born in the 19th century, following various
pogroms and the
Dreyfus Affair, with
Theodor Herzl's
Der Judenstaat (1896), the rise of
nazism created a new urgency in the quest to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance, with the
Great Uprising in 1936-39.
This struggle culminated in the
1947 UN Partition Plan in favor of a
Two-state solution instead of a
Binational solution. The plan was rejected and the
State of Israel proclaimed in 1948, leading to the first
Arab-Israeli War and to the creation of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. About
800,000 Palestinians fled from areas annexed by Israel, thus creating the "Palestinian problem" which has bedevilled the region ever since. The June 1967
Six Day War led to the
occupation of various territories. In November 1967,
UN Resolution 242 called for the "withdrawal of
Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict", something which has became a permanent revendication of the
Fatah, founded by
Yassir Arafat in 1959, and of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded in 1964 by the
Arab League.
Pan-Arabism was a popular anti-imperialist ideology in the 1960s, and
Nasserism favorized the merging of
Egypt and
Syria into the
United Arab Republic (1958-61). The short term
Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan (1958) also attempted to bypass the 1920s artificial borders. Pan-Arabism was however defeated with the 1967 Six-Day War and the emergence of
Islamism in the 1980s as a popular substitution to
secular Arab nationalism, as represented for example by the
Baath Party.
Japanese imperialism
After being closed for centuries to Western influence,
Japan opened itself to the West during the
Meiji Era (1868-1912), characterized by swift modernization and borrowings from European culture (in law, science, etc.) This, in turn, helped make Japan the modern power that it is now, which was symbolized as soon as the 1904-1905
Russo-Japanese War: this war marked the first victory of colored people over a European group, and led to widespread fears among European populations (first appearance of the "
Yellow Peril"). During the first part of the 20th century, while China was still victim of various European imperialisms, Japan became itself one of the first non-European imperialist power, conquering what it called a "
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". Allying itself with
Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy, it would lose its colonies after its final defeat during World War II.
The French colonial empire
|
A fairly typical advertisement for chocolate can be perceived as propaganda for the French Colonial Empire. It has been argued that this particular example supports a racist stereotype of the "Negro" as emotional - he is laughing - but quite slow-thinking. The badly structured sentence Y a Bon Banania reflects prejudices that Negroes could not speak French properly. It should however be noted that the black man illustrated wears the red fez and blue tassel of the Senegalese tirailleurs — colonial troops who won respect and (somewhat patronising) affection from the French public at large for their discipline and sacrifice in both World Wars. |
In France, the colonial empire was not used for massive
emigration, as in the
British Empire. In fact, until the
Third Republic (1871-1940), apart from the
colonization of Algeria started on
June 12,
1830, in the last days of the
Restoration, France did not have yet many colonies compared to the Spanish or the Portuguese empire. The
Antilles, in the
Caribbean Sea, had been colonized during this first wave of colonialism. After the repression of the 1871
Paris Commune, the
French Guiana — as well as
New Caledonia — were used for
transportation of criminals and
Communards. Because of the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the "colonial
lobby", gathering a few politicians, businessmen and geographers favorable to colonialism, was not very popular until World War I. In the 1880s, a debate thus opposed those who opposed colonization, such as
Georges Clemenceau (
Radical), who declared that colonialism diverted France from the "blue line of the
Vosges", referring to the disputed
Alsace-Lorraine region,
Jean Jaurès (
Socialist) or
Maurice Barrès (nationalist), to the "colonial lobby", supported by
Jules Ferry (moderate
republican),
Léon Gambetta (republican) or
Eugène Etienne, the president of the parliamentary colonial group.
