• What is colonialism?
• Causes of colonialism
• Consequences of colonialism
• Examples of colonialism
• Colonialism and imperialism
• Neocolonialism

We explain what colonialism is, its causes, consequences and historical examples. Also, imperialism and neocolonialism.

Colonialism could reduce the conquered peoples to slavery.

What is colonialism?

Colonialism is understood as the form of relationship of political, social and economic domination that exists between a power foreign (the metropolis) and other countries considered peripheral, which are exploited by the power and are called "colonies."

This domination is imposed directly and by force, generally through military occupation (conquest) and imposition of authorities from the metropolis. They are also imposed rules policies, social, cultural and economic that go to the benefit of the colonizers and to the detriment of the colonized.

Through colonialism, the military powers seize the lands and economic resources of the colonized territories. At the same time, its original inhabitants to a condition of subalternity, that is, of discrimination and cultural, social and political submission.

In some cases, those subjected are reduced to the slavery. In other cases they are considered citizens second category, incapable of exercising the sovereignty of their own nations.

Historically, colonialism is very old, and it was practiced by ancient empires. But the greatest colonial powers in history were mostly European: Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other powers of the time colonized much of the world and divided entire continents, as happened with Africa.

However, the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and other great contemporary superpowers have also had a history of colonial relations with other countries.

The great colonial expansion of the European powers occurred between the 16th and 19th centuries, and this historical stage is known as the "European Expansion" or the "Colonial Expansion".

Causes of colonialism

World powers extracted raw materials from their colonies.

Colonialism can respond to different causes of an economic, political and geopolitical order, which have to do with the history of the colonizing nations.

Essentially, these are growing powers, with a notorious military or technological power, that require more inputs and new materials in order to continue their growth. Therefore, they decide to steal them from other weaker nations. These causes can be summarized as:

• The need for new materials to grow. This is particularly important in the case of Europe, whose world position was secondary at the beginning of the 19th century, compared to Asian powers such as China. Access to raw Materials of India, the Americas and Africa allowed them to reach a critical mass that triggered the leap toward the capitalism.
• The impossibility of conquering your neighbors. For many colonial powers it was much simpler to initiate a colonization of new territories, little industrialized or populated by weaker nations, than to initiate a bloody one. war with the neighbors, just as powerful and willing to defend themselves. This does not mean that between them they did not compete for the distribution of the world, directly and indirectly.
• Obtaining workforce cheap.By shifting many productive initiatives to the colonies, the metropolises could take advantage of the labor in deplorable, unequal and unjust conditions, to which they subjected the colonized peoples. It was an economic relationship that was mostly beneficial to the colonizers.
• The rise of nationalism. In cases such as Europe, the emergence of a strong national feeling led the different empires of the time to compete with each other for dominance of the rest of the world, since by colonizing other territories they could expand their culture and have greater geopolitical control than its rivals.
• The rise of ideologies racist Y xenophobic. In many cases, behind the colonization there is a deep contempt for the life of the colonized peoples, considered inferior from a racial, cultural or religious point of view. This led many defenders of colonialism to want to disguise it as a “civilizing” task, since the powers imposed their model of life on the weaker nations, considered therefore “backward” or “primitive”.

Consequences of colonialism

The consequences of colonialism have been very important in shaping the contemporary world and have forever changed many of the non-European territories that subsequently managed to shake off the colonial yoke and resume an independent existence. These consequences can be summarized as:

• Reconfiguration of colonized territories. After years or centuries of colonization, the invaded territories stop looking like what they were initially, and even if they regain their sovereignty, they are no longer the same. This is notorious, for example, in the conformation of the African nations, whose artificially straight borders were defined by the powers based on meridians and parallels, leaving two or more ethnic groups of different languages, cultures and ethnicities in the same country. religion, destining them to a political life of conflict from now on.
• Creation of new cultures and nations. In many cases, the colonial dynamics engender mestizo, mixed cultures that are no longer any of the original ones, as happened in the Latin American case. The mixture of European, African and Aboriginal cultures resulted in a culture and a race that had never been seen before on the planet, inheriting in unequal measure from its predecessors.
• Imposition of certain cultures on others. During colonial rule, the language, religion and culture of the rulers expands and universalizes, in many cases remaining as part of the local culture once the colony is over. Thanks to this, European languages ​​are, for example, the diplomatic and commercial languages ​​of the entire world. This process is called “acculturation”.
• The first steps towards economy global. Colonialism favors the transit of raw material from different parts of the world to the metropolis, which gives rise to numerous exchange routes and forms of Commerce complex, which allowed, some time later, the emergence of the world or global economy.

Examples of colonialism

The Indian monarchy was dominated by the British crown.

Some examples of colonialism were:

• The English colony of India. Which served to create the British Raj, an Indian monarchy dominated by the British crown that existed from 1858 to 1947. Eventually the Indian subcontinent gained its independence and was divided between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
• The Spanish colony in America. Probably the largest and most ambitious colonial project in history, spanning from Mexico to Patagonia, all submitted to the power of the Spanish Crown after a bloody war of conquest in the 16th century. The Spanish colonies were organized into four viceroyalties, existing at different times: that of New Spain (which included Mexico and Central America), that of New Granada (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Guyana), that of Peru (Peru, great part of South America and some islands of Oceania) and the Del Río de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia). All of these colonies became independent from Spain throughout the 19th century, through a series of bloody and long wars of independence.
• The British colony in Hong Kong. Called British Hong Kong, it existed between 1841 and 1997, and was founded after the end of the Opium Wars between China and the British crown. The cession agreement signed between the last Chinese imperial dynasty and the European power gave them control of this island and its surroundings for almost a century, until, after the colonial agreement expired, Hong Kong returned to Chinese hands, under a regime of management special.

Colonialism and imperialism

Although they are similar and related terms, the colonial rule is not the same as the imperial one. The difference between the two lies in the perspective that the dominator holds on the dominated.

On the one hand, colonial rule leads to a certain margin of integration: subject peoples are assimilated to a certain extent within the dominant culture, and their territories become part of the national body of the colonizing culture.

On the other hand, imperialism does not seek to integrate or assimilate the colonies, but to extract from them as much profit as possible, imposing in return a convenient legal order and an extractive economy.

The relationship of imperial domination is handled in much more distant terms. It seeks above all to benefit from the dominated country, producing in its territory and then taking the resources, with which to later sell back to the colony what is produced at its expense.

This is first and foremost a terminological distinction.

Neocolonialism

Neo-colonialism should not be confused with traditional colonialism. It is a contemporary reinterpretation of colonial relations, now without the need for military control and direct administration of the colonized nation.

Instead, this form of domination operates through economic pressures (the mercantilism, the globalization business) and cultural imperialism (the assimilation of colonial values ​​by a local elite), in order to remotely direct the dominated nations.

However, neocolonialism has none of the important syncretic or cultural miscegenation effects that traditional colonialism brings. In a certain way, the concept of neocolonialism is assimilable to that of imperialism.