Colony and Colonialism

Lecture 1

• Colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably.

• The word colonialism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), comes from the Roman
‘colonia’ which meant ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’, and referred to Romans who settled in other lands
but still retained their citizenship.

Colonialism acc. to OED

• a settlement in a new country … a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a
community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed,
consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the
connection with the parent state is kept up.

• This definition, quite remarkably, avoids any reference to people other than the colonisers,
people who might already have been living in those places where colonies were established.

• Hence it evacuates the word ‘colonialism’ of any implication of an encounter between peoples,
or of conquest and domination.

• There is no hint that the ‘new locality’ may not be so ‘new’ and that the process of ‘forming a
community’ might be somewhat unfair.

• Colonialism was not an identical process in different parts of the world but everywhere it locked
the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships
in human history.

In Shakespeare’s Tempest for example…

• The addition of local inhabitants who lived on the island prior to the arrival of prospero turned
the romance into an allegory of the colonial encounter.

• The process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant un-forming or re-
forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices
including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellions

• So colonialism can be defined as the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods. But
colonialism in this sense is not merely the expansion of various European powers into Asia,
Africa or the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards; it has been a recurrent and
widespread feature of human history.

History of Colonialism

• At its height in the second century AD, the Roman Empire stretched from Armenia to the
Atlantic.
 • Under Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, the Mongols conquered the Middle East as well
as China.

• The Aztec Empire was established when, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, one of
the various ethnic groups who settled in the valley of Mexico subjugated the others.

• In the fifteenth century too, various kingdoms in southern India came under the control of the
Vijaynagar Empire,

• and the Ottoman Empire, which began as a minor Islamic principality in what is now western
Turkey, extended itself over most of Asia Minor and the Balkans.

• At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it still extended from the Mediterranean to the
Indian Ocean, and the Chinese Empire was larger than anything Europe had seen.

• Modern European colonialism cannot be sealed off from these earlier histories of contact—the
Crusades, or the Moorish invasion of Spain, the legendary exploits of Mongol rulers or the
fabled wealth of the Incas or the Mughals were real or imagined fuel for the European journeys
to different parts of the world.

• And yet, these newer European travels ushered in new and different kinds of colonial practices
which altered the whole globe in a way that these other colonialisms did not.

Colonialism

Lecture 2

What are the differences between European Colonialism & other earlier colonialisms?

• Was it that Europeans established colonies far away from their own shores?

• Were they more violent or more ruthless?

• Were they better organised? Or a superior race?

Marxist thinking locates a crucial difference between the two

• whereas earlier colonialisms were pre-capitalist, modern colonialism was established alongside
capitalism in Western Europe.

• Modern colonialism did more than extract tribute, goods and wealth from the countries that it
conquered—it restructured the economies of the latter.

• It drew those countries into a complex relationship with their own, so that there was a flow of
human and natural resources between colonized and colonial countries.
Double flow of labour and goods

• This flow worked in both directions—slaves and indentured labour as well as raw materials were
transported to manufacture goods in the metropolis, or in other locations for metropolitan
consumption, but the colonies also provided captive markets for European goods.

• Thus slaves were moved from Africa to the Americas, and in the West Indian plantations they
produced sugar for consumption in Europe, and raw cotton was moved from India to be
manufactured into cloth in England and then sold back to India whose own cloth production
suffered as a result.

However, Profit always moved in one direction

• In whichever direction human beings and materials travelled, the profits always flowed back
into the so-called ‘mother country’.

• These flows of profits and people involved settlement and plantations as in the Americas, ‘trade’
as in India, and enormous global shifts of populations.

Colonization entailed global movement of peoples

• Both the colonised and the colonisers moved: the former not only as slaves but also as
indentured labourers, domestic servants, travellers and traders, and the colonial masters as
administrators, soldiers, merchants, settlers, travellers, writers, domestic staff missionaries,
teachers and scientists.

The essential point is that…

• Although European colonialisms involved a variety of techniques and patterns of domination,

penetrating deep into some societies and involving a comparatively superficial contact with
others, all of them produced the economic imbalance that was necessary for the growth of
European capitalism and industry.

Thus we can conclude….

• That colonialism was the midwife that assisted at the birth of European capitalism, or that
without colonial expansion the transition to capitalism could not have taken place in Europe.

Colonialism and Imperialism

Lecture -3

What is Imperialism?

• Distinction between pre-capitalist and capitalist colonialisms is often made by referring to the
latter as imperialism, but this is misleading.

• Imperial Russia, for example, was pre-capitalist, as was Imperial Spain.

 • Early in its usage in the English language it simply means ‘command or superior power’ (Williams
1976: 131).