Prime minister from 1880 to 1881 and 1883 to 1885, Republican Jules Ferry directed the negotiations which led to the establishment of a French
protectorate in
Tunis (1881) (the Bardo treaty), prepared the treaty of
December 17,
1885 for the occupation of
Madagascar; directed the exploration of the
Congo and of the
Niger region; and above all he organized the conquest of
Indochina. The excitement caused at Paris by the sudden retreat of the French troops from
Lang Son led to his violent denunciation by Clemenceau and other radicals, and his downfall on
March 30,
1885. Although the
treaty of peace with China (
June 9,
1885), in which the
Qing Dynasty ceded suzerainty of
Annam and
Tonkin to France, was the work of his ministry, he would never again serve as premiere.
According to Sandrine Lemaire, only 1% of the French population actually visited its colonial empire. Because of this relative unpopularity, until at least World War I, the colonial lobby set up an intensive
propaganda campaign in order to convince the French of the legitimacy of its Empire, which most thought costly and rather useless.
Ethnological expositions — including
human zoos, in which natives were displayed alongside apes, in an attempt to justify
scientific racism and to popularize the colonial empire — had a crucial role in the popularisation of colonialism
[ Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, edition La Découverte (2002) 480 pages - French presentation of the book here ISBN 2707144010 ]. Although in France these
colonial exhibitions played a crucial propaganda role, they were common in all colonizing powers: the 1924
British Empire Exhibition was one notable example, as was the successful 1931
Exposition coloniale in Paris.
Germany and
Portugal also had such exhibitions, as well as
Belgium's, which had a
Foire coloniale as late as
1948. The political scientist
Pierre-André Taguieff said about the French Third Republic that it was host to "
racialism or an ideological racism that didn't perceive itself as such, and that called neither for hate, nor for stigmatisation, nor either for segregation, but which found its legitimity in colonial exploitation and domination, and its justification in its thesis of the future evolution of these inferior peoples".
Olivier LeCour Grandmaison has argued, for his part, that the techniques used for the French
colonization of Algeria starting with the invasion on
June 12,
1830, a few days before the end of the
Restoration, were later extended to the whole of the
French colonial empire (
Indochina,
New Caledonia,
French West Africa, a federation created in
1895, and
French Equatorial Africa, created in 1910). LeCour Grandmaison argued that Algeria thus provided the laboratory for concepts later used during the
Holocaust, such as "inferior races", "life without value" —
Lebensunwertes Leben — and "vital space" (translated in
German by "
Lebensraum", a concept used by the
Völkisch movement), as well as for repressive techniques: the 1881
Indigenous Code in Algeria, the principle of "collective responsibility", the "
Scorched Earth" policy, which made of French colonial rule in Algeria a permanent
state of exception.
Internment camps were also first tested during the 1830 invasion of Algeria, before being used (under the official name of
concentration camps) to receive the
Spanish Republican refugees first, than to intern
communists and, finally,
Jews during
Vichy France [ Olivier LeCour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial, Fayard, 2005, ISBN 35251692005 ]. Concentration camps were also used by the
British Empire during the
Second Boer War (1899-1902).
After World War I, the colonized people were frustrated at France's failure to recognize the effort provided by the French colonies (resources, but more importantly colonial troops - the famous
tirailleurs). Although in
Paris the
Great Mosque of Paris was constructed as recognition of these efforts, the French state had no intention to allow
self-rule, let alone
independence to the colonized people. Thus,
nationalism in the colonies became stronger in between the two wars, leading to
Abd el-Krim's
Rif War in
Morocco and to the creation of
Messali Hadj's
Star of North Africa in
Algeria. However, these movements would gain full potential only after World War II. The
October 27,
1946 Constitution creating the
Fourth Republic substituted the
French Union to the colonial empire. On the night of
March 29,
1947, a nationalist uprising in
Madagascar led the French government led by
Paul Ramadier (
Socialist) to violent repression: one year of bitter fighting, in which 90,000 to 100,000 Malagasy died. On
May 8,
1945, the
Setif massacre took place in Algeria.
