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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 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 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 in racial terms at the end of the 19th century.

Types of colonialism

Settler colonies, dependencies, plantations colonies, trading posts

Different types of colonialism may be distinguished, according to the form of colonization and also the date. Settler colonies, such as the original thirteen states of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina arose from the emigration of peoples from a metropole, or mother country, and involved displacement of the indigenous peoples to their permanent detriment [1]. 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

Main article: Missionary

Since the first European wave of colonization, the Catholic Church had a non-negligeable 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. And 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 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: Hannah Arendt

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" [2]. 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 of. 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 [3]. 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" [4] Despite this theoretical universality of the French conception of the nation [5], 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 [3].

The opposition between the metropole and the colonial administration

While 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 reasonment ultimately leads her to show that the human rights are in fact dependent of civil rights, and not the reverse as does 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.

History of Colonialism

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

Main articles: Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire
File:Lepanto.jpg
The Battle of Lepanto (1571), marking the end of the Ottoman Empire as the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, a key component of the creation of any Global Empire.

The year 1492 marked the "discovery of the Americas" by Christopher Columbus on behalf of Castille and the symbolic beginning of the European "Age of Exploration" [6]. It was not long after this that Castille began the conquest of South America and the Caribbean through its famous conquistadores, such as Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro. However, western colonisation has its roots in Portuguese trips, when explorers as Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Queirós and Torres went sailing from their capital Lisbon up to the Cape of Good Hope, before reaching India in 1498, opening a rush among other European nations to discover a route of their own. Indeed, the Portuguese had already captured Ceuta in 1415 and discovered the islands of Madeira in 1418 and Azores in 1432 [7]. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world outside of Europe in an exclusive duopoly between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.

This first phase of European's expansion led to the composing 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." Since 1580, the throne of Portugal was indeed held by Habsburg Spain, which would keep it until 1640. Thus, the two largest colonial empires were united under the Habsburg. Gold and silver from the Potosí mines, which belong to the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the Zacateca mines in modern Mexico largely provided for the cultural achievements of the Edad de Oro. Amerindians were reduced to slavery in this period to work in mines such as Potosí, while smallpox decimated the local population. In accordance with the mercantilism theories, the silver piece of eight helped finance the expensive Spanish Armada, which was sent by Philip II of Spain in 1588 in a failed attempt to bring an end to the conflict with England (1585-1604).

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

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

Main articles: Leyes de Burgos, Valladolid Controversy, and 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, 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 Atlantic slave trade

Main article: Atlantic slave trade

The desire for labour in the Americas, in particular concerning the sugar cane plantations, by the various European nations also led to the booming of the Atlantic slave trade leading to black 'colonisation' of the Americas- today this is especially apparent in the Caribbean where the largest ethnic group is of African descent.

North America in the 19th century

Mercantilism in the 16th and 17th centuries helped create trade patterns such as the triangular trade — in which the Atlantic slave trade was included. Raw materials (sugar,tobacco and cotton) were imported to the metropolis and then processed and redistributed to other colonies. Thus, the slaves were bought in Africa with textile, rums and other manufactured goods, and sold in the New World against raw materials. This exploitation of natural resources form the bases of today's terms of unequal exchange between nations [8].
Main article: European colonization of the Americas

The European colonization of the Americas 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
Main articles: Haitian Revolution and Abolitionism

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

Wars of Independence in Latin America
Main articles: South American Wars of Independence and Mexican War of Independence

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 Simon Bolivar in the North, brought to most Latin American countries independence from the European powers. The new Empire of Brazil was proclaimed by Dom Pedro in 1822, while the Mexican War of Independence from 1810 to 1821 led to the independence of the former country. In 1971, Eduardo Galeano published The Open Veins of Latin America, which became one of the most famous anticolonial books, along with Bartolomé de Las Casas' 1552 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

The second European colonization wave in the 19th century

Main articles: New Imperialism, Rise of the New Imperialism, and Scramble for Africa
European claims in Africa, 1913, following the Scramble for Africa.

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. 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 shock together 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. Rival imperialisms 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, 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. 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.

In Asia, the Great Game, which lasted from 1813 to 1907, opposed the British Empire to 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). Japan opened itself to the Western world during the Meiji Era (1868-1912). However, 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 could be done.

Herero chained during the 1904 rebellion, before the Herero Genocide (1904-07) in German South-West Africa (finally independent, under the name of Namibia, in 1990).

Leopold II of Belgium also managed to have a colonial empire, while the Dutch had the Dutch East Indies. In the same manner, Italy tried to conquer its "place in the sun", acquiring Somaliland in 1899-90, Eritrea and 1899, and, taking advantage of the "Sick Man of Europe", the Ottoman Empire, also conquered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Lybia) after 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 heritages from past colonization. Most of their colonies had acquired independence during the Latin American revolutions at the beginning of the 19th century, led by famous Libertadores such as Simón Bolívar or José de San Martín, while Dom Pedro declared Brazil's independence in 1822, founding the Brazilian Empire.