OED Definition of Imperialism

• The OED defines ‘imperial’ as ‘pertaining to empire’, and ‘imperialism’ as the ‘rule of an
emperor, especially when despotic or arbitrary; the principal or spirit of empire; advocacy of
what are held to be imperial interests’.

Lenin and Kautsky on Imperialism

• In the early twentieth century, Lenin and Kautsky (among other writers) gave a new meaning to
the word ‘imperialism’ by linking it to a particular stage of the development of capitalism.

• Lenin argued that ‘finance-capitalism’ and industry in the Western countries had created ‘an
enormous superabundance of capital’.

• It could not be profitably invested at home where labour was limited. The colonies lacked capital
but were abundant in labour and human resources.

• Excess capital had to move out and subordinate non-industrial countries to sustain its own
growth.

• Lenin predicted that in due course the rest of the world would be absorbed by European finance
capitalists.

• This global system was called ‘imperialism’ and constituted a particular stage of capitalist
development—the ‘highest’ in Lenin’s understanding.

• Lenin believed that the rivalry between warring European nations would result in their own
destruction and signal the demise of capitalism.

• Lenin’s definition linking capitalism with Imperialism allowed some people to argue that
capitalism is the distinguishing feature between colonialism and imperialism.

• Direct colonial rule is not necessary for imperialism in this sense, because the economic (and
social) relations of dependency and control ensure both captive labour as well as markets for
European industry and goods.

• Sometimes the words ‘neo-imperialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’ are used to describe these

situations.

Imperialism – the highest stage of colonialism?

• Since the growth of European industry and finance-capital was achieved through colonial
domination, we can say that imperialism is the highest stage of colonialism.

• Nevertheless, imperialism, colonialism and the differences between them ought to be defined
differently depending on their historical mutations.
So, How does one distinguish between the two?

• One useful way may be, as Loomba suggests, “ to separate them not in temporal but spatial
terms.’

• And, one needs to think of imperialism or neo-imperialism as the phenomenon that originates in
the metropolis, the process which leads to domination and control.

• So, what happens in the colonies as a consequence of imperial domination, is colonialism or

neo-colonialism.

Conclusion:

• Thus the imperial country is the ‘metropole’ from which power flows, and the colony or neo-
colony is the place which it penetrates and controls.

• Imperialism can function without formal colonies (as in United States imperialism today) but
colonialism cannot.

Decolonization of Africa

Lecture 4

History of African struggle for Independence

• In 1957, Gold Coast ( Ghana) became the first country in Sub Saharan Africa to gain
independence.

• In the next 35 years, the number of independent states began to grow.

• With the dismantlement of Apartheid in South Africa, the whole of Africa came under black
political rule

Peaceful and Armed Resistance

• Initial independence movements let to orderly transition, however, most of the struggles tended
to be protracted and violent.

• For Ex: Former Portuguese colonies Angola, Mozambique and Guinea- Bissau achieved their
independence after more than a decade of armed struggle.

• It was achieved similarly in Namibia and Zimbabwe where Whites resisted fiercely the idea of
black majority rule.

• War of liberation waged in Eritrea by EPLF not against European Colonialism but against
neighboring Ethiopia for what they claimed “its denial of Eritrea’s right to self-determination”
after the demise of Italian colonial rule.
 • May 1993, Eritrea became independent and South Africa a year later.

• Although formal, political colonialism ended, it did not completely disappear, it transformed into
neocolonialism.

• The process of Decolonization in Africa was not uniform, be it Belgian, British, French or
Portuguese.

• The process of decolonization in Algeria, Angola Mozambique and Kenya, Namibia, Zaire and
Zimbabwe was much more violent and traumatic compared to Cote D’ Ivoire, Tanzania or
Central African Republic.

Influence of World War II

• World war II was a critical time in African colonial history.

• It changed the existing relations between African Colonies and their European masters.

• Colonies were mobilized to play an important role in the war.

• For the first time the emphasis was on developing local productive capacities and not just on
extraction of raw materials.

• For example, forced labour was used increasingly in Belgian, French and British colonies. Such as
Ivory Coast, The Congo and Kenya.

• But during the war, it became difficult to ship raw materials to Europe because of military
pressure from Germany.

• Many Africans were also drafted into the armies of colonizing powers who served as
combatants, porters servants, cooks and drivers.

• The war experience enabled the African soldiers to see another side of their Colonial masters.

• Rather than being invincible, self-assured and emotionless Gods, they appeared as human as
any African.

• Fighting side by side European soldiers, they noticed that in the heat of battle the European
displayed the same emotions of fear and apprehension as they did.