In 1946, the states of
French Indochina withdrew from the Union, leading to the
Indochina War (1946-54). In 1956,
Morocco and
Tunisia gained their independence, while the
Algerian War was raging (1954-1962). With
Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958 amidst turmoil and threats of a right-wing coup d'Etat to protect "French Algeria", the decolonization was completed with the independence of African's colonies in 1960 and the
March 19,
1962 Evian Accords, which put an end to the Algerian war. To this day, the Algerian war — officially called until the 1990s a "public order operation" — remains a traumatism both for France and Algeria. Philosopher
Paul Ric"ur has spoke of the necessity of a "decolonization of memory", starting with the recognition of the
1961 Paris massacre during the Algerian war and the recognition of the decisive role of
immigrated manpower in the
Trente Glorieuses post-WW II economic growth period. In the 1960s, due to the necessity of reconstruction and of economic growth, French employers actively sought manpower in the colonies, explaining today's
multiethnic population. The February 23, 2005
law on colonialism voted by the
Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) conservative majority was finally repealed by president
Jacques Chirac (UMP) start of 2006.
After
World War I (1914-1918),
national liberation movements became more common, although they did not reach their full power until the end of
World War II (1939-1945). Due to Western education of colonized
elites, the use of colonial troops during WWI; US president
Woodrow Wilson's
January 8,
1918 speech on the
Fourteen Points — the fifth one stated that: "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of
sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined." — and also the prestige of the 1917
October Revolution,
anti-colonialism and
anti-imperialism spread itself to the colonized people, most notably with
Gandhi's
pacific struggle in the
British Raj, which was founded on
civil disobedience. The movement of decolonization, however, really started only after the
Allied victory over the
Axis (
Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy and the
Japanese Empire which had conquered a so-called
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [ Japanese imperialism lead to the interesting problem that colonialism and imperialism have not been exclusively an Western endeavour. Japanese imperialism followed the Meiji Era (1868-1912), during which Japan opened up itself to the West and learnt its techniques, assimilating its rationality, which led to the first victory of coloured people over white people during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Japan's victory at the time surprised the West that it led to fears of the "Yellow Peril" ]) and the foundation of the
United Nations (UN) on
June 26,
1945, when 50 nations signed the
UN Charter. The 1941
Atlantic Charter, signed by US president
Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued the
wilsonian tradition of the 14 Points.
In 1952, demographer
Alfred Sauvy coined the term "
Third World" in reference to the French
Third Estate. The expression distinguished nations that aligned themselves with neither the
West nor with the
Soviet Bloc during the
Cold War. In the following decades, decolonization would strengthen this group which began to be represented at the
United Nations. The Third World's first international move was the
1955 Bandung Conference, led by
Nehru for
India,
Nasser for
Egypt and
Tito for
Yugoslavia. The Conference, which gathered 29 countries representing over half the world's population, led to the creation of the
Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.
Although the US had first opposed itself to colonial powers, in particular during the 1956
Suez crisis between Egypt, France, the UK and Israel, the Cold War concerns about Soviet influence in the Third World caused it to downplay its advocacy of popular sovereignty and decolonization. France thus had a free hand in the
First Indochina War (1946-1954) and in the
Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), where
torture techniques were heavily employed (the Algerian war would become a military model of
counter-insurgency tactics, and has been studied ever since in military schools through-out the world). Furthermore, attempts such as
Mossadegh's
nationalisation of the petroil in
Iran were blocked by the US, who supported a coup in 1953 order to impose the
Shah (the covert operation was named
Operation Ajax). The next year, when
Guatemala's president
Arbenz tried to nationalise the
United Fruit, the
CIA overthrew him and replaced him by a military
junta in
Operation PBSuccess.
In spite of these
interferences in other states, decolonization itself was a seemingly unstoppable process. In
1960, after several
wars of national liberation, the UN had reached 99 members states: the
decolonization of Africa was almost complete. In
1980, the UN had 154 member states, and in
1990, after
Namibia's independence, 159 states
[ ] But what could be seen retrospectively as a gigantic and quiet wave representing the
Zeitgeist ("Spirit of Times") overthrowing the domination of European colonialist powers was in fact the product of the struggle of the colonized people, whom many paid it with their lives.