After World War I

Further information: Aftermath of World War I

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. Chilean poet 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 fictional independence.

League of Nations mandate

Main article: League of Nations Mandate

The colonial map was redrawed following the defeat of the German Empire after the first World War (1914-18). In the Middle East, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to redefinition of the territories. The Arabs found they had been betrayed, indeed doubly betrayed. For not only had the British and the French concluded a secret treaty (the Sykes-Picot Agreement), to partition the Middle East between them, but the British had also promised via the Balfour Declaration the international Zionist movement their support in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was the site of the ancient Kingdom of Israel but 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, the most important commodity in the 20th century industrial world. Although western oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding automobile industry and other western industrial developments, the kings and 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 in Turkey.

During the 1920s and '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. The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist quest to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance. (For a detailed account of this, see Israel-Palestinian conflict and History of Palestine.)

This struggle culminated in the 1947 United Nations plan to partition Palestine to create a Jewish state and a Palestinian state in the narrow space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The Palestinians rejected this plan, the Zionist settlers declared the State of Israel in 1948, the Arab states intervened, and the Arabs were defeated in the resulting war. About 800,000 Palestinians fled from areas annexed by Israel and became refugees in neighbouring countries, thus creating the "Palestinian problem" which has bedevilled the region ever since.

Japanese imperialism

Main articles: Japanese imperialism and Imperialism in Asia

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

Main article: French colonial empire
File:Yabonbanania.JPG
Typical advertising for chocolate, working as propaganda for the Colonial Empire. Carries on a racist stereotype of the "Negro" as emotional - he is laughing - but quite slow-thinking. The badly structured sentence Y a Bon Banania tries to make the racist point that Negroes don't know how to speak properly.

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

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

According to Sandrine Lemaire, only 1% of the French population actually visited its colonial empire. Because of this relative unpopularity, until at least World War I, the colonial lobby set up an intensive propaganda in order to convince the French of the legitimity of its Empire, which most thought costly and rather useless. Ethnological expositions — including human zoos, in which natives were displayed alongside apes, in a tentative to justify scientific racism and to popularize the colonial empire — had a crucial role in the popularisation of colonialism [9]. Although in France these colonial exhibitions played a crucial propaganda role, they were common in all colonizing powers: the 1924 British Empire Exhibition was one, as the successful 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris. Germany and Portugal also had such exhibitions, as well as Belgium's, which had a Foire coloniale as late as 1948. The political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff said about the French Third Republic that it was host to "racialism or an ideological racism that didn't perceive itself as such, and that called neither for hate, nor for stigmatisation, nor either for segregation, but which found its legitimity in colonial exploitation and domination, and its justification in its thesis of the future evolution of these inferior peoples".

Olivier LeCour Grandmaison has argued, for his part, that the techniques used for the French colonization of Algeria starting with the invasion on June 12, 1830, a few days before the end of the Restoration, were later extended to the whole of the French colonial empire (Indochina, New Caledonia, French West Africa, a federation created in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa, created in 1910). LeCour Grandmaison argued that Algeria thus provided the laboratory for concepts later used during the Holocaust, such as "inferior races", "life without value" and "vital space" (translated in German by "Lebensraum", a concept used by the Völkisch movement), as well as for repressive techniques: the 1881 Indigenous Code in Algeria, the principle of "collective responsibility", the "Scorched Earth" policy, which made of French colonial rule in Algeria a permanent state of exception. Internment camps were also first tested during the 1830 invasion of Algeria, before being used (under the official name of concentration camps) to receive the Spanish Republican refugees first, than to intern communists and, finally, Jews during Vichy France [10]. Concentration camps were also used by the British Empire during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

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

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

Historical debate about colonialism in France

Further information: Abolitionism and Negationism

On May 10, 2001, the Taubira law officially recognized slavery and the Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. Between various propositions, May 10 was finally chosen as day dedicated to the recognition of the crime of slavery. Anticolonialist activists also want the African Liberation Day to be recognized by the Republic. Although slavery was recognized by this law, four years later, the vote of the February 23, 2005 law by the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", was met with public uproar and accusations of historic revisionism, both inside France and abroad. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, president of Algeria, refused to sign the envisioned "friendly treaty" with France because of this law. Famous writer Aimé Césaire, leader of the Négritude movement, also refused to meet UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy, leading the later to cancel his visit to Martinique. The controversed law was finally repealed by president Jacques Chirac (UMP) at the beginning of 2006.