• This was a formative experience for African soldiers which expanded their worldview and
forced them to question their subject status and the benevolence of their European masters.

• These Africans gained confidence that they could shape their own destinies if willing to make
sacrifices, take action and struggle for what they wanted.

Impact of Education

• After 1945, a significant number of Africans began to demand more formal education and a
fuller role in the economy.
 • City dwellers with their active role as wage labourers in the nascent industrial and
manufacturing sectors during the war, had high expectations of a better life after the war.

• Most African schools were either traditional koranic schools or Christian missionary schools.

• Formal Education during colonial rule was only up to primary level.

• It was assumed that Africans generally need only basic literacy , numeracy and the ability to
communicate in the language of the colonial masters.

• The British felt that too much education may result in rising expectations which might lead to
protests.

• A few Africans were fortunate enough to journey to England and the United States to pursue
advanced education during the war.

• It was from this group that the nationalist leadership emerged.

• Post war development plans in almost every colony emphasized a commitment to secondary
and University education

• Britain trained new African elites in high school and colleges on the African continent.

• France trained its African administrators and technocrats in France and its African teachers were
more frequently educated at William Ponty school in Senegal.

• The demand for more economic and political reforms led to increased opportunities in formal
education which influenced the development of nationalists movement after the war.

Hence it can be stated that…

• Educated Africans played a crucial role in leading their countries to independence.

• However, they did it with the support they elicited from the nascent working class, ex soldiers,
local chiefs and rulers and their subjects.

• Further, the most important meeting of African intellectuals in the wake of WW II took place in
Manchester .

• It was the fifth pan African congress which adopted a strongly worded resolution condemning
colonialism wherever it existed

• Several future leaders of African independence were there at the congress.

• They demanded full independence for black Africa pledging to pay whatever price was
necessary.

• Most of the political activities of African nationalists were in London and Paris, however, most of
these African intellectuals returned to their home states after 1940’s to engage in nationalist
movements.
 The term postcolonial

Lecture 5

• The meanings of the term Postcolonial become complicated due to different understandings of
the term colonialism and Imperialism.

• Hence the term is the subject of an ongoing debate

• Can we say that the age of colonialism over because the descendants of once colonized peoples
live everywhere round the globe?

What does the prefix “post” imply

• The prefix “post” complicates matters by implying an aftermath in two matters:

• ONE : TEMPORAL (AS IN COMING AFTER)

• TWO : IDEOLOGICAL (AS IN SUPPLANTING) …COLONIAL IDEOLOGY SUPPLANTED BY

POSTCOLONIAL IDEOLOGY.

• Critics find the second implication highly contestable

• They argue that the inequities of colonialism have not ended, and ask if it is not premature to
proclaim the demise of colonialism.

• They would say that a country may be both postcolonial (formally independent) and neo-
colonial(in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at the same time.

• We cannot dismiss either of them: the fact of formal decolonization or that unequal relations of
colonial rule are being re inscribed in contemporary imbalances between first and third world
nations.

• The new global order does not depend upon direct rule. However, it does allow the economic,
cultural and (to varying degrees) political penetration of some countries by others.

• Therefore, are once-colonized countries actually postcolonial?

• This is a debatable question

Can the word postcolonial be used in any single sense?

• No. Not even in the temporal sense, because Formal decolonisation has spanned three
centuries, ranging from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Americas, Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa, to the 1970s in the case of Angola and Mozambique.

• Hence Ella Shohat trenchantly asked: “When exactly, then, does the ‘postcolonial’ begin?”

• Gayatri Spivak once remarked that “post colonialism began when third world intellectuals
landed in first world academies.”
 • Colonialism was challenged from a variety of perspectives by people who were not all affected
by colonialism in the same way

• For ex: the politics of decolonisation in parts of Latin America or Australia or South Africa where
white settlers formed their own independent nations is different from the dynamics of those
societies where indigenous populations overthrew their European masters.

Ambiguity of the term

• Hence, a blanket application of the term to all former colonies may blur internal social and racial
differences of many societies.

• It can be argued that the term ‘postcolonial’ does not apply to those at the bottom end of social
class hierarchy, who are still ‘at the far economic margins of the nation state so that nothing is
‘post’ about their colonization.

• George Klor de Alva explains this with the example of Spanish colonization of Latin America

Latin American Example

• Alva argues that the elites in Latin America were never colonial subjects and they ‘established
their own nation-states in the image of the motherland, tinged by the local color of some pre
contact practices and symbols, framed by many imperial period adaptations and suffused with
European ideals, practices and material objects’.

• The quarrels of these Americans with colonial powers were radically different from anti-colonial
struggles in parts of Africa or Asia and so, de Alva concludes, they cannot be considered
‘postcolonial’ in the same sense.