In effect, although the anticolonialist struggle didn't lead in all cases to wars such as the Algerian War (1954-62), it was nevertheless bloody. Many anticolonialist leaders were assassinated in more or less obscure circumstances in the 1960s, whether by foreign powers or internal enemies, sometimes supported by foreign powers who more or less openly supported
dictatorships (for example, France and its ties with the
Françafrique). The most famous names shouldn't dissimulate others less-known leaders, but a quick enumeration of
slain anti-imperialist leaders would include
Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime minister of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo assassinated in 1961;
Sylvanus Olympio, the first
president of Togo, assassinated in 1963 (quickly replaced by
Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who would rule Togo until his death in 2005);
Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition, whom was preparing the
Tricontinental Conference which was supposed to gather in
La Habana in 1966 national liberation movements (not states) from all continents in order to organize the anti-imperialist struggle (kidnapped in Paris);
Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of the
Mozambiquan FRELIMO, allegedly assassinated by
Aginter Press, the Portuguese branch of
Gladio [ See ISN Zurich Institute hosted by ETH Zurich University ] —
NATO's
anti-communist paramilitary organization during the Cold War —
Amilcar Cabral,
Oscar Romero, the prelate archbishop of
San Salvador and a proponent of
Liberation Theology, or
Dulcie September,
African National Congress (ANC) activist murdered in Paris in 1988
[ See Assassinated anticolonialist leaders subsection in the Decolonization article for a more complete list ]...
Many of these assassinations are still unsolved cases as of 2006, but foreign power interference is undeniable in many of these cases. To take only one case, the investigation concerning Mehdi Ben Barka is continuing to this day, and both France and the US have refused to declassify files they acknowledge having in their possession
[ See Mehdi Ben Barka for further information. France has declassified some of the files, but Ben Barka's family has stated that they have shed no new light on the affair, and that further efforts must be done. ]The
Soviet Union was a main supporter of decolonization movements. While the
Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961 following the
Bandung 1955 Conference, was supposedly neutral, the "Third World" being opposed to both the "First" and the "Second" Worlds,
geopolitical concerns, as well as the refusal of the US to support decolonization movements against its
NATO European allies, led the national liberation movements to look increasingly toward the East. However,
China's appearance on the world scene, under the leadership of
Mao Zedong, created a rupture between the Soviet Union and independentists movements. Globally, the non-aligned movement, led by
Nehru (India),
Tito (Yugoslavia) and
Nasser (Egypt) tried to create a block of nations powerful enough to be dependent on neither the US nor the Soviet Union, but finally tilted towards the USSR, while smaller liberation movements, both by strategic necessity and ideological choice, were supported either by Moscow or by Peking.
Fidel Castro's Cuba, who was at first neutral before turning itself towards Moscow, also sponsored liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique. Few liberation movements were totally independent from foreign aid.
This, however, didn't protect the Soviet Union from counter-accusations of "imperialism", in particular concerning the domination of Moscow over the
Soviet Bloc. Actually,
Roosevelt and
Stalin were accused of having divided the world into two parts during the February 1945
Yalta Conference, over which each state would have a free hand to impose his policies, although this has been dismissed as a legend. Thus, the 1953
uprising in East-Berlin was repressed by the
Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, while the
1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968
Prague Spring were crushed by the
Warsaw Pact forces. The 1979
invasion of Afghanistan has also been considered a symbol of Sovietic imperialism.