Decolonization

Main article: Decolonization

After World War I (1914-1918), national liberation movements became more common, although they did not reach their full power until the end of World War II (1939-1945). Due to Western education of colonized elites, the use of colonial troops during WWI; US president Woodrow Wilson's January 8, 1918 speech on the Fourteen Points — the fifth one stated that: "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined." — and also the prestige of the 1917 October Revolution, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism spread itself to the colonized people, most notably with Gandhi's pacific struggle in the British Raj, which was founded on civil disobedience. The movement of decolonization, however, really started only after the Allied victory over the Axis (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire which had conquered a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [11]) 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.

Dates of independence of African countries.

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

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

In spite of these interferences in other states, decolonization itself was a seemingly unstoppable process. In 1960, after several wars of national liberation, the UN had reached 99 members states: the decolonization of Africa was almost complete. In 1980, the UN had 154 member states, and in 1990, after Namibia's independence, 159 states [12] But what could be seen retrospectively as a gigantic and quiet wave representing the Zeitgeist ("Spirit of Times") overthrowing the domination of European colonialist powers was in fact the product of the struggle of the colonized people, whom many payed it with their lives.

In effect, although the anticolonialist struggle didn't lead in all cases to wars such as the Algerian War (1954-62), it was nevertheless bloody. Many anticolonialist leaders were assassinated in more or less obscure circumstances in the 1960s, whether by foreign powers or internal enemies, sometimes supported by foreign powers who more or less openly supported dictatorships (for example, France and its ties with the Françafrique). A non-exhaustive list of assassinated leaders would include, for example:

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 [14]

The fall of the Soviet Union

Chechnya and Caucasus region

The USSR were a main support 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. Thus, the 1953 uprising in East-Berlin was repressed by the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, while the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring were crushed by the Warsaw Pact forces. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan has also been considered a symbol of Sovietic imperialism. Anti-communists have claimed this showed that cynic "Realpolitik" was the only true law of international relations, while others pointed out that, although the USSR's official ideology led it to support national liberation movements in the Third World, it retained its state reflexes concerning its surrounding territories. Both point out that in spite of the 1917 October Revolution and its support to guerrilla movements, the new "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" shared essential continuities with imperial Russia. This judgment was confirmed with the dissolving of the USSR, when the "socialist principles" couldn't counterbalance any more the nationalist centrifugal forces.

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

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

Neocolonialism

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

Thus, in South America, the US began by supporting Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, and continued by giving at least tacit support to the "dirty war" — including Operation Condor, in which 50,000 persons were murdered and 30,000 "disappeared" (aka "desaparecidos"). On March 6, 2001, the New York Times revealed a 1978 cable which proved that chiefs involved in Condor "[kept] in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which [covered] all of Latin America" [15]. 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 ant the 1989 so-called Operation Just Cause against Panama's druglord Manuel Noriega. In Indonesia, Washington supported Suharto's New Order dictatorship, etc.

This interference, in particular in South and Central American countries, recalled 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.

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

File:Time Bhopal.jpg
Time cover about the 1984 Bhopal disaster, when a pesticide plant owned by the US firm Union Carbide released toxic chemicals, killing tens of thousands.
Main articles: Post-colonialism and Postcolonial literature

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

Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization

Main article: Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization

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

Chronology of colonialism

Main article: Chronology of colonialism

References

  1. ^ According to political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfers were considered as an almost humanist solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around World War II and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but 'often necessary' means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war, and was rendered easy through the invention of railroads. See Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd Ed (Verso, 2003) p.xiv - also An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
  2. ^ S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p.138
  3. ^ a b Template:Fr icon B. Villalba. "Chapitre 2 - Les incertitudes de la citoyenneté". Catholic University of Lille, Law Department. Retrieved May 3, 2006.
  4. ^ Template:Fr icon Dominique Schnapper, " La conception de la nation ", "Citoyenneté et société", Cahiers Francais, n° 281, mai-juin 1997
  5. ^ See in particular the famous 1882 conference "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" by Ernest Renan
  6. ^ The celebration of the Columbus Day, Día de la Raza in Spanish ("Day of the Race"), has been controversed 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.
  7. ^ 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
  8. ^ See the Bolivian Gas War for a historical and current exemple of social conflict based on the popular revendications to process the gaz in the country itself instead of exporting it as a raw material
  9. ^ Template:Fr Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, edition La Découverte (2002) 480 pages - French presentation of the book here ISBN 2707144010
  10. ^ Template:Fr icon Olivier LeCour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial, Fayard, 2005, ISBN 35251692005
  11. ^ 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"
  12. ^ "Growth in United Nations Membership, 1945-2005". United Nations. 2000. Retrieved 2006. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  13. ^ See ISN Zurich Institute hosted by ETH Zurich University
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ The cable has been published by the National Security Archives, and can be read here

See also


Bibliography

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