Landing of Columbus, painting of John Vanderlyn 1847 (public domain image)
(8) COLONIAL EMPIRE
You know what? I’m classing colonial empire with hydraulic empire and gunpowder empire (hence its placement with them in my top ten) – as offering some surface explanatory features but ultimately “neither adequate nor accurate explanation”.
Um, aren’t all empires colonial empires? Isn’t colonialism essentially synonymous with imperialism?
Well yes, hence my classification.
That is not to say that there aren’t some distinctive features that might be identified for colonial empires or colonialism.
Perhaps the most distinctive is that typically identified as “settler colonialism” – the large-scale immigration by settlers to colonies, as reflecting the origin of the term from Roman colonia – settlements or cities by Roman citizens, which in turn followed the ancient history of such settlements, notably by Greeks and Phoenicians.
The other potentially distinctive feature is that colonial empires operate on a model of an ongoing demarcation between the imperial nation and its subjects, such that the latter are not assimilated into the imperial nation or as citizens – “Rather than annexation, this typically culminates in organizing the colonized into colonies separate to the colonizers’ metropole”.
However, these distinctions can be fluid or questions of degree even when present, and definitions of colonialism are often so elastic as to be effectively meaningless other than as synonymous for imperialism – or particularly for contemporary definitions of colonialism, as synonymous for the imperialism you want to condemn as opposed to what you don’t.
Typically, colonial empires or colonialism invokes the modern European maritime empires, indeed usually called European colonial empires – often to the exclusion of anything else, except perhaps suitably Western “predecessors” such as the Romans or the Crusades, contemporaries such as Tsarist Russia or Japan, or “successors” such as the United States.
And as such, typically colonial empires or colonialism is used to invoke a particularly virulent form of exploitative or extractive imperialism. You know, the evil empires – as opposed to other states or polities that may well be imperialistic but are proposed to be more benevolent or benign in nature.
Like memes I’ve seen in response to people arguing that Arab or Ottoman imperialism wasn’t imperialism or at least a benign sort of imperialism – colonialism is when it is by boat.
But really, all empires are to some extent evil empires – and at least have some exploitative or extractive elements with respect to their subjects. No empire rises to or maintains its power by being nice, but by defeating or conquering its opponents and imposing control of its subjects – including that the latter are not free to leave or opt out of the empire, otherwise it’s not really or no longer an empire.
As such, apart from settler colonialism or fixed distinctions between the imperial nation and its colonies, colonialism and colonial empires ultimately seem more questions of degree within imperialism in general.