Anti-communists have claimed this showed that cynic "
Realpolitik" was the only true law of
international relations, while others pointed out that, although the USSR's official ideology led it to support national liberation movements in the Third World, it retained its state reflexes concerning its surrounding territories. Both point out that in spite of the 1917
October Revolution and its support to
guerrilla movements, the new "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" shared essential continuities with
imperial Russia. This judgment was confirmed with the dissolving of the USSR, when the "socialist principles" couldn't counterbalance any more the nationalist centrifugal forces.
Thus, after the 1989 fall of the
Berlin Wall and the insuing
revolutions, new
separatist tensions were observed in the former Soviet Union. In the
Balkans, the explosion of the
Yugoslavian union, created on
December 1,
1918 by
Serbian Prince-Regent
Alexander Karađorđević's proclamation of the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, led to unleash nationalisms which had been frozen under Tito's rule. The
Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 2001 led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In May-June 1991,
Slovenia and
Croatia unilaterally declared their independence from the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was immediately recognized by
Germany. The
Croatian War (1991-95) then marqued the
secession of Croatia. The
Republic of Macedonia declared independence in January 1992, and
Bosnia in April 1992. This led to the proclamation of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of the two remaining republics of Tito's Yugoslavia,
Serbia and
Montenegro; as well as to the
Bosnian war (1992-95), which culminated with the
Bosnian Genocide and the 1995
Srebrenica massacres, and finally took an end with the
December 14,
1995 Dayton Agreement. Bosnia now forms the
Bosnia-Herzegovina Republic, recognized, along with Croatia, in 1996 by the
Republic of Serbia. Starting in the late 1990s, new tension arose in the
Kosovo between
Albanian separatists and the Serbian forces, leading to the
Kosovo War (1996-99) — the autonomy of Kosovo and of the
Vojvodina region in the Yugoslavian Union had been cancelled in 1990 by the nationalist leader of Serbia
Slobodan Milošević. These disturbs led to the creation of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Although the Yugoslav wars may hardly be considered "anti-colonialists", insofar as they were separatist movements, the
First and the
Second Chechen Wars may doubtlessly be considered anti-colonialist struggles. On
April 21,
1996,
Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first separatist president of the
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, was assassinated. On
March 8,
2005, moderate separatist
Aslan Maskhadov, who had also been president of the Chechen Republic, was also murdered by the
FSB. The last moderate Chechen separatist was thus eliminated, leaving the way to
Islamists:
Sheikh Abdul Halim (killed
June 17,
2006) replaced Aslan Maskhadov, a move endorsed by
Shamil Basayev, thus allowing Moscow to claim its imperialist war was in fact wholly part of the
George W. Bush administration's "
War on Terror" triggered in 2001.
|
1900 Campaign poster for the Republican Party. "The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity's sake.", president William McKinley, July 12, 1900. On the left hand, we see how the situation allegedly was in 1896, before Mc Kinley's victory during the elections: "Gone Democratic: A run on the bank, Spanish rule in Cuba". On the right hand, we see how the situation allegedly is in 1900, after four years of Kinley's rule: "Gone Republican: a run to the bank, American rule in Cuba" (the Spanish-American War took place in 1898). The USA are becoming, as other European powers, an imperialist power. As did France before with its universalist doctrine, it claims that it acts for "Humanity". |
Despite the decolonization in the 1960s-70s, former colonies still are today for the most part under strong Western influence (although new imperialism have appeared on stage, namely China in Africa). Critics of this continued Occidental influence talk of
neocolonialism. The exception to this rule being in particular the
East Asian Tigers (mainly Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), and the emerging Indian and Chinese powers. However, even in this case colonialism has left scars, apparent in India with the 1984
Bhopal disaster, in which a pesticide plant released 40
tonnes of
methyl isocyanate (MIC), injuring between 150,000 to 600,000 people, at least 15,000 of whom later died. The plant was controlled by the US firm
Union Carbide, and didn't benefit from the same protections as in the US.