• White settlers were historically the agents of colonial rule. They never aligned themselves with
other colonized peoples.

In conclusion…

• In spite of differences with their mother country, the white settlers in the colonies were never
subject to genocide, economic exploitation, cultural decimation, and political exclusion felt by
indigenous peoples or by other colonies.

• Hence, such ruptures and disjunctures have to be kept in mind while we address the term
postcolonial

Postcolonialism

Lecture 6

Problems with Postcolonial theory

• Anti-colonial movements have rarely represented the interests of all the peoples of a colonized
country.
 • The newly independent nation-state makes available the fruits of liberation only selectively and
unevenly:

• The dismantling of colonial rule did not automatically bring about changes for the better in the
status of women, the working class or the peasantry in most colonized countries.

• So where is postcolonialism is the question

• Some critics feel that colonialism is not just something that operates in collusion with forces
inside, but a version of it can be duplicated from within.

• These are problems postcolonial theory is riddled with.

• Hence it is suggested that it is useful to think of postcolonialism not just as coming literally after
colonialism, but as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism.

Ideological problems

• There is yet another issue at stake in the term, and this time the problem is not with ‘post’ but
with ‘colonial’.

• Analyses of ‘postcolonial’ societies too often work with the sense that colonialism is the only
history of these societies. What came before colonial rule?

• What indigenous ideologies, practices and hierarchies existed alongside colonialism and
interacted with it?

• Colonialism did not inscribe itself on a clean slate, and it cannot therefore account for
everything that exists in ‘postcolonial’ societies.

• The food, or music, or languages, or arts of any culture that we think of as postcolonial evoke
earlier histories or shades of culture that elude the term ‘colonial’.

Spivak on Postcolonialism

• Critics such as Gayatri Spivak have repeatedly cautioned against the idea that pre-colonial
cultures are something that we can easily recover, warning that ‘a nostalgia for lost origins can
be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism’.

• Spivak suggests that the pre-colonial is always reworked by the history of colonialism, and is not
available to us in any pristine form that can be neatly separated from the history of colonialism.

• She is interested in emphasising the ‘worlding’ (i.e. both the violation and the creation) of the
‘third world’ by colonial powers and therefore resists the romanticising of once-colonised
societies ‘as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact heritages waiting to be recovered…

Anthony Appiah’s stand

• Critics such as Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991) have also criticised the tendency to eulogise the
pre-colonial past or romanticise native culture.
 • Such ‘nativism’, they suggest, is espoused by both certain intellectuals within postcolonial
societies and some First World academics.

The concept of the third world

• ‘Third World’ is seen as a world defined entirely by its relation to colonialism.

• Its histories are then flattened, and colonialism becomes their defining feature, whereas in
several parts of the once-colonised world, historians are inclined to regard colonialism ‘as a
minor interruption’ in a long, complex history.

• Post colonialism, then, is a word that is useful only if we use it with caution and qualifications.

Orientalism and Edward Said

Lecture -7

Said’s introduction

• The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance,
exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.

• Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over.

The European Orient

• For Americans ,the Orient is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East
(China and Japan, mainly).

• Acc. to Said The French and the British have had a long tradition of what he calls Orientalism …a
way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European
Western experience.

Orient is the contrasting other

• Said argues that the Orient is the place of “Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the
source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most
recurring images of the Other.”

So, what’s the Orient?

• In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea,
personality, experience.

• Yet, according to Said, none of these ideas of the orient is merely imaginative.

• The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.

From an academic point of view

 • Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient, whether the person is an
anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is
Orientalism.

Compared to area studies or oriental studies

• the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and
general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and
early-twentieth-century European colonialism.

• Nevertheless, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the
Orient and the Oriental.

East vs West binary

• Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction

made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident."

• political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction
between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social
descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny,
and so on.

Taking late 18thc as the starting point

• Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the
Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.

• In short, Orientalism can be understood “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient.”

Said’s use of Foucault’s “discourse”

• Said argues that Orientalism should be examined as a discourse in order to understand the
enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even
produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and
imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.

Orientalism

Lecture 8

FROM BEGINNING POSTCOLONIALISM PAGES 40 – 50

ORIENTALISM CONSTRUCTS BINARY DIVISIONS

 It constructs East / West Binary

 They exist in opposition to each other

 Orient is conceived as everything the West is not: its alter ego

 The opposition is however unequal: Orient is described in negative terms

 Ex: West is seat of knowledge and learning / East of ignorance and naiveté.

 West occupies a superior rank whereas the East is its subservient other

 The West defines itself in terms of the East

 Said Quote: “European Culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the
orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”

Orientalism is a Western fantasy

 Western views not based on existing facts

 They are dreams, fantasies and assumptions about the contrasting other

 Orientalism is a fabricated construct, a series of images that come to represent the orient’s
reality for those in the west.

 This contrived reality may not exactly reflect what is out there in reality.

 Nevertheless, this imaginative idea does have material effects.

Orientalism as an Institution

 Imaginative assumptions about the orient find their way into institutions

 Opinions, views and theses about the orient circulate here as objective knowledge

 Said says that the Orient “became an object of study in the academy, for display in the museum,
for reconstruction in the colonial office…” (Orientalism 7-8)

 In fact, the western project of enlightenment that aimed to secure progress for humanity
through developments in scientific and other objective knowledges is deemed to be tainted by
the subjective fantasies of the orient.

Orientalism is literary

 Said identifies philology (study of the history of languages), lexicography (dictionary making),
history, biology, political and economic theory, novel writing and lyric poetry as coming to the
service of orientalism.
  Orientalism also made possible new forms of writing that often celebrated western experience
abroad.

Stereotypes of the Orient

Lecture 9

The Orient is Timeless

 If the West was the site of historical progress and scientific development, the East was
unchanging and static

 Said: “Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient”

 Considered to be no different in the 12th C than in the 18th C.

 Trapped in antiquity far behind modern developments of the enlightened West

 The orient was often considered “primitive “ and “backward”.

 A westerner travelling to Oriental lands was not just travelling from one location to another in
space, he was also moving backwards in time.

 Hence the orient in orientalism is often timeless, static and cut off from the progress of Western
history.

The Orient is Timeless

 If the West was regarded as the place of historical progress and scientific development, he
orient was deemed remote from the influence of historical change.

 Orientalism assumed an unchanging orient

 Trapped in antiquity, far behind the modern developments of the “enlightened West”

 A westerner travelling to Oriental lands was not just moving in space from one location to
another, he was also travelling back in time to an earlier world.

The Orient is strange

 The orient is not just different; it is oddly different and – unusual, fantastic , bizarre.

 Westerners could meet all manner of spectacle there, wonders that would beggar belief and
make them doubt their western eyes

 The orient’s eccentricity often functioned as a source of mirth, marvel and curiosity for western
writers and artists

Assumptions about race

  In western representations oriental peoples often appeared as various invidious stereotypes.

 Some racial stereotypes are: the murderous and violent Arab, the lazy Indian and the inscrutable
Chinaman

 Racializing categories like Indian or Arabian were defined within general negative
representational framework typical of Orientalism.

 Orient was the place where the superior westerner was likely to meet the inherently inferior
other.

Orientalism’s assumptions about gender

 Popular gender stereotypes were the effeminate oriental male or the sexually promiscuous
oriental female

 The oriental male was insufficiently “manly”; a parody of the gentle female

 The exoticized oriental female was depicted nude or partially clothed in western art works of
the colonial period

 She was presented as immodest, active creature of sexual pleasure; a key to myriad mysterious
erotic delights.

 In western standards, men were supposed to be active, courageous, strong, virile

 And women, passive, moral and chaste

The Orient is feminine

 In opposition to the occident, the East as whole is “feminized” in orientalism

 It is deemed passive, exotic, luxurious, sexually mysterious and tempting.

 In contrast, the west becomes ‘masculine,’ – active, dominant, heroic, rational, self controlled
and ascetic

 This trope makes possible the specific sexual vocabulary available to the westerner

 The orient is ‘penetrated’ by the traveler whose ‘passions’ it rouses, it is ‘possessed’, ‘ravished,’
‘embraced,’…and ultimately ‘domesticated’ by the muscular colonizer.

 Hence, Orientalism became “an exclusive male province” (Said)

 It responded to and buttressed the discourses of the heroic, muscular masculinity common in
western colonial nations.

 The orient was a site of perverse desire for many male colonizers

 Projected onto the orient are western fantasies concerning supposed moral degeneracy,
confused and rampant sexualities
  It offered a delicious menu to western men; a sample of untrammelled life, free from the
prohibitions of society back home

 Travellers to the orient might imagine that they were going to lands where they could indulge in
sexual excesses.

The Oriental is degenerate

 Oriental stereotypes fixed typical weaknesses like cowardliness, laziness, untrustworthiness

fickleness, laxity, violence and lust

 Orientals were considered morally degenerate ; willing to indulge in more dubious aspects of
human behavior.

 In other words, orientalism posited the notion that oriental peoples needed to be civilized and
made to conform to the perceived higher moral standards upheld in the west