U.S. foreign intervention
On the other hand, because of the Cold War, which led Moscow and Peking to support anti-imperialist movements, the US (as well as other NATO countries) interfered in various countries, for example by issuing an
embargo against Cuba after the 1959
Cuban Revolution — which started on
February 7,
1962 — and supporting various
covert operations (the 1961
Bay of Pigs Invasion,
the Cuban Project, etc.) The US, as well as France for that matter, preferred supporting
dictatorships in Third World countries rather than having democracies which always presented the risk of having the people choose being aligned with the
Communist bloc rather than the so-called "
Free World".
Thus, in
South America, the US began by
tacitly approving Pinochet's
September 11, 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist leader
Salvador Allende, and continued by giving at least tacit support to the "
dirty war" — including
Operation Condor, in which 50,000 persons were murdered and 30,000 "
disappeared" (aka
"desaparecidos"). On
March 6,
2001, the
New York Times revealed a 1978 cable which proved that chiefs involved in Condor "[kept] in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the
Panama Canal Zone which [covered] all of Latin America"
[ The cable has been published by the National Security Archives, and can be read here ]. On
September 21,
1976,
Orlando Letelier, a
Chilean Christian Democrat, was assassinated by a
car bomb in Washington D.C. Among the people prosecuted for the people were
Michael Townley, a
DINA agent who had worked for the CIA. Townley confessed that he had hired anti-Castrist Cubans to boobytrap the car, through
Luis Posada Carriles'
CORU organization. US intervention in Latin american countries continued with the 1983
invasion of Grenada and the 1989
United States invasion of Panama against
druglord Manuel Noriega. In
Indonesia, Washington supported
Suharto's
New Order dictatorship, etc.
This interference, in particular in South and Central American countries, is reminiscent of the 19th century
Monroe doctrine and the
Big stick diplomacy codified by US president
Theodore Roosevelt.
Left-wing critics have spoken of an "
American Empire", pushed in particular by the
military-industrial complex, which president
Eisenhower warned against in 1961. On the other hand, some
Republicans have supported, without much success since World War I,
isolationism. Defenders of U.S. policy have asserted that intervention was sometimes necessary to prevent
Communist or Soviet-aligned governments from taking power during the
Cold War.
French foreign intervention
France wasn't inactive either: it supported dictatorships in the former colonies in Africa, leading to the expression
Françafrique, coined by
François-Xavier Verschave, a member of the anti-neocolonialist
Survie NGO, which has criticized the way
development aid was given to post-colonial countries, claiming it only supported neo-colonialism, interior corruption and arms-trade. The
Third World debt, including
odious debt, where the interest on the external debt exceeds the amount that the country produces, had been considered by some a method of oppression or control by first world countries; a form of
debt bondage on the scale of nations.
Post-colonialism (aka post-colonial theory) refers to a set of theories in philosophy and literature that grapple with the legacy of colonial rule. In this sense, postcolonial literature may be considered a branch of
Postmodern literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of peoples formerly subjugated in colonial empires. Many practitioners take
Edward Said's book
Orientalism (1978) to be the theory's founding work. Edward Said analyzed the works of
Balzac,
Baudelaire and
Lautréamont, exploring how they were both influenced by and helped to shape a societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fictional writers interact with the traditional colonial
discourse, but modify or subvert it; for instance by retelling a familiar story from the perspective of an oppressed minor character in the story.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's
Can the Subaltern Speak? (1998) gave its name to the
Subaltern Studies. In
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Spivak explored how major works of European
metaphysics (e.g.,
Kant,
Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human
subjects. Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is famous for its explicit
ethnocentrism, in considering the
Western civilization as the most accomplished of all, while Kant also allowed some traces of racism to enter his work.
Debate about the perceived positive and negative aspects of colonialism has occurred for centuries, amongst both colonizer and colonized, and continues to the present day. The questions of
miscegenation; the alleged ties between colonial enterprises,
genocides — see the
Herero Genocide — and the
Holocaust; and the questions of the nature of
imperialism,
dependency theory and
neocolonialism (in particular the
Third World debt) continues to retain their actuality.
*
Anticolonialism*
American Empire**
American exceptionalism**
History of United States continental expansion**
History of United States overseas expansion**
British Empire and Commonwealth Museum*
Chartered companies*
Colonial cinema*
Colonial style (
architecture)
*
List of Colonial Territories by country*
Colonial Exhibitions*
Colonization***
Arab colonization of North Africa***
Bantu colonization of Eastern and Southern Africa**
Colonization of Europe***
Roman colonization of Europe***
Arab colonization of Spain***
Soviet colonization of eastern Poland and southern Finland ***
Osmanic colonization of the Balkans***
Plantations of Ireland - British colonisation of
Ireland***
German colonization of Eastern Europe**
European colonization of the Americas***
British colonization of the Americas***
Danish colonization of the Americas***
Dutch colonization of the Americas***
New Netherland***
French colonization of the Americas****
New France***
Portuguese colonization of the Americas***
Russian colonization of the Americas***
Spanish colonization of the Americas****
Spanish Conquest of Yucatan****
Conquistador****
Spanish missions in California****
New Spain***
Swedish colonization of the Americas*
Corporate colonialism*
Darién scheme**
Dutch colonization of the Americas**
Lieutenant governor**
Viceroy of India**
Crown colony**
Dominion**
Imperial Conferences**
Balfour Declaration 1926**
Statute of Westminster 1931**
Commonwealth of Nations***
Commonwealth Realm***
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting***
Commonwealth Games*
Global Empire*
Independence**
Cultural imperialism**
Culture of capitalism**
Media Imperialism**
Imperialism in Asia*
Indonesian colonization of East Timor*
List of extinct countries, territories, empires, etc.*
Mercantilism**
New Netherland**
Portugal in the period of discoveries**
Portuguese colonization of the Americas*
Protectorate*
Israeli occupied territories Israeli settlement/colonies
*
Biopiracy /
Bioprospecting*
United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing TerritoriesOther chartered companies engaging in colonial pursuits include:
* The Bermuda Company
* The
British East India Company* The
British South Africa Company (
Rhodesia)
*
Compagnie de l'Occident*
Compagnie de Chine*
Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique*
La Compagnie du Nord*
Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes* The
Danish East India Company* The
Darien Company* The
Dutch East India Company* The
Dutch West India Company* The French African Company
* The
French East India Company* The Guiana Company
* The Guinea Company
* The
Levant Company* The
Mississippi Company* The Nanto-Bordelaise Company
* The
New Guinea Company* The
North West Company* The Providence Company
* The
Royal African Company* The
Russian-American Company* The Senegal Company
* The Somers Island Company (
Bermuda)
* The
South Sea Company* The
Swedish East India Company* '
Colony (song)' by Damien Dempsey, Irish singer-songwriter
*
Arendt, Hannah,
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (second chapter on
Imperialism examines ties between colonialism and
totalitarianism)
*
Conrad, Joseph,
Heart of Darkness, 1899
*
Fanon, Frantz,
The Wretched of the Earth, Pref. by
Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Constance Farrington. London : Penguin Book, 2001
*
Gobineau, Arthur de,
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853-55
*
Gutiérrez, Gustavo,
A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation, 1971
*
Kipling, Rudyard,
The White Man's Burden, 1899
*
Las Casas, Bartolomé de,
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (
1542, published in
1552)
*
LeCour Grandmaison, Olivier,
Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial, Fayard, 2005, ISBN 35251692005
*
Lindqvist, Sven,
Exterminate All The Brutes, 1992, New Press; Reprint edition (June 1997), ISBN 1565843592
*
Said, Edward,
Orientalism, 1978; 25th-anniversary edition 2003 ISBN 039474067x
*
Liberal opposition to colonialism, imperialism and empire (pdf) - by professor Daniel Klein
*
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
